KnownSRV Anniversary Newsletter

Dear valued clients,

I'm proud to announce KnownSRV is officially 4 years old. The domain name was registered on 14/07/2010 and I processed the first order on 02/08/2010 back in time when I was still working myself, with a fairly small startup budget invested by myself and no idea if the business was going to flourish or flop. As KnownSRV founder I wanted to write this e-mail myself, although it's been a long time since we expanded and stopped being 'one-man band' and became a team of experienced and knowledgeable people.

I know I'm a bit late. I wanted to send this e-mail earlier this month, but was busy with some priority things as a result of our increased and continued growth, which is honestly a good thing. Before I continue, I would like to take this opportunity to personally thank you for your business and continued loyalty.

As always, there has been a lot of changes and improvements since our last newsletter. We are committed to improving our services on daily basis in order to provide fast, secure and quality hosting platforms. Last year was very calm, there wasn't much issues which allowed us invest our time in other areas and improvements. I will go ahead and list some of our improvements that we can announce at this time. There is a lot of cool things and projects going on behind the scenes as well.

RIPE LIR
We became RIPE LIR and received another /22(read: 1024 IPv4 addresses). RIPE is a central registrar in Europe for network resources – IPv4, IPv6 addresses, ASN's etc. It gives us 100% control over our independent network resources. No middlemans, just direct contracts to ensure highest avability and risk-free services. Every serious ISP is a RIPE LIR, so are we!

KVM virtualization
We expanded our VPS offers to KVM virtualization systems. Until then we only offered OpenVZ. KVM provides better resource isolation while OpenVZ shares the same kernel with hardware Node. KVM has no restrictions in terms of functionality, but it has more overhead than OpenVZ. The main difference is that you can change the kernel and its modules on KVM, while it's not possible on OpenVZ. OpenVZ is generally a bit faster and much easier to use, hence we recommend and prefer it over KVM for most of purposes.

We run our KVMs on the following HP-branded enterprise-grade hardware:

Dual E5-2620, 128GB DDR3 RAM, 10x 2TB SATA drives, 2x SSDs for caching, Hardware RAID10, 2x 1gbps uplinks

E3-1270, 32GB DDR3 RAM, 4x 600GB SAS 15k RPM drives, Hardware RAID10, 2x 1gbps uplinks

DDoS Protection
DDoS is becoming a big problem in the industry. We have experienced this on our own skin some time ago, unfortunately. Today it is easier than ever to buy a booter and bring any average server offline for hours, days or even more. We recognized this and started working on our own DDoS mitigation systems a bit more than 1 year ago. It is now nearly 100% finished. We have been beta-testing the system for customers that were attacked on our network for some time and and it is working perfectly fine. The systems are 100% made and controlled by us and placed in our Netherlands flagship location. We can't disclose much information on how the systems work due to security reasons, but most important things we can say are: We have access to network ACLs on on upstream network(over 1000gbps in size) where we can apply ACLs(e.g drop all UDP) before it even comes to our rackswitches. We handle other types of attacks, such as SYN, on our set of 10G servers setup in a local anycast. We can handle up-to 50gbps of UDP and 5M pps of SYN at this time – likely even more but I set the limits lower just to be on the safe side.

That doesn't mean all our IP ranges are currently protected, though. We do NOT filter any traffic by default. We can activate protection if a given IP gets attacked, due to the way how we setup our network.

If anyone needs a perlament(always-on) protection, it is possible on request and recommended if your site gets attacked a lot of times per month.

Facelift
Our site got a facelift a few months ago. Not much to be said about that, feel free to visit http://knownsrv.com and see with your own eyes. Live chat is still there and our clients love this feature very much based on feedback we received. It is going to stay of course :)

Managed Services
KnownSRV is a well known managed provider. While we manage your servers free of charge, the service also includes custom server setups such as full security, installing nginx or Varnish in front of Apache for serving/caching static content in order to improve your loading speeds / performances. Need your server perfectly secured or/and optimizated for heavy traffic sites? No worries!

No Prims, no Patriot Act
Your security and privacy are our top priorities. We have both technical and legal systems in place which allow us to protect your business and privacy. We respect net neutrality and freedom of speech. We will not suspend your server only because someone doesn't like your content or has a personal beef with you.

Our Services
Shared Hosting Offers: http://knownsrv.com/shared.php
VPS Offers: http://knownsrv.com/vps.php

Dedicated Servers
We currently do custom dedicated servers where everything is possible... we can fully customize based on your network and hardware needs, everything from from 2gbps to 10gbps per server available, 100TB bandwidth option possible, CDNs and streaming allowed.

We can announce your IP space free of charge.
We can setup BGP sessions free of charge.
We can lease a dedicated router and/or switch.
We can setup network ACLs free of charge(e.g drop all UDP on 500gbps core network).
We can customize your hardware exactly the way you want. From CPU, RAM, drives to network capacity and bandwidth per server.
We can route your IP address via our set of 10G servers in local anycast and apply custom firewall rules before traffic reaches your server. It allows you to rate-limit traffic per IP or block certain ports before it gets to your server(DDoS mitigation purposes).


Affiliates - start earning today!
Did you know you can make money by referring clients to us? It is very simple. Once you have an account with us, you can activate affiliates option at http://knownsrv.com/clients/affiliates.php

Once activated, you will get your unique address(example:http://knownsrv.com/clients/aff.php?aff=657). Every time someone orders a service coming from your referral address, even if he visits via your address first time, then orders later(web browser cookies stay valid for 90 days!) you get 10% of the amount he paid to us – not just first payment, you get 10% of ALL invoices he pays to us as long as he stays a client.

You can refer your site visitors, friends, business associates, family members or anyone who is looking for web hosting solutions.

Discounts!
We all love discounts, don't we? We have prepared some amazing discounts for you.
new2014 – 20% off recurring / lifetime discount
new70 – 70% off first month / invoice(monthly payments only)

Online party – HOORAY!
We are very social people and we always like to keep in touch with our clients. We invite you to connect with us on social networks. It is a great way to stay in touch with us, get quick updates on what is happening around here, get some discounts and much more. Let's connect!
http://facebook.com/knownsrv2012
http://twitter.com/knownsrv

We look forward to working with you in the next years and hope our business relationship continues for many years to come. Since the start KnownSRV has been a provider you can trust, rely on and expand your business with. We do appreciate your continued business and we look forward to serving you in the future. Feel free to get in touch with us at info[at]knownsrv[dot]com if you have any questions, suggestions or you just want to say hi :)

Kruno Begic – Founder & Managing Director

KnownSRV LTD
Suite 18675, Lower Ground Floor, 145-157 St John Street
EC1V 4PW London
United Kingdom