Server replacement (UK)

[Staff 9972]

Hello!

[THREAD REPLACED WITH OTHER RELEVANT INFORMATION}.

Kind regards
AirVPN Staff
 

[kbps 29]

Which provider will it be?

[OpenSourcerer 1435]

M247, I'd say.

[arteryshelby 25]

Ah yes, more centralisation towards M247, the trend continues.

[kbps 29]

Let us hope it is not M247.  There seem to be quite a few issues with them for many people.  Quick forum search
  

[kbps 29]

But Air have said that they will not increase the use of M247
 

It is always good to have diversity on a network. 

[arteryshelby 25]

Not only Latency.. They also fake geolocations and AirTeam still not admits this. For example Berlin Location is not Berlin but actually Frankfurt. Barcelona is not Bareclona but Madrid..

[go558a83nk 362]

3 hours ago, kbps said:

But Air have said that they will not increase the use of M247
 

It is always good to have diversity on a network. 

They did not say they wouldn't add more M247.  They said they had no plans to.  That was some time ago and plans change.

[blueport26 11]

The problem with M247 is that they are the most widely used server provider across VPNs (and probably one of the cheapest), they have POPs in many cities. Some sites already block access solely on IP ranges used by M247.
I suspect that it's really hard to find a new hosting/datacenter that will match all the security criteria and be traffic neutral (because of torrent seeding - DMCAs).
From time to time I've used the servers that are in replacement now, and they gave me good speeds. Let's hope the new ones will be as good as old ones

Regarding the content blocking. I've tested some other VPNs and found one that is doing something innovative in this regard. From what I could find they are somehow faking the IP address when I visit sites like ipinfo.io (which provide API for blockers). I think that allows them to bypass many restrictions while still hosting their servers at M247.
Still I don't think we'll ever have a 100% working solution. Once workaround is found a new mechanism will be implemented by sites like netflix etc. 

[nb7x9e 2]

M247 confirmed on the Carinae replacement in London, so are all UK servers going to be M247 now?

[Ernst89 11]

I lost my Kitel connection today. Hence I arrived at this thread. I see neo-Kitel is M247 (old Kitel wasn't).

The previous latency problem I had with M247, quoted earlier in the thread,  did clear up, after a few months, presumably M247 bought more network bandwidth. This was all a long time ago.

However, my current perception is that third party sites block/discriminate against Geminorum(M247) more than old Kitel. Hence I would like the option to use a non M247 London site, if one is available .

Is a non M247 London (or just UK) server available, do I need to check them all, one by one?
 

[OpenSourcerer 1435]

23 hours ago, Ernst89 said:

do I need to check them all, one by one?

This.

I feel the need for provider info on the status page and in the API responses, similar to Mullvad for example.

[kbps 29]

Quote

The replacement servers are five, while the replaced ones are six. That's because we might be adding in the future another datacenter in UK in a different location.

I would be nice if the sixth server, as well as being hosted in a non M247 datacenter, will also be a 10GB server.  I wonder if this is why Air are holding back.  Why not migrate all servers???  

[OpenSourcerer 1435]

53 minutes ago, kbps said:

Why not migrate all servers???   

I'd say, it's mostly availability, and if available, it's the price. For a choosy VPN provider such as Air, having a mission-friendly data center offering 10 Gig is like coming close to winning the lottery. I can imagine how rare these offers are.
And then they start at a few hundred Euro in their minimal config for the private sector last time I looked, but you need additional CPU power, too, you know, OpenVPN crypt, decrypt, all the things; you're also a business, and if you wish unlimited traffic for a 10 Gbit/s server… you're probably paying into the thousands for just one server. But your customers are paying 2, 5, 7€ a month here for the right to connect to all servers. I see how that RIPs the financing, unless you radically ramp up subscription costs.

[kbps 29]

I understand that price will always be the deciding factor, after many other factors, but Air air does have a 10 Gig server, Ain in Sweden, so the precedence has been set.  As you say the availability of 10 Gig is there.  We shall just have to wait and see.

[OpenSourcerer 1435]

27 minutes ago, kbps said:

but Air air does have a 10 Gig server, Ain in Sweden, so the precedence has been set. 

Do keep in mind that Ain is an upgrade of an existing server:I think there was an offer from the data center which was financially interesting because AirVPN was already a customer there. And it probably wasn't done for all servers at once because it's the first 10G server in the fleet, no one knew if that data center actually is capable of providing sustained 10Gb. I can imagine a new server in a new datacenter will still be costly.
If it's a precedence, then only as a confirmation that such offers do exist, but as written, they're rare.

[Staff 9972]

1 hour ago, kbps said:

I understand that price will always be the deciding factor, after many other factors, but Air air does have a 10 Gig server, Ain in Sweden, so the precedence has been set.  As you say the availability of 10 Gig is there.  We shall just have to wait and see.

Hello!

Our first 10 Gbit/s lines dedicated only to our servers were used for the first time in Dallas, Texas, several years ago. One line is for the VPN servers and another one for the Tor nodes by Quintex. Then we had four (now six) 10 Gbit/s lines in the Netherlands. Each line was and is shared by 10 or 11 of our servers.

Then Xuange came, in Switzerland, that was the first one with an exclusive 10 Gbit/s line. Ain then followed and has been the last one at the moment.

As @OpenSourcerer says, prices in some locations (such as Tokyo) are too high for 10 Gbit/s and at least 600 TB traffic per month for a single server (2 Gbit/s 24/7 means you generate 600 TB in a month). Moreover, in order to beat the usual 1 Gbit/s full duplex, more powerful hardware is needed and a different software approach too.

Even so, on Xuange and Ain we could not manage to squeeze more than 3-4 Gbit/s (in total, up+down) when more than 150 clients are connected, and even the most powerful CPUs available on the market, running one OpenVPN instance per virtual core, suffer. The whole system get choked if we go up to 300 clients, which would be the minimum amount required to run those servers without losing money. Wireguard might help but it's uncertain and anyway many core customers of ours don't accept it for the notorious privacy problems, other customers can't use it for UDP blocks/shaping and so on, so we can't and we won't drop OpenVPN in any case.

EDIT: it's not only a pure AES/CHACHA20 processing power issue, but also a conntrack and packert mangling huge queue related issue, which gets intertwined with pure encryption/decryption processing power problems. - pj

For us, the cost per user to be provided with high bandwidth is remarkably higher with dedicated 10 Gbit/s single server lines, because we experimentally see that we can not put on such a server 10 times the users a 1 Gbit/s server can handle (unless we wanted to lower the quality of service, which is not on the table). Therefore, if we want to keep the same prices and at the same time we don't want to oversell, offering an infrastructure all based on a 10 Gbit/s line per server for 2.75 EUR/month (the current price for 3 years subscriptions) is not realistic.

Remember that year after year prices of AirPVN went down or remained unchanged, and today AirVPN is probably the less expensive VPN around (ruled out the free ones, as they profile you or do worse things too).

Maybe in the future, or maybe with a different pricing, migration to all "10 Gbit/s servers" could be pursued.

We're not "over-cautious" but realistic: in the last 5-6 years, while other VPN services accumulated important debts surpassing tens and tens of USD millions (think about PIA mother company, which went down for more than 30 millions in just 3 or 4 years; and other big ones, which are forced to oversell and continuously pay for favorable bogus reviews hiding overselling in order to survive) AIrVPN never ever had debts.

Who would be interested in paying more (probably x3 or even x4) to have access to 10 Gbit/s dedicated lines (one line per server) on a wide variety of AirVPN locations with the usual AirVPN quality? We might start a survey to know.

Kind regards


 

[NaDre 157]

8 hours ago, Staff said:

...
Who would be interested in paying more (probably x3 or even x4) to have access to 10 Gbit/s dedicated lines (one line per server) on a wide variety of AirVPN locations with the usual AirVPN quality? We might start a survey to know.

...
 

Not me.

I mostly use AirVPN for torrenting (no pointless racing, just media I actually want for my own use), with a small amount of media streaming from sites I don't feel I should trust. I have never had any reason to think that the AirVPN server was the bottleneck.