It's been a while since our last update post — and honestly, that's on us.
We've been heads-down building, fixing, expanding, and improving just about every corner of DartNode. Writing blog posts about the work kept getting pushed aside in favor of actually doing the work, which we think most of you would agree is the right trade-off. But we've got a lot to share, so grab a coffee and let's catch you up.
What We've Shipped Since the Last Update
VDS Slices — Dedicated Power, Fractional Price
Back during Black Friday, we quietly launched one of our favorite new products: VDS Slices. The idea is simple — instead of buying an entire dedicated server, you get a slice of one at a fraction of the cost. You get the raw performance and isolation benefits of dedicated hardware without paying for resources you don't need. It's been a hit, and we're continuing to expand the offering.
Three New Locations — Kansas City, Orlando, and Los Angeles
We've been busy planting flags. Since the last update, we've opened three new Points of Presence: Kansas City, Orlando, and Los Angeles. Whether you need coverage in the Midwest, the Southeast, or the West Coast, DartNode now has you closer to your users than ever before. And yes, more locations are on the way — but we'll get to that.
Houston ↔ Kansas City Backbone Route
For customers on our Houston and Kansas City nodes, you've probably already noticed something: things feel snappier. That's because we've lit up a private backbone route between the two POPs, giving your traffic a dedicated, optimized path instead of riding the public internet between them. Latency is down, routing is cleaner, and this is just the beginning of how we're thinking about our network going forward.
What's New Right Now
A Completely Overhauled Dashboard
This is the big one. We've rebuilt the DartNode dashboard from the ground up. The new dashboard is faster, cleaner, and built to support everything we're planning to roll out this year. Think of it as the foundation for the next chapter of DartNode — all the new features, new services, and new products we're launching in 2026 will live here first.
The old dashboard will reach End of Life on June 1, 2026. If you haven't switched over yet, now's a great time to explore the new experience. We think you'll like it.
VPS Stats & Management — Rebuilt and Responsive
While we were at it, we overhauled the VPS management and stats views too. Everything loads faster, graphs are more responsive, and the overall experience is just... better. Less waiting around, more actually managing your server.
SMTP Limiting — Keeping Our IPs Clean for Everyone
We've rolled out SMTP rate limiting across all customer accounts. We know change isn't always popular, but this one is squarely in the interest of every customer on the platform. Keeping our IP reputation clean means your emails actually land in inboxes. It protects shared infrastructure for everyone, and it's the right call for the long-term health of the platform.
Support Is Like New
Support has been one of our biggest focus areas this year, and we've made some real changes here.
We brought on two new support agents specifically for overnight hours, so there's now coverage around the clock. But staffing alone wasn't enough — we also built an entirely new internal tool called Ticket Desk, which routes support tickets the way a call center routes calls. When agents are online, you should be seeing reply times under 15 minutes.
We also updated the customer-facing ticket experience. Your ticket view now updates in real time, and you can actually see when an agent has opened and is actively looking at your ticket. No more wondering if anyone's seen it.
All of this is groundwork for something we're planning to bring back: a full live chat system. We're not ready to announce a date yet, but it's coming, and when it does, it'll be built on a support infrastructure that can actually handle it properly.
What's Coming in 2026
We don't like to over-promise, but we're happy to be transparent about what we're working toward. Here's what's on the roadmap for this year:
Network: We're expanding our backbone to connect all POPs — not just Houston and Kansas City. The goal is to operate our network the way a real ISP does, so no matter where your server lives, it has access to all of our edge peers and peering relationships. More cities are also coming: Boston and Denver are both planned for 2026.
New Products:
- Instant-On Dedicated Servers — bare-metal, available immediately, no provisioning wait
- macOS Cloud — yes, really
- DartNode Gaming Products — purpose-built infrastructure for game servers
- Managed MySQL and Managed Redis — we handle the ops, you handle the app
- Private VLANs — isolated Layer 2 networking between your servers
And more that we're not ready to talk about yet.
A Word on 2025 — and Why 2026 Feels Different
We'll be honest with you: 2025 was a hard year — for us internally, and for some of our customers who felt the effects of that. Infrastructure growing pains, scaling challenges, and some support experiences that weren't up to the standard we hold ourselves to. We're not going to pretend otherwise.
But we've spent the last several months fixing the foundation, rebuilding the parts that weren't working, and building the team and tools we need to do this right. 2026 is starting from a completely different place.
The prices aren't going up. The quality is. That's the commitment.
Thanks for sticking with us — and thanks for all the feedback, the tickets, and the honest conversations that helped us figure out where to focus. The best version of DartNode is being built right now.
— The DartNode Team
