We have renewed the network menu for OS installation, which is based on iPXE.
It gave us many advantages. Below is more about them.
HTTP downloading
It is ten times faster than TFTP (which was used before), especially when you deal with the huge files.
Current OS versions
Downloading of kernel and initial RAM-disks (initrd) launch directly from the official repositories. This helps to set up the newest OS version. Furthermore, we have used caching on our side, so these all could work faster.
UEFI
Now there is a possibility to boot servers in UEFI mode. Sooner or later all servers will be operated like this, not elsewise. And now we are ready for it. In addition to the boot menu, we had to work fruitfully on the scripts of automatic installation of all OS as well.
Repository mirroring
In addition to the network menu, we have implemented some improvements for a faster OS installation. Particularly, this is a download center - boot.xserver.cloud, which is caching kernels and initrd files, but the most important, it is a CDN network - IP address of the closest node is determined in each location according to this domain.
Similar CDN was implemented for the software of popular distributives mirror.xserver.cloud The speed of packets downloading during OS installation has increased manyfold due to caching.
Official Linux builds
We chose consciously the path of “natural” OS installation instead of other methods like virtual servers cloning from the templates. When you order a virtual server from us, you can be sure that an official OS version with a standard setup will be installed, but not some “customized” template with potential safety problems.
A bit more
In addition, we have applied some additional implements for the possibility of current OS versions installation at our new promotional 1Gb RAM and 10Gb SSD rate. Try to install the newest versions of Ubuntu or CentOS Stream with such limited resources, and immediately you will get an error message about a running out of RAM. There are no errors like that on our servers!
We do everything possible, so our customers were not limited even using the smallest VPS tariffs.