Mythic Beasts acquires BHost
Having a hungry Wyvern in our logo makes eating other companies much easier to draw.
Hot on the heels of acquiring Retrosnub, we’ve also bought the customers and assets of BHost. BHost are a virtual server provider with services in London, Amsterdam and California based on OpenVZ and KVM.
We’re excited about this acquisition as it provides us with a great opportunity to expand our network using BHost’s Amsterdam infrastructure. At the same time, we’re confident that we can provide some immediate and longer term improvements to the BHost service, not least through our larger support team being able to offer more timely and helpful responses to customer queries.
Although handover officially happened today, BHost customers have had access to our control panel for several weeks, mostly so that we could start tackling EU VAT bureaucracy. BHost are a US-registered business. We’re a VAT-registered business in the UK. Thanks to VAT MESS, it’s actually much harder for us to sell to EU-based consumers than it was for BHost, as we’re required to collect an unreasonable amount of evidence of customer location.
The good news for BHost customers is that we’re matching BHost’s current pricing with our UK VAT-inclusive price. This means that EU VAT-registered businesses, and all non-EU customers will see a significant reduction in the price that they pay.
If you’re a BHost customer and you’ve not already done so, please log in to our customer control panel using your BHost username (email address) and password and confirm your contact details.
Network Expansion
BHost run a network from London/Amsterdam with multiple 10Gbps uplinks and some peering in each site. We will be moving the BHost London network behind our own so that BHost customers can take advantage of our larger capacity uplinks and significantly better peering arrangements, which includes transit-free connections to every major UK ISP.
We’re also taking the opportunity to significantly improve the connectivity to our Cambridge data centre. We currently have two uplinks via different London data centres. We will replace one of these links with a direct connection to Amsterdam, and bring both up to 10Gbps. Combined with BHost’s existing London/Amsterdam connection, this will create a 10Gbps ring around London, Cambridge and Amsterdam, complementing our 50Gbps ring around our three London sites. This will provide increased bandwidth and improved resiliency for our Cambridge customers, whilst also providing a second London/Amsterdam link to improve resilience within the BHost network.
BHost Amsterdam customers will gain direct UK connectivity through our extensive London peering. We will gain the Amsterdam Internet Exchange connection (AMSIX) from BHost, bringing improved European connectivity to all London customers. We expect to be able to substantially increase the number of AMSIX peers, improving EU connectivity for all customers.
Cloud expansion
BHost’s London presence is in the Meridian Gate (MER) data centre. We already have a significant footprint in MER, although it’s not currently available as a zone in our public cloud. We’re investing in new hardware to deploy in Meridian Gate which is both substantially faster and more power efficient than the current hosts. We’ll be deploying this into our existing suite in MER, and then migrating BHost servers into it. BHost customers will see a small window of scheduled downtime as we migrate each server, but should then seen significantly improved performance on the new hardware.
Our Amsterdam and US presences will give additional options to customers that need to be physically hosted within the (post-Brexit) EU or US. We expect this to become more relevant after Brexit when the UK and EU may have diverging regulatory requirements.
Additional services
All BHost customers can now take advantage of additional Mythic Beasts services including management services for virtual servers, domain registration and DNSSEC-enabled, API-backed DNS hosting.
Support
Mythic Beasts have a larger support team and we’re very well placed to provide significantly improved customer service to all of our new customers. Of course, we do expect the period immediately after the transition to be very busy as customers become familiar with the new billing arrangements, and we get to grips with supporting BHost’s services. We will have additional staff during this period, but please be patient if support responses are a little slower than usual.