Beta is ending. Here's what happens next.

ServersCamp has been in beta for a while. Some of you have been deploying on us since the weeks when the panel had about three buttons and creating a VM was an act of faith.

That period is ending. We are moving to production. Most of what remains is the boring load-bearing work that nobody screenshots, and we will write about it here as it lands.

First, the part worth saying up front: your servers keep running exactly as they are. Nothing will be stopped or deleted because of the transition. Everything described below happens around your workloads, not to them.

Before any of that, one unglamorous step has to happen, and it involves you.

Step one: we check that your email works

Email is the only channel we have when something actually matters. A server finished provisioning. An invoice arrived. Somebody just logged into your account from a device we have never seen. If your address is dead, you learn about problems from your own monitoring instead of from us. Or you never learn at all.

Here is the embarrassing part. During the beta, email verification was never enforced. When we checked how many accounts had completed it, the answer was zero.

So in the coming days you will get an email from us asking to confirm your address. It has one green button. Your profile in the Console now shows whether your address is verified, and there is a resend button in case the email got lost. We will also repeat the mailing after a while, on purpose: the second copy is not a bug, it is us insisting.

Step two: the thank-you

You kept your workloads on us while we rebuilt half of the machinery underneath them, and some of the bugs you reported we would never have caught ourselves. A paragraph in a blog post does not cover that.

So here is what we are doing. Every eligible beta account with a verified email will receive credit based on its normal usage during the beta. For accounts in good standing, that means up to three months of normal usage. Account history and eligibility will be taken into consideration; the exact rules, calculation and credit lifetime will be published in a follow-up post.

And for the most loyal accounts and our earliest testers, we are preparing a few additional thank-you gifts. We will share the details when they are ready.

Two things are already fixed. First, the credit goes to verified accounts only: we are not going to grant three months of anything to a mailbox that bounces. Second, the usage snapshot was taken on July 25, before this post went live. Spinning up thirty servers tonight will not make the gift bigger.

What happens after

After email verification comes the rest of the production checklist: production billing, updated legal documents, and a public status page. Each of those will get its own post when it ships.

To everyone who stayed with us through the beta: thank you, friends. Now go check your mail.