• Wednesday, July 17, 2019

We are excited to announce that our OpenStack Cloud is now available! You can sign up through our newly redesigned website, add at least $3 in Cloud Credit, and log into the Cloud Control Panel to launch a new instance!

What's New?

There are several new features available through the Cloud Control Panel:

  • Image / ISO uploads
  • Snapshots / backups
  • Cloud-config with cloud-init user-data
  • Private networking
  • Security groups
  • OpenStack API

In addition to these features, cloud services are billed hourly with the option to prepay for cloud credit or pay for what you use with a credit card on file. Hourly prices are listed on our website, as well as the prices for image storage and bandwidth overages.

Known Issues

The new panel has a few known issues that we are working to fix soon. We will update this article as we go. Please contact us via support ticket if you spot something else.

What's Next?

We plan to offer the following options/features at some point in the next few months:

  • Container plans
  • Kubernetes
  • Block storage

We intended to launch LXC alongside KVM, but the driver we were working with was unfortunately retired. We are re-evaluating our container options (LXC, OpenVZ, etc.) with the goal of being able to offer something ASAP.

Existing VPS

Existing VPSs are not directly impacted by the launch of our new cloud service. You do not have to make any changes regarding your current VPSs. Your service will continue as it is. We have disabled new orders on SolusVM, but our SolusVM host nodes will run alongside OpenStack indefinitely.

We indicated a while back that existing VPSs would be migrated to OpenStack; however, after spending a lot of time on it, we decided to leave things in place to avoid massive headaches for everyone. Migrations would have involved unpredictable amounts of downtime, a variety of networking problems, billing issues for old coupons/annual payments, etc. We also determined that several popular OpenVZ features would not directly translate to LXC. You are of course welcome to create new cloud instances to replace your existing VPSs, but the systems and services are completely separate.

On a related note, we do have a few things in the works for existing VPSs. We will be migrating our OpenVZ nodes to OpenVZ 7 starting in the next month or so. We are also working on an emergency backup system that will allow you to restore VPS data upon request.

Update - SolusVM OpenVZ orders have been re-enabled while we work on our OpenStack container option.

Other Notes

  • Cloud instances come with 1 IPv4 and 1 IPv6 address. You can open a ticket for more IPv6 addresses.
  • The monthly price is the same between SolusVM and Cloud KVM plans, with cloud plans being billed hourly. Plan specs are identical other than IPv6 assignment.
  • Cloud plans have a different naming convention than SolusVM plans:
    • SKVM (Cloud) = SKVMS (SolusVM) - not to be confused with our retired SKVM-E3 plans
    • PKVM (Cloud) = NKVM (SolusVM)
    • VDS (Cloud) = SVDS (SolusVM)

We will be updating our Knowledgebase to reflect these changes over the next few days. We realize documentation on the new system is lacking and plan to add more ASAP.

As always, we welcome your feedback! Feel free to contact us via support ticket or our IRC channel.