UpCloud's 2020 milestones: How we upgraded our services

Vision and culture

For most of us, 2020 was an unexpectedly challenging year. The ongoing global pandemic has significantly changed lives around the world. Luckily, we at UpCloud have been able to continue operations to provide you, our users, with many new features and services throughout the year and by extent tried to make your year a little bit brighter. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all our users, new and old, for the year 2020. Let’s do a little recap of what we accomplished together.

Three new data centres

To improve our services and capacity we offer to UpCloud users, we’re continuously working on launching more data centres. This year, we are proud of three new additions. The first one of them was our answer to rising demand in North America with the New York data centre US-NYC1, UpCloud’s first one on the East Coast of the USA. The US-NYC1 was also our first data centre facility built fully on the new AMD EPYC processor architecture and set the trend for our future openings. But we didn’t forget about our valued European users either! From this autumn, we made available the ES-MAD1 and PL-WAW1, two new data centres in Madrid, Spain and Warsaw, Poland respectively. However, if you are still waiting for a data centre closer to you, rest assured that there are many new locations scheduled for 2021 as well!

UpCloud Object Storage

Storage offerings such as our homegrown MaxIOPS have always been our strong suits and on top of which we’ve built our latest solution, UpCloud Object Storage! It had been one of our most frequently requested features. We needed to fine-tune and polish it to ensure perfect service to our users. The hard work paid off, and starting this year, you have been able to take advantage of the Object Storage in most of our data centres! Object Storage brings many exciting possibilities for anything from backing up private data to global content delivery. The secure and scalable Object Storage comes with full S3 compatibility. It is ready to integrate with any of your existing tools and services. Consequently, we have been happy to see quick adoption of Object Storage among our users and we expect to see the demand just grow.

Network Transfer Pool

Networking is one of the cornerstones of our cloud infrastructure. We’ve long had a strong focus on offering advanced networking features made possible by our SDN Private Networks. However, while private network data transfer comes free, we do not want you to feel restricted by public networking costs. Therefore, earlier this year, we lowered our outbound transfer pricing considerably to just $0.01 per GB. But that’s not all! To further support our users in making the most of their cloud networking, starting from November, all transfer quotas afforded by our public cloud services were combined to a single account-wide Network Transfer Pool. It allows our users to freely build their services without worrying about network usage or hourly transfer rates. They can make every byte of transfer quotas shareable between their services. Enabling Network Transfer Pool has essentially removed excess transfer charges from the majority of our users!

Simple Backup

To help our users protect their business-critical data, we offer several backup options, including manual on-demand and automated scheduled backups. This year, we brought backups to another level by making them easier than ever before with the introduction of Simple Backup. Simple Backup is an easy-to-use option for anyone regardless of technical skills. It safeguards all attached storage devices to preserve your data, the server’s operating system, applications, and services by saving a snapshot of the Cloud Server. With simple and affordable pricing, it indeed became a handy companion to any of our monthly plans.

New helpful tools and services

When migrating your servers from on-premise or another cloud provider, you want to be as efficient as possible. To make the migration easier, we launched UpCloud Storage Import. It allows users to simply create new storage of any server image available online and deploy it on UpCloud. Besides server system images, Storage Import can also help with importing data storage images and installation media. Automating server configuration after the initial deployment often requires certain details of the server itself. As a helping hand, we launched the UpCloud Metadata service earlier this year. It allows users to query already deployed Cloud Servers to get detailed information about the server. Metadata is available as a cloud-init compatible JSON and accessible via a filesystem-like traversable API. Once enabled, it can be queried on any of the user’s cloud servers using any HTTP client such as curl or wget and put into use in bootstrapping software and services. We also extended the customisation possibilities of UpCloud’s SDN Private Networks. Our Private Network users can now create a gateway between any number of SDN Private Networks within a data centre with help from the SDN Router. For now, it has launched in open beta, which limits connectivity to SDN Private Networks in the same data centre. However, we’re already working on the next phase, which is going to enable connecting Private Networks across data centres. You can enjoy the beta phase free of charge and get ready for the global inter-zone connectivity. In addition to the many new services and features, our users can now get started with Plesk web hosting in seconds! Plesk is an advanced web hosting and WordPress management platform. It empowers just about anyone to build and manage multiple sites from a single dashboard. Plesk is now available on UpCloud as a pre-installed software stack in a dedicated public template. If you want to know more about the new features or our services in general, make sure to check out our FAQ and Documentation pages. You can also subscribe to our regular monthly newsletter and make sure that you never miss any important updates.

Growing teams

Naturally, none of these launches would be possible without our amazing teams. This year, we hired new colleagues for all our offices around the world. And even though we enjoy spending time together, we’re fully equipped to work remotely. That allows us to have teammates based in many more countries than just where UpCloud’s offices are located. And because our teams indeed are the core of the company, we’ve launched a brand new Career page and an Instagram account. There you can have a look behind the scenes of UpCloud. Read about our culture and values, see our offices, meet our people and, who knows, maybe even your future colleagues! Contact our Sales team

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UpCloud's 2020 milestones: How we upgraded our services

Three new data centres

UpCloud Object Storage

Network Transfer Pool

Simple Backup

New helpful tools and services

Growing teams

Most Relevant Blog

Autumn Greetings and New Features!

Antti Vilpponen joins UpCloud

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