The year 2018 at UpCloud in retrospect

At the end of the year, it’s great to have a chance to kick back and relax a little. We wanted to take a moment to reflect on the past events and what we’ve accomplished this year. We’ve certainly been keeping busy with news, announcements, and community events around the globe. Here’s a quick look at what we’ve been up to in 2018.

Amazing growth

We started the year strong with the announcement of FI-HEL2, our second data centre in Helsinki, Finland. It affirmed our position as a market leader on our home turf while providing new opportunities for local high availability and redundancy.

In August we brought a ton of brand new capacity to our growing western front. Our newest data centre, US-SJO1, launched in San José to many applauds. We’ve landed in Silicon Valley with the mindset to take over the party!

The new data centres were clearly a welcome sign as we’ve seen crazy growth in new cloud server deployments. We have seen more than 100% increase in concurrently running servers across all of our locations from the year before.

The growth in deployments has been driven by not only our existing loyal users but also the newcomers! With over 100% growth to active users when compared to the end of last year, we are excited to welcome every one of you.

Rising to new challenges

Along with so many new users come new challenges. We pride ourselves with our friendly user support and strive to make it as easily accessible as possible. Clearly, we are headed in the right direction as conversations with users grew by 500% over the past year. However, this does not mean we would have had to sacrifice on quality. On average, you can expect to receive a reply in less than 2 minutes and 89% of our users were extremely satisfied with the service and care they’ve received!

On top of it all, we’ve grown a lot internally this year with new great hires to each of our offices. We also opened our 4th office, this time in Seattle, US. With a full team of phenomenal technical support specialists, we are focusing on reaching each of our regions locally.  The UpCloud team as a whole stands some 40% stronger than the year before and we are always looking for more cloud minded experts to join us!

Inspiring community

Throughout the year, we’ve taken part in and sponsored more community events and meetups than ever before. From London to Singapore and many in between. It’s been awesome to meet with such an enthusiastic community from all walks of life. We are also happy to promise you our community engagement is only going to get bigger and better in the coming year.

We recently launched a new open community section on our new website and have been glad to see the activity you guys are bringing. Tutorials on anything and everything, stories from across the industry, and must-see open source project, we have something for everyone. But if you cannot find a guide on your favourite topic, you could be the one to teach others. With the open community comes the option for anyone to contribute and rake in some awesome rewards!

Further along the year, we were excited to see our efforts recognised by Cloud Spectator ranking UpCloud as the best cloud provider in EU. Cloud Spectator is a leading infrastructure-as-a-service marketplace analyst with a lot of sway in the industry. They perform highly detailed and in-depth comparisons to find the best cloud providers on the market. The competition was tougher than ever but in the end, we came on top for the second time running!

Staying secure

January was also a busy time in the cloud industry due to the discovery of the Meltdown vulnerability. The security bug in Intel processors affected just about everyone in the cloud industry. Our engineers thoroughly investigated and researched the vulnerability and its impacts. Fortunately, we were able to quickly roll out timely security updates to mitigate the issue live without disruptions to you, our users.

Unfortunately, Meltdown wasn’t the only vulnerability discovered in Intel processor this year. In August, L1TF aka Foreshadow raised its head like second whack-a-mole. As with Meltdown, our engineering team was quickly on top of the issue. Not long after the discovery, we had our entire infrastructure updated with latest security patches again with no impact to users.

Massive changes

The first quarter of the year saw our largest pricing refresh in UpCloud’s history. We announced entirely new monthly plans starting at just $5 per month. While everything else seems to be getting more expensive year over year, at least our cloud servers have the right direction!

The last and perhaps the biggest news came just last month. We relaunched our entire company along with a brand new website and a shiny new control panel. The new company image and everything that came with it had been in the works for a long time. It was awesome to see the great reception it received from everyone. A big thank you to all our users for your continued support!

Coming soon in 2019

We’ve always had the mindset that there’s no question too small or request too large when it comes to providing for our users. With that goal, we have been building a custom solution for those looking for the ultimate performance, security, connectivity. Make sure to keep your ear to the ground in the coming year for the announcement!

Cheers for the year and looking forward to the next great one!

Team UpCloud