Network Presence Blog

We’ve watched the global and domestic Cloud Computing / “Public Cloud” offerings and market change over the years (we’ve been running since early 2008) and one aspect that isn’t common in standard VPS or “Cloud” plans nowadays is automatic weekly backups for all customers, by default, as we’ve done for years.

I understand the lack of that free service from a technical operations load management perspective, and from a maturing market where competition is producing the “minimal viable product”.

Accordingly, from July 2014 we’ll stop our general automatic weekly backup activities of customer VPS. Customers will still be able to request a full VPS Disk backup to be taken of their VPS through our web-based VPS Management pages and our API (and as has been the case with our historical automatic weekly VPS backups, these backups are stored “off chassis” but still on Network Presence equipment in the Data Centre).

We’re also in July aiming to add a “Snapshot” backup service, where short-term ‘quick copies’ of your VPS Disk are going to be available and where reverting to those snapshots is quicker than a full restore.

Customer-initiated backups will also be able to be taken more frequently than the once-a-week current automatic backup system as well, and we’ll start allowing at least daily backups done by customer web-based requests in July.

It’s worth noting that in assessing the impact of this removal of the automatic weekly VPS backup system, we found that far less than 1% of our customers have ever utilised these backups to restore their VPS and that removing the load placed on the VPS Platforms by this weekly regime will result in better/higher performance (in Disk IO & CPU headroom) for all customers.

After July 1st 2014 when the automatic weekly VPS backups are ceased, as mentioned above, customers will still be able to take backups of their VPS and restore from those backups via their own requests to our web-based VPS Management system and there will still be no charge for that capability. Should any customers still require Network Presence to automatically take regular full backups of their VPS, then we will create a new product for that service.

FYI and regards,
Richard.

During the evening of Tuesday June 10th from 11pm that night (through to 7am on Wednesday morning) we will be performing upgrades to network infrastructure (routers, switches & other network-based infrastructure) and selected hosting server platforms of Network Presence in Sydney, Australia.

Customers with services (VPS) on the platforms to be upgraded will be emailed advisory notices shortly, and this is a general notice related to other ancillary upgrades and Infrastructure Maintenance being performed during this scheduled window of time.

This Maintenance Window starts from 11pm Sydney time on the evening of Tuesday June 10th, 2014 through to 7am on the Wednesday morning, and I’ll be personally contactable by phone & online during and after these works incase there’s any issues that arise. During this Maintenance Window, selected network or server equipment will be worked on and restarted. Works will be completed as quickly as possible (timing information will be in emails to affected customers) and restarts are short service interruptions only.

This will incur outages to selected hosting services of Network Presence in Australia during this off-peak scheduled works period.

Our Engineers will be remaining on-site during Wednesday at our Sydney Data Centre to quickly attend to any issues post-upgrades which may arise.

FYI and regards,
Richard.