Windows Server 2025 has been released, and we've added it as an option for unmanaged dedicated machines and virtual machines (VDSes) now.

This OS is the first Windows Server version to be based on Windows 11 (2016, 2019, and 2022 were based on different editions of Windows 10). It is still very similar. The start menu is back to a light background and now centered in the screen by default, and additional control panel options have been switched to a different format that is simpler and more touch-friendly (but less advanced-user and keyboard-mouse friendly).

DayZ (Standalone) has now been added to our managed game system! We're offering DayZ servers at a special introductory flat price of $19.99 for any size of server, at any location, through our DayZ order page entry. Order one up and give it a spin!

(There's also a Halloween sale going on right now for DayZ itself, with half-off the price, on Steam.)

Another game that we added to the order page recently is Battle Grounds III. This well-rated game is based on the American War of Independence.

For a short time, we are offering a steep discount on freshly-ordered E-2186 and E-2288 dedicated machines.

Normally priced at 199.99/mo, we've slashed the E-2186 down to 159.99/mo -- a $40 savings. With the "highest discount" option chosen to trade a one-time payment for a permanent monthly discount, pay as little as 119.99 monthly!

Or, level up to the E-2288, which has two more processor cores and higher performance per core, along with dual enterprise-grade NVMe SSDs. It is normally 229.99/mo but drops down to 189.99. That's only 149.99 with the one-time payment option.

On top of this, we've temporarily reduced the price on an unmetered port (available at Premium locations) to only 9.99!

This is a great time to upgrade an older machine. But, the sale will be over soon, and end even earlier if run out of inventory, so order quickly.

(These prices are also available to existing customers, but any one-time payment would need to be repeated, and other changes, such as the OS fee or bandwidth transfer amount would need to be applied.)

* Unmetered 1 Gbps network port upgrades for dedicated server machines at Premium locations (Chicago, Dallas, LA, and Seattle) are temporarily down to $9.99/month, our lowest price ever. Both new and existing customers can take advantage of this.
* 75% off the first month for new unmanaged Linux VDSes, through coupon code BEVMGW. It's a great time to give one of these a spin!
* Rust servers at each price level have dived down by $20/month.

We're also testing a 1-core VDS offering again, due to some customers requesting it for Linux microservices. Please note that the one-core option comes with much less bandwidth transfer and storage, as it's really only meant for small stuff -- and, Windows won't run very well with only 1 GB of RAM, so while we still allow Windows to be ordered, we recommend Linux.

We have spare inventory on many dedicated machines, so we are running a brief but steep sale on new orders to clear them out! While supplies last, many packages, including most types of machines in Chicago, Dallas, and New York, have $30 off from this sale. Just select the package that you want on the order page, and the discount will be applied.

Want an even bigger discount on a machine? We've added a couple of extra up-front-payment options for larger machines that allow customers to have a lower monthly price for life in return for a one-time payment. This is a great deal if you expect to keep the server for a long time.

We're also briefly bringing back our offer of 20% off the base price of any standalone game server or VDS/VPS that is transferred to us from a competitor. If you've been thinking about upping your game with a higher quality host, now is a great time to do it! Just use coupon code KMKHRL and enter the IP address and provider name that you are switching from in the "Comments" field of our order page (this old server will need to be shut down within 30 days). When you submit, 20% will be shaved from the base price. This is on top of any discount for purchasing multiple months at a time.

We added 2-Step Verification as an option last month! For increased security, we recommend that customers enable this feature through the control panel, under "My account".

Using 2SV means that an extra code will be sent to your email when a log in is attempted (we also support authenticator apps). If an attacker somehow finds out your password and tries to access your account, the extra step should stop the attempt, as long as your email account is secure.

We're also activating this feature automatically for dormant accounts that haven't been used in a long time, such as a year, to protect customers who may leave payment sources on their accounts here and forget about them. We've seen a few cases of an attacker using credentials stolen from elsewhere to log in to old accounts and attempt purchases.

We've added initial V Rising support to our managed system here: https://www.nfoservers.com/order.php?type=vrising. V Rising servers can be created standalone as well as on Windows managed machines/VDSes (the game doesn't yet support Linux).

We're still calibrating pricing, and it may go up later as we have more data. Since this is a building-oriented game, memory and CPU usage are hard to predict and likely to fluctuate a lot. As with some other games, we've started off by linking pricing to both player count and memory usage.

To celebrate the addition, we've issued a coupon code for 50% off the base price, for the first 50 customers! Enter this into the order page to take advantage of it: VRISING50. The special price gets locked in for as long as the server is kept in the same configuration.

We've upgraded Dallas! It is now a Premium location for us and boasts 200 Gbps of upstream capacity, increasing its performance and significantly enhancing its ability to absorb DDoS attacks.

In celebration of the upgrade, we're running a steep sale on our E3-1270v3 and E3-1271v3 dedicated server machines at this location. For a limited time, you can snap up one of these machines for $30 off the normal price -- dropping the cost of an E3-1270v3 from 76.99 to 46.99 per month when the one-time cost option is chosen, for instance.

These machines have been real workhorses and continue to stack up, particularly against modern cloud offerings. Bare hardware platforms like these lack the virtualization overhead and less predictable performance of the cloud, and these machines are faster on a per-CPU-core basis than most VPSes.

We've started the search for an additional support agent! If you're interested in working for NFO, check out our employment page for next steps.

This past year and a half has been a wild ride for society and for NFO! But, we're happy to report that we're still going strong. With some sense of normalcy returning and summer in full swing, we'd like to give some updates.

DDoS attack activity has increased since the pandemic started, and we have been increasing our mitigation capacity to better filter those out for customers. Our Chicago location currently has over 300G of raw capacity, and we're in the process of adding more by the fall. We've also augmented our Seattle location to have 200G of capacity and bumped up LA to 100G.

One of our more requested additions, IPv6, is entering customer beta testing. We hope to finish introducing it as a free option for all VDS customers sometime this year.

We have been ironing out panel bugs and adding features for our various services, such as our recent implementation of FTPS (TLS support for FTP, which prevents passwords from being sent in the clear and encrypts all other data, too) for all game server packages.

Our VDS offerings are being upgraded to implement purely solid-state storage. This is an ongoing process which is nearing completion, with all Windows-supporting machines already done and remaining Linux machines being upgraded or entirely replaced. (All new machines that we add to our fleet have been exclusively solid-state for the last few years, and NVMe has also become standard for us.)

AMD and Intel have been releasing new, faster, chips, but they have become difficult to obtain and restricted in how they can be used. We have trialed a limited number of Intel W-1290P machines recently and will continue to test other hardware, such as the new Intel E-23xxG series when it becomes available. Some AMD Epyc 7543 machines that we ordered back in February (for use in VDS hosting) are supposed to finally arrive in late August, and we'll put those through their paces when we do.

And, we're now hiring! Another post will cover this in a little more detail.