Changes to NatVPS

natvps_uk

Hello All,

This thread is being created for full transparency and to keep the community up to date with what we're working on.

As of today all UK NAT VPS' on the following nodes:

• uk-nat-vps-1
• uk-nat-vps-2
• uk-nat-vps-3
• uk-nat-vps-4

have been migrated to the Micronode panel.

Does this have any impact on my service?

All users have been migrated and access to the Micronode panel can be found under Additional Information from within the billing platform.

The panel provides the same basic functionality as SolusVM although the primary missing feature is bandwidth monitoring. This is something we are working on however as of right now servers will still be suspended on bandwidth overuse, we will attempt to inform users before their bandwidth gets close to running out.

Everyone will be given the chance to move to a node with unmetered bandwidth if this is a concern although most users never get close to their bandwidth cap.

Why do migrated hosts show under legacy devices?

We consider these nodes our legacy nodes down to the age of them, low specifications and the fact that they were provisioned on SolusVM which we have now moved away from. There are no immediate plans to retire these nodes although they will not last forever and we can only support them for so long. When the time does come to retire these we will give notice of migrations approximately one month before the migration date.

Migrated hosts are also on separate user accounts with a prepend of legacy_ this was to make the migration as smooth and easy as possible, if you have an existing micronode account and would like the accounts merged please open a ticket.

Does the HTTP proxy still exist on legacy nodes?

Yes.

Why have we migrated away from SolusVM?

Micronode was created for us to sell physical servers, we invested a lot of time and effort into the panel and we immediately faced issues, the Raspberry Pi's and other low end boxes are almost impossible to get currently and have been for over a year - We will come back to this however the panel was almost dormant during this time.

We invested a lot of money into building a panel in house and it was built to support KVM, OpenVZ, LXC and Physical hardware from the start. Recently we started offering NATVPS services through the Micronode panel to great success followed more recently by Instances.

So to get to the point:
SolusVM was costing us for two reasons, the management overhead of two panels and the monthly (and yearly) costs associated with SolusVM.

For transparency SolusVM costs us £600 per year plus the cost of the SolusVM WHMCS module which is an extra £150 per year - This is money that we would rather invest in additional locations and in additions and improvements to Micronode.

I hope everyone can accept this decision and that it doesn't cause too much drama, we're doing this for the right reasons and the prices of our deals will continue to be as competitive as possible.

This is not a support thread, if you cannot access the micronode panel please open a ticket.

I will add this is not a decision we took lightly.
/natvps

bliss

Keep it up, man. UK network is unbelievable!

emperor

@bliss said: Keep it up, man.

Yes indeed.. its one of the most generous bw limit for nat vps and network is quite good. Nice work.

iaecm

Respect personal coded panel

ehab

it has been working fine.

yoursunny

Micronode AGPL license when?

natvps_uk

@yoursunny said:
Micronode AGPL license when?

In all seriousness open source is a possibility, either that or we licence it for a small fee to other NAT providers for around £1 per node per month.

We have a few ideas.

AuroraZero

First time caller long time listener. Just have to say that I am liking the first vm I received from you. Will call back with more details at a later date since my dinner is almost completed.

cctv

When does the nat vps sale in the UK start?

natvps_uk

@cctv said:
When does the nat vps sale in the UK start?

Likely tomorrow, maybe Monday

EvanP

Wow, you build your own control panel ? That's incredible!

cctv

@natvps_uk said:

@cctv said:
When does the nat vps sale in the UK start?

Likely tomorrow, maybe Monday

I now see that the nat vps in the UK has only 2 in stock, will it increase its stock when the next round of sales starts?

natvps_uk

@cctv said:

@natvps_uk said:

@cctv said:
When does the nat vps sale in the UK start?

Likely tomorrow, maybe Monday

I now see that the nat vps in the UK has only 2 in stock, will it increase its stock when the next round of sales starts?

It will once we get to the UK offers 😉

bdl

I'm on the legacy system, did you want me to open a ticket to move to micronode? more than happy to do so if it helps you in some way!

natvps_uk

Did somebody ask for loadbalancers?

We're adding LBs, these can be used as a simple ipv6 => IPv4 proxy or to distribute load between instance locations and for high availability. You can add as many instances as you like to a LB and like all other micronode services they come with unlimited bandwidth!

Loadbalancers are not located on the nodes, instead they are regional. You may add hosts from any location in to any LB location although for the best latency we recommend selecting the closest LB to your hosts.

Initially LBs are being rolled out in a single location within Europe, we picked this location down to the low latency to Finland, UK and France. The service is hosted on scaleways network and it is highly available.

SSL is provided automatically via letsencrypt.

Loadbalancers work with any non-legacy VMs and all instances. Micronode credits are required to deploy an instance and they each account for 64MB RAM and 3GB disk from your resource pool.

Loadbalancers will be live on Saturday 3rd December 2022.

We look forward to everyones feedback!

ehab

auto cert is a real good bonus. Do it autorenew ?

natvps_uk

@ehab said:
auto cert is a real good bonus. Do it autorenew ?

It does

Ympker

That's some great transparency for a dollar nat service (this is meant to be a compliment)

natvps_uk

Here is an LB demo, two instances are sat behind it in two different locations: https://proxy.micronode.uk/

If anyone wants to be on the loadbalancers beta drop me a DM

tarasis

@natvps_uk said:
We look forward to everyones feedback!

Wow!

Fritz

@natvps_uk said:
Here is an LB demo, two instances are sat behind it in two different locations: https://proxy.micronode.uk/

If anyone wants to be on the loadbalancers beta drop me a DM

allow me to ask, Is it really a load balancer or just round robin thing.

yoursunny

Can one load balancer handle multiple hostnames?
Can one load balancer handle wildcard hostnames?

natvps_uk

@Fritz said:

@natvps_uk said:
Here is an LB demo, two instances are sat behind it in two different locations: https://proxy.micronode.uk/

If anyone wants to be on the loadbalancers beta drop me a DM

allow me to ask, Is it really a load balancer or just round robin thing.

It’s really a load balancer

natvps_uk

@yoursunny said:
Can one load balancer handle multiple hostnames?

No

Can one load balancer handle wildcard hostnames?

No

natvps_uk

Micronode 1.1.0 Released!

Changelog

Added:
* General UI Improvements
* Support for Loadbalancers

Changed:
* Automated torrent detection, updated monitored processes.
* General UI Improvements

Fixed:
* Reduced minimal disk size to 2GB
* Fixed bug causing CentOS 8 Instances to crash upon enabling Tun/Tap

natvps_uk

Loadbalancers

Loadbalancers are live although our documentation is not. So here's the rundown for anyone that wants to give them a go:

Loadbalancers only support instances and MicroNode Native VPS' - Legacy devices are not supported.

To create a loadbalancer you must select at least one backend host. A CNAME must be pointed to the Target returned in the panel.

Web servers such as Nginx or Apache2 must be configured to listen on the first public IPv6 Address on port 80.

SSL is configured automatically once DNS has propagated.

We expect the main use of the loadbalancers will be a simple IPv6 to IPv4 proxy, this is setup as follows:

Select the backend Instance/VPS and the hostname matching the CNAME that you will point to the endpoint:

Point a CNAME to the endpoint returned in the loadbalancers table:

Advanced Use

How does the load balancing work?
Requests are sent to the backends in a round robin, if a backend is down the requests are simply routed to the other backend.

500 errors must be returned in order for a server to automatically drop out of an LB. If 10 50X responses are sent over 60 second period the backend will drop out for 5 minutes or until the health check returns a 20X.

What is a health check?
Health checks are not mandatory although to ensure that a backend drops out of the LB in the case of issues it is recommended. To create a health check you should create a route within your application on the root of your web directory called healthcheck, healthcheck.php, healthcheck.html or healthcheck.htm. This should ideally be a script that ensures that connections to databases and other services are successful and should return a 50X response if not.

Backends are automatically dropped out of the LBs if a healthcheck fails.

ralf

@natvps_uk said: We invested a lot of money into building a panel in house and it was built to support KVM, OpenVZ, LXC and Physical hardware from the start. Recently we started offering NATVPS services through the Micronode panel to great success followed more recently by Instances.
For transparency SolusVM costs us £600 per year plus the cost of the SolusVM WHMCS module which is an extra £150 per year - This is money that we would rather invest in additional locations and in additions and improvements to Micronode.

I'm not a customer, so I might be missing something obvious that your panel supports that SolusVM doesn't, but on the face of what you've written here, it seems like making your own panel cost more than paying the SolusVM fees would have cost.

natvps_uk

@ralf said:

@natvps_uk said: We invested a lot of money into building a panel in house and it was built to support KVM, OpenVZ, LXC and Physical hardware from the start. Recently we started offering NATVPS services through the Micronode panel to great success followed more recently by Instances.
For transparency SolusVM costs us £600 per year plus the cost of the SolusVM WHMCS module which is an extra £150 per year - This is money that we would rather invest in additional locations and in additions and improvements to Micronode.

I'm not a customer, so I might be missing something obvious that your panel supports that SolusVM doesn't, but on the face of what you've written here, it seems like making your own panel cost more than paying the SolusVM fees would have cost.

You’re correct as things stand currently, we have 10 nodes, solusVM is around £10 per month per node. However when we have say 100 nodes that starts to become a larger and larger chunk of money.

By investing in our own panel from the start not only can we add features to suite the needs of our clients but we also save massively in the long run allowing us to be more competitive both in terms of cost and features.

Keep in mind that SolusVM doesn’t support physical hardware, we provide budget Dedis along with VPS’and that Solus doesn’t support “cloud like” instances without the use of buggy 3rd party software that adds additional cost again.

ralf

@natvps_uk said: You’re correct as things stand currently, we have 10 nodes, solusVM is around £10 per month per node. However when we have 100 nodes that starts to become a larger and larger chunk of money.

Ah, gotcha. I thought it was a fixed £600 for the company. Yeah, makes sense then.

natvps_uk

Just to gauge interest, we're looking at adding some RISCV64 dedis to Micronode to allow people to experiment/develop on RISCV architecture.

Before we go-ahead with the hardware order I want to see if there is any interest.

These would be £7 per month for a single core D1 RISCV CPU and 512MB RAM.

We will also add a small amount of RISCV Instances to Micronode which will run on LXC.

Let us know if anyone is interested!

yoursunny

@natvps_uk said:
These would be £7 per month for a single core D1 RISCV CPU and 512MB RAM.

💸

Offer would violate rules because £7/month exceeds $7/month limit, most of the time.
Even if it's $7/month, I wouldn't buy because I can probably buy hardware for $84 or less, equivalent to the annual rental cost.
It's more effective developing locally.

We will also add a small amount of RISCV Instances to Micronode which will run on LXC.

🙋

I already have the Instance credit, so I'll certainly spend some on one of these.
I want ARMv7 and MIPS32 too.