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ServerDragon Comes to Portland?
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ServerDragon Comes to Portland?

raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran
edited February 2013 in Help

Hey @KuJoe -

Saw your email announcement. Are you stocking normal OvZ in Portland, Oregon or just DDOS-protected OvZ?

I would certainly love a regular OvZ in PDX - a lot closer than Tampa :-)

Comments

  • He told us in the IRC that the ddos protected clients will be moving to Oregon. Not sure about existing clients/new regular orders.

  • This is change I can believe in.

  • I didn't see the announcement. When is this effective?

    Waiting on the move and activation out there before I pickup a DDoS protect service.

  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    From the email:

    After yet another meeting today, we've finally ironed out some things and want to provide everybody with some updates on current happenings as well as our plans for future events (some very soon, some a little ways away).
    
    Network Outages and Resolution
    
    First off, we want to address the network outages we've experienced in the past, yes all of them. Every single outage was a result of an issue with our BGP sessions, we still don't know why or how, all we know is that our data center's routers would not establish a connection so our IPs were not being announced to the world. 
    
    After countless attempts to fix this, we finally decided to drop BGP all together and stick to very basic (and very reliable) static routes for our networks. The downside to this is that we no longer have the automated Distributed Denial Of Service (DDOS) mitigation like before but we are actively testing a replacement and currently have this running on the network so this will hopefully be a thing of the past also. 
    
    We are still working on getting full network redundancy back in place and will be working on our backup router tomorrow, once this is complete and stable we will release an official Reason For Outage (RFO) for the January outage and provide more specifics. We also have 2 new routers being shipped later this month to offer us more options to work with.
    
    We will be performing network maintenance on February 12th while on-site. Downtime is expected to be less than 1 minute while we move cables around.
    
    Pro-rated Billing
    
    In December we started implementing pro-rated billing, after over a month of using this setup we took a look at the numbers and realized this was hurting us more than helping us so we have switched back to our original setup but we've enabled "sign-up anniversaries" which means the first service you order will mark your anniversary, subsequent orders will be set to that date so all invoices will be due on one day which makes accounting easier for us and our clients. If you order an O128 plan on February 11th for a year then all future orders will also be on the 11th (monthly will be on the 11th for each month while yearly will be on the 11th for the current month for the following year). This is only for new orders, current clients will not be impacted by this change.
    
    DDOS Protection and 3rd Data center
    
    Back on to the topic of DDOS protection, originally we were offering it as an add-on, but we've decided that we will be putting a much bigger focus on this and will be shipping out a new OpenVZ node tomorrow (2/12) to CNServers in Portland, OR  which is our current DDOS protection provider for our Tampa location that we utilize. 
    
    All current DDOS Protected OpenVZ clients will be migrated to our new node once it is up and running to allow complete isolation from other services. This will also significantly reduce the latency clients are currently experiencing.
    
    There will be no change to any DDOS Protected cPanel or KVM plans at this time.
    
    We will be discontinuing our DDOS Protected KVM services and will be making some changes to our OpenVZ plans to better fit the new location. Current OpenVZ clients will not be impacted and will be able to switch to the new plans if they wish to. My advice to any clients interested in purchasing one of our OpenVZ plans at DDOSProtect.Us is to do it now before the new node arrives next week because some plans will no longer be offered and the ones that will be will have different resources.
    
    We will also be offering DDOS proxy services for domains for those who have a specific website elsewhere that they wish to protect from DDOS attacks at a fraction of the price that others are advertising.
    
    Our Denver data center will benefit from the lower latency of this location so we plan to have a private network setup between Denver and Portland to provide better service to our clients who wish to host in Denver bu t with DDOS protection.
    
    We expect this to be up and running by the last week of February. We are uncertain how we will be doing this migration of current OpenVZ clients and how the tunnels will be setup for cPanel and KVM clients so there will most likely be an outage while this is configured. We will contact these clients individually with more details as we get closer to bringing the node online.
    
    Server Name Changes
    
    While this has very little impact on 99% of our clients, we felt it was best to include this in the e-mail to avoid confusion later on. With the rapid expansion outside of Florida, we will be making some changes to our naming convention for our servers to make them easier to identify at first glance. Our new naming convention will include the State and function in the name. Again, this will have no impact on your services, just th e way we identify nodes.
    
    Denver Data center
    
    We've been receiving a lot of good reviews for our newest location and are very pleased with how it is shaping up. Joe will be taking a trip to Denver next week for unrelated matters but will be stopping in to personally take a look at the facility and meet the staff there sometime during his trip. Support response times may also be longer for the week of February 18th while Joe is in Denver.
    
    Atlanta Data center
    
    Yup, you've read it right. We're looking at a 4th location already! CNServers is expected to open an Atlanta location by March and, as we said before, our new focus on DDOS Protection has brought us to look for an East Coast location also to meet the needs of all of our clients. This also means we plan to setup a private network between Atlanta and Tampa so our Tampa clients can benefit from low latency DDOS protection. There is no ETA on when we expect to do this and will most likely depend on how well our new Portland location performs.
    
    Possible E-mail Delivery Issues
    
    Lastly, we want to include this in this e-mail to explain why some of you may have received duplicates of this e-mail. Our system has been having frequent timeouts when performing batch processes and we expect that sending a mass e-mail to all of our active clients will be no different. If you are receiving duplicate e-mails, we apologize. You may delete any other e-mails with the same subject as they are just duplicates with no additional information.
    
    Thank you all for all of your continued support. We have been busting our backs trying to give you the hosting experience you deserve at an affordable rate and hope that all of these steps we've taken are in the right di rection to meeting your expectations of us. Joe has been trying to be more active on our Twitter (@SecureDragonLLC) so be sure to follow him for random updates on various happenings around here.
    
  • Wow! Big pack of info there.

    The DDoS proxy sounds real interesting.

  • Well best of luck to Server Dragon at the new locations. For me in eastern Canada I'm about ready to throw in the towel. The Florida location times out for me 7 or 8 times a day. Probably not SD's fault, just crappy routing. Denver, Portland are more west-oriented -- better for me to host in the EU. And now it looks like Atlanta, already crowded (IMO) with quality LEB providers. Thank SD, it was a good ride.

  • Eastern Canada... You should be good with the million offer army out of Buffalo, Choopa army, or many others.

    We saw one on Peer1 network and other I think at Neteligent recently. But I assume you have other needs for these ehh? @sleddog

  • I have LEBs all over the place, including some of the ones you mention. Proven-over-time ones get assigned a production task. Until proven, they sit in the holding pool. Crappy ones get cancelled :)

  • mikhomikho Member, Host Rep

    I wish KuJoe the best, one of the provider I can really recommend.

  • Your method to the VPS madness is the same as mine it seems @sleddog.

  • "first off" .. man this is one my pet peeve words... It's one of those "extragrammatical idioms"

    Used a lot in tech for some reason I just don't like the term... but that's just me :)

    Anyway, interestingly, the first time this term was referenced officially was in the OED in 1880 with a quote from Mark Twain: ‘First-off, I thought it would certainly give me the botts.’

    @raindog308 said: First off, we want to address the network outages we've experienced in the past, yes all of them. Every single outage was a result of an issue with our BGP sessions, we still don't know why or how, all we know is that our data center's routers would not establish a connection so our IPs were not being announced to the world.

  • What the heck was Mark Twain referring to as the "botts"? @twain

  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    @pubcrawler said: What the heck was Mark Twain referring to as the "botts"?

    19th century bandwidth. It totally sucked.

  • KuJoeKuJoe Member, Host Rep
    edited February 2013

    @twain said: "first off"

    If you look at my e-mails/announcements, I tend to use the same phrases quite frequently. I really hate this but it's a force of habit. I always have a "first off" and a "lastly" if it's more than 3 paragraphs long. When I'm typing up anything other than e-mails/announcements my vocabulary tends to be much better, don't know why I am usually at a loss for words when it comes to important things like that.

    I'll address some of the questions addressed to me in this thread and via PM now. :)

    The Portland and Atlanta locations will be for DDOSProtect.Us VPSs only, we do not have the ability to offer unprotected IPs so all IPs will have at least 1Gbps of protection on them.

    Originally the goal was to keep the current plans we offer, but after much discussing we're taking this opportunity to break out of the LEB market and expand our clientele as we've been noticing some changes in the LEB scene and have always known the market to be a volatile one so we don't want to be caught without other options in any event. Additionally, we've found that offer cheap DDOS protection attracts the wrong type of clients so we're going to be raising the prices just to keep the unwanted abusers off. It's a double-edge sword, keeping it cheap for the client on a budget also means making the service easily accessible for the 13 year old kid who wants to abuse it.

    And yes, we are done with KVM. I just hate managing the node. While some people really hate OpenVZ and will never use it, I frankly don't care at this point. If they want $100 worth of DDOS Protection for $7 they will just have to accept OpenVZ or go elsewhere. If you knew how much I made an hour you'd understand why I automate as much of SD as possible and it's just not an option with KVM.

  • I've always viewed SecureDragon as a small, local Floridian VPS provider. Great to see it get larger! :)

  • KuJoeKuJoe Member, Host Rep
    edited February 2013

    @Voss said: Raising the price to keep 13 year old ddos magnets away does the make much sense.

    You're not the one who's been under a constant 10Gbps SYN flood for over a month. ;)

  • @twain said: "first off" .. man this is one my pet peeve words... It's one of those "extragrammatical idioms"

    Used a lot in tech for some reason I just don't like the term... but that's just me :)

    There's actually a specific reason: us computer nerds tend to think procedural, so we like things like "first off" and "lastly". "first off" is about as goofy as ending messages with "regards", but such is life :)

    @KuJoe said: And yes, we are done with KVM. I just hate managing the node.

    Well that's not a good sign for someone who's just beginning to offer it!

  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    @KuJoe said: And yes, we are done with KVM. I just hate managing the node.

    Interesting...I thought you said you hated Xen and were glad to phase it out in favor of KVM.

  • 10Gbps SYN flood... ouch.

  • KuJoeKuJoe Member, Host Rep

    @Damian said: Well that's not a good sign for someone who's just beginning to offer it!

    Don't get me wrong, it's not bad. It's just not something I want to manage. I already invest about 40 hours a week into SD, I don't enjoy working on Xen or KVM like I do OpenVZ. Heck, if we had another support tech who wanted to manage Xen/KVM we would have quite a bit more nodes.

    @raindog308 said: Interesting...I thought you said you hated Xen and were glad to phase it out in favor of KVM.

    I prefer KVM over Xen. :)

  • KuJoeKuJoe Member, Host Rep
    edited February 2013

    @Voss said: Raising the price to keep 13 year old ddos magnets away does not make much sense.

    Steve wanted me to elaborate more on this comment.

    A prime example of the abuse we've experienced is the client who was rewarding people on HF who could successfully take his VPS offline. They put a bounty on their VPS on Christmas Eve and on Christmas Day the CNServer techs wasted hours trying to keep this kid online creating custom ACLs and making changes to their network as the attacks reached over 4Gbps (they should have nullrouted him and billed us for the excess bandwidth but they were more concerned with keeping the client online). The client provided proof in the HF thread of VPS ownership and when confronted, the client didn't deny it and just said "thread is over a day old". He had been reselling our services previously on HF to kids who were in turn using them to protect themselves from counter-DDOS attacks they were sending to other kids. Pretty much it was one big DDOS game with us footing the bill.

    It's also worth noting that all of the people on HF reselling our services are charging more than 3 times what we do for the same service.

  • I'm not really familiar with this, is there actually any regulations that prohibits DDOS?

  • KuJoeKuJoe Member, Host Rep

    @DalComp said: I'm not really familiar with this, is there actually any regulations that prohibits DDOS?

    I'm not sure what you mean by this. I know some people are trying to push legislation that makes DDOS attacks a protected form of protest, but as of right now it is against the law to perform a DOS attack and it normally breaks multiple laws in the process. The most common laws are those pertaining to gaining access to a computer without the owners consent.

    @Voss said: That's a pretty concise explanation, I appreciate it @KuJoe

    No problem. :)

  • @KuJoe said: I'm not sure what you mean by this.

    Pardon my English. Yes, I was asking about law(s) related to DOS.
    Hmm.. Yeah, I just read wikipedia and got the general picture.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack#Legality

  • Starting to really like these location options.

    Network in Denver is great. 13-15 ms from Aurora on both CenturyLink and Comcast.

    On other providers in the area, Qwest takes Cogent to LA to get to both of them. 85-90 ms Auora -> Denver

  • KuJoeKuJoe Member, Host Rep

    We pulled the server out of E Solutions today and boxed it up. We'll be shipping it out tomorrow since they won't be able to rack it until the new network is setup next week anyways (100Gbps network capacity, impressive) and I won't be able to configure the server until I get back from Denver on the 23rd anyways.

    Just keeping you updated for those waiting patiently. :)

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