4 years of the way of the samurai. How not to get stuck, but to enter the IT history

In 4 years, you can complete a bachelor's degree, learn a language, master a new specialty, gain work experience in a new field, travel to dozens of cities and countries. Or maybe 4 years in ten and all in one bottle. No magic, just business - your business.

4 years ago, we became part of the IT industry and found ourselves connected with it by one goal, bound by one chain. Birthday is the best time to talk about your journey, while remembering how the calendar of the industry itself turned over. In this post, everything will be like on a real holiday: memories, beer, burgers, friends, stories. We invite you to our virtual retrospective party.

4 years of the way of the samurai. How not to get stuck, but to enter the IT history

End of July 2015

  • July 23, 2015 стало известноthat the NASA telescope discovered "Earth 2.0". Scientists have said that this is the most Earth-like planet of all previously discovered. Such objects are cool enough to have liquid water on their surface, and therefore potentially life. The distance to our "double" is 1400 light years. A new planet named Kepler-452b has joined a group of exoplanets like Kepler-186f that are similar to Earth in many ways.
  • On July 27, 2015, MIT announced some cool news: a new material for creating ultra-long-acting tablets, a PH-sensitive polymer gel, has been discovered. It should replace not the safest plastic capsules of long-acting drugs and microdevices for monitoring the state of the gastrointestinal tract. This technology is expected to be a breakthrough in the treatment of severe viral and infectious diseases.

At this time, one not very large team of IT people knew that a supernova would soon break out in the Russian hosting universe.

▍Supernova Explosion

There are almost 800 publications in the RUVDS blog on Habré, but few people know who is doing this project. We are a former team of algorithmic traders, in July 2015 we started developing RUVDS virtual server hosting.

There were several reasons for this. The main one is that the turnover of our market began to decline catastrophically under the yoke of sanctions and the prevailing unfavorable situation for foreign investors. The niche that we occupied in the field of algorithmic trading at some point turned out to be actually overflowing with us. For individual instruments, every second deal was made with us, and these were some of the most liquid derivatives and securities of our market. Another reason was that clients were also shrinking: teams like ours were managing the capital of small commercial banks, which began to rapidly lose their licenses. Hence the impossibility to increase capital under management and enter a fundamentally different size of business.

The low turnover of our market and the small number of players is the main reason why other algorithmic teams and funds could not overcome the stage of development and grow into large funds like Knight Capital abroad.

And what did we have? The accumulated knowledge and experience in creating high-load systems and high-speed infrastructure - all this turned out to be in demand on the IAAS services market. Understanding perfectly the needs of traders, we first of all created an infrastructure that we would use ourselves. As a result, the first clients of the company were brokers and their clients-traders BCS, Finam, National Settlement Depository (Moscow Exchange).

When creating hosting, we used automation skills and the experience of our team. After all, algorithmic trading is a rather difficult task, which teaches you the strictest discipline, maximum coherence in a small team and unhealthy perfectionism in relation to the result. This is the key to success, perhaps, for all start-up companies.

On July 27, 2015, MT Finance LLC was registered. The first investments in the project were servers from the equipment park designed for low-latency trading. The office was located in the same place where the traders sat. Subsequently, there were fewer and fewer traders, and now only a few Bloomberg keyboards remind of this stage in the development of our team.

4 years of the way of the samurai. How not to get stuck, but to enter the IT history
Nikita Tsaplin in the first office of the company with the same keyboard

December 2015 years

  • In December, the 2015 PHP 7 released the biggest update since 2004. In the new release, performance has been improved three times.
  • At the very end of December 2015, it became known that Android moves to OpenJDK. Android N no longer had Oracle's proprietary code, which ended a series of disputes between Google and Oracle over the Java API.
  • On December 21, the world learned that bacteria found, capable of withstanding the latest generation of antibiotics, which put the world on the verge of a post-antibiotic era. By the way, during this time nothing has changed, the world is still saved by antibiotics.

▍Launching of our own data center in Moscow, in Korolev

Another habit with algorithmic trading is building your own infrastructure from start to finish. Algorithmic trading is full of paranoia: what if the algorithm is stolen, what if someone else’s channel is slower – after all, money is at stake. In the cloud business, we decided not to change this habit, because data has become a new currency for us, and we decided to build our own DC. We have been looking for a site for a long time that could satisfy the needs of energy supply and communications, as well as general reliability - as a result, we settled on the site of one of the strategic plants in our country, which managed to offer the best conditions. Taking into account that, first of all, reliability is important in a data center, we invited an experienced team from MTW.RU to cooperate. Its specialists provided invaluable assistance in the construction of the data center. As a result, this made it possible to build the data center in the shortest possible time with high quality, taking into account the many years of experience of MTW.RU.

4 years of the way of the samurai. How not to get stuck, but to enter the IT history
The data center is located in a bomb shelter on the territory of JSC Composite. This object is also interesting because it is a complex of several independent rooms (hermetic zones), the premises of which are airtight. This increases the fault tolerance of the data center, and also allows for more flexibility in the implementation of individual customer requests for security and reliability.

Reportage for lovers of geek porn

4 years of the way of the samurai. How not to get stuck, but to enter the IT history
Today, RUVDS has its own data center, located at the address: Moscow Region, Korolev, st. Pionerskaya, 4. The premises of the data center are certified in accordance with the requirements of the FSTEC, designed in accordance with the TIER III reliability category, according to the TIA-942 standard (N + 1 redundancy with a fault tolerance level of 99,98%). The area of ​​the data center is about 1500 sq.m. Part of it is occupied by the operator's room, utility rooms, diesel generators and other systems. The existing reserves allow to quickly increase the area of ​​the data center and the supplied power supply by at least twice.

▍December 2015 — launch of ruvds.com service

When creating the service, in order not to depend on other people's developments, we also decided to go our own way. Self-written implementation of the core of the service allowed our resource to acquire a set of advantages in comparison with competitors. First of all, it is security and full control over each script: we know what works and how, we see all the internal aspects of the project and we can quickly introduce innovations.

The first version of the site was written in PHP, but it did not last long - due to rapidly growing loads, I had to switch to C#. Several development teams participated in the creation of the site in different periods of time.

The design of the site has not changed much since the first day of launch - sometimes we make small changes, but in general our audience is quite conservative and we try not to make big changes on the site.

2016

  • On March 9, 2016, Google released a stable version of Android 7.0 Nougat and began rolling out the operating system to devices. Android N introduced support for Java 8.
  • March 10, 2016 Microsoft released own OS based on Debian GNU/Linux for network switches. The system was called SONiC, Software for Open Networking in the Cloud. The company encroached on a serious corporate segment, where it has not yet been.
  • At the end of March 2016, Mail.ru laid out ICQ sources on GitHub - the updated version of the messenger was written entirely in Qt, which could not but please techno enthusiasts.

▍March 25, 2016 started blogging on Habré

First post was more like a press release, and further publications - like awkward marketing moves. But years passed, we evolved and today our blog is in first place among all the blogs of Habré companies.

Airat Zaripov, a former trader and physicist, set up the corporate blog, and it is thanks to his work that you know the blog as it is now. The recipe is simple: as soon as we stopped considering Habr solely as a channel for attracting customers, we were able to make a truly popular and exciting blog. Today, Habr for us is a key platform for interacting with our audience, and for sales we have concentrated on other channels - we, of course, will not talk about them.

In 2018, we entered the top twenty largest IaaS service providers, according to the CNews Analytics: The largest IaaS providers in Russia 2018 rating.

In March 2016 we launched our own affiliate program, then became technological partner of the international IT giant Huawei. When choosing hardware for our service, we initially chose what we had to work with before - Supermicro server platforms, which were manually equipped with the necessary content by our admins (in the best traditions of high-frequency). At some point, we were faced with the fact that when increasing volumes, one or another part ended, and as a result, the equipment fleet became motley. We realized that according to our requirements, we need to order servers from China. When choosing a vendor, we were guided by the opinion of Oscar Wilde and simply chose the best - Huawei.

* * *

  • All summer 2016 IT party of the world (and not only) was catching Pokemon in Pokemon Go. But that hasn't stopped the industry from moving forward.
  • June 13, 2016 Apple renamed OS X to macOS and added Siri there. The new macOS received its first Sierra release. At the same time, the new iOS turned out to be hacked before reaching public beta - the iH8sn0w hacker tried.
  • On June 20, the new Chinese supercomputer Sunway TaihuLight was officially recognized the most productive in the world: theoretical peak performance of 125 petaflops, 41 chips with 260 cores each and 1,31 petabytes of main memory.
  • On June 28, 2016, Microsoft released a cross-platform version of .NET to Open Source. By the way, the promised developers have been waiting for a year and a half.
  • July 8 GitHub turned blocked on the territory of Russia - leapfrog began.
  • In August VKontakte rolled out new design, and Pavel Durov rolled out im 7 claims to the design. The guys didn't get bored 🙂

▍We too

June 2016 — on the RUVDS website created first 10000 virtual servers. In honor of this event, we released mugs, some of which are still in service in our office 🙂 Curiously, the tradition of issuing mugs on memorable dates began with Nicholas II.

4 years of the way of the samurai. How not to get stuck, but to enter the IT history
Friendship with Huawei became closer, so on June 24, 2016, RUVDS together with Huawei held the first thematic forum "Cloud Technologies in Russia" (CloudRussia), a photo from which you can see here.

In August 2016 we finally Have begun sell VPS running Linux. We were the first on the VPS market to start selling virtual machines at a price of 65 rubles per month - at that time it was the best offer, it was cheaper just to take web hosting. And in September we done it is possible to install Linux OS images with the ISPmanager 5 Lite control panel.

* * *

  • On September 9, 2016, VKontakte launched its own messenger.

In general, oddly enough, the end of 2016 (and the beginning of 2017) turned out to be not very rich in bright events, but there were enough stories, especially those related to security. For example, on December 1, 2016 discovered over a million Google accounts hacked. All the blame turned out to be the Gooligan virus, which could steal email addresses and authentication data, gain access to Gmail, Google Docs, photos and other company services.

  • On December 11, Google Chrome completely stopped supporting Adobe Flash Player. The era is gone...
  • On December 12, Roskomnadzor declared war on localhost and added address 127.0.0.1 in the register of prohibited sites. It became clear that without half a liter there was no way to figure it out and they started developing ... beer. It was a major release.

* * *

At the end of 2016, our marketing department asked the question "How to surprise customers." A crazy idea came up - instead of champagne and tangerines, offer something more original. We settled on craft, because it was just becoming a new trend in the beer industry. Since some of our best friends are Beer Bros brewers, we just have to agree on a small batch with our own label design. The name came up almost immediately:Dark Admin" to attract the target audience to the drink. And the first toast to the localhost, without clinking glasses.

After the new year, we received good feedback from customers on gifts and decided that our own labels were not enough for us, we needed our own beer. In February, when there was still snow on the street, our team came to the plant: we got slippers, caps, gloves and went to brew beer. The process, in fact, is boring, fun for 30 minutes - when you can taste different malts, and then you have to grind it, drag heavy bags up the stairs, throw them into the brew kettle and wait several hours for the wort to boil.

4 years of the way of the samurai. How not to get stuck, but to enter the IT history
As a result, “admin’s” beer was brewed - already in the spring, when it had time to ferment, the first ton of ready-made foamy drink stood in a barrel and waited for its draft hour. But what to do with such a volume? Give clients so much, drink yourself? Problematic, so we decided to help the factory a little, which at that time had an agreement with several bars, through which we decided to start the first steps. We held several presentations and free tastings, but this did not help much in sales.

Is it a coincidence, but Burger Heroes restaurant opened next to the company's office, where I accidentally met the owner, Igor Podstreshny. He accepted with interest the idea of ​​attracting a geeky audience to his establishment with admin beer.

An article was published on Habré about the development of design for foam bottles, in which we invited everyone to a free tasting. There were plenty of people who wanted to, the owner of Burger Heroes liked Habr's audience - this is how the idea was born to complete the branded beer with a branded burger for geeks. For us, this has become a new offline gastronomic experiment and an opportunity to attract a wide audience of the restaurant.

2017

  • In February, it was revealed that Facebook Messenger could record audio and video without the knowledge of users. Then on sale has returned legend of legends - Nokia 3310.

And in February we launched a new containment area in Switzerland, in Attinghausen (reportage). We chose the DC from the picture and did not lose. The former military bunker was in line with the company's commitment to reliability, and Jason Bourne himself would envy the security systems used at the facility. The first servers were taken to Switzerland by train (so as not to shake things up) from Moscow to Strasbourg, and from there through the Alps in the trunk of a rented car.

4 years of the way of the samurai. How not to get stuck, but to enter the IT history

* * *

  • In May 2017 it was sad and boring: updates of everything and everything, ban of social networks on the territory of Ukraine. From joyful - artificial intelligence AlphaGo won world champion in the game of go.

And we, in order not to waste time, acquired new important partners. May 2017 only:

  1. With the support of the insurance broker, Pure Insurance insured their liability to customers for unauthorized public disclosure of personal data and corporate information in one of the largest insurance companies in the world - AIG. Then the personal data leak scandals had not yet erupted and we were looked at as idiots even by AIG themselves. Another habit of algorithmic trading is trying to anticipate risks. A good trader is primarily a risk manager, so security issues in the cloud business are #1 for us.
  2. We made friends with Kaspersky Lab and became the first provider to offer its customers anti-virus protection for virtual servers running Windows Server OS - Kaspersky Security for Virtualization Light Agent (light agent for virtual environments).
  3. Together with HUAWEI and Kaspersky Lab held a forum "Collaborative Cloud Security for Business”, where they discussed all the paranoia and real risks of storing data in the cloud.

* * *

June 2017 was marked by two important events that thundered on all tech blogs:

  • On June 27, half of the world was shocked by the Petya virus, which was laid in different countries by airports, banks, subways, the largest mining and manufacturing companies. This was actively written on Habré: time, two, three, four.
  • July 9 died Anton Nosik, one of the "pioneers and founders of Runet".
  • Pavel Durov actively butted heads with Roskomnadzor over Telegram.

We had our own war - for reliability, stability and a little ... for seven feet under the keel.

In June 2017, the RUVDS data center in Korolev passed certification for compliance with the requirements of the FSTEC of Russia. The Rucloud data center is designed in accordance with the TIER III reliability category according to the TIA-942 standard (N + 1 redundancy with a fault tolerance level of 99,98%).

Having worked hard in May, in the summer we organized a competition for our partners, the main prize of which was participation in the regatta on the Moscow River in the same boat with our team. Already in August, the winner of the competition took part with us in the Regatta Media CUP (on J/70 class yachts) on the basis of the Royal Yacht Club. Then, among 70 participants, our team took 4th place.

4 years of the way of the samurai. How not to get stuck, but to enter the IT history
The event was remembered for its bright emotions and positive, so it was decided to return to the sail later and already on high water.

* * *

  • October 10, 2017 the world saw Alice, Yandex voice assistant.
  • November 28 bitcoin overcame $10 mark.

In November 2017, we translated our service into English and German to make it easier to find a common language with customers from Europe.

  • On December 7, Bitcoin passed the $16 mark.
  • In December, there was a powerful leak - the AI.type virtual keyboard server, on which a password was not set, leaked the personal data of 31 million users.

* * *

At the end of the year, we decided to continue our alcohol experiments - after receiving a lot of good reviews about DarkAdmin and gaining experience, we brewed a new light pale ale for admins, which was called SmartAdmin. The new type of beer also appealed to a wide audience and received high marks on Untappd. The commercial component did not interest us at that time - it was a product for friends from friends. And for the third year now, this beer has been popular; it can still be found in many craft bars in Moscow.

4 years of the way of the samurai. How not to get stuck, but to enter the IT history

2018

  • 2018 is off to a rocky start for the IT industry. January 4 all over the world узнал about complex and unpleasant vulnerabilities in the hardware of modern Meltdown and Specter processors.
  • There were more to come. As soon as the first wave of panic subsided, the local Russian one came ... In general, the epoch-making story of the blocking of Telegram by Roskomnadzor began. For almost half a year, we were all sitting on pins and needles, because Telegram has become both a messenger, and the media, and even a sales channel for many companies. Blockages turned out to be severe - entire services fell from the actions of the regulator, computer centers and companies were idle. How this story will end is still unknown.
  • January - PowerShell became available for Linux and macOS.
  • February 6, 2018 at 20:45 UTC Elon Musk запустил into space your Tesla Roadster.
  • April 5 from Facebookflowed away» data of 87 million users.
  • 6 April vulnerability in Cisco switches has endangered almost the entire world of corporate networks by hacker attacks.
  • July 2018 - Google Chrome started mark all HTTP sites as "not secure".
  • And there was column with Alice, the new iPhone, the sharp growth of neural networks and applications related to them.

For us, 2018 was the year of collaborations and competitions.

▍Spring 2018. Khabraburger

4 years of the way of the samurai. How not to get stuck, but to enter the IT history
We decided to return to the gastronomic hobby in collaboration with Burger Heroes. The development process of the burger turned out to be not fast - almost a year passed from the idea to launch in production. At the end of 2017 we held competition for the best burger recipe and voted on Habré. Based on the proposed recipes, the chefs of Burger Heroes prepared a burger called Habraburger (do not read hungry!).

In the spring of 2018, together with Habr, we held Geektimes Seminar: how to talk about technology and gadgets simply and clearly. Naturally, it was not without Habraburgers and branded Smart Admin.

4 years of the way of the samurai. How not to get stuck, but to enter the IT history

▍May 2018. 12 years of Habr and Coin for happiness

On the 12th anniversary of Habr, the best blogs of companies and the best authors of Habr were awarded - Habr Awards. In the nomination “Best blog on Habré”, our blog took an honorable second place, overtaking Mail.ru Group and stepping on the heels of the JUG.ru Group.

4 years of the way of the samurai. How not to get stuck, but to enter the IT history
We were one of the sponsors of the event and invited the then unknown singer Monetochka. And as you know, Habr made many people famous. The coin was no exception - its star rose right after the corporate party 🙂

4 years of the way of the samurai. How not to get stuck, but to enter the IT history
On August 23, together with Habr, they held another seminar, “How to motivate an author if he is a programmer” - more than 80 people came to the event, including representatives of the largest players in the Russian IT market: Headhunter, Technoserv, Tutu.ru, LANIT and others.

▍August 2018. Server in the clouds (real)

Summer, heat, irresistible desire for action. We decided to perfectly add a literal meaning to the phrase "cloud server" and arranged a contest "Server in the clouds» with the launch of a piece of iron into the sky in a balloon. The competition consisted of the following: on a special landing page, it was necessary to answer several questions about virtual servers and put on the map the point of the supposed landing of the ball. The main prize of the competition was participation in the Mediterranean regatta - 512 Habr users came to try their luck, and posts about the launch received a total of more than 40 thousand views.

By the way, the system administrators of the company then beat the scientific component of the project - it was interesting to find out how the server would behave in the air, whether there would be a connection with it and how it would work in non-standard conditions. To do this, several communication systems were connected to the server, and a ground-based flight control center was built. Later, this story grew into a more serious project and reached new heights, but more on that later.

▍November 2018. Aegean regatta

From November 3 to November 10, 2018, the RUVDS and Habr team took part in a sailing regatta in the Aegean Sea - yes, yes, in continuation of the same regatta in 2017 on small boats. In total, more than 400 people took part in the regatta on 45 yachts of different classes - among them were both clients of the hosting provider and just representatives of large IT companies.

4 years of the way of the samurai. How not to get stuck, but to enter the IT history
4 years of the way of the samurai. How not to get stuck, but to enter the IT history
Despite the fact that most of the members of our team were beginners and took part in sailing for the first time, well-coordinated work allowed the RUVDS team to enter the top 10 finalists.

4 years of the way of the samurai. How not to get stuck, but to enter the IT history
Cool post about the regatta

▍New RUVDS services in 2018

Lest you think that instead of work we just drink beer, eat burgers, race yachts and run servers in a balloon (isn't this a dream job ??!)), here are a few “working moments” that fell like from the cornucopia:

  • In the summer of 2018, they offered customers the "Big Disk" - a new service in which users could connect an additional large-capacity hard drive to a virtual server at a price of 50 kopecks per GB.
  • We expanded our presence in Europe and Russia - our network of distributed data centers was replenished with two new sites - in Moscow (MMTS-9, M9) and in London (Equinix LD8). Thus there were four of them.
  • In August 2018, we passed the mark of 100.000 created servers.

At the end of 2018, RUVDS entered the top twenty largest IAAS service providers (according to the "CNews Analytics: The largest IaaS providers in Russia 2018").

Also at the end of 2018, we moved from the old data center in Switzerland to Zurich. The move was forced - a private investor looked after a bunker with a super-heaped data center and bought it, apparently, to store the crypt (almost on the eve of the collapse of many altcoins)). The move began with a gradual shutdown of the equipment at 00:00 on November 10. All work was completed at 04:30 - in 4,5 hours everything was carefully turned off, taken out of the data center, loaded into transport, transported along beautiful Swiss roads to a new place and assembled / connected there. Everything went twice as fast as planned, and even without a single failure - like in a Swiss watch. You can read about the DC in Zurich here, but about the move itself - here.

▍December 2018, Game Overnight. Old school gaming

Ever since childhood, we know from the proverb that there is time for business, and fun - at least a couple of hours is needed. Therefore, together with the Museum of Soviet Slot Machines, we decided to hold the first old-school video game tournament in Russia. It so happened that in terms of the number of participants it was our largest project - 2 thousand people took part in 10 stages of the tournament. More than 400 people came to the museum for the final games, 80 of which reached the final games. Sergey Mezentsev (from the Reutov TV duo) dressed as DJ Ogurez, the sea of ​​SmartAdmin and our new project - Super Mario burger developed for the event (second collaboration with BH).

4 years of the way of the samurai. How not to get stuck, but to enter the IT history
Slot machines: where they came from in the USSR and how they work
Photo report from Game Overnight

▍Walking into the New Year…

How could you have done so much? And that's not all - there was still a calendar, photos from which, as Fridays, lie here.

4 years of the way of the samurai. How not to get stuck, but to enter the IT history

2019

We don't know what 2019 will be like for the industry. Maybe the main event will be the closure of Google+ on April 2, 2019, or maybe numerous leaks of personal data, or maybe the law on autonomous Runet. It is possible that the main event has not happened yet.

Our business is to work with technology and provide clients with the professional services they demand, regardless of the market, politics and economy.

So, in 2019, we opened 4 new containment zones in Russia and in the world:

  1. February - in St. Petersburg (Linxdatacenter)
  2. March - in Kazan (IT Park)
  3. May - in Frankfurt (Telehouse)
  4. June - in Yekaterinburg (Data Center Yekaterinburg)

In total, RUVDS now has 8 sites in the world: its own TIER III level data center in Korolev and containment zones in Interxion ZUR1 data centers (Switzerland), Equinix LD8 (London), MMTS-9 (Moscow) and other cities. All data centers correspond to a reliability level of at least TIER III.

4 years of the way of the samurai. How not to get stuck, but to enter the IT history
Interactive tour as part of a closed presentation Cloudrussia Interactive Courseheld jointly with our partners from Huawei. Showed the capabilities of the infrastructure using the example of similar equipment installed in the laboratory Open Lab Moscow with a full containment area of ​​90m2.

▍April 12, 2019. Project "Stratonet»

If we have upgraded the regatta along the Moscow River to the Aegean Sea, then why not upgrade the “Server in the Clouds”? So we thought and decided to continue experimenting with servers off the ground. The first flight proved that the idea of ​​“air-based servers” is not as crazy as it might seem, so we decided to raise the bar and take a step towards the “space data center”: check the operation of the server, which will rise on a stratostat to a height of about 30 km - into the stratosphere. The launch was timed to Cosmonautics Day.

On April 12 our little server successfully landed into the stratosphere! During the flight, the server on board the stratospheric balloon distributed the Internet, filmed / transmitted video and telemetry data to the ground.

In a nutshell: on the landing page page it was possible to send text messages to the server through the form; they were transmitted via the HTTP protocol through 2 independent satellite communication systems to a computer suspended under the stratospheric balloon, and he transmitted this data back to Earth, but not in the same way via a satellite, but via a radio channel. Thus, we understood that the server generally receives data, and that it can distribute the Internet from the stratosphere. On the same landing page, the flight path of the stratospheric balloon was displayed with the marks of receipt of each message - it was possible to track the route and height of the "sky-high server" in real time.

4 years of the way of the samurai. How not to get stuck, but to enter the IT history

By the way, in all this action there was also a competitive mechanics - you had to guess the place where the stratospheric balloon would land. The winner will get a trip to the Baikonur Cosmodrome for the launch of the Soyuz MS-13 rocket. The winner is known to all of you vvzvlad, which was recently published on our blog gorgeous photo report from trip:

4 years of the way of the samurai. How not to get stuck, but to enter the IT history

Let's open the cards: we plan to develop Stratonet project further, we complicate the task, we work out different ideas. For example, why not organize a high-speed laser link between two stratospheric balloons to use them as repeaters. And also launch a server on a satellite and see how memes will be hosted at a space data center ... :)

In August 2019, CNews Analytics published a new rating of the largest IaaS providers in Russia. In it, RUVDS took 16th place, up 3 points from last year.

At the end of summer 2019, our technical support team started learning Chinese. And all because we were the first of the hosting providers to launch a VPS with a price of 30 rubles - you can’t think of anything cheaper, if only to give away for nothing. This tariff has become a real alternative to web hosting and all the virtual servers on it were bought out in less than a day. The next delivery took place in 2 weeks - we bought 2 times more equipment, but this was not enough - we bought the virtual machines in a few hours. The tariff has become extremely popular not only in Russia, but also abroad - and that's just the Chinese succeeded here. At the moment, the tariff is available only by pre-order - the queue is like for iPhones at the best of times, but it is moving 🙂 They say that someone even sells seats in it (not us).

▍Levelord and Ko era

Back in 2019, we had the opportunity to meet legendary game designers and computer game developers, whose interviews can be read here:

Levelord became a friend of the company and even wrote two publications to our blog. In June 2019, the winner of the company's competition won a dinner with a game designer, and in October, Richard starred in our commercial (where without it). Habr readers see these creations first:


* * *

Since April 2019, we have radically changed how our technical support works. In addition to the new, fully customizable ticket system, we have increased the staff of all support levels, abandoned the outsourcing of the first line and switched to the most honest 24/7. Call at night, don't let the guys sleep 🙂 Such changes have reduced the processing time and response to incoming messages at times.

In August 2019, we added the ability to configure a firewall - the "Configure firewall" button is located next to the IP address of your server in your personal account.

In September 2019, for virtual servers on Linux OS, it became possible to select images with pre-installed Plesk and cPanel control panels. Panels are great for novice users, more than 80% of the sites in the world are already running under their control.
When you buy a new server, you can get a Plesk panel for free until the end of the year. The cPanel panel is also provided free of charge for the first 2 weeks of server operation, then you can purchase a license yourself.

Also since September, RUVDS has appeared the ability to connect video cards to rented virtual servers. A video card on a VPS is the same as on a home computer, it will allow you to run any applications in the familiar desktop interface, solve various tasks that require serious computing power: performance and video memory bandwidth. A server with a video card is available for order in the RUCLOUD data center with a processor frequency of 3,4 GHz.

In October, to enable customers to monitor and manage their servers from mobile devices, we released RUVDS mobile application for Android OS (for iOS - soon).

Recently, due to the recent reorganization of the support work, there was a need for a large openspace space, as a result of which we moved to a new office with ping-pong and drawings on the walls 🙂 Office decoration is still in progress, but for now a few photos:

4 years of the way of the samurai. How not to get stuck, but to enter the IT history

Well, then there was November 2019 - we are writing this post, the 777th in a row. And we are slowly getting ready to sum up the results of the year, as it was in 2017 и 2018 — in 2019, too, there is something to tell.

Come to work with us, follow our blog on Habré, use the services of RUVDS. We make our history only with you. Only for you.

Source: habr.com

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