Xen Linux VPS Transition

Effective August 2008 Xtraordinary Hosting are making significant pricing improvements to our Xen VPS hosting plans.

Old Pricing 

 New Pricing

 
Our aims are:

• to ensure we remain competitive on price and features
• to grow our customer base
• to standardise on new high specification servers and retire old servers
• to simplify our pricing structure
• to move all customers to a new management platform featuring LVM backups and VPS control system
• to be fair and equitable to existing customers

The new host server specification is:

• Xen 3.1
• HP DL-160 G5
• 2 x 2Ghz Intel Xeon 5405 2x6MB 1333 FSB Quad-Core CPUs (8 cores in total)
• 16GB ECC DDR2 PC2-5300 Fully Buffered RAM
• RAID-10 with high performance Adaptec 5405 card with battery backup
• 4 x 500GB nearline hot-swap SATA disks with 32Mbyte cache

Performance benchmarking indicates significant improvements in terms of CPU and disk I/O performance compared to both our existing and competitors' VPS plans.

Transition Arrangements

At present we have Xen host servers in three datacentres: 

Going forward Interxion is our primary London hosting centre and all new Xen signups are currently placed there. IP ranges are assigned to each datacentre location and it is not possible to move individual IPs between datacentres. We recognise that some customers will not wish to change IPs and some may wish to maintain their VPS hosting in Scolocate or Telecity for other reasons. We are therefore placing new Xen host servers in all three datacentres to ease the transition.

Customers should contact support @ xtrahost.co.uk quoting their customer number and IPs and schedule a time for the transition. We will arrange for the VPS to be copied over to the new server, this will take around 15-45mins depending on the quantity of data on the VPS. Timing can be scheduled to suit the customer, including evening, night and early morning timeslots if necessary.

Pricing will be the same in all three datacentres with one exception being made that data transfer (bandwidth) allowances will be lower in Edinburgh, Scolocate. This reflects more expensive bandwidth costs in Scotland. Existing Edinburgh customers who require more data transfer may change IPs and request that their VPS is moved to London Interxion.

Additional data transfer use above allocated allowances will be charged as follows:

• London servers £0.10 per GB
• Edinburgh Scolocate servers £0.50 per GB

Edinburgh customers who expect to use heavy quantities of bandwidth are advised to move their VPS to London.

Backup Arrangements

Backups on the new servers will be carried out by taking a daily LVM snapshot. This is an automated process which takes a snapshot of the VPS and then copies the snapshot image to a local backup server. The backup snapshot's file system can be read only mounted from within VPS. The backup retention policy is to hold two snapshots at any one time:

• most recent full daily backup
• most recent full weekly backup

This backup service is included free with all VPS plans.

Currently backups on some of our Edinburgh Scolocate servers are based on a push based rsync method. This will be not be supported on the new servers and transition must be made to LVM.

Pricing Transition

The new price list will apply to existing customers once their VPS transition to the new servers has been completed. Customers can choose one of the following options:

• continue to pay the same price but with an enhanced plan (i.e. more memory, disk space, data transfer etc. for the same price), or
• upgrade to a higher plan level, or
• pay new reduced fee levels and move to a new plan with similar or improved specifications

Note two exceptions:

• £15pm+VAT remains our minimum fee level so customers paying £15pm+VAT cannot reduce fees they can only increase specifications
• Customers who have pre-paid in advance for 3,6 or 12 months service may take advantage of plan specification upgrades immediately (subject to moving server) but can only reduce their fee levels when their plan next comes up for renewal.

For ease of calculation and billing purposes new monthly fee levels will apply from the next regular monthly billing date following the server transition.

Customers paying by Standing Order will need to change the payment amount with their bank.

Customers paying by paypal subscription will need to change the payment amount, we can send you a link to assist you in doing this.

FAQ

I have only recently made an upgrade to my VPS plan, why did you not mention this earlier?
The schedule for this repricing has not been fixed until very recently, a lot of preparation work has gone into this and we did not want to raise customers expectations until we were fully ready to fulfil them.

Are there any changes to the services provided?
Other than backup arrangements mentioned above all other service standards such as support are unchanged.

Is there a deadline for transition to new servers?
We have not set a date to complete the transition yet but we do intend to set a deadline, this will depend on the rate of progress with the transition.

Why not offer a cheaper plan, say 128MB plan for £8-10pm?
We are sticking with our existing minimum of £15pm+VAT as there are underlying support costs related to each customer account which are difficult to satisfy long term with pricing at or below the £10pm level.

Are Windows VPS plans affected?
There are no changes to Windows VPS plan pricing.