As we are now entering the last quarter of the year, we look back on 2016 as an eventful year for OVPN. At the beginning of the year, I was the only one working fulltime with OVPN. Now, there are four of us in addition to two part-time employees. We improved the infrastructure by adding servers in Frankfurt and we increased the capacity in Stockholm. In April, the OVPNbox was released and as of now hundreds of households and offices around the world are protected by it.
We have great ambitions at OVPN. Thus, we are always working on improving products and strategies as well as making the whole operation scalable in order to make our service appealing to a larger audience. During the past year, most of our efforts have been on developing and improving the OVPN client. One of our goals is making the service easy enough to use so that anyone can do it. However, the truth is that we have a long way to go before we're there.
Bringing that vision to life is a time consuming, complicated and costly process. Thus, we really appreciate everyone's patience and understanding! Today we are releasing our previous beta version of the client as the latest sharp release. The newest version should solve many of the issues user's have been reporting. Going forward, we plan to release updates of the client much more frequently, namely once a month. We hope this will bring important updates to our customers a lot faster than before.
Moreover, we are working on improving and increasing the guides for various operating systems. In order to accomplish that, we've bought a large array of routers and NAS's in order to have a sufficient testing environments to make current and new guides better.
In relation to the news about "Spridningskollen" in Sweden, OVPN grew quickly. The servers and infrastructure handled the increased growth without any issues. However, the lead times for our support increased significantly. It became obvious that support was a new bottleneck that needed to be solved and therefore we've started looking for a full-time support employee.
We are also aiming to increase the pace of our product development meaning that we've also started looking for:
- An additional C++ & Qt-developer for the OVPN client
- A PHP (Laravel) & JS-developer
- A DevOps
We've received many questions regarding where we are planning on placing servers. We are still exploring our options regarding ISPs and which datacenter to choose, but we are well into our search.
In order to expand quickly, we've already bought the hardware for expanding to three new datacenters. The idea is to place three servers in each new datacenter to begin with. As soon as the traffic picks up, we'll of course increase the capacity. Moreover, each new datacenter will have the same physical security that OVPN has grown famous for.
The plan for now is to expand the following cities:
- Toronto, Canada
- London, England
- Amsterdam, Netherlands
If you disagree with our choice, please let us know which city you would prefer. Send your suggestion with a good explanation to support@ovpn.com