We hope everyone had a fantastic holiday, and we have some very exciting things to share as we enter 2016!
Up until this point, a majority of our devices have been using E3-1230v2 CPUs, and although some newer devices have been quietly deployed with newer hardware, we'll be transitioning to the newer and slightly higher clocked E3-1231v3s entering 2016, and will be upgrading our US-East, US-West and Amsterdam locations with this new hardware. Performance has always been a key aspect of our business and something we're always monitoring, and although the 1230v2 CPUs are still serving us very well today, we're transitioning to newer hardware to only improve the longevity of our service and performance for our customers.
With this upgrade, we'll also be moving these devices onto a newer, more stable network setup allowing us a lot finer control internally, as well as higher level DDoS protection. Our US-East location will be merged with our Northeast location, meaning all US-East devices will be housed in Chicago moving forward. There are a considerable amount of back-end changes, which ultimately aren't visible to customers, but provide much better service guarantees.
Unfortunately, this does mean that many customers in these locations will have their server IPs altered to support this new network setup, but we'll be working with you to alleviate any issues or downtime that may occur because of this. Customers affected will be sent maintenance notifications at least 2 weeks prior to the work, as well as will be able to lookup information regarding the maintenance window beforehand via our dedicated maintenance page: https://nodecraft.com/issues
In other news, we're really excited for the progress we've made towards our next release of NodePanel and expect to start alpha testing mid-end of Q1 2016. The changes we're making will allow our customers to start hosting many other servers for other games and there are a lot of extra features we're not quite ready to spoil for you yet, but stay tuned. You can keep up to date with any further developments by subscribing to our newsletter.
As always, if you have any questions or concerns regarding this upgrade and migration of service, feel free to contact our team and we'll be happy to alleviate any concerns or questions.