2020 has been an intense year for the cloud, and the acceleration of Edge computing has been especially intense. Changes to the way people work and collaborate online have pushed enterprises to move their workloads ever closer to users, creating new use cases and needs for Edge computing.

That's why today we are excited to introduce a new generation of bare metal servers for the Maxihost Platform, a carefully selected and optimized selection that can be deployed instantly in many regions around the world, including an ARM-based server that is sure to make some of you excited about the future of the Edge. More on that later.

New servers, new names, more power

We are changing the names of our servers to help you better identify their purpose and main characteristics. This is not exactly an original idea, and we know that many cloud providers have adopted the nomenclature coined by AWS to differentiate their servers, but sometimes convention is better than innovation, and naming our servers to something that most of you are already familiar with felt like the natural move.

Second-gen servers are considerably more powerful than the previous ones, with every one of them having better specs than their predecessors.

On top of that, we are also introducing purpose-built machines that are optimized for particular workloads. Compute-optimized servers are available today, and soon you will also be able to deploy storage-optimized and network-optimized devices. Storage comes first with the s2.large.x86 server, a great option if you are looking to build your cloud-native storage.

This server sports a Dual Xeon 4214 processor with 24 cores at 2.2 GHz, 128GB of RAM, and two disks of 256GB SSD and ten disks of 14TB, as well as two bonded 10Gbps NICs. A great option for Kubernetes native storage like MinIO or Ceph deployments, or even iSCSI.

ARM The Edge!

We are excited to add an ARM server to the fleet, powered by the Ampere eMAG processor, an incredibly dense, enterprise-grade server that ARM enthusiasts will love!

With NVIDIA's acquisition of ARM and the introduction of Apple Silicon, ARM is sure to make a dent in the Edge, and we believe it will become a lot more popular in the near future.

We've partnered with Ampere Computing to bring their eMAG processor to the Maxihost Platform and are looking forward to seeing what our customers will run on this powerhouse machine.

All second-gen servers, including c2.large.arm are available today and can be deployed in any of our global locations. Deploy now!

New Maxihost Point of Presence (PoP) in Chile brings automated bare metal cloud servers and low-latency connectivity options to western South America.

SAO PAULO, October 20, 2020 — Maxihost, a global provider of bare metal-based cloud infrastructure products offering high levels of automation, scalability and control announces that it has partnered with PIT Chile, a leading Internet Exchange Point (IXP) providing interconnection and data center services, to launch a Point of Presence (PoP) in Santiago, extending its reach in the LATAM region and providing new opportunities for Maxihost international clients looking to access this vital area. 

Santiago, one of the largest economies in the Americas, has a modern telecommunications network and is quickly becoming an interconnection hub for digital businesses, attracting both regional ISPs and international CDNs who require fast, low-latency connectivity to deliver content to the area.

PIT Chile is the second largest IXP in South America and the sixth in the world in terms of traffic, with 2Tbps, allowing PIT users and companies to seamlessly connect with each other, access public cloud services, publish on social networks or deliver gaming and streaming services. By partnering with PIT Chile, Maxihost can now offer clients seeking to conduct business in the region direct access to PIT Chile’s rich ecosystem of 150 carriers and content providers, providing great domestic connectivity as well as high-quality Tier 1 international connectivity.

 “We are thrilled to partner with PIT Chile to make it possible for our clients to deploy bare metal servers in Chile. Before establishing this PoP, our customers were serving Chile from our PoP in Brazil at an Internet speed of 50ms,” explains Guilherme Soubihe Alberto, CEO of Maxihost. “With our PoP in Santiago, our clients will be able to provide services at a speed of 10ms or less. This means faster speed for any latency sensitive applications such as gaming, streaming and web applications.” 

Likewise, PIT Chile sees benefits from the addition of Maxihost to a list of customers that includes Chilean ISPs as well as major CDNs such as Facebook, Fastly, Google and Microsoft. 

“We are excited to inaugurate the new Maxihost PoP in Chile,” adds Daniel Fried, Commercial Director of PIT Chile. “As a high bandwidth bare metal provider, Maxihost will inject high volumes of traffic into our backbone. Additionally our PIT members will benefit by being able to instantly deploy servers using Maxihost’s highly automated bare metal cloud platform.” 

PIT Chile selected GTD’s Lidice II Data Center in the heart of Santiago for the Maxihost launch because this secure, modern, green facility with 100% redundant “carrier- class” latest generation equipment and fiber optic access rooms, has Tier III certification that ensures the high availability of services and ultra-low latency connectivity delivered by PIT Chile for all of Latin America. 

The new PoP is also significant in that it increases Maxihost’s footprint to include the western part of the continent, bringing their powerful infrastructure options closer to a greater number of users. Neighboring countries such as Peru, Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador can also benefit from the new Maxihost PoP. 

In terms of serving a larger global audience, Maxihost has a substantial presence in the U.S. as well as Sydney Australia and is working towards expanding into Europe and Asia before the end of Q1/2021.

Meanwhile, Maxihost continues to enhance its platform, having recently added  a private VLAN capability that enables fast and secure Layer 2-based communications between related bare metal servers within a data center. 

Maxihost is a global provider of on-demand bare metal cloud and network services for businesses of all sizes. Its mission is to help make the Internet faster and safer by providing powerful, secure, scalable infrastructure solutions. For more information, visit www.maxihost.com or contact [email protected].

Creating Layer 2 networks in your Bare Metal Cloud is essential to keep mission-critical services away from the open internet, as well as to reduce your bandwidth costs.

Having your bare metal servers communicate privately usually requires a considerable amount of manual work. That's why we're incredibly excited to announce Private VLAN.

Private VLANs allow you to group servers, enabling private communication between them. This is useful in a number of instances where you don't want or need traffic from specific servers going through the internet. Connecting two or more servers in the same Private VLAN is the equivalent to them being physically connected.

An example of how you could use this feature is connecting multiple servers through a Private VLAN for backup purposes. By having your backup routines go through Maxihost's private network, you not only benefit from added security but also don’t have to pay for outbound data transfers, greatly reducing your bandwidth costs.

Another common use case for Private VLANs is managing services like DHCP.

Maxihost packets on a Private VLAN do not go through the network layer, and traffic is not filtered in any way.

Private VLAN is available today for users with access to the new dashboard experience. It’s also available from the API. To learn more about this new feature, go to the Help Center.

We are looking forward to hearing your feedback. Reach out directly to the team that built it at [email protected].

As COVID-19 cases continue to mount, Maxihost has put a comprehensive plan in place to ensure customers aren't affected. We are working diligently and responding to a rapidly evolving situation to make sure we continue to provide the highest level of uptime and resiliency, keeping our commitment to customers.

Today, we would like to provide more visibility into our strategy, providing details about our plans and how we execute on them while maintaining the health and safety of our employees.

Infrastructure resilience and reliability

Our service is designed with a high degree of redundancy and fail-over capabilities to reduce the likelihood of impact.

Maxihost handles thousands of servers globally, delivering 99.9%+ uptime across different data centers. We have employees or partners close to every data center location we offer, which gives us flexibility if supply chains are disrupted in an extended crisis.

Work from home

Maxihost employees and contractors are able to (and frequently do) work from anywhere. We have the resources and tools to do our jobs securely from any location. Out of an abundance of caution during COVID-19, Maxihost employees regardless of office location are being encouraged to do their work remotely.

All business travel and visits have been suspended, and onsite interviews with candidates are being conducted over video conference.

We understand these are very challenging times, and we are doing everything we can so customers are not impacted. Don't hesitate to reach out to us if you have questions about our Business Continuity plans.

Edit March 17th: We haven't ruled out the possibility of increased lead time on restock events, but our supply chain is still performing as expected and vendors are optimistic.

Edit March 19th: Despite most employees already being working from home for a week now, as a precautionary and proactive measure to reduce exposure to COVID-19 and to keep our employees and communities safe, we've made our work from home policy mandatory.

Edit May 28th: As businesses start opening up again across the country, employees will be gradually invited to come back to the office starting June 1st. Starting today, all employees of all positions will be given the possibility of working from home for as long as they want.

Edit June 11th: All employees are now free to work from the office at their discretion. We won't be making mandatory requests and those who want to continue working from home are free to do so. We don't expect to change our policies in the near future, so this will be our last update to this post.

Most Enterprises have some sort of multicloud environment on their stack, simply because different clouds are better at certain things than others.

Running RDS on AWS, an Active Directory cluster on Azure, and a handful of Bare Metals on Maxihost is enough to make even seasoned System Administrators sweat.

Amplified by an ever-growing and often unnecessary complexity that shows up during application development and deployment, cloud environments have become so different from company to company that managing them is a challenge particular to each organization.

In order to simplify the management of these workloads, we're excited to announce our integration with Mist.io.

Mist is a multicloud management platform that helps you manage the most generic abstraction of your clouds, servers, and VMs, while also providing integration with other services like Kubernetes.

By using Maxihost with Mist you can deploy and manage your bare metal servers, and do the same for all the other clouds that your company or team uses.

We're excited to be partnering up with the talented team at Mist so that our customers will finally be able to bring their virtualized clouds and bare metal servers together on a single control panel.

Getting started is as easy as adding your API token to Mist's dashboard, here's how.

PS: Maxihost users who sign up for Mist in February, will get three months of free usage.

Measuring and understanding your traffic is an important part for sizing your infrastructure and keeping costs under control. Today, we're excited to launch new bandwidth graphs. They are much faster and easier to read, and were built from the ground up to help you make more sense of your traffic.

Key metrics

These are the most important metrics to help you understand what went on during the selected period. The Max value is the max speed hit by the server during the period, and Current is the speed at the present time.

Preselected period and custom ranges

It can be useful to look at different periods to see how your traffic behaves. You now have a wider range of predefined date periods to quickly navigate your graphs, and you can also select custom periods.

Availability

The new graphs are available for all accounts—just go to your server's bandwidth page. If you have feedback or feature requests, click on the Feedback option under the Support icon. We're looking forward for your ideas on what we should tackle next.

Prior to today, when you needed to access your server remotely through IPMI, you had to contact our team, who would then create a VPN session and share temporary IPMI credentials that you could use. Since that is not ideal when you need to change things quickly on your infrastructure, we have been working hard to increase the speed and safety of all of this processes.

Today, we are proud to announce the next step in enhancing the management of your servers from the dashboard and API: Maxihost Remote Access.

When you go to the dashboard and select a server, you will now find the Remote Access option.

Clicking on it will take you to a page where you will set up a VPN session and obtain the credentials to gain access to the IPMI instantly.

How we're making the process safer

IPMI is notoriously insecure, but it is still the best way to manage a server when you lose SSH access or need to make changes to server operation.

In order to protect you and your servers, we have built an incredibly safe way to access your servers remotely. Here are some of the measures we took to protect you:

• IPMI IP addresses are always private. We require that you create a VPN session before getting the IPMI credentials.

• When you create a VPN session, we make sure that session only has access to the IPs that exist in your account, meaning you cannot access anything from a private network that is not assigned to you.

• VPN sessions and passwords expire after 24 hours. We do not store passwords anywhere.

• Every time you request your IPMI credentials, we change the IPMI password. Again, we do not store IPMI passwords anywhere.

When providing remote access for Bare Metal, providers usually have to compromise on something, either removing IPMI access and only providing a console, or simply disabling everything. We are glad we have found a solution that keeps your servers safe while giving you full control of the underlying infrastructure.

If you are interested in learning more, see the documentation. You will find more information about how to use Remote Access.

Also, don't hesitate to share your feedback with the team who built this. Send an email to the Engineering team.

Security and Compliance are one of the largest barriers when adopting the cloud according to this recent report from Accenture. An important part of dealing with security is making sure that the right people have access to the right resources.

Today we're pleased to announce Role-Based Access Control for the Maxihost dashboard.

With RBAC you can easily add and remove users, assign one of four predefined roles, and limit access to your account based on what people are allowed to do within your account.

You can select from three predefined roles:

• Full Permission: Users with the Full Permission role have view and edit rights to all account information and settings. The Full Permission role can add users, create and manage all server settings, and even delete the entire account.

• Collaborator: Collaborators have access and edit rights to all the information on Servers and Networking. Collaborators can create new Servers, add their SSH Key, request Additional IPs, and do all of the other server management actions, including deleting servers. They cannot view any account-related details, such as billing information or add team members.

• Billing: Users with the Billing role are only able to view and edit billing information and view and pay invoices. They can't see or modify servers or services on your account.

• API Access: You can set additional permission for users for API access. This is useful if you want to build an integration with a secondary user with limited Dashboard access.

Learn more about adding users and using RBAC here.

Maxihost started as a simple web hosting provider in late 2001. We then went on to build our own data center in 2015, which enabled us to work with some of the world’s most interesting and innovative companies as they distributed their workloads in Latin America.

Today we're taking the next step in our journey.

We’re launching a big update to our product offering, along with a new logo and website. This is more than a coat of paint on our brand—it’s the result of long and profound collaboration between our in-house marketing team and James Mikrut and the great team from Keen Studio, who worked to create a new, more cohesive visual identity for Maxihost.

Why now?

The company is growing and changing at a rapid pace. We’re no longer a niche service provider. We’re building IT infrastructure products that make the internet faster for companies at the forefront of their industries.

This has resulted in changes to our products and the need for the Maxihost team to turn its complete focus to the platform that is enabling this change.

Incremental adjustments to the old website weren’t an option, as much of it didn’t reflect the Maxihost we are now. From our messaging to product features, we knew we needed to start from scratch.

It’s still us, but more consistent and, we hope, more instantly recognizable.

We hope you enjoy it.

It’s good to know that your Bare Metal is being deployed instantly after you requested it, but it’s much better when you know what’s happening during that process. Starting today, you can!

There are a few different stages we’ll show you during the deployment process.

Awaiting will tell you which servers have open invoices that need to be paid before being provisioned. For users in the hourly billing beta, we skip this stage as payment is due only at the end of the billing cycle.

Deploying means our systems are hard at work running additional hardware tests, installing the Operating System you selected and making sure everything is good to go.

When the device is ready to be used, we’ll show you a New stage. That’ll persist for 72 hours to make it easier for you and your team to know which servers have been deployed recently.

Give it a try

We hope this update makes it easier to keep track of your deployments. Let us know what you think!

Thanks again for being a Maxihost customer.