Yesterday we pushed out some enhancements to the Billing section of the GoGrid customer portal. As we mentioned previously, recently we have been focusing on the “billing experience”. In March, we provided three important updates to Billing which included: Monthly Invoices, Account Plan Changes and Usage reporting. Yesterday, we rolled out some enhancements and updates to the Billing section, specifically, the “Payments and Invoices” area.

To access this updated functionality, simply navigate to: My Account > Billing. Once there, you can click on the “Payments and Invoices” section within the Billing Menu:

From there, you will see the latest 10 Payments and 10 Invoices. (Note that the pictures used in this post are from an Employee account on GoGrid and may not reflect all possible scenarios that a GoGrid customer might see.)

The Items are sorted by Date.

Fields displayed for Payments are:

• Number – this is the unique payment number. Note that if you click on the hyperlinked number, you can see the Payment Details.
• Date – this is the date that the payment posted to your account.
• Method – various payment methods could be displayed here depending on your contract (e.g., Check, Visa, Cash, etc.).
• Amount – this is the amount of the payment.
• Applied – this is the amount that was applied against a payment.

Fields displayed for Invoices are:

• Number – this is the unique invoice number. Note that if you click on the hyperlinked number, you can see the Invoice Details.
• Date – this is the date of the invoice.
• Amount – this is the amount of the invoice. It could be a positive or negative (in parenthesis) amount depending on if it is a payment or charge.
• Balance Due – this is the total amount due on your account and reflects payments or charges applied to your account.

Clicking on a specific Payment number will provide all of the details of that payment and show all of the invoices that the payment applied to.

Below the Payment Details are the Invoices Paid by that payment, for example:

The Invoice Details shows line items of various charges on your account, including Memory and Transfer Plans, Overages (if any), Cloud Storage, Server Charges, and other related items. You can see the same Invoice details if you click on one of the linked Invoice Numbers on the summary screen:

When you couple the updated Payments and Invoices section with our recently introduced Usage feature (you can read more about it in this post), you get enhanced visibility into your GoGrid account. Briefly, the Usage section allows you to get both a summary and details on various Metered and Fixed Services within GoGrid. It is located under the “My Account” section. Below is the Usage Summary for the Current Period:

To download the details as a CSV file, simply choose the Billing Period that you want and click the “Download Usage Report” in the left bar:

With the recent updates and changes to the Billing Process, the new Payments and Invoices section and the Usage feature, we believe that you should now have very powerful insight into the Billing and Usage of your GoGrid account. As we continue to evolve these features and improve on them, we are always looking for feedback and ideas so please leave a comment on anything related to this that you feel you would like to share.

Part of a new Engineering and Product initiative at GoGrid is the fact that we will be providing more frequent updates to our Cloud Infrastructure Services. These updates may take the form of new or updated features, bug fixes, or back-end enhancements. Our goal is to provide these updates and feature releases on a monthly basis (more information on our new agile software engineering process will be coming) so that we can answer customer requests and needs on an extremely timely basis as well as introduce revolutionary services to the Cloud Infrastructure marketplace.

Today (March 11, 2011), we released our March 2011 update (code name “Long Beach”). The major features and updates are listed below:

• Enhancement to the MyGSI Feature
• Usage Report
• Billing Improvements
• Ubuntu 10.04 Cloud Server Support
• Debian 5.0 Cloud Server Support

Please read on for details on each of the items listed above.

MyGSI Updates

About a year ago, we introduced a new feature called MyGSIs – customized GoGrid Server Images – and how easy it was to create and save a Server Image. Server images are helpful for horizontal scaling, re-imaging of servers, disaster recovery, or setting up failover environments. Until this update, we had a pretty straight forward 3-step process: 1) create a Sandbox Image, 2) configure your server, prep it, and run scripts, and 3) save the server to cloud storage.

Now, we have consolidated this process into ONE step. Simply select the existing server you want to save and click the Save icon. That’s it! There is no need to create a Sandbox Image, run preparation scripts or anything else. And, the best thing is, any existing server can be saved as a server image.

The Save button is also in the List view:

Once you choose the server that you want to save and click the Save icon or link, you will get the following prompt.

Note that if your server has more than 50 GB of data on it, the saving process will fail and you will need to reduce the amount of data on your server.

Simply give your server image a name, description, and indicate whether it is a Web or Database server.

After this, you server will be gracefully shut down, and the image saving process will start. You will see your server’s status light turn to amber:

And there will be an entry in the Jobs tab that not only states that the action has started, but also after a few seconds, displays the expected time for the server to be fully saved to cloud storage. If there is no “Estimated Job Duration,” just wait a minute and refresh the Jobs tab.

Your server will come back on line shortly.

Once the server image is created, you have the ability to instantiate new servers from it, or share it with the GoGrid community as a Community GSI (CGSI).

Lastly, the MyGSI process is backwards compatible, meaning that if you had created a Sandbox Server previously and it still appears within your GoGrid account, you can still convert it into a MyGSI using the same older process. Also, any MyGSIs created using the legacy process will still be available to create new server instances. However, the creation of Sandbox Images has been removed as of this release, and replaced with the much easier process described above.

Be sure to read the MyGSI User Documentation that can be found on the GoGrid Wiki.

USAGE REPORT

Included with the “Long Beach” update is a new feature to help you get a better view into the activity within your GoGrid account. There is now a new tab called “Usage” which is under the My Account section. This new report is in beta for the next 90 days.

The Usage Report overview is broken up into two sections: Metered Services and Fixed Services. Metered services are things like RAM, Storage, and Outbound Transfer. Fixed services are for items that recur regularly during a month’s time, things like monthly licenses or IP addresses allocated to your account. Metered services are more variable in nature.

The Usage Report shows a quick snapshot of Metered and Fixed Services for the current or previous billing period. NOTE:  The historical data in this report will not be backfilled; therefore the previous billing period will not be viewable as of this release. Also, the Usage data collection officially starts on March 11th, 2011. This means that the current billing period report may be inaccurate for up to 30 days for some customers. Once a full billing cycle passes, the Usage Report will show accurate data.

Under the Usage Menu, you can see a link to “Download usage report”. After selecting the billing period from the drop-down menu, click the link to download all of the associated usage data for that period and it will be downloaded to a CSV file.

The CSV file contains the usage statistics for the following objects:

• Cloud Servers – # of GB Hours
• Outbound Transfer – # of GBs
• Licenses – # of instances of a particular license
• Cloud Storage – maximum GBs stored for that day
• Load Balancing – # of instances of a load balancer
• Public IPs – total # of IP addresses allocated to the account
• Operating Systems – # of instances of a particular Operating System in use

The fields reported are listed below:

• Account Name
• Customer ID
• Report Start date/time
• Report End date/time
• Object Type (see above)
• Name of the Object
• Description of the Object
• Data Center
• Usage Start date/time
• Usage End date/time
• Quantity
• Units

A quick tip, be sure to format the “reportStart,” “reportEnd,” “usageStart” and “usageEnd” to mm/dd/yy hh:mm to see the full details with the date and time.

For additional details, visit the GoGrid Customer Portal Guide that discusses the new Usage feature.

Billing Improvements

One of the advantages of utilizing GoGrid’s Cloud Infrastructure Services is the ability to choose a Pay-As-You-Go plan or a Volume pricing plan. We are allotting more focus to the “billing experience.” In the past, our focus was on the delivery of the services and after engaging with our customers, we realize that some time and care was needed for the overall experience. To that end, we have kicked off a complete overhaul of the billing process to provide you with not only a better experience but also with more insight into your account usage.

This first iteration of Billing Improvements consists of the following changes:

1. Monthly Invoices
2. Account Plan Changes
3. Usage

The details of each of these items are listed below.

Monthly Invoices

To make the billing and invoicing process easier, we are removing daily invoicing. From this point forward, customers will now receive monthly invoices on their monthly bill date. The monthly bill date is the date on which a customer opened their account with GoGrid.

There are a few exceptions in which additional invoices may be generated:

• Fixed Services – if you are using a fixed service like dedicated servers, VPN, or hardware firewalls, you will receive an immediate, one-time invoice. The charge(s) for this service(s) will be pro-rated through the next bill date. However, the next monthly invoice will include a full charge for the next month’s fixed service and is paid in advance.
• Manual invoices – if there are manual invoices generated off-cycle.

NOTE: There may be a bit of a transitional period during March 2011 because of the switch from daily to monthly invoicing. If you have any questions, please contact your account manager.

Account Plan Changes

We have updated the process of making changes to your GoGrid account plan and have a clear trail of the changes you have made and when they were made. We have also added email notifications to the process so that you get two email confirmations: one when you request a change and one when the change is implemented.

Just as you could in the past, select either the RAM or Data Transfer Plan and then choose whether you want your plan to be Monthly or Annual (you get a better discount if you choose an Annual plan):

Confirm the plan you want and accept the terms of service.

Once you make your selection, there will be an indication of the plan change within the Plan Selection page (in red) and your current or active plan will appear grayed out:

Also, within the Jobs tab, you will see an entry confirming your plan change.

You may upgrade or downgrade your various plans as you see fit. Downgrades take place on the customer’s next bill date. Plan Upgrades take place retroactively back to the beginning of the current billing period.

The process for Upgrades is a bit more complicated. On the next bill date, customers are credited the last month’s lower plan charge and are charged for the new plan for the previous month and in advance for the next month.

Sometimes examples are a bit easier to understand:

In the case above, you can see how the charges for the lower plan are reversed out and the new plan is retroactively applied.

In most cases, people upgrade plans during a current month because they are going into an overage situation or in anticipation of incurring overage charges.

Ubuntu 10.04 Cloud Server Support

With this release, we are pleased to announce that Ubuntu 10.04 32- and 64-bit Cloud Server Operating Systems are now available to complement Ubuntu within the Dedicated Server Operating System choices. This is the LTS – Long Term Support – version of Ubuntu.

Debian 5.0 Cloud Server Support

Also with this release, we have included Debian 5.0 32- and 64-bit Cloud Server Operating Systems to complement Debian within the Dedicated Server Operating System choices.

More to Come

The “Long Beach” release is the kick-off of a new agile development process here at GoGrid. We will be aiming to have regular monthly releases from this day forward so stay tuned for more exciting news from GoGrid. Be sure to subscribe to the GoGrid Blog Feed to get regular updates.

As mentioned within The Wall Street Journal yesterday, GoGrid has a new Cloud service offering, namely a Hosted Private Cloud for enterprises and corporations. GoGrid’s Hosted Private Cloud provides a private, secure and dedicated infrastructure environment with all of the benefits of cloud computing, leveraging the powerful technology and management layers of our public cloud, GoGrid.com. What sets it apart from other “Private Clouds” in the marketplace is that it is run and managed by GoGrid, effectively converting CapEx to OpEx and eliminating costly expenses typically associated with in-house data center build-outs and management. GoGrid Hosted Private Clouds are dedicated to single corporations and with all of the characteristics of cloud computing: self-service, on-demand, managed via a portal or API, and scalable.

The GoGrid Hosted Private Cloud is:

• Secure – delivering state-of-the-art security and protection within a non-shared environment
• Private – a cloud environment dedicated to a single company with unmatched computing performance of our public cloud
• Lower Cost – with no Capital Expenditure, the GoGrid Hosted Private Cloud is a pay-as-you-go Operating Expense

Read more about the GoGrid Hosted Private Cloud on our website.

The following Press Release is now available on the GoGrid site:

GoGrid First to Deliver Hosted Private Cloud Infrastructure Leveraging Proven Public Cloud Technology

Leading Cloud Provider offers the ability to create and manage private cloud infrastructure via a dedicated platform

San Francisco, Calif., – January 19, 2011 – GoGrid, a leading cloud infrastructure company, today announced the introduction of an enterprise-grade hosted private cloud solution — a revolutionary advancement in cloud computing built for enterprises, service providers, financial institutions and businesses in other key verticals. The GoGrid Hosted Private Cloud offers the award-winning capabilities of GoGrid’s public cloud in a completely dedicated and secure environment – all with no hardware procurement or resource sharing.

Contrary to other “private cloud” offerings available in the marketplace, GoGrid’s Hosted Private Cloud service delivers on the true value of cloud computing by converting capital expenditures to operating expenses, ensuring that infrastructure components can be deployed in a self-service, pay-as-you-go model, and ultimately providing scalable programmatic Infrastructure-as-a-Service. Most importantly, GoGrid’s solution is a hosted and managed environment running on dedicated hardware for each enterprise which means there are no costly and time-consuming data center environments to set up and maintain.

“The GoGrid Hosted Private Cloud has excellent security, reliability and is easy to deploy,” said Lee Cardona, director, CSI for Orange Business Services. “We are happy to use their infrastructure, with their top level of technical support and industry-leading SLAs, as an embedded component of our customized service management solution we are offering our multinational customers.”

Built with proven technology and best-in-class features, the GoGrid Hosted Private Cloud provides many benefits including:

• Dedicated Solution – GoGrid’s highly-secure solution is dedicated to each customer and includes hardware, software, and networking. There is no sharing of compute, storage or local (Layer 2) networking resources which means that all levels of data, server integrity and security are fully ensured.
• True Cloud Computing Characteristics – GoGrid’s Hosted Private Cloud adheres to the critical characteristics of cloud computing including no capital expenditure, complete self-service and control, a pay-as-you-go model, and vertical and horizontal scalability of on-demand infrastructure, all as a maintenance-free offering.
• No Expensive Hardware or Software Costs – No additional purchases and upgrades are required as enhancements are automatically included with the service offering.
• Near Real-Time Implementation – Unlike other private cloud or software virtualization offerings, the GoGrid Private Cloud can be delivered quickly. There is no lengthy waiting period for hardware to be requisitioned, configured and deployed because the GoGrid solution is specifically built for quick and easy adoption.
• High Performance Cloud Technology – GoGrid’s Cloud technology has been benchmarked by numerous 3rd parties as a top performer in a variety of measurement tests including I/O, CPU and other pertinent metrics. GoGrid provides this same high-performance infrastructure within the GoGrid Hosted Private Cloud.
• “Cloud Bursting” Capabilities – allows for the seamless integration to the GoGrid Public Cloud for additional on-demand capacity.

According to Ted Chamberlin, Research Vice President at Gartner, “Enterprise adoption of cloud computing is accelerating but many find that hurdles exist in pure public or private cloud models. Hybrid cloud models including hosted private cloud offerings will stimulate adoption by bridging the gap between current and future cloud-based IT infrastructure requirements. Enterprises require tighter security controls, rigorous auditability, and predictable management of cloud computing services and hosted private clouds provide the means to do so.”

The new GoGrid Hosted Private Cloud includes flexible management tools that enable customers to have complete control of their infrastructure.  With enterprise IT and finance departments in mind, the sub-account and chargeback capabilities provide usage transparency and controls preventing “server sprawl,” allowing customers to hold individual employees and business units  accountable for infrastructure consumption within their organization. Enterprise businesses can easily understand and manage costs associated with their private cloud implementation and more easily forecast and plan future resource allocation and usage.

“I am proud that our Hosted Private Cloud is yet another GoGrid pioneering market introduction that helps enterprise IT organizations execute their cloud computing plans,” said John Keagy, chief executive officer and co-founder at GoGrid. “GoGrid’s Hosted Private Cloud is the first infrastructure solution that delivers the complete set of benefits and features expected from a public cloud computing environment – on private, dedicated hardware. Our customers realize that service offerings that only deploy dedicated hardware powered by virtualization software don’t deliver on the true benefits of cloud computing and are cost prohibitive.”

More information about GoGrid’s Private Cloud offering is available on the GoGrid Web site at http://privatecloud.gogrid.com.

About GoGrid
Thousands of leading IT experts choose and rely on GoGrid’s Cloud infrastructure services. GoGrid enables sysadmins, developers, and IT professionals to create, deploy, and control cloud environments and complex virtual and physical server networks with full administrative control. GoGrid’s industry standard specifications and robust service offerings are powering thousands of businesses globally to achieve previously unrealized efficiencies. Deploying a GoGrid infrastructure solution using a Standard or Partner Server Image, free hardware F5 load balancing, Cloud Storage, private VLANs and much more takes minutes via a web interface, API, or iPhone application. GoGrid provides users the control and advanced capabilities of a data center environment with the flexibility and immediate scalability of the cloud. www.GoGrid.com

If you are interested in receiving more information on GoGrid’s Hosted Private Cloud, please contact one of our Cloud Specialists.

Our software “elves” have been hard at work preparing the latest and greatest feature and service updates to the GoGrid cloud. We are excited about our December 2010 release as it is packed with enhancements and new and updated features to truly make GoGrid your choice for deploying Cloud Infrastructure or setting up a Hybrid Hosting environment.

Some of the noteworthy features and changes include:

• GoGrid Dedicated Servers in our East Coast Data Center
• Limited Time Promotion on East Coast Dedicated Servers and West Coast GoGrid Firewall
• GoGrid Image Sharing
• GoGrid Fortinet Firewall Ordering
• Increase Windows Sandbox Server Size
• Other Changes including Windows Patch Updates

Read on for more details on each of the items above.

GoGrid Dedicated Servers on East Coast

GoGrid has been leading the industry when it comes to Hybrid Hosting as is evident with other providers rolling out similar features. However, we are 2 years ahead of most of our competitors in providing integrated cloud and dedicated infrastructures within GoGrid. To complement this, we have rolled out GoGrid Dedicated Servers in our East Coast facility (US-East-1). GoGrid Dedicated Servers (GGDS) in our West Coast data center (US-West-1) have been incredibly successful for our customers.

GoGrid Dedicated Servers are provisioned via the GoGrid web portal and can be fully publicly and/or privately networked with our F5 load balancers, Firewalls, and Cloud Storage. There are a variety of use cases you might want to consider that are optimal for using Dedicated Servers or a hybrid of Dedicated and Cloud Servers including:

• Disaster Recovery – now you can set up a DR environment on either the East or West Coast.
• Fail Over – similar to DR environment, mirroring or providing a portion of your infrastructure on either coast can help you recover from costly outages. You can also set up a secondary presence to handle routine maintenance periods.
• Unique Application Sets – there may be some applications that have requirements for particular hardware or operating systems not available within the GoGrid Cloud Server list. In many cases, Dedicated Servers can meet these requirements.

The steps to provision a GoGrid Dedicated Server are the same in all of our data centers.

When you first launch the Add screen, you can select either US-West-1 or US-East-1. Selecting US-East-1 will show you the following:

You can see that “Dedicated Server” is now an option. Selecting that will start you down the easy process of provisioning a Dedicated Server.

Fill out the form and choose a Configuration option and Pricing plan.

Accept the Terms of Service for the Dedicated Server:

Once the server request has been created, it will be available within 2 business days as per GoGrid’s Service Level Agreement (SLA). You can track the progress by viewing the icon within the Grid and List views. Yellow means that it is being provisioned. When it is Green, your server is ready to use. The server below (GGDS East #1) is in the “Processing” state:

You can also view the status via the Jobs tab.

Once the Dedicated Server is ready, the Job will show as “Succeeded”:

GoGrid Dedicated Servers are also displayed within the List View.

Promotion on GoGrid Dedicated Servers or GoGrid Hardware Firewall

Beginning on 12/15/2010, GoGrid will be making minor price increases on Standard Dedicated Servers and Advanced Dedicated servers. The new pricing is reflected below:

• Standard Dedicated Servers: $300/month or $3,000/year if prepaid annually
• Advanced Dedicated Servers: $400/month or $4,000/year if prepaid annually

NOTE: If you purchase a GoGrid Dedicated Server prior to 12/15/2010, you will be GRANDFATHERED into the current pricing plan. What that means is if you purchase a Dedicated Server before 12/15/10, your price will remain at the old rates as long as you have the server deployed. The price for Ultra Dedicated Servers is not changing.

GoGrid Image Sharing

Have you created a server image that you are proud of? Or perhaps you want to share a Diaspora server to help spread the Open Source alternative to Facebook? With this release, we have launched a new GoGrid Image Sharing feature that allows for true collaboration between GoGrid users across the globe. The process is extremely easy. You start with a MyGSI (GoGrid Personal Server Image) and then simply click on the Sharing icon to make it available to all GoGrid users. Let’s walk through this briefly.

First, start with a private server image (MyGSI). Details on how to create a MyGSI can be found here.

Once you create your MyGSI, it will appear under the Images tab:

Note the Sharing state is set to “Private” by default and the icon next to it shows a single user.

To make the image “Public“, simply click on the Server Image line. It will launch the editing screen (where you can change the Name and Description of your server, as well as the minimum RAM required to use your image):

When you choose to make your image “Public” be sure to choose a clear, descriptive name to make it easier for users to find. Also, be sure to set the minimum amount of RAM for that server image to be at a level that it would perform well for other GoGrid users who deploy it.

Simply change the Sharing status from “Private” to “Public” and click the Submit button. Your server image will then be available to all GoGrid users.

Should you ever need to make changes to your server image, be sure to mark the image as “Private” and then go through the Image change process of using that Server Image to create another Image Sandbox, making your appropriate edits and then creating a new MyGSI.

Once the image is publically shared, it will appear within the GoGrid Cloud Server Image Selector (note the Owner column):

Creating a new server based on this Shared Server Image is the same process as creating any other Cloud Server within GoGrid. The only exception is that when you select a shared image, you will be presented with a screen that says GoGrid does not provide support for this image.

Once you agree to the terms, you can create your server.

GoGrid Fortinet Firewall Ordering

With this release, you can now easily order a GoGrid Fortinet hardware firewall. To provision a hardware firewall via the GoGrid Customer Portal you simply need to click on the Fortinet Firewall link in the portal. It appears under the Quick Links section:

As well as within the List view when the Network section is active:

Once you click on that link, you will be presented with the Fortinet Firewall Order Form:

Fill out all of the required and appropriate information and your GoGrid Hardware Firewall will be available within 2 business days. You will be notified via email when your Firewall is available to use. Please note, the Fortinet Firewall option currently is only available in our US-West-1 data center.

The GoGrid Hardware Firewall is $200/month and this price includes one type of VPN connection. Additional VPNs are available at $50/month or $500/year with a pre-paid plan.

Increase Windows Sandbox Size

Users of Windows Servers and the GoGrid MyGSI feature will rejoice with this enhancement. Due to popular request, we are increasing the GoGrid Sandbox Image size from 20 GB to 30 GB. The sandbox disk size for Linux distros will remain at 20 GB.

This increase in size will allow you to have more space for software and OS updates as well as your code and data.

Other Changes including Windows Patch Updates

This release also includes some other changes of note. For starters, we have renamed the “Upgrade” icon to “Scale”. This is part of the RAM Scaling feature that we released previously. To scale your servers vertically (meaning increasing or decreasing the amount of RAM allocated to your server), simply click on the server you want to scale and click the Scale icon:

For more details, please read our blog post on this feature.

We have also updated our base GoGrid Server Images for Windows to include the latest software updates and security patches as of November 30, 2010. The following servers have been updated:

• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 Edition R2 w/MSSQL 2008 Workgroup
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 Edition R2 w/MSSQL 2008 Standard
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 Edition R2 w/None
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition R2 w/None
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition R2 w/MSSQL 2005 Standard
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition R2 w/MSSQL 2005 Workgroup
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition w/None
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition w/MSSQL 2008 Express / PHP5 / IIS 7.0 + FastCGI
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Enterprise x64 Edition w/None
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Enterprise x64 Edition w/MSSQL 2008 Standard
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Enterprise x64 Edition w/MSSQL 2008 Workgroup

Several bug fixes have also been applied and the GoGrid API has been updated to version 1.7. Please see our Wiki for documentation on the new API items.

More to Come!

I’m sure that you’ll agree this is quite a list of enhancements and new features. There’s plenty more coming in 2011! I encourage you to attend our Webinars or request a 1-on-1 consultation with one of our GoGrid Cloud Specialists to learn more about how GoGrid makes Complex Infrastructure Easy!

Right on the heels of the GoGrid 3.0 release, we needed to be sure that we didn’t slow our momentum down. To that end, this week we have released some new features to GoGrid which are important to highlight.

We have 3 exciting features, specifically:

• East Coast Load Balancers
• New GoGrid Dedicated Server Images
• 16 GB RAM on GoGrid Cloud Servers

East Coast Load Balancers

As we work towards obtaining full feature parity within a few months in our East Coast Datacenter launch, one of the first items that we enabled was that of Load Balancing. Just like in the West Coast Datacenter, Load Balancing on the East Coast remains FREE. With the rollout of Load Balancers in the East Coast, all GoGrid users now have the ability to deploy 6 total Load Balancers for free, 3 in each Datacenter.

Remember though, you can only balance traffic within 1 particular datacenter. That is to say, you currently cannot use one load balancer to manage traffic across 2 datacenters. You must set up a load balancer within each datacenter to route traffic therein.

New GoGrid Dedicated Server Images

At GoGrid, we were the first to pioneer the term “Hybrid Hosting” which means that you can mix and match the best of breed infrastructure solutions within your GoGrid Cloud. You can choose to instantiate GoGrid Cloud Servers for elastic scalability as well as deploy GoGrid Dedicated Servers should you want PCI compliance or require a dedicated solution. You can use the Load Balancers to route traffic between Cloud and Dedicated servers as well as attach Cloud Storage to either Server type.

With this release, we added SIX new images to the GoGrid Dedicated Server list, bringing the total available Dedicated Server Images to 26. The new Dedicated Server Images are:

• Ubuntu 10.04 (32-bit)
• Ubuntu 10.04 (64-bit)
• CentOS 5.5 (32-bit)
• CentOS 5.5 (64-bit)
• RHEL 5.5 (32-bit)
• RHEL 5.5 (64-bit)

With this update, the list of available GoGrid Dedicated Servers now includes:

• Linux
  • Fedora Core Linux 11 & 12 (32 & 64-bit)
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.8, 5.4 & 5.5 (32 & 64-bit)
  • CentOS Linux 4.8, 5.4 & 5.5 (32 & 64-bit)
  • Ubuntu Linux 8.04, 9.04 & 10.04 (32 & 64-bit)
  • Debian Linux 4.0 & 5.0 (32 & 64-bit)
• Windows
  • Windows Server 2008 Standard (4 & 8 Core License)
  • Windows Server 2008 Standard with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Standard (4 & 8 Core License)
  • Windows Server 2008 Standard with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Standard (4 & 8 Core License)
  • Windows Server 2003 Enterprise (32 & 64-bit and 4 & 8 Core License)
  • Windows Server 2003 Enterprise (64-bit and 4 & 8 Core License) with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 & 2008 Standard (64-bit and 4 & 8 Core License)

The process for ordering a dedicated server has not changed. Simply click the ADD button within the GoGrid portal, and select Dedicated Server:

Then choose the Configuration you would like:

And then select the Operating System image you want on that GoGrid Dedicated Server (note: I have highlighted the new CentOS 5.5 options in the list):

Once you save your GoGrid Dedicated Server configuration, it will be available for you within 2 business days.

16 GBs of RAM on GoGrid Cloud Servers

For those GoGrid users requiring more RAM, Cores and persistent hard drive space, we have now enabled the ability to provision GoGrid Cloud Servers with 16 GB RAM allocations.

GoGrid Cloud Servers deployed with the 16 GBs of RAM configuration also have 960 GBs of persistent storage and either 8 or 16 cores depending on the Operating System (Windows and Linux respectively). 16 GB configurations are backwards compatible with MyGSIs and Partner GSIs. However, this configuration is only available for 64-bit Operating Systems.

There were also a series of bug fixes included with this release.

What other items would you like to see included in future releases of GoGrid? Leave a comment and let me know!