Welcome to the High Availability Hosting Blog

We’d like to wish all our customers, partners and friends a very Merry Christmas.  Whatever you’re doing this holiday period we hope you have a good time.

Warmest Regards,
High Availability Hosting Limited.

The festive time is very nearly upon us, and whilst most of us will be tucking into mince pies (Stuart – again), we want to reassure customers we’ll still be available incase of emergencies at the Sheffield Data Centre.

Every customer gets 15 minutes of inclusive Remote Hands time per working day, not including weekends and public holidays.  With that in mind, our Remote Hands / attend site schedule is as follows:

Wednesday 21st December – Normal (working hours)
Thursday 22nd December – Normal (working hours)
Friday 23rd December – Normal (working hours)
Saturday 24th December – Emergency (DC infrastructure or OOH callout ONLY)
Sunday 25th December - Emergency (DC infrastructure or OOH callout ONLY)
Monday 26th December – Emergency (DC infrastructure or OOH callout ONLY)
Tuesday 27th December – Normal (working hours)
Wednesday 28th December – Normal (working hours)
Thursday 29th December – Normal (working hours)
Friday 30th December – Normal (working hours)
Saturday 31st December – Emergency (DC infrastructure or OOH callout ONLY)
Sunday 1st January 2012 – Emergency (DC infrastructure or OOH callout ONLY)
Monday 2nd January 2012 – Emergency (DC infrastructure or OOH callout ONLY)
Tuesday 3rd January 2012 – Normal (working hours)

No new customer installs, Request For Changes, or infrastructure work will take place on weekends or public holidays until the new year.  Customer support tickets will continue to be answered in the usaul manner (working day on low/medium, within 4 hours for high priority) throughout the festive period.

Please avoid calling us out on “Emergency” days unless it is an emergency.  “can you just…” requests will not be answered, only emergency issues with the Data Centre infrastructure or paid-for callout work will be responded to.  If a customer kit support ticket is raised on an “Emergency” day, and cannot wait until a “Normal” day, a charge WILL be made.

High Availability Hosting, working alongside another Sheffield based IT company have implemented a Private Cloud and virtualisation stack for a well known pharmacy chain who’s head office is based in Doncaster.

The work involved building a new Windows Server Hyper-V cluster and management workstation, shared iSCSI storage with replication to a duplicate device, and building several new VM’s to replace existing servers.  The work finally involved some training for the IT Administrators on site.

The first application to be fully virtualised away from physical servers was Exchange 2007, with users migrated to the VM without loss of service.

With the other IT supplier providing the hardware, and HA building the servers, a future-proof solution has been implemented good for a number of years!

If you’re planning a Private Cloud migration, or simply wanting to virtualise in-house servers, or even move to a managed service in the Sheffield Data Centre – get in touch:  sales(at)hahosting.com or call us on 0114 2280022.

With just a handful of customers left on Exchange 2007 now, and with 30 days left on the SSL Certificates, we’ve started final decom procedures for Exchange 2007 and TheVirtualCloud.

The final customers will be migrated to Exchange 2010 before mid-January, ready for us to switch off the Exchange servers, management servers, and domain controllers running the legacy TheVirtualCloud infrastructure.

Web hosting, SharePoint, Control Panels, DNS etc… have already been migrated to newer servers and switched off.

Exchange 2007 was one of the first products sold by High Availability Hosting back in February 2008, Exchange 2010 was made live in October this year.

A 10GB Exchange 2010 mailbox costs just £6 per month, with unlimited mailboxes just £8 per month!
(ex VAT)