01 May 2012
27 April 2012
Ubuntu Precise Pangolin released
19 March 2012
Tilaa is supporting software appliances
03 January 2012
New website online
In the past we've always worked with fixed plans, which combined memory and disk space in a single VPS package. Our most prominent new feature is the ability to customize a VPS and configure memory and storage space independently.
Another noteworthy feature is that our virtual private networks feature is now out of private beta and available to all customers. The virtual private networks feature allows you to create a private network for network communication between two or more Tilaa VPS's. Use of this feature is free and traffic over the virtual network is not billed.
We've also added some statistics: You can view things like CPU time, disk I/O and network I/O for a short and longer term impression of the performance of a VPS. This is an addition to the accounting system we already had.
We now have a decent order system in place. It's now easier to configure and order multiple VPS's in one go or create a quote for your IT manager to approve.
We hope you like the new website! Even though we've been testing the new website extensively it is of course possible there are still some bugs here and there. If you find one please let us know!
28 November 2011
Lower pricing for Windows, cPanel and DirectAdmin licenses
As of now you can order a VPS with cPanel/WHM VPS optimized license for just € 9,95 extra instead of € 15,-.
A DirectAdmin licensed VPS doesn't cost € 7,50 anymore. You can order DirectAdmin for just € 3,95 extra from now on!
A control panel is an out of the box LAMP server solution based on Linux, which is completely manageable from your browser. When you order a VPS with a control panel, Tilaa does the installation for you, totally free!
The web interfaces are easy to use. No knowledge of Linux operation systems is needed to use cPanel and DirectAdmin. With the Tilaa 2 weeks satisfaction guarantee you can try out our services. If your VPS doesn't meet your expectations, we will refund all subscription fees.
You can visit the websites of cPanel and DirectAdmin for more product information.
21 November 2011
Virtual private networks now in private beta!
A while ago we did a blog post about working towards virtual private networks. Today we can announce that we've reached a point where we can provide this feature to select customers in a private beta program!
It's now possible to easily build one or more virtual private networks between any number of nodes on our platform. Haarlem and Amsterdam use a flat layer-2 network, so nodes running in Haarlem will be directly reachable from nodes in Amsterdam and vice versa without any routing required. Our Schiphol site also supports virtual private networks, but runs completely stand alone from our other sites.
Virtual private networks are provisioned on a seperate VLAN and are completely isolated from each other by an extensive set of firewall rules to ensure maximum privacy and security.
The main reason for not making this feature available to all customers yet is that it's quite possible that we currently block too much traffic and that our rulesets might need some finetuning. By testing this feature with selected clients we can iron out any issues that might arise with specific customer setups.
Once everything works to our satisfaction we will unlock the virtual private network feature for all our clients. This should be somewhere within the next 2 months. If you would like to test this feature as well, please contact our support team!
18 November 2011
Our highly available NFS storage is available!
We're proud to announce that as of today we offer highly available NFS storage to all our customers on our Haarlem site!
Over the years customers have asked us on a regular basis what the best way is to share files between multiple VPS's, which is often required for building a redundant platform. Well, we simply didn't have an easy answer to that. There are several possible solutions, which all have their up- and downsides. You could, for example, use rsync to replicate content, but this is not a realtime process. You could set up a separate VPS with a NFS server, but it wouldn't be redundant. You could setup something like glusterfs, which allows synchronous redundant replication, but it doesn't perform very well (especially with lots of small writes). So basically each customer was confronted with a tradeoff: Consistency, performance, availability (pick two). With this service, making a tradeoff is no longer needed!
Our NFS cluster is built using a 4U disk enclosure (JBOD) connected to two servers. We use RAID-10 for maximum redundancy and performance. We have 300GB of SSD storage for a high performance read cache and use two mirrored extra high performance ZeusRAM SSD's for the filesystem journal, which greatly reduces latency for synchronous writes and ensures no data is lost upon a power failure.
The cluster is connected with two 10Gigabit interfaces to a separate redundant storage network. The reason to put storage on a different physically separated network is to ensure low latency and high performance. All our virtualization servers are connected to this network as well. When you request NFS storage you'll get an extra network interface in your VPS. We use Jumbo frames (MTU 9000) to reduce packet fragmentation and our testing shows we can completely max out the network interfaces of multiple VPS's at the same time when writing to or reading from an NFS share.
Even if you don't need to share data between multiple VPS's this can be a great solution to improve overall I/O performance of your VPS!
Our pricing scheme is simple: € 0,65 per month per GB of NFS storage, excluding VAT where applicable. The minimum requested size is 10GB and we don't charge any setup fees.
Please do note that we don't make backups of your NFS data by default. Our recently announced backup service is compatible with our NFS service: We can backup your NFS share (out of band) on-site or off-site. We will then keep backups of your NFS storage on separate hardware.
This service is currently only available to VPS's running on our Haarlem site. If you would like to use this service, but are currently hosted in one of our other sites we can discuss a migration of your servers to Haarlem. Please do note that your IP addresses will change if you do that.
Windows VPS's should also be able to use this service by installing the "Subsystem for UNIX-based applications", but we currently haven't tested this. If you'd like to help us test, let us know.
If you're interested in this service, please contact our support team and provide the following information:
- How much NFS capacity do you need
- Which VPS's should be able to access this storage
- Do you want backups of your NFS share
- And if so: Do you want them on- or offsite and how much backup capacity do you require
Many thanks to our early testers for the valuable feedback. We hope you enjoy yet another often requested feature!
15 November 2011
Our managed backup service is live!
It has taken us a while, but we're proud to finally be able to provide both on-site and off-site backup services to our customers! Our backup solution is based on rsnapshot, which we've been using internally for years and has proven to be a very robust solution.
We've evaluated lots of backup alternatives over the last year, which is why it has taken us a while. We did some extensive testing with Bacula, for example, but we discovered that it doesn't provide us the level of flexibility and simplicity we need for a cloud based backup service. We discovered that most backup suites/solutions, either open-source or commercial, don't really fit within this model. We considered other more basic tools like rdiff-backup and duplicity, but we wanted a fully managed "set and forget" solution (from the point of view of our customers anyway) and those tools don't provide that. Rsnapshot is a pull-based backup: We login remotely and grab the files from your server, just like a real backup product, but without the complexity and limitations.
Some reasons to finally settle with rsnapshot are:
- No special backup agent on the client required (running a SSH daemon is enough)
- Minimal configuration on the client required (rsync and our public SSH key must be installed, that's it)
- Backups are stored as files (easy restores)
- Very space efficient (identical files are hard-linked)
- Support for incremental backups
- Centralized backup monitoring (we monitor backups for our clients, so they don't have to)
- Fast, secure and doesn't require much system resources
We make backups of the following intervals:
- One backup per hour of the last day (24 backups)
- One backup per day of the last week (7 backups)
- One backup per week of the last month (4 backups)
- One backup per month of the last 2 months (2 backups)
One thing we still need to do to make this service feature complete is to provide an interface for customers to restore their files. We decided not to wait with the launch of this service before we would have a restore feature as well. For now you can request a restore by contacting our support team and we'll do it manually for you (of course without any restore fees).
Pricing for our backup service is based on reserved disk space on our backup storage. We recommend to keep a backup quota at least 150% of the amount of used disk space on your VPS to prevent space from running out. The more files change on your server, the more backup space you'll need. You can share the backup quota with multiple VPS servers, as long as the backups are both stored on the same site. So if you have two VPS servers, one of them using 6GB of disk space and the other 14GB, you would request at least 30GB backup storage. The minimum requested backup storage is 10GB.
Pricing information (per month, excluding VAT where applicable)
| Backup capacity | Price per GB (on-site) | Price per GB (off-site) |
|---|---|---|
| 10GB - 20GB | € 0,19 | € 0,27 |
| 20GB - 60GB | € 0,13 | € 0,21 |
| 60GB - 480GB | € 0,10 | € 0,18 |
| 480GB or more | € 0,08 | € 0,16 |
Note that we don't have any on-site backup capacity on our Schiphol site. If you have a VPS on Schiphol and request backups this will be an off-site backup by default.
Also note that this backup service doesn't work with a Windows 2008 server. A Windows backup solution is on the roadmap for next year.
If you're interested in using our backup service, simply send a mail to our support team at support@tilaa.nl and specify the following information:
- Which servers do you want to backup (if you have more than one)
- Do you request on-site or off-site backups
- How much backup storage do you require
- If there is any data you would like to exclude from the backup, please specify it
Setup of the backup will be done by Tilaa and we don't charge any setup fees.
A backup service has been requested lots of times and we hope you like what we've built!
09 November 2011
Fedora 16
This version contains a lot of new and interesting features, have a look at the release notes. Tilaa has both 32bit and 64bit versions available as of today.
Enjoy!
20 October 2011
Updated Windows 2008 images
14 October 2011
Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot available
26 August 2011
Tilaa is supporting Gentoo!
make them even better.
18 August 2011
Scientific Linux 6.1 available
Scientific Linux is a Red Hat based distribution by Fermilab, CERN and others. See
scientificlinux.org for more info.
05 August 2011
3rd datacenter live! IP failover possible between sites.
Here is a picture of our new network infrastructure:
Our Schiphol site runs completely independent from the other sites and is therefore an excellent location for running fallback services like nameservers and mail backup or external network monitoring.
11 July 2011
Towards virtual private networks!
Over the last couple of weeks we've removed the hard-coded limits and decoupled the network interfaces from the virtual machines. This code has been deployed to production last week. Most of these changes are not yet visible from an end-user perspective, but it was important groundwork to make some new interesting things possible:
- The default public and private network interfaces as we provide them by default are now completely optional and can be removed (which can be useful in some specific use cases).
- It's now possible to add additional interfaces to a VM for one or more VLANs. This allows for network integration with private clouds and direct private links to remote offices, for example. This feature is only available to private cloud customers, because VLAN tags are scarce and are not always required.
- And the most important bit: We've also implemented a virtual network feature. Effectively this provides the same level of security as a VLAN, but is implemented in a different way. In the near future all our customers will be able to build one or more virtual networks on our platform and connect VM's to one or more of these virtual networks. Want to build a DMZ network protected by a centralized firewall gateway? You can! Want to build a seperate management network? You can! We are currently beta-testing and hope to be able to launch this feature soon (and it will be free)!
We are looking forward to launch these features. Keep an eye on this space for further announcements!
Billing code feature update
- It's now possible to modify/update the credit card authorization, which comes in handy in case a credit card is due to expire or if you prefer to use a different credit card for recurring payments.
- You can now deposit a credit in a customer account. When new invoices are generated, they can be automatically paid from the remaining credit. This is especially handy for people who prefer to have one big transaction rather than a small transaction every month. It will also make it possible for us to offer more cloudy services in the future, for example by implementing hourly and daily billing intervals.
- Fulfill multiple open invoices with one transaction. No need to go to the complete payment procedure for each open invoice anymore.
18 June 2011
We now support Debian 6.0 (Squeeze) with DirectAdmin
26 May 2011
Fedora 15 images now available!
Enjoy :)
18 May 2011
Important network changes on our Haarlem site!
(Our other site in Amsterdam will not change at this time.)
Migration planning
We will start announcing our own ranges at 0:00AM and verify that all network routes are properly announced over the internet. This should not cause any downtime.
At 1:00AM sharp we will move the VRRP gateway IP's from our current upstream provider to our routers. Unfortunately we cannot do this without downtime. If everything goes according to plan, downtime will be at most a couple of minutes.
After that, we will verify that everything works properly and then inform our current upstream provider they can stop announcing our routes.
We can then safely shutdown our then obsolete uplink to our current provider. We expect to finish the migration around 2:00AM and will of course carefully monitor the network afterwards.
Reasons for routing ourselves
Routing our own network has several advantages, the biggest ones being that we have more control and flexibility:
- We can improve routing to whatever geographical location or continent we (and not an upstream ISP) think is important by adding new carriers and internet exchanges or changing routing policies.
- We will be able to fail over IP's between sites (for that extra bit of redundancy).
- We can route dedicated subnets for private cloud customers and give them their own VLAN and gateway that is completely seperated from our other customers.
- We can fix most if not all network related issues ourselves without being dependent on external suppliers.
IP addresses
All IPv4 addresses will remain the same and no configuration changes need to be made to a Tilaa VPS.
IPv6 is a different matter. As mentioned on our website and blog, IPv6 connectivity is currently still an experimental feature. One of the reasons for that is that our current IPv6 subnet is provided by our upstream ISP. Since this upstream link will not be available after the migration, this IPv6 subnet will stop working.
We are going to provide a new IPv6 subnet and will also provide IPv6 router advertisements, so no manual configuration is needed anymore to get basic IPv6 connectivity up and running. Once more information is available we will dedicate a new blog post on how to move over to the new IPv6 subnet.
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