6sync

Few days ago we hinted our irc and twitter communities about upcoming changes to our template offering. Today, we are happy to announce addition of Ubuntu 12.10 template, as well as updates to CentOS, Debian and Ubuntu 12.04 templates which are now very fresh! We hope you enjoy using them as we are committed to keeping our templates offering up-to-date and stable.

New Biscuit is still in development, and incorporates many of the ideas you guys have been telling us about over the course of the last few years. We will keep you in the loop as development progresses.

Ubuntu 12.04 is now available!

I know a lot of you have been eagerly awaiting this new release so we
are please to announced we have freshly baked new Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise
Pangolin) images available for immediate deployment. Along with a slew
of updated packages comes Linux [kernel] version 3.2.

But most exciting of all, this release is special as it is a “long-term
support” (LTS) edition. In English, that means this new version of
Ubuntu will be supported and actively maintained for a whopping 5 years!
For this reason we highly recommend it for all new Ubuntu server
installations.

Enjoy.

After a long time coming, IPv6 reverse DNS records can now be instantly created and deleted within Biscuit. Woohoo!

The release of CentOS 6 was something we eagerly anticipated, not only because of its many new features and fixes, and fresh new packages, but also because it brings even more benefits to each and every one of us that love virtualization.

Here at 6sync we have been busy the last few weeks with testing, testing and some more testing of the new CentOS 6 release, and now that its finally announced by the CentOS team, we can’t be more happy and proud to offer you CentOS 6 image. CentOS 6 replaces CentOS 5 as the preferred deployment option if CentOS is your thing, but we will be supporting CentOS 5 in Biscuit for quite some time as well.

Some of the new features include ext4 (think, blazing fast performance), newer kernel, updated PHP and various other pieces of software that will make your life better, faster and more reliable.

We hope you will be enjoying this brand new CentOS release, and as always, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us should you have any questions.

It has been a long time since we actually posted something on this blog – time really flies when you are having fun, and with all the interaction going on we just didn’t have the time to write anything! But do not worry, behind the scenes our secret coding monkeys have been working hard to deliver you a new batch of awesomeness in the form of CentOS 5.6 template. Yes, that is right – starting today, you can deploy CentOS 5.6 biscuits that will appear in your cookie jar almost instantly.

If you have been running CentOS so far, goodness from 5.6 is only a “yum update” away.

But that is certainly not all – some weeks ago, we had our first (of many to come!) community meeting where we discussed a lot of nice things, and we really liked the feedback you gave us – you folks are made of pure awesome!

On to other matters, we have been giving away Portal2 for the last month and it is now time to announce the winners – please congratulate Barry Morrison and Shawn Hampton – we hope to see you in co-op soon! Sadly, we were not able to get Portal2 copies for all of our customers, but we hope to play with you online as well!

As we march forward into the dark, we could not be more grateful to each one of you. It is you that constantly drive us forward to rethink the way we do things and innovate, and the stories of our community, performance and support are becoming legendary.

‘Till next time, live long and prosper.

System administrators are a strange kind of people – we rely on them every day, and believe they can keep our sites up so we could continue doing what we do best. But the tricky part in sysadmin business is that very few people, if anyone, actually understands what and how they do their magic, and don’t really appreciate the work they put into it.

Well, at least until something bad happens – then all the blame goes to them. Every now and then, a downtime or a problem will occur, and they will be the ones that will have to both take the blame and fix the problem yesterday.

Since we are sysadmins ourselves, and have been in such situations countless times, we decided to tackle the problem by integrating world-class R1soft backups in Biscuit and offer it to our clients at an amazing price. Just look at this pricing:

• Agent pricing: Free
• Backup space: 20GB – $5/month
• Backup space: 50GB – $10/month
• Backup space: 100GB – $20/month
• Backup space: 200GB – $40/month
• Backup space: 500GB – $80/month

Oh, and forget about monthly snapshots, our minimum backup interval is set to 24 hours – yes, only 24 hours so you can be sure your data will be backed up at regular intervals that aren’t light years away from each other. These backups are rotated at 5-day intervals and, to complement, we also include 4 weekly backups so you can go back further in the past if needed. But if you need even more regular backups, this is what the pricing looks like per-agent:

• 24 hours backup interval – Free
• 12 hours backup interval – $5/month
• 6 hours backup interval – $10/month
• 2 hours backup interval – $15/month

Why do we offer backups at such an affordable price you ask? Because we want every one of you out there to use the backups. We want you to keep your data safe. Oh, and did we mention the backups are saved at an off-site location for even more magic points? Being paranoid as we are, we would even suggest keeping your own backups in addition to ours, just to be on the safe side.

C’est la vie, unless you have backups ready in case problems happen

What do you think of our backup offerings? Do you like its integration with Biscuit? What would you like to see changed? Let us know, we want to hear from you!

We have just finished the new awesome functionality. That is all.

This quote comes from one of our valued community members nicknamed macdotnub. While we like to keep the new things that are being worked on to ourselves until they are completely ready for public consumption, it is no secret that we have often teased people on various mediums about the new functionalities and we will continue to do that in the foreseeable future.

One of such features we were working on recently is the addition of IP address management. What that means is that you are now able to request additional IPs, making your VPS much more suitable for various usages. Being a scarce resource, we have put some limits that correspond to your plan size as follows:

1. Nano – 1 IPs
2. Mini – 2 IPs
3. Kilo – 2 IPs
4. Mega – 3 IPs
5. Giga – 3 IPs
6. Tera – 4 IPs
7. Peta – 4 IPs
8. Exa – 6 IPs

While these are hard limits, we are quite reasonable people, and can in certain cases grant exceptions to the limits mentioned above. In any case, you will need to provide a valid justification for additional IPs.

With the addition of this important functionality, we have opened the doors to a lot of other things you have asked from us, including the availability of various control panels like cPanel or DirectAdmin. While we do not have an ETA on them, rest assured this is something we are actively looking at, and will have it implemented in due time.

The way IPs work is a bit different from what you might be used to – we don’t assume you are stupid, and instead of auto-magically adding IPs to your VPS, we send you an email with the instructions on how to add it manually. The reason why we took this approach is because it gives us an enourmous flexibility to attach new IPs to your VPS without requiring a reboot, a functionality that we believe nobody else can offer at this time.

Do you like it? Will you take advantage of the new functionality? Do you need more IPs? Let us know, we want to hear from you!