Tilaa, Virtual private servers and private clouds

FreeBSD 8.3 and 9.0 images

2012-05-01T10:18:00.002+02:00

We now have images for FreeBSD 8.3 and FreeBSD 9.0 available.

Ubuntu Precise Pangolin released

2012-04-27T10:39:00.001+02:00

Yesterday Ubuntu announced their new long term support (LTS) release, with the codename Precise Pangolin. We have images available in 64-bit and 32-bit variants.

Tilaa is supporting software appliances

2012-03-19T16:55:00.006+01:00

We're proud to announce the support of software appliances on our platform.

A software appliance is an out of the box software solution which is specially build for a certain role. Tilaa offers the most used open source appliances from Turnkey. Installation of the appliances is fully automated. You can start using your appliance within minutes.

We've implemented the following appliances:

CMS

WordPress Appliance - Blog Publishing Platform

Drupal 6 Appliance - Content Management Framework

Joomla Appliance - Cutting Edge Content Management

Gallery Appliance - Photo Album Organizer

Moodle Appliance - Course Management System

Movable Type Appliance - Professional Publishing Platform

phpBB Appliance - Community Forum Solution

StatusNet Appliance - Open, distributed microblogging

Wiki

Deki Appliance - MindTouch Core Enterprise Wiki

TWiki Appliance - Enterprise Wiki Platform

DokuWiki Appliance - Documentation Wiki Platform

MediaWiki Appliance - Wikipedia's Wiki Engine

MoinMoin Appliance - Wiki Engine

Webshop

Magento Appliance - Flexible eCommerce Platform

Web development

App Engine appliance - Google App Engine SDK

Django Appliance - High-level Python Web Framework

LAMP Stack - Web Stack (MySQL)

Ruby on Rails Appliance - Web Application Framework

Symfony Appliance - PHP Web Framework

Standalone Tomcat Appliance - Java Servlet and JSP Platform

Tomcat on Apache Appliance - Java Servlet and JSP Platform

Revision Control Appliance - All-in-one code repository

TurnKey Core - Common base for all appliances

Database

LAPP Appliance - Web Stack (PostgreSQL)

MySQL Appliance - Relational Database Management System

PostgreSQL Appliance - Object-relational Database System

Tracking & CRM

Bugzilla Appliance - Bug Tracking System

Mantis Appliance - Bug Tracking System

Roundup Appliance - Issue Tracking System

Trac Appliance - Integrated SCM & Project Management

Tracks Appliance - Getting Things Done (GTD) Application

OTRS Appliance - Ticket Request System

ProjectPier Appliance - Easy Online Collaboration

Redmine - Integrated SCM & Project Management

vTiger CRM Appliance Customer Relationship Management

Messaging

ejabberd Appliance - XMPP and Web Chat

When you want to start using appliances you can select the desired appliance in the server configurator.

New website online

2012-01-03T12:45:00.005+01:00

Today we've launched our new website with a new look and feel, a new logo and lots of new content and features!

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!

Lower pricing for Windows, cPanel and DirectAdmin licenses

2011-11-28T16:31:00.001+01:00

We're happy to announce a big price decrease for the available control panel licenses on the Tilaa platform.

Also we decreased the prices of Windows licenses. For only € 3,95 a month extra you can run a Windows server.

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.

Virtual private networks now in private beta!

2011-11-21T12:40:00.004+01:00

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!

Our highly available NFS storage is available!

2011-11-18T15:23:00.007+01:00

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!

Our managed backup service is live!

2011-11-15T12:52:00.006+01:00

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!

Fedora 16

2011-11-09T16:11:00.005+01:00

Yesterday the Fedora Project announced the release of Fedora 16 (Verne).
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!

Updated Windows 2008 images

2011-10-20T16:09:00.003+02:00

Today we've updated the Windows Server 2008 images available on the Tilaa platform. Tilaa offers Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 as Web, Standard and Enterprise edition. All hot fixes and patches provided are already included in the new image.

Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot available

2011-10-14T12:32:00.004+02:00

Yesterday the latest version (11.10) of Ubuntu was announced, and we already have the images available. To see what's new in the release named Oneiric Ocelot, have a look at the release notes

Tilaa is supporting Gentoo!

2011-08-26T13:08:00.000+02:00

One of the requests from our last customer survey was support for Gentoo.

Creating Gentoo images has been on our todo list for a long time, but we kept postponing it since we knew we had to jump through some hoops to get it working.

Our image creation is a completely automated process, and uses a method like kickstart, or preseed, or Microsoft sysprep, combined with pxe. Gentoo has no such thing however.

A while ago an enthusiastic Gentoo user contacted Tilaa and offered us his help to sort this out.

Based on some examples from https://bitbucket.org/marduk/virtual-appliance/wiki/Home we quickly got this to work.

After a few weeks of testing and tuning we now have 64bit and 32bit images. They're based on a 2.6.39 kernel with most of the necessary stuff built in, and all the unnecessary stuff left out. This makes booting them very fast. Since we have almost nothing installed by default, except for iptables, acpid, syslog-ng and cron, they also have a very low memory footprint.

We'd love for you to test them out, and please let us know any improvements we can make to
make them even better.

Scientific Linux 6.1 available

2011-08-18T17:59:00.006+02:00

We've just enabled a new version on Scientific Linux. From now on it's possible to start a server with Scientific Linux 6.1 in 32 bit and 64 bit on the Tilaa platform.

Scientific Linux is a Red Hat based distribution by Fermilab, CERN and others. See
scientificlinux.org for more info.

3rd datacenter live! IP failover possible between sites.

2011-08-05T22:38:00.016+02:00

Tilaa is proud to announce opening a 3rd location! As of today you can choose between three different sites: Schiphol, Haarlem and our new site in Amsterdam!

With the opening of the Amsterdam site we're launching some cool additional features we've been working on for a while.

New network infrastructure

Opening the new Amsterdam site was the last step in completing our new network infrastructure. We've build a completely flat network between the Amsterdam and Haarlem location, with redundant, low latency and high bandwidth connectivity between both. We've also added an extra transit link towards the internet, which is also available to both sites.

Here is a picture of our new network infrastructure:

IP failovering between sites

The flat network between these sites gives you the possibility to use an IP address on both sites. For example, you can now build a complete load balanced and/or clustered service infrastructure running over both sites. You can protect your business against site disasters by building redundant services over multiple sites.

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.

Network uptime guarantees

With the new network infrastructure in place we can guarantee higher network uptimes. The previous network uptime guarantee of Haarlem and Schiphol was 99%, but we can now provide a network uptime of 99,95% on both Haarlem and Amsterdam. Our network uptime guarantee for Schiphol is currently unchanged.

CentOS 6 images

2011-07-11T16:04:00.004+02:00

CentOS 6 was released just hours ago, but we already have images available.

Enjoy!

Towards virtual private networks!

2011-07-11T11:46:00.004+02:00

Ever since we started with Tilaa, each virtual machine has had a public and a private network interface by default. This was hard-coded in our infrastructure. As time went by, we realized there are limitations to this approach and that we had to manage network interfaces in a more flexible manner to allow for custom network configurations.

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

2011-07-11T11:29:00.004+02:00

We've made some improvements to our billing code, some of which have been requested lots of times by our customers over the last year:

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.

We now support Debian 6.0 (Squeeze) with DirectAdmin

2011-06-18T18:02:00.005+02:00

From now on it's possible to order DirectAdmin in combination with Debian 6.0 (Squeeze) on the Tilaa platform. Both 32-bits and 64-bits images are available.

Fedora 15 images now available!

2011-05-26T14:22:00.003+02:00

On May 24th Fedora 15 (Lovelock) was released and we now have our images for deploying Fedora 15 on a Tilaa VPS ready! As usual, we have 32 and 64bits versions available.

Enjoy :)

Important network changes on our Haarlem site!

2011-05-18T21:09:00.006+02:00

On May 30th, between 0:00AM and 2:00AM CEST we're going to put our two new shiny routers into production and will start routing our network traffic through our own AS (196752) on our primary site (Haarlem). We have selected two network carriers for multi-homed connectivity to the internet.

(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.

New distribution - Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal)

2011-05-12T15:48:00.000+02:00

A few days ago Ubuntu 11.04, codename Natty Narwhal, was released.
We've tested Natty Narwhal, and we're glad to announce that the images are now available on our platform for automatic provisioning, for both 64bit and 32bit.

Updates for April

2011-04-27T08:38:00.004+02:00

Here's a little update on what we've been working on lately:

Backups

Our plan was to make our backup feature available to customers around this time. Unfortunately we've been delayed by a number of factors and are not ready to release this feature just yet.

Initially we wanted to use the free disk space of our virtualization hosts to store backups on. This proved to be difficult, especially since we didn't want to store the backups of a customer on the same host their VPS is running on.

So what do you do when a customer VPS is migrated to a different host (for a VPS resize for example) and the target host is actually the host storing the backups for this customer? Or what if a customer orders a second VPS and is assigned the host where their backups are stored? What if there is no more disk space to store backups on? In all these scenario's we'd need to migrate the backups to a different host. Additionally, the backup process itself will increase the I/O load on our virtualization servers, which is not really desirable. To make things simple we decided to put backups on dedicated hardware.

The best indication that we can give is that we hope to have our backup feature available within 2 or 3 months from now. We don't expect to see further delays, but you never know what crosses our path.

New plans

As mentioned in our previous post, we've extended our plans with extra RAM and disk space! We like to stay ahead of the curve and continue to offer the best VPS deal there is without sacrificing quality and performance.

To allow our existing customers to upgrade we needed to implement a feature where a VPS will be migrated to a different host when not enough resources were available on the current host. We've also prepared a bunch of new servers to add resources to our VPS pool to make the upgrades possible.

Everything worked out well. We get a lot of positive feedback about our new plans and pricing and most of our existing customers have upgraded without any issues.

Physical migration in Haarlem location

We've had a physical migration of our hardware to new rackspace in our Haarlem location. We now have enough spare rackspace to grow for at least a year and will not have to physically move our hardware on that site again. When our racks are full, we can simply order a bunch of new racks and patch them up to our existing racks.

Network routing

We are going to start routing (BGP) our own traffic on our Haarlem location. We've selected two transit providers that will provide us with redundant links to the internet. In case one transit carrier fails, our traffic will be automatically routed through the second transit carrier.

In May we are going to test our BGP setup with a non-production IP range. Once we are satisfied everything works as advertised we will start announcing our production IP ranges as well. Of course, affected customers will be notified upfront about this change and should not expect to see more than a couple of minutes downtime while the IP ranges are being migrated.

Tilaa's turns 2! - Big RAM and storage upgrade

2011-03-30T08:38:00.022+02:00

We are celebrating our 2 year anniversary in April. Two years ago we've started developing our platform with just a couple of servers in private beta. Today we are hosting hundreds of virtual servers on our fully automated platform.

Thanks to the extreme growth we went through, we've managed to reduce our operational costs considerably. We would like to share that with our customers by upgrading our plans with up to 50% more RAM and storage space!

Effective immediately, our VPS plans have the following specifications:



  256 MB RAM   10 GB HDD   125 GB Traffic  1 CPU €   6,95 
  384 MB RAM   15 GB HDD   192 GB Traffic  1 CPU €   8,95 
  512 MB RAM   20 GB HDD   250 GB Traffic  2 CPU €  10,95 
  768 MB RAM   30 GB HDD   375 GB Traffic  2 CPU €  13,95 
 1024 MB RAM   40 GB HDD   500 GB Traffic  2 CPU €  19,95
 1536 MB RAM   60 GB HDD   750 GB Traffic  2 CPU €  24,95 
 2048 MB RAM   80 GB HDD  1000 GB Traffic  3 CPU €  34,95 
 3072 MB RAM  120 GB HDD  1500 GB Traffic  3 CPU €  44,95 
 4096 MB RAM  160 GB HDD  2000 GB Traffic  3 CPU €  64,95 
 6144 MB RAM  240 GB HDD  3000 GB Traffic  4 CPU €  84,95 
 8192 MB RAM  320 GB HDD  4000 GB Traffic  4 CPU € 119,95 
12288 MB RAM  480 GB HDD  6000 GB Traffic  5 CPU € 159,95 
16384 MB RAM  640 GB HDD  8000 GB Traffic  5 CPU € 229,95

Existing customers can upgrade their virtual servers to the new plans via our self-service portal. For everyone else: Surf to tilaa.nl to have your own virtual private server online within minutes!

Have fun!

btw: This is not an April 1st joke ;-)

Updates for February: Billing and backups

2011-02-26T12:01:00.004+01:00

It's been a bit quiet on our blog for the last month. That doesn't mean we've been doing nothing. Actually, we've been so busy that we kind of forgot to update our blog :) So here's a short overview of what we've been working on lately:

First of all, we've been busy with our internal business processes. One of the things our customers might have noticed is that our invoices are now build up differently and have a new look and feel. That's all part of our new improved billing infrastructure. Our new infrastructure will make it possible to add new billing features more easily, some of which are currently under development.

Secondly, we've been working very hard on a backup service. Initially, we started working on an rsync+ssh/rdiff-backup based backup solution. Once we got everything working with restricted chrooted shell accounts and quota's, we realized that we weren't actually building a backup solution. Rather, we were building a place to store files. We weren't satisfied with this (partial) solution and in the end we decided that this solution would be insufficient. We got rid of it all and started over.

After evaluating various options, we've decided to start implementing a backup solution based on Bacula, a very mature open-source suite of backup tools. When we're ready, all that our customers will have to do to start making backups is to install a (non-intrusive) agent on their VPS (available for most if not all Linux distributions, FreeBSD and Windows) and our system will handle the rest. On Windows, the Bacula agent even utilizes VSS features to make consistent backups of your files. It also comes with a basic console that customers can use to trigger a backup manually or restore files (even to a different server if you want).

We will be able to show backup status through our website and send notifications to customers if one or more backups have failed, trigger backups, restore files and fine-tune backup settings like backup schedules, retention periods and file excludes. Not all these features will be available from the start, but will be quite easy to add later on.

In the meantime we're using Bacula to backup our own infrastructure (in the spirit of "eat your own dogfood"). Once we're satisfied that everything works as advertised and we're done developing an initial set of features, we are ready for a first release to the general public. We expect this service to become available around April/May, so keep an eye on this blog for the announcement if you're interested in this feature.

Thanks for listening!

Results customer survey

2011-01-17T17:21:00.014+01:00

If you are a customer of Tilaa you received an invitation to fill in our customer survey. Because we are open minded we like to share the results with you.

How does it work... We had some multiple choice questions in a 5 point scale. Score 1 and 2 where below average, 3 is average and 4 and 5 were above average. Because we think just good is not good enough, our goal was to score above average on all points with at least 75%. On some points we accomplished this goal, on other points we've got some work to do.

Here we go...

What do our customers think of our services?

Stability - 97% average or above
Performance - 97% average or above
Features - 92% average or above
Payment options - 90% average or above

What do our customers think of our customer service?

Speed of answer - 93% average or above
Friendliness - 95% average or above
Knowledge - 93% average or above
Flexibility - 93% average or above

Would you recommend Tilaa to someone else?

Yes! A 99% score!

Conclusion:

Main conclusion is that we have to work on extra features and the billing process, and we will! We're busy implementing an off-site backup service. Things as more payment options, variable billing, quarterly and yearly billing and a new ticketing system are on the roadmap for the upcoming months also.

Thank you for the mass response, this will help us a lot improving our products!