Major Infrastructure Upgrade in Europe
Last updated: February 6th 2020
Introduction
We are very excited to announce that we have just rolled out our new and much-improved infrastructure in Europe. This means that you will, as an existing customer, automatically be migrated to this new infrastructure. This change is a big step forward and means you will not only receive a free and not insignificant hardware upgrade, you will be able to reap the benefits of our vastly enhanced flexibility in our underlying networking and hardware infrastructure.
Action is required: You will be receiving new IP addresses for your server(s)
Before you read on and learn about all the awesome benefits the new infrastructure gives you, there is an important procedure which will happen first. As we need to migrate our existing EU customers from the old to the new infrastructure you will receive new IP addresses (Ipv4 and IPv6) in addition to your old IP addresses which will still work for 15 days after the migration.
We will be doing a rolling migration of customers, so not everybody will be moved at the same date. This means that you will be contacted by us directly in the near future with precise instructions and information regarding how and when your specific server will be migrated.
Your old IPv4 and IPv6 address will work for 15 days once we contact you with the new IP details, so you will have two addresses that point to your server in the interim.
In all practicality what will happen is that we will migrate your server in one of two ways:
- Without any downtime whatsoever but with the possibility of your data going out of synch
- With minor downtime but without your data going out of synch
When you receive our information email, we will ask you which migration method you prefer, as it depends on the type of website or application you are running on your server.
We will then perform the migration and assign your new IP addresses to your server.
You will then need to update all relevant DNS records so they point to the new IP addresses within 15 days.
The fact that you will have two sets of IP addresses that point to your server for a period will have no SEO impact whatsoever.
For more detailed information on the migration process, click here.
You can migrate your server yourself already today!
If you don't mind a little downtime, and you can update your DNS records yourself, then you can quite easily migrate your server to the new infrastructure already today, and don't have to wait for your turn in the migration process. In order to move your server, simply:
- Suspend your server
- This allows you to keep all settings and data in Webdock as-is (with the exception of monitoring which you may need to re-enable)
- Please make sure all the suspension operation steps have completed 100%, after which Provision a new server from the suspended snapshot on our new EU infrastructure
- Update your DNS records
- For LAMP and LEMP stacks: Re-run the Server Identity tool and Run the Certbot SSL tool once your DNS records are updated
- This is required as your Webdock URL alias will have changed during this procedure
- If you have set up ForwardMX or Postmark, repeat the setup procedure. Just go through the initial setup steps and wait for the verification email to arrive. You should only need to update the Postmark DKIM DNS record. If you get a message that the domain already exist, contact Webdock support and we will sort you out.
You will never pay "too much" doing this - as soon as you suspend your original server you will be refunded in full for any server time you have already paid for - and when you create the new server a new billing period starting the day after begins
You are getting a free hardware upgrade and performance boost!
All our profiles are receiving an upgrade across all metrics which result in a tangible difference in pageviews / second.
All profiles: RAM limits are now fixed, improved SWAP architecture, faster underlying SSD drives, faster snapshotting, better VM isolation
For most users our improved swap architecture will not mean much, but for our smallest tiers our new swap partition scheme may mean a real difference if your site suddenly gets a lot of traffic. If you run out of available RAM our new spacious SSD-backed swap will prevent your site from crashing or taking a nosedive in performance.
This may also become significant for our larger tiers, as before we had soft limits on RAM in our production profiles, whereas now they have become hard limits.. We have increased the amount of RAM in our bigger profiles however, and we have yet to see a site hit those limits in any significant fashion - so this is most likely nothing you need to worry about.
In general our underlying SSD drives are now a bit faster as well, allowing us to deliver more IOPS.
Our storage backend has gotten an upgrade as well which should result in you seeing much faster provisioning from snapshots than before (about 2x speed increase)
Our Virtual Machine architecture has also been improved for further isolation between VMs meaning better security for your server.
Webdock Micro: 2GB more disk space, 2 more CPU cores, 10% more pageviews / second
Our most basic profile is getting a modest 2GB disk space upgrade, up from 3 to 5GB disk space. You may not notice this upgrade that much however, as this upgrade is simply to offset the fact that we no longer compress your data in our zfs storage backend. So for most sites this means about the same free disk space available after the upgrade as before.
In addition the Micro profiles are going up from 4 physical cores and 8 threads available to 6 cores and 12 threads available.
This results in, on average, about 10% more pageviews /second - as long as your site doesn't exhaust available RAM.
Webdock Micro+: 7GB more disk space, 2 more CPU cores, 10% more pageviews / second
Our next tier up from Micro gets a more significant 7GB disk space upgrade and the same CPU core / thread upgrade as the smallest profile. This profile keeps the same amount of RAM available as before (4GB).
The main difference here, with the exception of more disk space is that it is less likely this profile will exhaust RAM ón a heavy or busy site and will be able to sustain more pageviews / second for longer
Webdock Production Ready: 50GB more disk space, 2GB more RAM, 4 more CPU cores, 40% more pageviews / second
Our recommended Production Ready profile is now called SSD Pro and now has 10GB of RAM and 100GB of SSD disk space. In addition we have upped the CPU core count to 10 cores and 20 threads. This translates to a very tangible increase of about 40% more pageviews / second which this profile can deliver.
Webdock Production Ready+: 11 Euro cheaper, 2GB more RAM, 80GB more disk, 9 more CPU cores, 75%+ more pageviews / second
Our very largest profile is now called SSD Premium and has gotten the most significant upgrade. Not only is it 11 Euro cheaper, down to 34 Eur / month, but it has gotten 80GB more disk space, more RAM and a huge increase in CPU power which in some scenarios almost doubles what this already very capable profile could deliver.
This profile is truly a beast.
You are receiving a /112 IPv6 subnet for free (65,536 addresses)
Due to the enhancements to our networking infrastructure, all EU customers will now receive a /112 IPv6 subnet. This means you can activate a whopping 65,356 IPv6 addresses on your server if you so wish for various services. It might seem overkill with that many IPv6 addresses, but this is in fact one of the smallest ranges we can possibly assign :)
You are getting much greater flexibility moving forward
This infrastructure upgrade not only means more capable hardware, it also means much more capable networking infrastructure. This primarily means that once we are done building the appropriate interfaces, you will be able to scale your server in any way you want, transparently and without downtime, and without loosing your IP addresses.
Before we were quite limited in how we could scale our servers, but in the new setup you will be able to change between profiles in a single click and immediately up or downgrade. You will even be able to scale individual resources such as disk or RAM add additional IPv4 addresses to your server etc. for a much improved Cloud experience.
We are still building these interfaces however, so please contact Webdock Support if you need any scaling of hardware and we will do it manually for you.
The physical location of your server is changing
This major infrastructure upgrade means that from today onwards all servers in Europe will be placed in Helsinki, Finland instead of Falkenstein Germany. This has no impact on you in any practical sense. We use the same underlying co-location datacenter provider and the Helsinki datacenter has the same world-class uplinks and peering as the Falkenstein datacenter.
Latency might vary infinitesimally compared to how it was, depending on your location within the EU, but this will have no practical effect on your website performance.
All new servers created in Europe from today onwards are on the new infrastructure
This major change is live already today and if you create a server in the EU with Webdock you will be placed on our new infrastructure with all the benefits mentioned here. So give us a spin and let us know what you think!
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