The United Kingdom has always had a special place in our hearts here at NodeCraft, especially with one of our co-founders living there today. A little over a year ago, we launched our first location in Maidenhead, United Kingdom. We took a risk by trying to establish a relationship with a new provider whom we’ve never dealt with before, but ultimately were unable to replicate the quality of service, uptime, and even upload speeds that our other locations for which we’ve become renown for. Today we are announcing that this location will be closed as of September 30th, 2016.
Existing UK Customers
Firstly, we’re sorry this has to happen. We understand that low latency always is preferred, especially when it’s close to home. We’d ask that you give our Amsterdam location a try, as the added latency is generally less than 15ms for most UK residents, especially in the London area. You’ll be receiving an email in the following weeks which gives you a 2 week notice before we migrate your server automatically. We will be taking full backups and shipping your files to a much faster, more reliable, and fully operational network. The only thing you really need to be aware of in this situation is that you may suffer some downtime during the migration and your IP address will change. We recommend that you use a hostname, to prevent your player-base from being unable to find your server after the migration. If you already have a hostname, no changes will be necessary as it will be automatically updated when the server is relocated.
If you find that our Amsterdam location isn’t suitable to your needs or that you’d like a refund, we’re extending our 3 day money back guarantee to include 14 days from your purchase or latest invoice, for all customers with service in the UK.
Why we’re closing this location
One of the biggest questions we constantly face is why our prices are higher than many of our competitors. The primary reason, which accounts for upwards of 50% of our margins, is that it’s difficult to create a reliable network infrastructure to handle the demands of modern online gaming. DDoS attacks are massively expensive to detect and mitigate, and the infrastructure we require really needs far more flexibility than the average provider is willing to put up with. This is why we’ve migrated portions of our customer-base from 4 completely different providers since we’ve opened our doors for business; each new provider has taken us one step closer to the perfect setup or has greatly improved our network for all customers.
Uplink Speed
The problems began any time we wanted to move customers between devices or even to our redundant backup storage. We often got less than 1MBps of upload, which is less than 10% of the devices’s expected throughput and with the average Minecraft server’s backup size being 2-5GB in size, it would often take an extended amount of time to upload the files to another server. This resulted in lots of frustration and the any customers which had more than a couple friends, and often resulted moving to the Amsterdam location anyway.
Older Hardware
We also were very limited on the hardware selection and lack of upgrade contracts, which we typically retain with our providers. This meant we couldn’t cycle out SSDs every 9-12 months as we’ve been able to with our other providers, but were also limited on processor upgrades, which further fragmented our customer-base from the latest and greatest performance.
In Closing
All things considered, we feel that moving customers to our Amsterdam location will be the most beneficial course of action. We’re keeping our eyes open for the potential of re-opening in the UK as soon as we can find a better solution. To avoid these types of situations in the future, we’re considering a network testing beta-testing user list to better vet locations before deploying larger subsets of customers to them.
As always, if you have any queries or concerns, don’t hesitate to reach out to us!