Let's start 2020 with a bang! Future plans, Datacenter migration and new staff. - Bytesized Hosting

tl;dr: We are working on cool new things, Pete joins the team, +Stream and BYSH-VPS will be offline for a day at the 2nd of March 2020.

Heya,

It's the start of a fresh year and I wanted to take this time to walk you through some of the upcoming changes for the year 2020.

A new product

Those of you that have been with us for years know that I like to re-invent Bytesized every couple of years. Our market is constantly changing and evolving and it's of the utmost importance that our offer stays relevant. I pride myself on our talent to innovate and offer the best support in the industry. The latest innovation cycle was already 5 years ago with the introduction of the Appbox. This is why we've started working on a new product that makes it easier for us to offer you different types of plans, for different needs and to ensure that these plans grow with you, as hardware becomes cheaper. Again, our oldest members will probably remember a couple of times where a new plans came out which offered double the resources for the same price and the migrations to ensure everybody could get the benefit of these new plans. Our new service aims to end this cycle while also offering more freedom and features (root access anybody?)

Datacenter migration

Our ambitious plans for 2020 however outgrew our current datacenter where there was no more room for growth, as was clear by the fact that we are constantly sold out. That's why we've decided after weighing all the pros and cons to migrate our hardware to a new datacenter (IMDC) where we have room for growth. This does mean however that we have to physically move all our hardware to a new location, causing downtime. Now this is new territory for us, we never moved datacenters before. We have no idea what to expect nor do we know how long everything will take but to be safe we are going to assume that we will be offline for at least a day. No worries, pricing and the network connectivity for all existing plans will stay the same.

The move of our hardware is currently scheduled for the 2nd of March 2020, so be sure you prepare yourself for a day without access to your account if you are on a +Stream or BYSH-VPS plan. Our apologies for this necessary evil and as always we will ensure that any lost days will be compensated.

New Staff

Some of you might have already interacted with him on Discord or via Tickets because after ten years of working alone with freelancers I've finally managed to get my first full-time hire; Pete. He also wanted to say hello:

"My name is Peter, you might have seen me around and you might have not, I’m Bytesized newest employee. I’m the dad of one and soon to be two kids, like to do sports and play lots of video games. I’m enthusiastic about joining the company and look forward to continue the amazing work that has been done for over 10 years!"

Pete is an experienced coder and CTO. He is helping me design and build the new product and in the coming months he will be taking on more and more of my day-to-day responsibilities while I prepare him to take over leadership of Bytesized near the end of 2020. I love Bytesized to bits but I would love a break of the responsibilities that owning and running a company brings that's why I'm planning to take a year off in 2021, Pete is helping me reach this goal.

That's it for now, if you have any questions let me know in the comments :)