Been with you guys for over a decade and I'm just wanting to make sure all is good with the NFO company. I don't see as much activity in the News area let alone discounts being posted in a while. Just wanting to make sure we all have a solid future with NFO. I plan on being a customer for as long as I am able to be one! Thanks for the wonderful service all these years and hopefully a long time to come!
Hope all is well!
State of NFO?
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squirrelof09
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Re: State of NFO?
I've had similar thoughts but haven't really been brave enough to say it...I'll be interested to see if staff have any comments
Re: State of NFO?
We've just been keeping our heads down and working hard here. This has been a crazy year, with new challenges -- such as endless DDoS attacks launched by kids who have never had to go back to school -- and no real breaks to take a breather and work on deeper, longer-term plans.
In terms of sales and price drops, we often have those when our own costs go down, and that hasn't been happening recently, so we've slowed them down. Partially that is because new hardware has become harder to reliably source, with fewer options and much longer leadtimes, and hasn't been increasing as much in value from generation to generation in the last few years. AMD has been lighting a fire under Intel recently, though, and we have started to see more options coming out. We're excited to be testing some Milan (Zen 3) machines that we have on order now and hope to start rolling out this year to replace the oldest hardware that we have in place for VDSes.
As COVID-19 improves, we should start seeing more workload normalcy here, as well, and start posting more news as we knock out long-in-coming projects.
I don't have any worries about longevity. Revenues are stable (we have found that when we do right by our customers, they like to stick around!) and we manage our finances well. We've been here for almost 20 years now, and I fully expect for NFO to still be offering services for decades to come.
In terms of sales and price drops, we often have those when our own costs go down, and that hasn't been happening recently, so we've slowed them down. Partially that is because new hardware has become harder to reliably source, with fewer options and much longer leadtimes, and hasn't been increasing as much in value from generation to generation in the last few years. AMD has been lighting a fire under Intel recently, though, and we have started to see more options coming out. We're excited to be testing some Milan (Zen 3) machines that we have on order now and hope to start rolling out this year to replace the oldest hardware that we have in place for VDSes.
As COVID-19 improves, we should start seeing more workload normalcy here, as well, and start posting more news as we knock out long-in-coming projects.
I don't have any worries about longevity. Revenues are stable (we have found that when we do right by our customers, they like to stick around!) and we manage our finances well. We've been here for almost 20 years now, and I fully expect for NFO to still be offering services for decades to come.
Re: State of NFO?
Good read, and thank you for the transparency. To Edge100x: I had interpreted your post in viewtopic.php?f=1&t=15709 to mean that nothing would change as a result of COVID, but I've reread your post and I now see that you only meant downtime.
This post was good and I appreciate the transparency. It's something you wouldn't expect to hear at much larger companies.
I joined NFO on January 1 2018 and these forums on July 25 2019, but my activity didn't start kicking up until around April 2020, so I guess that was a bad time. I'm sorry to hear about these problems from COVID-19, and I wish you luck with recovering it.
I myself have just accepted it as a permanent change
Even when watching TV/movies/etc I wonder why people aren't wearing masks before I remember it was released in 2017
This post was good and I appreciate the transparency. It's something you wouldn't expect to hear at much larger companies.
I joined NFO on January 1 2018 and these forums on July 25 2019, but my activity didn't start kicking up until around April 2020, so I guess that was a bad time. I'm sorry to hear about these problems from COVID-19, and I wish you luck with recovering it.
I myself have just accepted it as a permanent change
Even when watching TV/movies/etc I wonder why people aren't wearing masks before I remember it was released in 2017Re: State of NFO?
Oh, one change I did notice in this year is that *.site.nfoservers.com started using HTTPS connections. NFo said for years it was impossible due to the number of subdomains limit but I guess eventually they pulled it off, that's useful 
Re: State of NFO?
Not sure if that one was intentional, but we've made lots of little tweaks in many systems. Just part of our ongoing maintenance and improvement activities. A lot has to go on behind the scenes to keep every datacenter, machine, and software system running smoothly.