servd

As web developers ourselves, we're continually striving to update our platform in ways that add the most value to our fellow Crafters, and reduce any stress involved in hosting your projects. Two things that have been raised by multiple of our customers, and that have been on our radar for quite a while, are DDoS protection and data centre redundancy.

Today we're launching our updated ingress platform, which brings both of those features along with a host of other nice upgrades to boot.

The New Ingress Platform

With our legacy setup, all projects pointed their DNS records directly to the server clusters that hosted their project. This was simple to set up and configure, however after a few years of use it has shown couple of drawbacks.

1. If a data centre goes offline for any reason, we need clients to update their DNS records to be able to recover them to a new location.
2. The load balancing and routing infrastructure within our clusters received all incoming traffic directly, making it vulnerable to DDoS attacks.

Our upgraded platform changes this by making a global Anycast CDN (powered by Cloudflare) the initial point at which traffic enters our platform. We can then direct traffic to different origins out of the back of that CDN as required. Not only does this give us great flexibility with how traffic is routed, allowing for full data centre failovers without DNS updates, it also allows us to use Cloudflare's Enterprise level DDoS protection and WAF functionality for all of the projects hosted on Servd that have upgraded.

We're pretty excited about this.

Some Things Are Already Available

We've already rolled out an updated Domains page in our dashboard for managing your project's domains, along with a new Under Attack mode which allows projects to mitigate DDoS attacks directly from our dashboard:

Also, when you're migrating an existing project over to Servd, you'll also see that we now have the ability to perform domain ownership and SSL pre-verification, allowing for zero downtime migrations over to Servd from another host.

And also worth a mention: we now have CDN edge caching available for all static assets, http/3 support and brotli compression. Speeding up your HTML, CSS, JS and image file delivery to end users no matter where in the world they are.

Some Things Are In The Pipeline

We've also started building out the functionality we need to quickly move projects between data centres and restore them from their latest offsite backup, allowing us to get projects back online quickly even if the data centre they're hosted in goes completely offline.

To accompany our Under Attack Mode, we'll also be adding the option to automatically enable this if web traffic goes above a specific threshold, allowing you to automate your DDoS protection based on expected levels of traffic.

We have IPV6 on our roadmap to add to this new setup - we already own the addresses, we just need to get them integrated!

Upgrading

New projects created as of 1st Jan 2024 will automatically make use of the new platform. Any existing projects will need to run through the upgrade process which can be found on the Domains page in our dashboard. You can read through the details on how to do that here.

If you have any feedback on the new platform, or concerns related to upgrading, send us a message in the usual ways and we'd be happy to help!