It’s our aim to make things easier and quicker for our customers, so over the past few weeks we’ve been rolling out CloudLinux OS into our web hosting environment. The new OS is designed to give customers increased control over their hosting.

CloudLinux is an operating system that uses lightweight virtualization to improve the performance and stability of the server. Using some of the latest technology found in cloud environments, it brings some massive benefits to a regular hosting ecosystem. The CloudLinux OS gives our web hosting, PaaS and SaaS providers the ability to manage resources available to their shared hosting customers in a reliable and efficient way.

In a shared web hosting environment, one web server is shared between users. Hosting companies benefit from enhanced security and stability within the Lightweight Virtual Environment (LVE) created by CloudLinux OS. System administrators can control CPU, memory and connections available to each tenant. The result is effectively preventing one site from slowing down or taking down an entire server, allowing hosters to substantially increase server density, bringing far greater efficiency to their business while delivering overall improved service to customers.

To celebrate the agreement, the two companies have a special offer for customers. Anyone who orders and installs a server with a CloudLinux license before the 1^st March 2012 will receive the first two months of CloudLinux free of charge. CloudLinux OS licenses can be purchased directly on our site and existing customers can license their existing infrastructure through LeaseWeb’s customer portal. Fancy finding out more about how you can benefit from the CloudLinux OS? Get in touch with us via sales@leaseweb.com.

                          

We have therefore compiled a list of the top ten common myths that contribute to wasted IPv4 addresses, and explain why they are misconceptions. This was actually only for internal use, but we thought we could share it with the rest of the world.

1. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – the myth that hosting a webpage on a dedicated IP address improves its pagerank has been around for some time within the hosting industry, but this is not true. There are a number of factors to consider when thinking about SEO, but a dedicated IP address is not one of them.
2. Hosting multiple websites – you may host hundreds (or even more) http sites on a single IP address. This is a common practice; for example, most Google services use shared IP addresses. In fact, there are no disadvantages of hosting multiple websites, especially as there are more websites than IPv4 addresses – so shared IPs are the way to go.
3. Hosting multiple services – hosting different services on a single IP could help to cope with scarce IPv4 addresses. Different services like ftp, email, web or dns use different ports and can therefore safely be shared over one IP address without any interference.
4. Secondary DNS – some people host primary and secondary name services on the same server, but some have a separate DNS server for each domain they host. Many registries require two different IP addresses to host a domain for redundancy reasons, but one server gives no redundancy at all. Therefore all LeaseWeb customers may use our secondary name servers for all domains they host. This way the name services are not only fully redundant, but you also save your resources and IP addresses, and therefore money.
5. Dedicated IP address for SSL sites – While SSL sites cannot share an IP address with other SSL sites, they do not require a dedicated IP address. You are still free to host one SSL site on an IP address that has other services, like DNS, email or non-SSL web.
6. Virtual host bandwidth usage – another common myth is to host different http sites on different IP addresses as this is the only way to monitor the traffic generated by each site. In fact, you can still host websites on a shared IP and have detailed traffic statistics for each one. For example, if you have apache web servers in place you may use modules such as mod_logio or mod_watch to track bandwidth/usage data.
7. Only IPv4 can be used – anything you host or that you want to be made available to anyone on the Internet requires an IPv4 address. Many people have several sites/virtual machines that have a very limited user base, like test environments or management. If you have any sites/servers that are used only by you, such sites or services may as well be hosted on an IPv6 address. This can even lead to improved security of services by making them unavailable to other parts of the Internet.
8. VPN access – you don’t need a separate IP address for each VPN line you host. If you decide to use Network Address Translation (NAT) and want to have multiple VPN customers behind shared IP address (es), you can host as many VPN lines as you want and you are not limited to the number of IP addresses you can have.
9. Virtual machines – you need a separate IP address for each virtual machine if you plan to sell them to different customers. However, if you use virtualization as a security measure to isolate different services, you should consider hosting at least some back-end virtual machines on private IP addresses and make them available only from the other VMs on that server. By doing this, you can completely isolate important servers hosting databases, file storage and management information, for example, from the internet and still be able to access them from other virtual machines.
10. Emailing – you can use IPv6 addresses to offload some email traffic from IPv4. In many cases you actually get better results by sharing IP addresses between different customer campaigns, therefore not requiring as many IPv4 addresses.

We hope that by shedding light on these common myths, we can help to solve some of the issues around the lack of available IP addresses. If you have any questions, comments or maybe even a myth that we haven’t heard of, do let us know! We’re available via our website and on Twitter @LeaseWeb. Alternatively, you can leave a comment or question below.

                          

There is (still) a lot of confusion about the various cloud layers. ‘Cloud’ can have different meanings depending on the context. For example, we use the term IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), to refer to the type of cloud services we offer. For more information on the various cloud types, the Wikipedia definition is pretty clear and concise. Our strong focus on IaaS is logical stems from the fact that LeaseWeb is an infrastructure provider. We collaborate with customers in various segments to add value to their own business, or enable them to use our infrastructure as building blocks for new products and services.

Cloud services are becoming more and more commonplace – and are a great alternative for dedicated / hardware infrastructure. The new Gartner quadrant on IaaS that was published earlier this week stresses this clearly: Infrastructure as a Service is not the hip new kid on the block anymore, but is being used in all business areas where flexible infrastructure is needed.

To be honest, this is not a surprise to us. We’ve been building IaaS platforms for a few years now, and have noticed a growing demand for these kinds of services. However, we do feel it’s important to use the right infrastructure to satisfy your needs. IaaS can be a perfect fit for some applications, but for others it might not be the best choice. You can read our blog series on hosting online games for examples to see why might be better off using dedicated hardware.

Creating a strong IaaS Cloud offering is a natural evolutionary step for LeaseWeb. Our current dedicated server portfolio actually has quite a number of  ‘cloud-like’ characteristics: we use a fully automated delivery system, we empower our customers via our Self Service Center, and allow for on-demand delivery and customization of infrastructure capacity (either through the panel or an API). Our next step is to use this platform and our experience to deliver more IaaS products / features.

We will start off the process by upgrading the current ‘express cloud’ product to a new platform, based on open source technology and high-performance, fully redundant compute and storage systems. In the first quarter of 2012 we plan to introduce the first iteration of this product; this will be a basic cloud product, similar to the current express offering (but with the addition of a virtual network setup). On top of this, we will start introducing new functionality, moving steadily towards a full-featured IaaS product, where you can customize the feature set based on what you need. For example, you might want to add load balancers and firewalls, or you could switch to hourly billing to be more cost-effective. Our list of planned features is quite extensive, and we will be adding functionality in regular updates.

In short, we have some exciting times ahead of us. We are looking forward to rolling out this new platform, and getting feedback on what you need. We strongly believe that a great product can only be built by working with our customers, so be sure to let us know if there is anything you need – use the comment section below if you have any feedback or questions!

                          

Reinstallations with customized partitions
For some time now the SSC offered the possibility to reinstall a server, but every installation received our default partition layout. We fixed this: you now have the ability to modify the partition layout and specify volume sizes according to your own preferred configuration:

This feature is also available via our API.

Create  a ticket from SSC
From now on you can create a ticket for our Support, Administration or Sales departments. Depending on the department selected, you will see a list of topics you can choose for your ticket. Selecting one of these topics will make sure we’re able to quickly reply to your request with the best possible response. Of course, if the topic of your request is not listed, you can always choose ‘Other’ and describe the topic yourself.

It is also possible to suggest new features for the SSC – let us know what you’d like us to build next!

NOC messages & Mailing subscriptions
We have integrated our Network Operations Center under My Account -> Notification Settings. Maintenance & Network Status updates shown on www.leasewebnoc.com are also displayed here. In addition, you can manage your subscription settings for our NOC mailing list on this page.

API access for all customers
We feel it is important to give customers the possibility to integrate our services in their own systems, so we are continuously building out our API.

Before this release, the SSC API was available on request at our Sales Department.  API access can now be enabled and disabled from My Account -> API. You will find the API Document with all API calls and descriptions in our Support section. For security purposes you need to add your RSA key to request password information for new installations. You can also lock your API key to only allow API calls from a number of specific IP addresses.

That’s it for now. As always, whenever you need help with the SSC, or you have suggestions for us to improve our self service center, please let us know by leaving a comment below, tweeting us (@LeaseWeb) or even through the SSC. Your feedback is highly appreciated and we really like to hear what is important to you.

                          

On top of that, our networking team has welcomed many new colleagues. They’ve not only been busy focusing on Europe, but also our recent expansion into the US. We are building our own network in North America to strengthen our connections between Europe and the US, which will heighten the quality of our global network even further.

Like many companies at this time of year, we do not schedule any big activity or upgrade work during the holidays. Instead, we use this time to be proactive, to check that everything is operating smoothly and to order in new products. For instance, the past week we tested network capacity to guarantee there is enough demand in the future. We also ordered new networking hardware as well as assisted other departments with the renewal of any contracts ending in December. In short, we do all that is needed to be completely prepared for 2012.

It’s also really interesting to monitor the increase and decrease in traffic during the holiday period – which is often dependent on what the weather is like. If it’s sunny or snowing, we see much lower traffic due to people going out for long walks (probably to burn the calories from those tasty Christmas dinners). But if it’s raining and miserable, people don’t want to go outside. Instead they spend time online buying new products, researching information, chatting or even playing games. Ecommerce websites for instance experience a very heavy traffic load during this time, often equaling their yearly traffic in December alone, so these companies need to ensure they have enough capacity.

By testing our own capacity, we are able to prepare LeaseWeb for any traffic growth during high periods of demand, while avoiding any traffic bottlenecks of traffic. For that, we need to make sure that all networking hardware such as routers and blades are bought and implemented by the end of this year and on time for 2012.

So what have we got in store for next year? Well, we are very excited to upgrade our AMS-IX peering capacity to 100 gigabit Ethernet! As 100GE is the latest standard, we are proud to be the first hosting provider in the world to implement this technology. This way, we are able to meet the ever-growing traffic demanded by our customers. We are also continuing our expansion into the US and the integration of our German network.

Make sure you keep checking back here to find out more about what the networking department is up to. In January we will be blogging about traffic usage and data trends in 2011, so watch this space! And as always, don’t forget to let us know your thoughts – leave us a comment below, or tweet us (@LeaseWeb).

                          

In 1993, seminal first person shooter Doom was released and its development budget was $ 200.000, making it one of the most expensive games ever to be created at the time. Now it is 2011, and we’re just weeks away before the launch of highly anticipated MMORPG Star Wars: The Old Republic. Its rumored production budget: $ 135 million, more than any other game to date. To put this into perspective, CGI heavy movies such as this year’s Rise of the Planets of the Apes and Conan the Barbarian cost the same (or less) to produce. And we haven’t even started with costs like marketing, licensing and distribution, which may or may not be included in stated production budgets.

But even if you are a small indie game developer and don’t have astronomically high budgets to work with, there is still one important but often overlooked cost: hosting. This is an unavoidable expense for online games and can form a big part of your operational costs. But how do you find the right price for your hosting?

First of all, we have to work on the assumption that cheap or expensive does not have to mean better or worse. The goal is to find a solution that matches your needs for the right price. For some this might mean a standardized hosting package. Others might get more bang for their buck when they build their own custom solution. But no matter what hosting solution you choose, they all consist of several building blocks that you can play around with:

1. Location: You should aim to have the best connectivity possible, but every hosting location adds costs. By strategically consolidating your servers into fewer locations, you can already save a lot of money. Remember: Excellent networks need fewer locations to maintain good connectivity with a large reach, while large hosting providers benefit from economies of scale. They can buy in large volumes, enabling them to competitively price their products.
2. Managed or unmanaged hosting: Look at what your company can do by itself. If you have enough in-house knowledge of networks and server software, you can opt for a more hands-on approach through unmanaged hosting. Aside from saving costs, it also means you are much more flexible and don’t have to depend on others to keep your servers running.
3. Colocation or Leasing/Renting servers: You will also have to choose between colocating or leasing hardware. Below we’ve compared the two against each other:
   

   	Colocation	Leasing/Renting
   Description	With colocation you rent rackspace in a datacenter that you can use for your own hardware. This gives you complete control and more flexibility in terms of hardware, but is more time consuming, adds additional costs and requires in-house expertise to take full advantage of both hard- and software. Also, keep in mind that the upfront investment for a colocation infrastructure can be quite large. This is offset by the fact that colocation can be cheaper in the long run.	Leased / rental servers (aka dedicated servers) provide you with hardware owned by a hosting provider, which are hosted in one of the datacenters the host is active in. The hosting provider maintains the hardware and will repair or replace a server if it breaks down, making it an ideal option if you can’t or don’t want to invest in the manpower for hardware maintenance. Leasing hardware requires a relatively small financial investment to get started, though it might cost more when compared to colocation over a longer period of time. Your choice of hardware is limited to what the hosting provider can offer you, but some providers offer custom-built servers. Leased servers are often delivered very quickly – sometimes within a few hours
   Billing components	Rent for rackspace Electricity Traffic	Rent for hardware Traffic
   Additional costs	On-site staff (or remote hands) Your own hardware Keeping a stock of spare parts	Remote Hands / SLA (if required)

4. Type of network: Different hosting providers have different kinds of networks. LeaseWeb for instance has a standard and a Volume network taking customization and financial flexibility to a new level. The Volume network includes an economical mix of transit providers, allowing for the reduced cost to be passed on to the customer. Our other network is the Standard network, which includes more transit providers and better speed to those hard to reach providers on the Internet. This way, depending on the type of application you are hosting at LeaseWeb, we are able to recommend different solutions at varying price points and grades of service.
5. Various billing models: Depending on the performance of your game, you can gain substantial economic advantages by selecting the right billing model. There’s quite a variety, which we have described in a previous blog: how we bill for bandwidth.
6. Additional services: Ask yourself what other features you require to keep your games running smoothly. For instance, having a SLA on top of a 24/7 support service guarantees your games will experience minimal downtime.

You may also want to take future developments into account. What if your online game is more successful than anticipated? Or what if it’s less? Some hosting providers work with monthly contracts, which mean you always have the option to create a setup that matches your needs. Aside from that, it never a bad idea to check if a hosting provider has a promotional program that offers you the benefits you need.

As you can see, there are a lot of different things that influence your monthly hosting costs. But gaming is serious business, and having a lower bottom line helps you stay competitive. The key lies in finding the right balance between your game’s requirements, how much hosting infrastructure you can manage yourself and of course: the price of each decision.

That’s it for this week, and for this series as a whole. But it doesn’t have to stop here of course. You can still meet our online gaming consultants at GameConnection Europe (booth #220). Feel free to come by and say hi or ask questions about hosting and online games. You can also contact us through sales@leaseweb.com, leave a comment in the section below or tweet us (@LeaseWeb).

The complete ‘It’s all in the game’ blog series:

1. Reliable Hosting
2. Worldwide Connectivity
3. Fast Scalability
4. Efficient Pricing

                          

CDNs enable our customers to serve web content more quickly to their users, wherever they are in the world. For instance, we are the number one mirror for Mozilla in Europe and North America, serving 80 million downloads each day without a hitch. Customers can also benefit from accelerated slow websites, faster page serving and high-performance bandwidth, at affordable prices. This greatly improves network efficiency when off-loading high traffic downloads such as FLV videos. The LeaseWeb CDN is the latest advancement in technology to support the e-commerce and web hosting industries. CDNs are still relatively new to the market but are considered the ultimate solution to meet the increasingly data reliant and cost sensitive demands of modern businesses. We are really excited to soon launch our own, fully tested and approved version in Q1 2012.

But what makes our product different from the other CDN provisions emerging in the market? One of the key differentiators in the LeaseWeb CDN, aside from the 2.3 Tbps network we own and operate on, is the improvement in invalidation time when importing or updating files onto our servers. We have successfully managed to develop a platform that has brought the invalidation time down to 15-20 minutes.

Another key element we are proud to include in the CDN offering is real-time statistics, which customers can access from the Self Service Center (SSC). Coupled with fully featured API integration, this gives our customers full control over their service, allowing them to tailor it accordingly, at any time. Of course our customer service team is always on hand to support and answer any questions you may have. We also provide Origin Pull support which greatly simplifies CDN implementation and management. Data can be automatically transferred from a web server rather than manually uploaded – making it a much quicker and easier process for our customers.

If you would like to be a part of the LeaseWeb CDN Beta testing phase, please get in touch with one of the team as we are really keen to hear from you.

                          

Latency and Network stability
So what do we actually mean with connectivity in relation to online gaming? Basically, it comes down to two things: low-latency and network stability.

Gaming professionals probably already know what latency is, but just to be sure: latency is the average delay experienced when an internet packet goes from source to destination and back again. We measure latency in milliseconds (ms) and a lower average latency score is better. The average latency score depends on the amount of jitter, which is the range between which an average latency score fluctuates. A stable network will have a small range of jitter. For example, when playing a first person shooter such as Battlefield 3, you need to be able to react extremely fast to win. If you have a jitter range between 30 and 60 ms, this won’t be a problem. But if your latency changes wildly between 30 ms and 150 ms, you’ll experience choppy gameplay (and will be shot or fragged continuously):

You can imagine that if you have too much latency, the game becomes virtually unplayable.

Getting the right connectivity
So the goal is to reduce latency while setting up a stable network environment. Here are some guidelines to do just that:

Find the right combination between hardware and software
Games that require fast responses are playable up until a latency of 60 ms. A game like Farmville on the other hand is still playable with a latency of 300 ms (though if it’s still fun when the connection is that slow is of course debatable). This means it is important to find the right match between software, hardware and network.

Optimizing the game server software for connectivity is something that has to be done during the development or testing phase. As for hardware: if you use only quality servers with multi-threading capabilities, the data can be processed as fast as possible. But how do you determine the right network infrastructure?

Host your game from a geographically close location
There are various elements that influence latency, but you can do a rough estimation of the theoretical latency of a network. All you need to know is the geographical distance between the datacenter hosting your games and the location of your player.

Every kilometer of fiber adds 0.02 ms latency. So to estimate the average network latency, take the distance between two places in kilometers, and multiply it by 0.02. For example, the distance from Frankfurt to Amsterdam is about 450 km. The calculation then becomes 450 x 0.02 = 9, which means the theoretical latency should be 9 ms on average. You can then compare this theoretical number with actual results from network tests, to determine the quality of the network. For instance, the LeaseWeb network from Amsterdam to Frankfurt (and back) scores an average of 8.6 ms, which means it’s a great connection.

Keep in mind though that this is just a rough theoretical calculation. There are a few ‘real life’ factors that you need to take into account:

• Submarine cables add 0.015 ms latency per kilometer: When calculating the theoretical latency for networks that cross oceans, the multiplier changes to 0.015 ms latency instead of 0.02 ms. This is because submarine cables usually go in a straight line from point A to point B (as opposed to inland fibers, which often take quite optimal, though not necessarily straight paths).
• Not all continents are directly connected: If you want to send data from Europe to South America, you enter the American continent through North America. You then follow the inland line to South America, which easily results in a latency of 200 to 250 ms. This is why games often have continent based servers.
• Home ISP’s add latency too: Most gamers play from their home. Because of this, a player may get additional latency of up to 50 ms due to the technology used by his own home ISP.

Armed with this knowledge, it’s easy to understand why you should minimize the distance between your hosts and your player. This means spreading out your servers across many different datacenters. There are two ways you can facilitate this. The first is working with many (small) hosting providers, which can be a costly operation. The second way is working with a large hosting provider. They are often active in key datacenter locations, effectively becoming a one-stop-shop for all your connectivity needs.

Choose a network that has as many direct connections as possible
No matter how you choose to close the distance between your servers and your players, a good hosting providers has:

• High quality exchange connections: A hosting provider should be connected to quality internet exchanges. A European host for instance has to be connected with DE-CIX and AMS-IX (located in Frankfurt and Amsterdam respectively). These are the two largest internet exchanges in the world, both for volume of traffic and the amount of connected networks.
• Multiple quality transit providers: Having access to various Tier 1 transit providers provides both redundancy and high quality connectivity, in turn ensuring speed and global coverage.
• Multiple uplinks: If part of the network becomes unavailable due to maintenance or an incident, this has a direct impact on speed as there is less bandwidth for the same amount of traffic. The more uplinks a host has, the more room there is for traffic, which leads to a higher network stability.

Test your set-up
Once all the preparations are done, it’s time to put it all to the test. As Jay Wilson, Game Director of the Diablo III puts it:

(…) no matter how good your automation programs and software are, you can’t emulate having the game out in the real world and that’s the only way you can see what the hardware can take, how well the networking works, and optimize and tune to those things. There’s just nothing like the real environment for that.

That’s it for this week
If you keep all things mentioned in mind when deciding on the right hosting solution, your games will have good chance of running lag-free. Should you have any questions, you can always contact us through gaming@leaseweb.com, or drop by booth #220 during GameConnection Europe from 6th to 8th December. Will you be attending GameConnection Europe too? Let us know by leaving a comment in the section below or tweeting us (@LeaseWeb)!

Be sure to tune in next week, when we discuss the various features of scalable hosting for MMO games.

The complete ‘It’s all in the game’ blog series:

1. Reliable Hosting
2. Worldwide Connectivity
3. Fast Scalability
4. Efficient Pricing

                          

Online gaming has taken off like no other market in the gaming industry. Long gone are the years of 56k modems (and the static noise they make when logging in). Thanks to the prevalence of high speed home internet connections, the gamers in the family, which now includes everyone from kids to grandmothers, meet online with millions of other players around the world to play Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games.

MMO games hold a powerful sway over those who play them. Players spend weeks, months, even years honing the skills of their avatars or climbing the ranks of leaderboards. With such a heavy investment, it’s understandable that the moment an online game is not available, players get frustrated. To illustrate: here is a nearly 7 minute monologue from a MMO player about an offline game server:

Bad word-of-mouth like this spreads like wildfire among the gaming communities. If data gets corrupted (with players losing their hard earned items or ranks in the process), the attractiveness of the game sinks even lower. Worst case scenario: your players leave permanently. If this affects enough people, it might even get picked up by the mainstream press.

It’s safe to say that downtime directly translates into loss of revenue. But what can gaming professionals do to minimize downtime? A big part of this comes down to choosing a reliable hosting provider with the right infrastructure. Keep the following in mind when choosing a location for your servers:

• MMO games work better in a dedicated environment: You need guaranteed performance to run MMO servers reliably. Dedicated servers provide you with just that, giving you access to all their resources. In addition, these servers often have multi-CPU and multithreading capabilities, which most game server software can benefit from.
• Use quality hardware: It seems like a given, but it’s important nonetheless. By using only high quality hardware you will have fewer instances of the server physically breaking down. A good hosting provider also keeps a stock of replacement parts (or even complete servers!) to ensure fast repairs.
• Take care of redundancy: Even after having eliminated nearly every possible risk, there is always a chance that your servers go offline unexpectedly. In such cases, having a backup environment lets your players continue their gaming session while you’re working with your provider to solve the problem.
• Have a hosting provider with 24/7 support and server monitoring: Online games should be playable around the clock, all over the world. But you (and your co-workers) will have to sleep at least some time. Having a hosting provider with 24/7 support and monitoring services means you can rest comfortably, knowing that your servers are running smoothly.

There are many aspects to consider when choosing a hosting provider for your online gaming business, but this should provide you with a good introduction on one of the most important points: reliability. Of course, we’d be happy to discuss this in more detail with you. LeaseWeb has several consultants that specialize in hosting solutions for online games. Paul (p.grimwood@leaseweb.com) and Larry (l.malik@leaseweb.com) will attend GameConnection Europe this December, so drop by booth #220 to speak to them. Alternatively, you can send an email to gaming@leaseweb.com if you would like to know more.

Are you going to GameConnection too? Let us know by dropping a line in the comment section below or tweeting (@LeaseWeb) us!

That’s it for this week. In our follow up next week, we’ll discuss the basics of connectivity specifically for the gaming industry.

The complete ‘It’s all in the game’ blog series:

1. Reliable Hosting
2. Worldwide Connectivity
3. Fast Scalability
4. Efficient Pricing

                          

What’s new
So what changes will directly impact our customers?

• All US products are now available in dollars
• Automated credit card payments (via a new payment service provider)
• Many usability improvements to make browsing our website hassle-free

Another big part of the project was separating all LeaseWeb companies, also known as our legal entities, within our ordering system. As you may know, last year LeaseWeb successfully expanded into Germany and the United States, giving us a stronger local presence. However, when ordering services and products through the website, you would still enter into an agreement with LeaseWeb BV, the Dutch entity of LeaseWeb. This also meant that ‘officially’ you had to contact LeaseWeb Netherlands if you had a question regarding your product or service.

Now, when you place your order through Leaseweb.com or the Self Service Center (SSC), your contract will be with the LeaseWeb subsidiary that’s in the same geographical location. For instance, when you order a server located in the Netherlands, you will get a contract from LeaseWeb BV. If you order a US-based server, you will get a contract from LeaseWeb USA, inc. This new system allows us to offer more service locations, giving our customers more choice globally.

Deploying GUS2CAS
Monday last week, at the brink of midnight, it was the moment of truth. Big projects like GUS2CAS affect a lot of different company applications. To ensure minimal impact on our customers, an overnight deployment was chosen. That evening a big team of dedicated web developers, system administrators, networking experts and project managers gathered in LeaseWeb HQ to work their magic.

It was a long night, with everyone working at full speed to get the deployment up and running. At four o’clock in the morning, phase one of GUS2CAS went live. Afterwards, the whole team worked until seven o’clock to make sure everything was functioning correctly. A couple of minutes later we already had our first US client ordering through the new system – without any problems!

Tired but content, the red-eyed deployment team went to bed while a fresh team of developers came in, ready to deal with any incidents that might occur. We are very proud to say that no major incidents were reported. So all in all, the deployment went as smooth as could be!

The future
With phase one deployed, all improvements for LeaseWeb USA, inc. are implemented. In the next couple of months we will focus on getting the new features for our German counterpart live. Of course we made sure all customer information is still correctly registered in our Customer Administration System (we call it CAS for short). This, by the way, is also where the name of the project came from: Germany & USA to the Customer Administration System.

Earlier customer satisfaction survey results and feedback picked up by our customer support department were used to determine some of the basic features. Customer opinion has always been very valuable to LeaseWeb, precisely because it gives us a good indication of what to focus on. So please keep on giving your feedback to make sure we always exceed your needs! You can send your suggestions to info@leaseweb.com, tweet them to us (@LeaseWeb), or leave them below in the comments.