Important Notice: Hosting service changes and Panel migration
I wanted to create this post as we will soon be sending out an email containing information on our upcoming panel migration. This is a place to ask any questions related to the migration and to find answers on how this may impact your services.
Please feel free to ask any questions and I'll help out where I can!
Dear Customer,
We hope this message finds you well. As we approach the migration date on February 17th, we want to provide you with comprehensive information about the upcoming changes to our hosting services.
Hosting Panel Migration:
On February 17th, we will be transitioning to a new consolidated panel for both billing and control. This migration will convert VPS customers services to Micronode instances, allowing immediate creation of VMs in any of our 8 locations post-migration.To access the new consolidated billing panel, use the email address and password associated with your existing clients.natvps.uk billing panel. Note that existing Micronode panel credentials will no longer work.
VPS to Instance Conversion:
If you are a current instances customer, you will be seamlessly migrated to our new consolidated billing and control panel. For existing VPS customers, your VPS will be automatically converted to an instance with no downtime. You will be assigned at least the same amount of resources as your current VPS for the remainder of the billing period.Pricing Adjustment:
Unfortunately, this change will impact the pricing for VPS clients. The pricing for Micronode instances starts at £15 per year for 512MB RAM and 20GB disk.Payment Method Update:
Please be aware that the new panel no longer supports credit/debit card payments outside of PayPal.Over the next few weeks, all current PayPal subscriptions will be canceled in preparation for the migration. On your next billing cycle, you will need to pay manually. Reminders will be sent 15 days, 10 days, 5 days, and 1 day before your service expires via email.
Security Updates:
Our new panel no longer supports password-based logins (on newly created instances). You must add an SSH key for authentication. A guide on how to do this is available within the new panel.Two-factor authentication is available via Google Authenticator or another one-time token generator. We strongly recommend enabling this feature, and it will be mandatory in the future to enhance the security of your account.
Other Services:
If you have a storage VPS or a Dedicated server with us, expect a separate email covering the changes associated with these services.Support During Migration:
Should you encounter any issues or have questions regarding the migration, please email us at for login-related problems. If you can successfully log in, kindly open a support ticket for any other concerns.
We appreciate your understanding and cooperation as we implement these changes to enhance our services. If you have any further questions, our support team is here to assist.
Comments
I knew this day would come, after several times of migration and migration.
It's sad that 2 GBP yearlly VPS will be terminated soon which is very stable for about 16 month (except 3 short down times when migration) but not quite performant or just oversold, which took minutes to finish a simple
sudo apt-get update.Anyway, may your £2 VPS rest in peace.
MicroLXC is lovable.
Yeah it saddens me having to make this decision but we really need to be profitable and we’re so so close at this point. One thing I can promise is we will bring back the £2 per year VPS’ at some point one way or another. I’m not sure what this will look like, it may be entirely IPv6 or maybe “basement” style hosting but it will be back.
We have to concentrate on instances right now as that’s where 80% of the revenue comes from.
Depending on when you renewed you could have up to a year remaining on your VPS and depending on the specs you may find that you get a substantial upgrade as everyone will be getting a minimum of 512mb RAM and 20GB disk during this migration.
I assume you’re on the UK node, whilst none of our nodes are oversold this one is the lowest spec and it’s on HDDs. Again with this migration you can delete your VM and create a new one in another location with faster nodes.
£5 and £10 Instance credits, increasing to £15 too?
With Amsterdam double resource ending for new containers, can we expect better stability and lower packet loss?
How's the IPv6 BGP announcement going for Sweden location?
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Thanks for your honesty. The stability of your service has been proved by time (16 months).
You've announced the migration 2 weeks beforehand, and keep customers' current service running until next due date, and the service is very stable (very few downtime). What else can I ask for? Your service is decent.
Undoubtedly, natvps.uk deserves and is bound to flourish.
MicroLXC is lovable.
We may bring back the 256mb/10gb resources packages priced accordingly. Any reoccurring offers will be void after the migration although we will continue to have Black Friday and festive deals.
We’re aiming to get DDoS protection in this location which will help with stability, the occasional packet loss is caused by DDoS attacks.
Out of our hands unfortunately although I’ve been told it will be complete before the migration, failing that the provider can assign us a /64 which will at least give everyone IPv6 connectivity.
😢
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Just to update on this, we're still on track for the 17th. Today all paypal subscriptions have been cancelled and automatic service termination/suspension has been disabled.
All services migrated to the new panel that expire in the next 7 days will be extended by two weeks to give everyone a chance to get familiar with the new panel and setup payments.
We have two new locations which will be available at launch. The beta is now running the release candidate and only bugs/hotfixes will be released prior to the launch.
If anyone that is already a micronode VPS customer or Instances customer would like to join the beta/pre-release for the remaining 7 days please DM me. This is a good opportunity for VPS customers to get familiar with Micronode instances prior to the migration.
edit reason: Sometimes I don't make any sense.
Over the busy weekend I missed your announcement. On receiving the payment cancellation today, visiting LES was my first impulse; nice not only to find your announcement but also a nice variation is that the payment is not cancelled because of a bankruptcy :-P
I thought the concept quite innovative: I can now meta-idle by putting funds in my instance pool but not initializing any resources for real-world idling.
It's been alluded to above of course, but... Any chance you'll see my double-resource 7,50-per-year-credit can be booked as a half-price 15,00-per-year credit, and survive the migration?
I'm not fond enough of distributing Wireguard keys to wait for a new 'recurring' offer and perhaps do it again, after having this recurring offer never reach the first recurrence. I couldn't keep them at the regular (for me double) price.
That all said, I'm quite happy to be able to occasionally use a VPN through one of the gateways, and never found any of the little machines out of service.
Good luck migrating!
Edit: incongruous quoting
The reason recurring offers aren't being migrated is due to a fundamental change in the way we manage payments on the new platform.
We no longer provide recurring plans; instead, purchased resources are valid for 12 months and do not automatically renew. At the end of the billing period, if a user wishes to continue using the platform, they can simply purchase more resources.
We've made this decision for several reasons, with the main one being that a significant number of clients forget about their service renewal and may initiate charge backs after the payment has been processed.
However, we will still offer promotions, particularly around Black Friday and the Christmas period, where resources will be discounted. Since many users with recurring offers typically made their purchases during these periods, they will have the opportunity to renew at a reduced cost.
Anticipating questions about renewals and the renewal process, I'll provide a transparent explanation below:
Clients can purchase additional resources at any time, this does not extend the amount of time that the resources can be used for and instead increases the current resources.
Thirty days before a resource expires, we'll send an email warning of the impending expiration. Subsequent reminders will be sent 15, 10, 5, and 1 day before the expiry date. Following this, there will be a 1-week "Renewal period." You can purchase resources at any time during this period to maintain your renewal date.
It's important to note that the renewal date of the resources is based on the date of purchase, not the expiration date of your current resources.
By including the 1-week renewal period, we aim to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to renew their resources and maintain their renewal date without duplicating the amount of resources they require or downtime. At the end of the renewal period, resources and instances will be suspended, followed by termination after an additional 3 days.
This also effectively means that Micronode resources are valid for 371 days from the date of purchase.
Below is a screenshot showing where resource expiration can be viewed in the new panel.
A "resource", is that "an amount of credit", or "a container running with configured resources, bought with limited-time valid credit"?
A resource is a package containing exactly that - a group of resources that can be used to create VMs in any of our locations. This is fairly clear in the new panel. All resources are valid for 12 months.
This is text taken from the "Order resources page" in the new panel
Thanks for elaborating, let me ask more of your time :-)
I like some stability in a changing world, so I ever only buy subscriptions at recurring prices. I may or may not be the only one with that particular trait on the forum.
Complicating matters: imagine I did have two 15,00 credits, overlapping 6 months. On expiry, can I have all 16 VMs halved in specs to keep them running, or will a random 8 of them drop over the lower threshold of 64M/2GB and disappear?
Sorry for all the questions. Just tell me if my mind is not flexible enough to encompass the possibilities :-P
They expire at the time they were purchased. This is visible in the console.
You can delete or resize as many VMs necessary to free up resources. If this is not done prior to the expiry all VMs are suspended however you can still delete or resize the suspended VMs to free up enough resources to bring some or all of the VMs online.
There's no way to resize diks.
If an account with two credits is using 22GB storage, and one credit expires, some data loss is inevitable before any VM could be brought up.
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Or another credit can be purchased. Or the data can be retrieved ahead of time, like I say multiple emails are sent prior to expiry to remind the client, they all detail what occurs if the credits are left to expire.
I’m not sure how I can make it more fair than this.
"fair" = recurring dealz
The normal solution is disabling auto renewal.
14 days before renewal, the system generates an invoice with the same price.
The customer makes payment, which means the customer knows they are explicitly renewing a service.
The customer does not make payment, the service gets cancelled.
Don't automatically charge payment methods; disable PayPal billing agreements, each payment must be made explicitly.
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It’s literally no different, the user logs in and pays. If they don’t their service gets suspended.
The difference is whether the user pays £5~10 (with stability and predictability) or £15 (with regret that the price could be lower next week).
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For full transparency here’s the reality:
£15 has always been the price for instances, we’ve offered deals for less (and we will continue to do so).
Deals under £15 12 months ago were breaking even which was fine for the promotion of the instances platform.
In the last 12 months the majority of our providers have increased costs substantially, even where we own hardware we’re paying substantially more for colo.
£15 per year = £3.75 per year for a 128mb/5GB disk VPS which can be created in any of our locations - we believe this price is more than fair given the flexibility that Micronode offers.
The deals for £7 instance credits etc are no longer breaking even, they are running at a loss and we’re not profitable - very close but not yet profitable.
This doesn’t mean that we’re dead pooling and it does not mean that we’ll no longer offer “Dealz” it simply means that we need to make a few changes to get back on track.
We’re doing everything possible to keep the price at £15 per year - we’ve taken out long term contracts for collocation and server rental at a reduced cost.
We’ve invested heavily into a new panel that will allow us to grow our unique product and save costs in the long run.
Everything we’re doing is to make sure we’re here in 5 years time providing the same level of service for hopefully the same price but we’ve had to make some adjustments.
Where possible we’ll offer deals, I can promise that there will be promotions at Black Friday and Christmas but we can no longer commit to reoccurring offers that aren’t realistic.
When the offers were introduced they were done so based on the prices we were paying for our nodes and services, everything has increased in price since then, we didn’t have long term commitment with our upstreams, collocation providers or server providers and we have learnt from this by committing to contracts that not only lock the price in for us but also our customers.
I know that the cancellation of reoccurring offers will upset people but it’s something that needed to be done.
Prediction:
Come November, many £5~10 dealz recipients will become former customer of MicroNode.
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Unfortunately I think @yoursunny is right. I don't want to look for offers every year just to get a cheaper price. The flexibility of creating/deleting instances is nice - but i think having the guarantee of a permanent price is more important than this flexibility. So i'm thinking about moving - but let's see...
On the one hand, I understand that a price is not profitable < £ 15 - on the other hand I have a different idea of reoccuring.
As I’ve said instances resources start at £15, expect that to remain the price for years to come, we’ve done everything possible to lock this price in.
A few people have asked if the new panel will make Suspensions - Particularly those related to torrent activity more clear.
We have completely re-written the torrent detection tooling using completely new logic which has proven to be pretty resilient in testing. This tooling has been running in reporting only mode on all of our nodes for the last month with no false positives reported.
The way suspensions work has also changed around torrent related activity, suspensions are now only active for 15 minutes. After the 15 minute period the VM will automatically be un-suspended. To be clear on this an email is sent to the client for both the suspension and the un-suspension.
Inside of the panel there is a new suspensions page that allows clients to see the reason for the suspension and a few log lines to help them diagnose the issue:
On repeated offences account suspension or account termination is still the likely outcome but 99% of users simply just don't realise that they aren't allowed to torrent and hopefully we'll not see many repeat offences.
Going forwards I'd also like to include a downloadable pcap file that the client can use to diagnose but this will come later.
Hopefully this clears a few things up.
This is sad. I just renewed a vps two days ago, and I thought you will be providing better pricing/alternative panel but with new pricing model.
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You have 12 months at the current price at least!
Quoting from above:
Again I’m not sure what this will look like yet but we will offer something similar to the old VPS deals again in the future. Right now we need to concentrate on Instances as that’s the primary revenue stream. Again I apologise for the changes but they had to be made.
You are at the higher end with the £15 per year for 512mb ram when multiple $10 per year vps offers are available with dedicated ipv4 and more resources. I'm not sure how anyone would find any value for this now.
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It’s not £15 per VPS, it’s £15 per 512mb RAM / 20GB disk that can be used to launch a VPS an any of our 8 (soon to be 10) locations.
You can create up to 8 64Mb VPS’ or 4x 128mb VPS etc, credits can also be stacked to create larger instances.
Ah, I understand now, looking forward for your new panel. wish you best of luck this year
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Do all locations have swap space now?
Running with 64MB RAM requires that (apt won't update without swap).
Do you recommend such low RAM values?
No, using swap to substitute low memory also puts a huge strain on IO and is seen as resource abuse however all of our templates will run in 64MB of RAM with over 50% free.
The issues arise when clients want to perform the likes of an ‘apt update’ or ‘apt upgrade’. To get around this we support live memory upgrades and downgrades- clients can add memory, perform the maintenance required and downgrade the instance specifications.
This is very popular with clients running lightweight VPN servers and other low memory applications and it allows users to get the most out of their resources.
LGTM - best of luck for the migrations. I hope the micronode will have vnc interface eventually, it's not a must but a nice thing to have.
also looking forward for the 100GB+ storage plan, You've been providing good service so far in terms of CPU / IOWait / Steal / Network, unlike certain basement*chough*provider. that also reminds me I have to do a short review, after I've been procastinating all year long.
Fuck this 24/7 internet spew of trivia and celebrity bullshit.
Is there ever a VNC on containers?
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something like this? not really ootb i guess
Fuck this 24/7 internet spew of trivia and celebrity bullshit.
My current VPS NatVPS-256m-FR is £1.50 GBP/year but now it will cost £15 GBP/year but will add + 256MB ram. I certainly understand that this is a cheap offer (which is why I bought it). It's understandable that prices go up and it's ok to raise the price if your business is no longer profitable (although it was stated that the offer was repeatable), but 10x, seriously.
I didn't like your attitude towards current customers. I didn't like that you do this notification after the VPS renewal and not before the renewal. Personally, I would have just not renewed this offer and bought a VPS from another vendor on Black Friday. Moreover did not see in your offer a refund, only to create another VPS in your instance which I never even used. Personally, I asked for a refund via ticket.
Its pretty difficult for me to try and justify instances to you as you're right, this is a huge price increase for the £1.50 per year FR NATVPS offer.
Like I said its not something that we wanted to do but we needed to make a change, I've been as fair as possible in the way that we've gone about this. Your service is still valid until your renewal date (which I believe is November). Your service will not only double in memory during the migration but there also will not be any downtime.
To highlight on this point: but 10x, seriously
Its a different offering entirely compared to the VPS range, I'll be clear here in the fact that our VPS' range never really sold too well and there are only a handful of customers with the £1.50 per year offer, as we're moving away from the standard NATVPS offering entirely (and such a low number of clients still have this offering) it was impossible to justify adding support for this range into the new panel - especially considering we haven't sold VPS' for over a year (excluding renewals).
We have clients renew with us daily, regardless of when we put this announcement out someone would be in your position, I get that this is frustrating and again I can only apologise for this. To make it clear again though - your service is still valid until the next renewal with no extra costs, double the resources and the possibility to move it to another node in any of our 8 locations.
As your service is still valid until the end of your billing period (We're not just turning off all NAT VPS services) you get to use your VPS as normal for the next 9+ months or you can re-create it in another location completely free of charge.
I've mentioned this a few times in this thread:
These will be back, I'm not sure when and I can't make any promises but its not unlikely that it will be before the end of your billing period.
Again as I mentioned in the reply to your ticket, whilst we don't usually refund mid billing cycle (and that we're not terminating your services or charging you extra for the remainder of your billing cycle) we would be willing to offer you a refund for the remaining months of your service.
Or you can enjoy the double resources, 8+ locations and the flexibility of Micronode Instances until the end of your billing period for no extra charge.
its up to you, just let us know what you want and again I apologise for having to make this change, it was simply not possible to predict the price increases that we as a provider would face over the last 12-18 months. We've learnt from this and we're doing everything we can to prevent it from happening again.
I don't see a valid reason for existing customers to ask for refunds etc.
The credit we paid for is still usable until its original expiration date, with no reduction of functionality.
There's no violation of the contract.
That's assuming the upcoming migration doesn't cause excessive downtime.
Remember that the contract requires at least one location to be up and have stuck at any time.
If the migration causes all locations to lock up and unavailable for deployment (say, for more than 24 hours), users will have reason for chargebacks.
Existing customers are of course unhappy for losing a recurring dealz.
Renewal would be a separate contract.
Nobody forces the existing customers to renew and enter the new contract.
On the other hand, the 2x, 3x, 10x price does not entice the existing customers to renew either.
By November, we would be evaluating whether the value of service is worth the £15 charge.
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.> @yoursunny said:
The migration won’t entail any downtime other than the old panels being down for the best part of the day whilst we migrate. Looking at the metrics we have Saturday is the quietest day for instance creation, reboots and reprovision - Sunday is the busiest which I found pretty strange.
Agreed but for the sake of £1.50 it’s really not worth my time to argue, especially when it’s actually cheaper for us to refund than migrate (a 512mb/20gb resource package costs us a lot more than £1.50 for 9 months)
>
I’m doing everything possible to make this worth its value, we have some nice new locations coming including Australia, Singapore, US East coast, new NVME UK node and likely Japan.
NATVPS UK Singapore + Japan vps finally coming soon.
MY/SG & Worldwide Latency Test V3 : http://www.mywebping.com (27 February 2021 Updated)
MY-Unifi Home SmokePing: http://smokeping.mywebping.com/smokeping/
Natvps was created from a spare server but now it demands a profit.
Personally I have no problem as I can use other alternatives and rarely access your services either.
My billing was paid last month and I will use it for good sake till the last drop.
Good luck!
https://microlxc.net/
I'm a content VPS user in the unhappy customer boat.
I read and can relate to the arguments for the change in price, and wish the good willing providers on the board all the luck in a competitive market.
I do wonder though, what the value of "recurring" in an offer is, if just two months later a provider can post "Sorryz for the misunderstanding, I miscalculated and my offer is not recurring after all. See you again next year!"
Having the choice between two similar offers for a £20 value VPS,
.. how many of you would take the one-time £9 offer over the recurring £10 offer?
For me, I'd let the one-time offer pass. It's a hobby for me; I like to configure and link things. It takes some time, I learn a bit, and I can use my work afterwards. Idling is the main hobby of many of the VPS's; it happens that months pass before I get to using a new VPS. My fault of course, wouldn't happen to anyone else on the forum :-P
Anyway, the first year is mostly observing whether I actually use a VPS and the things I put on it, and see whether it's worth, for me, the discounted price. If my VPS's lost their recurring offers, I'd be hosting everything at home in no time :-D
The Micronode App is currently under maintenance. We apologize for any inconvenience caused.
⏱️
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The migration is around 70% complete. Another couple of hours and the panel will be removed from maintenance.
The new panel is now live, please remember that it is your billing panel credentials rather than your micronode credentials.
Is Amsterdam now also on the Location Specific Bandwidth list or is it a bug?
I'll check, probably just been fat fingered during the migration.
Just to update on the migration
All Micronode instances and resources have been moved across.
All Micronode VPS’ have been converted to instances and migrated to the new panel.
We have had reports from one user that their instances were not showing in the new panel, if anyone has this issue please open a support ticket as soon as possible so we can assign your instances.
Storage VPS’ and Dedicated servers will be migrated in the coming days, if your payment is due on a storage VPS or dedi please don’t be alarmed, we have extended the billing period by 30 days.
If you need to manage a Storage VPS please open a ticket, we will be available to assist whist this element of the migration continues.
We noticed that our new IDS wrongly suspended around 5 instances for network scanning, all of these instances have been unsuspended and the process has been tuned to prevent these false positives.
I hope everyone is enjoying the new panel so far, we’ve hit a new record for the number of instances created in a 24 hour period.
I guess the 'good luck' Romania location is gone now, being not visible in the panel anymore?
Server being down isn't a indicator.
Is there any kind of notification about decommissioning of locations? Also didn't notice Finland is now Sweden until logging in.
Romania hasn’t gone but it’s not been fully migrated yet as we’re having a few issues with the node. Should be back in a few days.
Finland migration was announced back in October of last year.
Via mail or here in the forum?
As far as I remember there was an email, announcement in the billing panel and a forum post.
We had a few tickets relating to the migration back in November which were dealt with at the time.
If you need any assistance post migration I’d be happy to help where I can.
Going forwards with future migrations/location retirements (whilst I don’t actually expect any in the foreseeable future other than potentially Romania if the issues persist) they will go out of stock 30 days prior to the migration and everyone with an instance in that location will receive both an email notification and a notification in the panel.
We’ll also be able to give people the option for a full migration with data or a self migration without data.