News

With today's update, we are excited to announce performance-boosting hardware upgrades across the entire worldwide Vultr cloud! The Vultr infrastructure team has been working hard for the past several months to deploy refreshed hardware in all of our 15 locations featuring the blazing fast Intel Skylake CPU architecture.

Since inception, Vultr's 100% SSD compute plans have earned a reputation for reducing costs while also delivering industry-leading benchmarks. The brand new Skylake architecture is the next installment in our product roadmap and takes compute speeds to the next level. What does this mean for your web applications? A performance boost of up to 50% on new deployments!

Newly created VC2 compute instances priced at $10 and higher will receive priority assignment to our brand new Skylake architecture. Throughout 2018, our infrastructure team will be focusing on delivering more hardware and ensuring we are able to deliver as close to 100% Skylake assignment for all plans - with additional Skylake capacity going online soon!

There has never been a better time to accelerate your web application with the latest generation Intel hardware on the Vultr platform! Our detailed benchmarks show how our compute instances stack up against our previous architecture. Check out our detailed benchmarks or test for yourself by creating a new account!

Comments or feedback? Let us know via our contact page, or on Twitter @Vultr

In April of 2016, the EU Parliament passed new legislation called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The regulation is designed to harmonize data privacy laws across Europe, to protect and empower all EU citizens data privacy and to reshape the way organizations across the region approach data privacy. As a customer of Vultr, you can rest assured that Vultr is fully committed to being GDPR compliant with the legislation that starts enforcement on May 25, 2018.

As part of our commitment, we are updating our Privacy Policy to let you know how your data is being used and what steps we take to ensure its security. We have applied these changes to bring our policy in line with the European law, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Transparent and secure handling of personal data will continue to be of the utmost importance to us.

Below, you will find relevant links to policies that have been updated:

Our GDPR Privacy Notice
Our Privacy Policy
Our Cookie Policy
Our Terms of Service

You can learn more about our policies and how you might be affected by GDPR by visiting https://www.vultr.com/faq/#gdpr

We are pleased to announce that the Vultr One Click App library has a new addition - Plesk Onyx! Plesk simplifies the webmaster's life by putting powerful tools for managing and updating your web servers into one easy to use control panel. Among the many features, Plesk simplifies website set up, manages email accounts, automates security patching, and gives access to a wide library of useful extensions. Combined with Vultr's easy to use one-click app deployment, launching a Plesk cloud server is easier than ever!

Want to give Plesk a try? We’re currently offering the license FREE for 30 days as part of a special promotion to launch our newest One Click App. During the first 30 days of your Web Pro or Web Host server, you will only pay the base instance cost with no additional license surcharge.


The Plesk Onyx offering comes in three different flavors:

Package	Price per month	Price per hour
Web Admin Edition SE	Free	$0.000/hr
Web Pro Edition	$7.50/mo	$0.011/hr
Web Host Edition	$12.50/mo	$0.019/hr

Plesk Web Admin Edition SE
This 100% free version of Plesk is ideal for starter sites. As the entry level edition, it is limited to a maximum of 3 domains and it is ad supported.

Plesk Web Pro Edition
Webmasters will find an upgrade to the Pro edition checks most of their requirements. Web Pro adds many additional features, increases the domain limit to 30, and is available for $7.50 per month ($0.011 per hour).

Plesk Web Host Edition
The Web Host Edition is targeted toward businesses as it allows unlimited hosted domains and adds reseller functions. Web Host Edition is available for $12.50 per month ($0.019 per hour).

Start using Plesk on the Vultr platform to help simplify your website management today! Read more on our Plesk App page or deploy Plesk Now now!

Feedback or comments? Reach out to us using our contact page, or on Twitter @Vultr.

Does your application's security design require an advanced setup with multiple distinct zones of isolation in the same geographic region? If so, you'll be excited to hear about our latest addition: support for multiple private networks! While private IP space traffic was always securely isolated and inaccessible by servers outside of your account, multiple private networks enable you to add another layer of isolation by segmenting compute instances located in the same datacenter into different private network groups.

Adding private network isolation within the same location no longer requires complicated firewall configuration management. Using the Vultr control panel or our API, you can now create multiple private networks in each of our 15 cloud locations across the globe. In just a few clicks, you can attach one or more of these networks to specific instances on your account. The network section of the customer portal allows you to create, list, label, and manage all of your private networks.

There is also no need to worry about bandwidth limitations, either - private network traffic is unmetered. Learn more about private networking on our docs portal.

Have feedback or comments? Reach out to us on our website or by tweeting @Vultr

As you may already be aware, a critical security flaw affecting Intel CPUs has been gaining traction in security research circles over the past several days.

While the full details of the security issue are still restricted and there have been no official statements from Intel, our security team has been actively reviewing available information and planning for the necessary next steps. Our engineers have also been testing available kernel patches to ensure necessary upgrades proceed smoothly.

Current facts outline a vulnerability that likely affects a wide range of Intel processors. The patch to mitigate this issue will also likely require a one-time reboot of your instances. Once our team begins scheduling reboots, you will receive advance e-mail notification for any affected instances with a scheduled date and time. While reboots may cause a few minutes of downtime during the restart window, this will be a necessary step to ensure that your compute environment remains secure.

Note: This is an actively developing story and more details will become available in the coming days. Our team is actively monitoring this issue and we will update this article with any developments that directly impact your Vultr.com infrastructure.

Article Updates

- Intel has released a statement on the issue. A link can be found in the additional resources section below. Additionally, we are working closely with our Northeast Intel Representatives to gather additional information and resources directly from their Cloud Service Provider (CSP) team.

- The details of the security vulnerabilities have been disclosed early in CVE-2017-5753, CVE-2017-5715 and CVE-2017-5754. Our engineers have already applied updates to our infrastructure to ensure the security of our platform. The original date of the coordinated disclosure was scheduled for January 9th and information from hardware manufacturers is still currently incomplete. We are continuing to closely monitor the issue and will provide additional updates as necessary.

Additional resources:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/02/intel_cpu_design_flaw/
https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intel-responds-to-security-research-findings/
https://meltdownattack.com/

From the beginning, the team at Vultr has focused on making all aspects of hosting infrastructure management easier for everyone. Today we are excited to bring the simplicity of the Vultr platform to an old hosting industry stalwart - dedicated servers - by introducing the brand new Vultr Bare Metal product line!

Powered by Vultr's cloud orchestration, you can now easily deploy single-tenant physical dedicated servers with zero virtualization layer. We’ve also added an array of cloud features typically only available for standard compute, such as hourly billing, fast api-driven deployment, and availability in multiple geographic regions.

Direct Hardware Access
Vultr Bare Metal provides direct access to the full power of the underlying physical hardware without a virtualization layer. On our platform, you'll be in the driver's seat of a real, physical server, with the convenience and simplicity of Vultr automation. Bare metal servers are also single-tenant only which means that only you will have full access to the resources of your server.

Worldwide Deployment
Deploy bare metal hardware around the world in 10 minutes or less using our point-and-click control panel. We are first introducing bare metal in Singapore and more locations will be rolled out in the coming weeks.

Flexible Resource Management
Easily scale and customize your bare metal environment via our user-friendly customer portal or by using our flexible API. In addition, all bare metal plans include the same no long term contract terms and hourly billing you’ve come to expect from our standard compute offerings.

All Standard Operating Systems
The complete Vultr operating system library has been updated to support bare metal servers. This includes all our versions of Linux, Windows, and BSD with full root/administrator access. Seamlessly switch between virtual and bare metal hardware without having to compromise!

Bare metal adds the proven performance and security of the Vultr platform. Read more about bare metal servers on our product page and deploy a bare metal server today!

Comments or feedback? Reach out to us via our contact page, or by tweeting @Vultr

Vultr values the contributions made by security research communities who analyze and help solve vulnerabilities in the web ecosystem. Like many of our industry peers, Vultr has chosen a policy to compensate researchers for ethical disclosure of security issues. In an effort to improve the feedback loop for bugs on the Vultr platform, we've added a new bug bounty portal where any discovered security issues can be reported.

How Vultr's bug bounty program works:
1. Identity a security issue in any part of our platform or API.
2. Report it to us here. Include detailed steps to reproduce the bug and attach additional evidence as needed.
3. The report will be reviewed and, if verified, you will be compensated based on the scope and severity of the bug.

In scope sites:
https://my.vultr.com/
https://www.vultr.com/
https://api.vultr.com/

Focus areas:
• Injection attacks.
• Authentication or authorization flaws.
• Cross-site scripting.
• Sensitive data exposure.
• Privilege escalation.

Please visit our bug bounty portal for additional program details and up to date information.

As an integral building block of the internet, DNS is a critical service that demands reliability, scalability, and high performance. Built on a highly distributed and globally present anycast network, Vultr DNS was designed from the start for stability and redundancy, ensuring users will experience fast response times when resolving domains.

Vultr DNS is available to all customers at no additional charge. Management of records is simple for projects of all sizes and records can be updated using our user-friendly portal or through automation with the Vultr API. As with all of the other parts of our cloud platform, the Vultr Ops team keeps a close eye on this critical piece of infrastructure so you don't have to!

The team at Vultr has made multiple recent upgrades to Vultr DNS, including:

DNSSEC - You can now enable/disable DNSSEC support for your domains. DNSSEC adds a layer of trust to your DNS infrastructure to prevent against man-in-the-middle attacks.

SOA Settings - By popular demand, you can now edit the public email address and primary nameserver listed on your domain's Start of Authority (SOA) record. SOA records are used to relay important information about your domain to other nameservers. If you're using Vultr DNS for vanity nameservers, you can now edit your SOA record and list your custom nameservers.

CAA Records - Now supported by most certificate authorities, these records control access to which authorities can issue certificates for your domains. Using this record, list what certificate authorities you use and prevent rogue certificates from being issued for your domains.

SSHFP Records - In combination with DNSSEC, these records are used as a secondary verification when connecting to a host over SSH. Adding SSHFP records for your servers' hostnames help your terminal client guarantee it's connecting to the right host.

Punycode support - Punycode is support for all domain records. Our control panel will automatically convert your domain name to punycode when normal unicode text is submitted.

The entire feature set is detailed in our Vultr DNS documentation.

Calling all techies - Vultr article writing bonuses are now higher than ever! The Vultr Docs community resource contains hundreds of helpful articles for both IT professionals and novices alike to get a jump start on their project. The guides cover a wide range of topics, from Linux to Windows, Web Servers to MySQL & MariaDB, and much more!

Do you have advanced technical knowledge and a knack for writing how-to articles? Our community of developers and engineers will thank you for sharing your knowledge and Vultr will reward you with your choice of account credit or PayPal payouts. To get started, visit our Vultr Docs submission page and contribute your articles today!

Send us your feedback on our contact page or by tweeting @Vultr !

Our operating system offerings have been updated to include Windows Server 2016. As the latest version of Microsoft's flagship operating system, Windows Server 2016 includes updates to IIS, Active Directory, PowerShell, the network stack, and much more. The desktop interface has also been revised, providing a similar experience to Windows 10.

With this update, high performance Windows Server 2016 servers can now be deployed with one click across our entire global network. And of course, popular features such as startup scripts, IPv6, and private networking are fully supported.

We welcome your feedback - reach us on on our contact page or tweet to @Vultr!