New: Balance depletion indicator and SRV + CAA DNS records

Aside from shipping Ubuntu desktop images, our team here at BitLaunch has been busy working on three features to improve the usability of our service. They're available to all users now, at no extra cost.

1. Balance depletion indicator

The first, a balance depletion indicator, is designed to provide more clarity about how long the funds in your BitLaunch wallet will maintain your servers. While we have offered depletion alert emails for some time, the "balance depleted in x days" indicator will help you to better plan in advance. It also provides context for the impact changes such as backups or additional severs will have on your balance over time.

2. SRV DNS records

Next up are SRV records for BitLaunch DNS services. For the unfamiliar, an SRV record lets you specify a host and port for specific services. This can be useful for things like instant messaging, VoIP, and other services that you want to travel through a specific port.

Two important fields to understand are priority and weight and how they differ. The "priority" field lets an admin specify one server that supports a service over another, with lower priority servers receiving more traffic.

Weight allows you to specify the order of servers with the same priority value. For example, if you have two servers with a priority of 10, the server with the higher weight will receive more traffic.

3. CAA DNS records

Finally, the introduction of CAA records will help you to specify which certificate authorities are able to issue certificates for a given domain. This is helpful for both security and ease of management.

With a CAA record, you can blacklist certificate providers who are known to have consistently made mistakes or had unsavory practices. Another recommended use case is to limit authorities to just a few providers so you can more easily manage your certificates.  

Joining BitLaunch

To get started with these new features, create a BitLaunch account if you haven't already and visit your control panel. Got feedback? Let us know via live chat and we'll see how we can help.