The holiday season is characterised by lower user activity on the Internet. We can see this in our company by the fact that the pressure on customer and technical support is decreasing. Our statistics show that people just enjoy relaxing and don’t sit in front of computers as much. We always take advantage of this period to move forward with a lot of projects, improve the infrastructure and finish some of the rest. Plus, this year the Czechs decided to start enjoying themselves earlier and so June was a little bit of July for us 🙂
Testing and building of oil cooling continues
In the past few months, several other tests of our oil cooling system have taken place. There are 90 servers in the oil bath and the main thing being tested is the design flaws of the bath itself and what to improve. We’re going to be going to another 90 servers in the middle of the holiday season.
In June, we also tested the connectivity link.
Testing of the internal water circuit that will transfer heat from the oil baths to the “engine room” has already been carried out. There, the heat will then be transferred as needed to the building heating circuit, parking lot heating, municipal pool heating, cooling from the well, or from a nearby water dam for the hydroelectric plant.
Tests have shown that a few major modifications need to be made directly to the water cooling of the oil baths. 90 powerful servers can heat up nicely under full load. We want full redundancy (the server is cooled by 2 independent circuits), uniform cooling of all components and sufficient reserve for this.
Oil cooling already outperforms air, but there is potential to go further. For one thing, we don’t know what the future will bring us in terms of technology, and we also like the fact that with a full cooling failure, servers loaded in oil can run for tens of minutes at full load without the water circuit running. Try turning off the cooling for a few tens of minutes in a normal DC at full operation 🙂
In May we connected the water circuit with the swimming pool area. In June, rapid excavation work was underway. We connected the outdoor circuit to the swimming pool equipment and cleaned everything up quickly so that the season could start. In the autumn, after the season is over, the work will continue. Now we don’t want to interfere with the holiday swimming season.
Migration of web hosts to new servers
At the end of 2017, we started setting up NoLimit web hosts on new servers with fast processors and NVMe drives. The entire solution is built on our cloud, so everything is more transparent, easier to migrate and spread the load. Migration without failures is even performed automatically when we detect problems. It can happen that when you notice that your site is slower because someone is doing something wrong on the server, before you write to support, the person is gone and everything is running smoothly.
When our cloud solution was sufficiently tested and debugged, we started thinking about migrating all our customers to the new solution. Tens of thousands of services were involved. Unfortunately, the new and old solutions are not compatible at all, so we had to figure out how to do it.
There were some major problems here, why it stalled several times. Firstly, the development of the new solution went forward. So by the time a suitable migration solution was made it might not work anymore. We were also dealing with some internal network modifications to strengthen the network infrastructure and were waiting to see what final solution would be chosen.
Furthermore, the colleagues in charge assumed that we wanted a fail-safe migration, because they got used to the idea that everything that goes right must be done in such a way that the customer ideally would not even know it. We had to explain to them that in this case we could afford an hour or two of downtime. However, we assume that everything will eventually be without downtime.
And then came the new hardware, which surpassed our existing solutions in every respect. Specifically, it is the HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage, which stands out for its stability. HPE promises 3 million IOPS with a response time of under 1 ms and guarantees data availability up to an incredible 99.9999%. They can scale up to 80 PB / one system.
However, we did see a few percent speedup when we deployed it to 49 servers with customer raw data. All new NoLimit web hosts are now running on these disk arrays.
So now we finally have the details arranged, the network sorted out, the hardware tested and most importantly time to do a gradual migration 🙂
Development of new services
Work on the WEDOS Anycast is continuing. The first PoP is already operational and is located in our company in Hluboká nad Vltavou in WEDOS DC1. We are testing the whole concept of anycast and other associated services such as advanced protections on it. For problematic IP addresses with a large number of computers, we would like to give way to either cookies, JavaScript redirection, and if that doesn’t work, captcha. Since the end of last year, we have seen an increase in malicious attacks, which we wrote about in January.
Sharp deployment will depend on how further testing and development goes. We are also waiting for the modification of some open source solutions with whose developers we are in contact.
Another service that will be worked on in the quiet of the holidays is WEDOS Apps. It is a SaaS (software as a service) solution that allows you to choose the one you like from a large list of software. You set the parameters and WEDOS Apps creates a VPS ON with the ideal parameters and installs everything you need there. Our first tests show that we could set up a VPS and install the necessary software in minutes.
The service will start with monthly and annual billing, but later we can imagine daily billing. This will come in handy if you need to set up a VPN, game server or shared storage for a weekend, for example. There are even plans for a dedicated WordPress server. No inflated webserver parameters to make it look faster, but really a server with custom modules made for WordPress. We’ve already tried it and hundreds of thousands of accesses per minute were not a problem for a clean install.
Improving our partner program
Although we are happy with our partnership programme and have already paid out CZK 19 million, we still do not pay enough attention to it. That’s changed now. One of my colleagues got wedos.as in charge and together with another from insurance.cz they are now working on how to move everything forward.
They have a lot of ideas and space to implement them. If you are an active partner in our commission network, you definitely have something to look forward to.
WEDOS Pay
We have reached a stage where the fees associated with payments are already quite high and it is worthwhile to make our own solution. WEDOS Pay, s.r.o. was added to the list of subsidiaries of WEDOS Internet, a.s., which will operate the WEDOS Pay service.
We’ll take it easy at first. The service is mainly used for quick bank payments. We plan to open bank accounts in Slovakia, Poland and other countries where we have enough customers.
The WEDOS Pay service will mainly reduce the high costs associated with transfers via third-party services and, if everything goes according to plan, it will eliminate exchange rate risks to a large extent, which will enable us to offer better prices in the future, especially for customers paying in EUR and USD.
For our customers, WEDOS Pay will mainly serve as a payment gateway and online wallet. It will also eliminate some problems such as automatic debiting of payments and allow for daily billing for services. As mentioned above, we are preparing a number of SaaS services and WEDOS Pay will be the solution for daily billing.
Acquisitions
Although we are still recruiting, we are still short of people. We currently have around 40 people, but we would be happy to add another 10 skilled colleagues who are willing to develop new services and take existing ones further.
Since we are not able to expand our team as we would like, acquisitions are the next way forward. So we started to look for interesting projects with skilled people behind them that we could enter into commercially. We are the largest web hosting on the Czech market, we have more than 280 thousand customers from all over the world, huge technological background and experience. Well, we have a lot to offer 🙂
We are currently in negotiations with two potential bidders whose products could expand our SaaS portfolio. But we probably won’t make it before the end of the holidays. It’s a challenge 🙂
Conclusion
In fact, we don’t know what all our colleagues are working on. Some people find some interesting novelty, they try and test it “in secret”. Then they prepare a presentation and we just watch 🙂 Of course, it always depends on the priorities and the current workload of the developers. But we are able to implement interesting things quite quickly.