Today we wanted to take some time to update you on last months new server deployments, the war in Ukraine and what it means in the context of our service and how it will affect some of our customers.

Server Update

Firstly some of you have pointed out that we reused some of the names from our old servers for our new ones. The HELIOS, AURA and ZEUS node names were reused for our new nodes and in-fact when it comes to HELIOS we physically swapped out the server at its location meaning the new server inhabits the exact same rack as the old server.

The names EOS, RHEA and THEA were retired and we introduced ORION as a new name for one of the new servers. This name was actually chosen by one of the plugin authors we work closely with.

So how have they been performing? - In short, brilliantly. We've had the highest level of performance available since the service started. The time it takes for pages of our website to load are significantly down, especially when users access the Dashboard for the first time and a lot of their data hasn't been loaded into memory yet.

Similarly the API itself has been delivering answers with the lowest latency we've ever seen and more importantly consistently. Being able to deliver 99.99% of requests in under 9ms (before network overhead) is a remarkable achievement. This has been made possible by the marriage of our new components. The CPU our high speed memory and the flash based storage all working together to provide this consistently low access latency.

Over the past month since deployment we have come under multiple DDoS attacks in the same way that we had prior to the new server deployments and we're happy to say the new infrastructure handled these with ease. We were able to absorb the extra traffic generated by the attacks without incident. We didn't even see the average API latency increase.

We couldn't be more happy with the new infrastructure.

Ukraine

Like most of the world we're horrified by the unjustified war in Ukraine perpetrated by the Russian federation under Putin. We condemn this needless war and hope that the Ukrainian people will ultimately prevail.

As you may know from our server status page we have two servers in Eastern Europe. However they are not in Ukraine and are not in any danger at this time. If this changes we will deploy more servers in Western or Central Europe.

When it comes to our Russian customers we want to be clear, we do not blame you for the actions undertaken by your government. However we are beholden to the same sanctions as others which means we can no longer process your bank cards or accept PayPal payments from you. We've also made the decision not to accept other forms of payment that may bypass the sanctions such as cryptocurrency.

We've already heard from a few of you about this and as we've written back, we won't be accepting other forms of payment and instead your plans once they end will transition to our free tier. We won't be blocking Russian citizens from using the service but your government, its agencies and anyone we're aware of on international sanction lists will be denied service.

We know this is an unusual blog post, we've never had to discuss an ongoing war before. We have customers in Ukraine, Russia and many other European countries who are afraid right now. Our service should be the least of their problems but we are receiving support emails from customers who are affected by the war and its ramifications (such as the sanctions) so we felt it was important to address a few things here for you in public.

Thanks for reading and please keep yourselves and each other safe.