Operations work can be thankless. You might talk to support from time to time. You’ll notice our development department with new features. But when operations does its job really well, well, they’re not really that noticeable to you as a customer. And that’s the whole point. Hassle-free for you.
So as we put another year behind us, we want to take this opportunity to highlight many of the improvements and investments we’ve made in 2020.
Some upgrades we’re making to increase stability. That is, to reduce the risk of downtime or problems. Others we are doing to make our environments even faster. To make hosting even better for you.
Faster servers and more stable networks
At the beginning of the year, we upgraded all our hard drives to fast NVMe SSDs. New AMD EPYC processors and an upgrade of the network to 25 Gbps fibre mean that things are even faster now.
All copper cables in the network are now completely replaced with fibre. This allows for higher speeds within the network. In addition, fibre is more reliable and secure for the future.
During the year, we have also done a lot of work to replace older routers with new, redundant and faster variants.
Finally, we have also strengthened the internet connection itself between the halls (dark fibre) and into each hall. Both our halls also have two Internet Service Providers (ISPs). This provides extra redundancy if, for example, a cable is dug up or in the event of re-routing.
Upgrading DDoS protection
Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are common. They involve attempts to overload the network and thus take down services. We already have strong DDoS protection in place, but technology is advancing rapidly. Especially as we become even more dependent on technology in 2020. That’s why we are progressively strengthening protection and working with our ISPs.
Towards 2021?
Technological developments are constant and rapid. We are of course continuously working every year to strengthen, upgrade and improve. In the beginning of 2021, we welcome a new senior employee to our operations/devops team and we are also looking for another new employee for devops/3rd line. Maybe that’s you?