CEO-Blog: How we will manage to grow
Hey Ghosties,
Our service is growing. As many of you noticed, we went from an average of around 2.500 users online to up to 5.000 users. That means that the load of the service has been doubled during a few weeks. And it’s still growing. That’s amazing. Especially because we grow in countries where we were not very well known in the beginning, like: US, UK, France and also in regions like Morocco, India, Indonesia and Vietnam.
We improved a lot of things in the last month and it seems that now, we reap what we sow. We added a lot of server locations and IPs, we launched the support for a new protocol, PPTP and we did a lot of changes “behind the scenes” to make our service more stable. And finally we offer, since a couple of weeks, unlimited traffic for all our subscribers. Special thanks to our Indiegogo contributors who made all these improvements possible.
The rush on our service caused some problems in the last weeks, so we had to change some things on our login-server and on our general load balancing. It seems that the adjustments had an effect and the service is back to normal right now.
But there are still some things on our roadmap and I want to let you know what the future will bring us.
First of all, we listen to you, our user and will integrate some features you have been asking for. The results of our user survey from the last two month showed that connection speed was a pretty clear priority for you. We asked you on what we should focus first and your answer was totally clear: You want first of all a VPN connection that does not slow down your existing internet connection. These “feature” was more important for you than all the other things like higher encryption, more servers or additional tools. Based on that, we offer you since a couple of days a new auto-login which gives you a slot on the nearest server to your location to provide you a fast connection. Furthermore we will reduce the amount of slots by server to offer you more average bandwidth per user.
Following the “local server” strategy, we will provide you also with free servers in all countries. Right now, we are working on a new update that will make it possible that every single server in our server park can be at the same time a free, premium or proxy-server that supports all protocols like Open VPN, PPTP or (soon) L2TP/IPSec. We will also add local servers in the regions we got popular right now. So we have to add more servers in US and also new servers in Africa and Asia.
Right now our Product Management is preparing the release of L2TP/IPSec. It’s already integrated. We are “just” working on the documentation and integration in our website. It will be available in the next week.
We work also on a complete new tariff system. We are planning to make everything quite simple in the future and offer you just three different subscriptions:
1. Free VPN: We want to keep the free service with unlimited traffic, but we need some sort of funding for that, so we are planning to integrate a donation system. Right now we need around 8.000 USD every month to run the free service. We will see, if our users are willing to donate. As you remember we raised 25.000 USD on Indiegogo in one month, so we can keep the service free for another 2 month now.
We also have to limit the bandwidth on our free service to keep the traffic as low as possible, so we will offer the free service with a 1 Mbit/s connection which is quite enough for surfing the web anonym, safe and without being charged. Also we will keep the notification-system for advertising the paid service and we keep the auto-disconnect after a couple of hours (to make space for active users and kick users that just idle).
You will automatically connect to a free server next to your location.
2. Premium VPN: You get access to all Premium Servers that we have in our server park plus the guarantee that you get also access to all servers we ad during your contract period. There will be no bandwidth limitation (then the technical limitation of the servers) and no forced disconnect.
You have also access to all protocols like Open VPN, PPTP and L2TP/IPSec.
You can auto-connect to a server next to your location. You can chose between to different modes, either “Focus on speed” or “Focus on security” and we connect you to a server that fits the best. Or you choose your server manually by choosing it from our server list.
3. Business VPN: Additional to the features of our Premium subscription you will get access to an extended server park with “Highspeed servers” and “Highsecurity servers”. These servers are especially configured for providing either a high connection speed (less crowded and fast connection) or high security (crowded and 256bit encryption).
We hope to make everything easier with that structure, and we’re looking forward to your feedback.
Right now we are also working on a iOS-App that allows you to establish a CyberGhost VPN connection through your Apple device and we have also an Android and Mac version on our roadmap.
We hope to launch all the above mentioned things till the summer. We will keep you informed and while we launch everything step by step.
Best regards
Robert
CEO and co-founder
wow amazing! thanks for your hard works!
Well that sounds great!