June 15, 2026 · Dave.

All VPS Customers Get a Free Upgrade to NVMe Storage!

As of today, all customers have been automatically upgraded to our new Generation 2 VPS hosts at no charge, which includes NVMe RAID10 storage!

We’ve been working on a project rather quietly for the last few months to re-standardize what our VPS hosts run on. Previously, they were HP DL380 Gen10 2U servers, and there’s nothing wrong with them, but their configuration and size weren’t ideal for VPS hosts. 2U is totally unnecessary, and they had huge, read-intensive SAS drives instead of reasonably sized, write-optimized NVMe drives.

So we decided that we’d do a rolling replacement of all of our Generation 1 HP servers into new Generation 2 Dell R640/VXRail E560F servers. We’d buy the parts for a Gen 2 server, build it, test it, go to the DC, migrate everyone off one server, unrack it, rack the new one, validate, and rebalance customers until the job was done. And there was no downtime whatsoever!

Not much has actually changed between them, believe it or not, except for the storage of course, which is now FAST as heck.

fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50) (Partition /dev/zd224):
---------------------------------
Block Size | 4k            (IOPS) | 64k           (IOPS)
  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ---- 
Read       | 660.27 MB/s (165.0k) | 5.44 GB/s    (85.1k)
Write      | 662.01 MB/s (165.5k) | 5.47 GB/s    (85.5k)
Total      | 1.32 GB/s   (330.5k) | 10.92 GB/s  (170.6k)
           |                      |                     
Block Size | 512k          (IOPS) | 1m            (IOPS)
  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ---- 
Read       | 3.40 GB/s     (6.6k) | 9.02 GB/s     (8.8k)
Write      | 3.58 GB/s     (7.0k) | 9.62 GB/s     (9.3k)
Total      | 6.99 GB/s    (13.6k) | 18.64 GB/s   (18.2k)

CPU performance should be identical (because we are using the same Xeon Platinums), although RAM speed has been standardized at 2400MHz instead of the mixed 2666/2933MHz sticks that were in the Gen 1 servers. Since each server has a whopping 12 channels of memory available, we don’t expect any performance impact from that decision. Other than that, the rest is pretty much the same. If you don’t believe me, here’s a Geekbench 6 result.

And, of course, a lovely shot of three of these new 1U Dell hosts.

Yes, I even splurged for the LCD bezels.

The old HP hosts have a new life as our internal infrastructure cluster, so nothing is going to waste.

We hope to have more good news to share with everyone soon!