WEDOS celebrates 6. Birthday

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Today we celebrate 6. WEDOS birthday. Six years with you. Let us give you a little summary of what we have achieved in the last year.

Today we celebrated 6. WEDOS birthday. My colleagues and I took pictures both in the server room and on the construction site of the new datacenter, where some of us were for the first time. These are the people who look after your data, maintain your servers, complete network infrastructure, datacenter and are available 24/7.

There was a small celebration:

There was also a photo shoot in the server room:

We took the train to the construction of the new datacenter:

At the construction site, we saw the future chaplains:

Finally, there was a cake (3 cakes to be exact) with a candle with the number 6 (and a fire extinguisher – just in case):

We have had another very successful year. We are growing, improving our services and last year we started building a unique datacentre where servers will be cooled in an oil bath. They will literally swim in oil and the waste heat will be used to heat the municipal swimming pool in Hluboká nad Vltavou.

We would like to thank all our clients for their trust and we would like to summarize what we have achieved since our last birthday.

Today we all took a picture so you can believe how many of us there really are. There are over 30 of us! We’re a small company with a big meaning. With full automation, our 31 employees handle over 400,000 active services. To date, we manage approximately 15.67% of all .CZ domains and have a similar overall share of the hosting market. We are the largest provider of hosting services in the Czech Republic. Our datacenter (and our autonomous system) hosts the largest number of hosting services in the Czech Republic. With a bit of exaggeration we can say that the WEDOS datacenter is one of the most important IT buildings in the Czech Republic. If we did not have power, almost every sixth Czech website would not work.

You can see on the chart that we are clearly the fastest growing hosting in the Czech Republic. Thank you for your trust!

What we’ve done in the last year

IDS/IPS protection in operation

We have tested and successfully deployed IDS/IPS protection in live operation, achieving truly groundbreaking results. At the beginning of September we started to gradually deploy new filters, which we have been working on for half a year. Thanks to them, we eliminate more than 21,000 of the most common security threats. The result is a noticeable speed-up, especially for popular content management systems. Although we did not invest (higher) millions of crowns in some paid IPS/IDS protection, but chose an opensource solution, we did the right thing. It’s already coming back to us in the form of your positive feedback and reduced strain on our infrastructure.

This unique technical solution is unique in the Czech Republic and is exceptional in hosting companies worldwide. If someone offers a similar solution (in the world), you will pay a lot of money for it (many times the price of hosting). The security of your web hosted applications is now handled by 4 powerful servers with 1,536 GB of RAM and a total of 160 CPU threads. We block dozens of different attempts to penetrate your web hosts every second. Some are simple, but some are special and complex attacks that we can detect and protect your website. We will soon start showing statistics and publish more details.

Just a small sample of traffic statistics from one part of our network that we monitor via IDS/IPS protection:

DDoS protection

Our DDoS protection has repelled more than 160,900 attacks in the last year. Yes, indeed, it is a similarly high number, which is almost unbelievable. The strongest attacks were in the tens of Gbps and were several million packets per second.

However, we must continually improve our defences as attacks become more sophisticated and technologically advanced. Before the holidays, we were rejoicing that we hadn’t had the slightest outage related to DDoS attacks for about a year and “lo and behold”. Just last month, we dealt with one of the most impressive and complex attacks we have encountered to date. It was a bit complicated by the fact that these were IPv6 attacks, where no one has much experience yet.

It was not easy, but we managed to solve everything and we are one step further. We’ve made a lot of adjustments to the network, to the system. We’ve modified the protection. We changed the IPv6 address registration and everything is much better now. We are still investigating the situation.

On average, one attack was 142,038 packets per second strong and attacks were on 5,180 IP addresses plus attacks on unused and unprotected IP addresses.

Just a small sample of the traffic statistics (it’s not very visible and it’s not even accurate, but you can see that the attacks are more intense now):

We are building a new datacentre – ecological, safe

Our new datacentre, which we are gradually building, will be unique in the world. Cooling servers submerged in an oil bath is only an experiment for most of the world. For us, however, it is a reality where you will already have your data next year. In addition, we will use waste heat very efficiently. We’ll send him to the town pool. Such efficient cooling is not yet used in the commercial sphere. At the same time, we want to obtain the official TIER IV certification for it as the first in the country, and the first in the world for an oil data centre.

In terms of safety, the building is cast in reinforced concrete (30-110 cm of reinforced concrete) and the server room will be underground. Access to the server room will be via a palm bloodstream reader and two people will need to authorize entry. Otherwise, you can’t get through the two vault doors.

The list of interesting things could go on and on. For example, the datacenter will have a reduced oxygen level and this will serve as fire prevention and protection against damage to the servers.

We would also like to remind you that, unlike other companies, we are building the datacentre not only without subsidies, but also without loans. Just as our first (and current) datacenter was purchased with our own funds and is our own and we are not renting, the new (second) datacenter will have the same economic basis. This is an extraordinary thing for the stability of our company and you won’t find many similar projects in the Czech Republic.

It is certainly not without interest that we manage the construction ourselves and organise all construction-related activities ourselves. This allows us to build exactly what we need – functional and high quality, just the way we want it.

We don’t spare iron and concrete 🙂

Future data hall (underground)

Some interesting facts about the second datacenter

We have already used 1,350 m3 of concrete and over 100 tonnes of iron. For more details, visit http://dc.wedos.cz/.

The WEDOS 2 (OIL) datacenter will be 100% oil cooled (possibly the first in the world) 480 m2 for servers and technology and 515 m2 for facilities (existing 440 + 440 m2) Expected PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) 1.03 (compared to the classic 0.73) existing (1.17). Start of construction 10/2015, completion winter 2016/2017. Dual power supply including 1+1 generator and N+1 UPS on each power branch, 3 independent optical routes to the building. Prevention of fire by reduced oxygen levels. Concrete monolith (up to 110 cm of concrete in places), servers underground. In combination with the WEDOS 1 datacenter, it will be an N+1 datacenter. It will therefore be one of the most secure solutions in the Czech Republic, both in terms of physical security (it is de facto 2 shelters) and in terms of operation, because the datacentres will be fully redundant and mutually substitutable (for selected services).

It currently looks something like this on the site:

And this is how it will hopefully look like soon:

New domain endings

We have become an accredited registrar of .pl domains, which we offer, how else, than at purchase prices. We still register and renew domains without any margin. Of course, you get free DNS records management and miniweb service from us.

We are now considering becoming an accredited registrar of generic domains through ICANN. We would very much like to hear your opinion on this topic.

New IPv4

We ran out of IPv4 and had to buy new IPv4 ranges. At first we tried to regulate the sale of services with a higher price, but even so, we simply ran out of IPv4 and had no more. We have purchased and are now preparing to acquire additional ranges. We want to be ready for further growth in the virtual server business. In addition, we experienced the inconvenience of IPv6 a month ago and have realized the vulnerabilities and issues of IPv6 and will much more prefer IPv4 traffic. So for about a month we have IPv4 to all VPS for a crown.

News and news again

Over the last year, we have also been able to implement innovations much faster. We were one of the first big players on the Czech market to introduce PHP7 and Let’s Encrypt for all customers.

Mailserver migration

In February we successfully completed the migration of customer services to the new mailserver. We literally ran away from a paid solution that didn’t work to a custom product that is based on opensource. In total, we migrated 63,383 services, 200,000 mailboxes with more than 110 million emails. Just to give you an idea, it was about 25 TB of data. Unlike the previous solution, the new mailserver allows us to scale the performance much more according to the current needs. And apart from some minor problems at the end of August, we have not had the slightest complication or outage. We responded immediately and added an additional performance element to prevent the complication (related to the attack) from happening again.

IDNs for .eu domains

Since January we can register IDNs for .eu domains. We are planning more in the future. Our system is already ready for everything.

OTP

At the end of last year, we launched OTP (One Time Password) authentication to increase the security of customer accounts. So you can have all customer accounts with this extraordinary security feature which is used for the most demanding applications and for example in banking.

ISO certification and certificate of excellence

We have defended our ISO certifications and have received from TÜV SÜD – ISO 9001 (quality management), ISO 14001 (environmental management), ISO 27001 (information security). Last year, we received the Certificate of Excellence, which only a few companies in the Czech Republic (from all sectors) receive. It was a reward from TÜV SÜD – for our compliance with ISO standards and thorough preparation for certification. We really appreciate this award because we were the first IT company to receive it.

Competitions

This year we have started a big competition for jerseys for sports clubs. We’ve given out a few dozen of them so far. You decide which sports club gets them at jersey.wedos.com. As a thank you, you will receive a discount coupon.

Another winner received a car from us. Another had a borrowed Tesla. Others won laptops and others won trips worth tens of thousands of crowns… We gave away thousands of USB sticks. We gave away hundreds of other gifts. We just like to make you happy…

What do we need to finish?

We have too much going on and we are not keeping up with the development of new services as we would like. We have almost completed a new service WMS (Wedos Managed Server), which is a compromise between shared web hosting and virtual server that has never been seen before. Thanks to the HP Moonshot high-performance servers, we will be able to offer you incredible performance in the form of 720 CPU cores, 2880 GB of RAM and 90 TB of disk. Purely for your use. All this with simple management from our interface. You won’t have to worry about updates, hardware or need server admin knowledge, you just click what you need and that’s it. In addition, our solution is highly scalable. You will be able to freely change the parameters and modify the server performance according to your requirements. We wanted to have it all done by the beginning of the holidays, but problems got in the way and we had to solve them as a priority. We will soon offer a test run for selected interested parties.

Our services will soon be running on such a server:

The statistics of boredom is…

For the statistics, we leave out last year because somehow we didn’t count and so we don’t have some numbers.

Development of the number of domains at WEDOS

From the statistics you can see which domains are selling and growing and where, on the contrary, the interest of clients is decreasing. These are actually active domains.

Domain201320142016IncreaseNote
.cz96.508134.339191.66542,67%We are clearly growing the fastest on the market
.eu22.27423.47231.89635,88% 
.pl  318 NEW
.com7.87511.49717.40351,36% 
.net2.1372.8103.57727,29% 
.org8751.1821.37916,66% 
.biz340385364-5,5% 
.info1.5581.8091.758-2,8% 
.name210273229-16,2% 
Total131.777175.767248.58941,43% 

Hosting services

The development of the growth of hospitality services. These are truly active services. So these are not some non-existent numbers.

Service201320142016IncreaseNote
Web hosting38.59454.40684.08454,54%There are currently over 120,000 domains on paid web hosting
VPS3.8065.2915.91111,71%We didn’t have IPv4.
WEDOS disc8.2508.83811.13926,03% 

Other interesting numbers

 201320142016IncreaseNote
Physical servers24233748744,51%Currently machines 2×20 threads CPU, 384 GB RAM, 8×960 GB SSDs….
Staff18213147,61% 
Payments via bank252.000439.338928.491111,33% 
Emails received by our support1,667.5422,745.7774,204.76353,13%Including messages from servers etc.
Emails handled by our support260.409421.607684.96662,46% 
Completed chats119.813187.623331.01576,42% 
Telephone calls3.0004.000approx. 6.00050% 
Number of laptops/computers distributed1110we’ll see 🙂  
Number of cars distributed02we’ll see 🙂  

Interesting facts about our datacentre WEDOS 1

Total RAMapprox. 115.200 GB
Total HDD space3,120.000 GB
Total SSD space921.600 GB
Total processorsabout 900
Average monthly consumption62,128 MWh
Overall connectivityCurrently 30 Gbps, but will increase to 80 Gbps later this year
Number of servers for DDoS protection10
Number of servers for IPS/IDS protection4
Number of security cameras9

Birthday event

we have prepared for you:


6 months free with new web hosting as a gift

validity: 13. – 18.9.2016

66% discount on new VPS SSD and all additional services

validity: 14. – 18.9.2016
Discount Code: NAROZENINY6VPS

The discount applies to new VPS SSD orders for the first billing period.
The coupon can only be redeemed once per customer account.


66% discount on new NoLimit web hosting and additional services

validity: 15. – 18.9.2016
Discount Code: NAROZENINY6NOLIMIT

The discount applies to new NoLimit web hosting orders for the first billing period.
The coupon can only be redeemed once per customer account.


11% discount on NoLimit extension (save for 6 weeks)

validity: 16. – 18.9.2016


Extend your VPS for a year or a month with a 6% discount

validity: 17. – 18.9.2016


New CZ domain for 66 CZK/year without VAT

validity date: 18.9.2016
Discount Code: NAROZENINY6CZ
max. number of uses: 66 times

The discount applies to new orders of CZ domains for the first year.
The coupon can only be redeemed once per customer account.

Reviews on social media

If you take the time to rate our company on social media this week, we will select the 3-10 most interesting reviews each day and send a USB flash drive with our logo to the selected candidates.

You can rate on Facebook and Twitter. The link to the Facebook review is here.

Thank you in advance for your evaluation.

With a taste for 7. of our existence

We have a lot of plans for the next year(s). We will have a lot more news soon. I’m sure you have something to look forward to.

Thank you for your support and we look forward to further cooperation!

The team of WEDOS Internet, a.s., which to date has 31 employees who take care of the company 🙂