Welcome to the High Availability Hosting Blog

We’ve started carrying out power audit work at the Sheffield Data Centre, accurately documenting what each customer & device is allocated, and what it’s using.

All co-lo customers will be contacted over the weekend with regards to what they’re allowed, and if they’re using any excess, but for the sake of completeness here are the allowances (unless  by prior arrangement):

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Single Server

• 1 x power socket
• 1A power

Quarter Rack

• 4 x power sockets
• 2A power

Half Rack

• 6 x power sockets
• 5A power

Full Rack

• 12 x power sockets
• 10A power

Additional Resources

• Additional power @ £22 per month per Ampre
• Additional sockets @ £2.50 per month

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All prices exclude VAT.

Customers are not permitted to plug devices direct into the UPS, only into PDU’s provided by us.

Customers may provide their own additional PDU’s, but they should plug into our PDU.  We use our PDU as the measuring point for power consumed.

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Our wholesale energy prices have increased this year, we’ve decided not to pass on this cost to customers at this time, however we will be invoicing customers more activly with regards to their actual power and socket usage.

We’ve had a few support tickets raised from customers who are migrating to our Hosted Exchange 2010 service, mainly around what MX records and Autodiscover entries to add for their domains.

So…

If you’re using our NEW HOSTED EXCHANGE 2010 service

MX record: mailgate.hahosting.com
(delete any other MX records)

Autodiscover entry: a CNAME with a name of autodiscover pointing to autodiscover.hahosting.com
(so if your domain was fredbloggs.com, you’d have an DNS CNAME entry of autodiscover.fredbloggs.com pointing to autodiscover.hahosting.com)

If you’re using our LEGACY HOSTED EXCHANGE 2007 service

MX record: mailgate.thevirtualcloud.com
(delete any other MX records)

Autodiscover entry: a CNAME with a name of autodiscover pointing to autodiscoverredirect.thevirtualcloud.com
(so if your domain was fredbloggs.com, you’d have an DNS CNAME entry of autodiscover.fredbloggs.com pointing to autodiscoverredirect.thevirtualcloud.com)

If you’re using our WEB HOSTING / MAILENABLE service

MX record: webmail.hahosting.com
(delete any other MX records)

Autodiscover entry: None required

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Support

If you host your DNS with us (ie your domain names point to our name servers), then raise a ticket with us and we’ll make any changes on your behalf.  If you host your DNS with another provider, we will be unable to any support other than telling you which information you need to change.  It’ll be up to yourself or your provider to make that change.

Last night (09/11/2011) we implimented a new dedicated Load Balancer and Firewall for the Exchange 2010 cluster.

The decision to impliment a dedicated appliance was taken after feedback from customers who have multiple services with us, at the same time resolving issues connecting Exchange 2010 to our legacy Exchange 2007 and Basic Mail services on MailEnable.  Having Exchange 2010 on it’s own appliance gives us much more flexibility for mail routing.

If you want a Free Trial of Hosted Exchange 2010, contact sales@hahosting.com !

We’re now using Exchange 2010 for our own email here at HA Hosting.  Our mailboxes were migrated away from Exchange 2007 last weekend.

Using the same platform as our customers gives us a much stronger support position and makes us able to respond to customer issues quicker.

There’s still plenty of customers to migrate away from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010, the project scheduled for completion before Christmas, when Exchange 2007 will be switched off.