Welcome to the High Availability Hosting Blog

We’ve today ordered 4 x Intel i7 servers to host Virtual Private Servers at the Sheffield Data Centre.

These servers will suppliment our existing AMD Phenom II server cluster, giving customers either AMD or Intel options.  We’ll be doing some testing this week before bringing the servers into live service next week.

Prices to customers won’t change, and we may run a special offer in February for Intel based VPS’s.

HA Hosting provide Virtual Private Servers from just £10 per month, with a choice of Windows or Linux Operating Systems.  See http://www.sheffielddatacentre.com/servers/default.aspx for full details.

We are investigating reports of a Node crash in our 2nd Hyper-V cluster.  Engineers have been called to site to investigate.  We are lead to believe all client machines on the affected node have been rebooted automatically on a new node.  More updates when known.

(Saturday 28th January 16:20).

UPDATE 17:10 – All services for all customers who’s servers were on this node should now be back to normal.  The offending cluster node has been taken out of service for hardware replacement on Monday (30th).  Further work next week to re-balance the cluster following this incident will happen next week.

We apologise for this issue.

The last customers have been migrated from Exchange 2007 to our new Hosted Exchange 2010 platform.

The legacy (3 year old) Exchange, Management, Domain Controller servers will now be soft-decommed before being switched off at the end of the month.

The website still says Exchange 2007 – this will be fixed!

Hosted Exchange 2010 10GB mailboxes are £6.00 per month.  Unlimited and ” basic” mailboxes are also available, contact us for more information, a trial, or to order.

04/01/2011 17:30 – We’ve had reports of intermittent packet loss for some customers.  It seems to depend which way through Virgin Media’s network the connection comes in, so we’ve raised a ticket with Virgin Media Business (6 hour fix time).  Updates to follow.

UPDATE 04/01/2011 22:00 – Not all customers affected still, depends which traffic route is followed.  Virgin Media have escalated to BT for further checks.

UPDATE 05/01/2011 05:30 – Virgin Media have completed loop tests overnight and reset BGP sessions, we have rebooted 1 edge router. No further significant packet loss detected overnight however we will gauge during the working day.

UPDATE 05/01/2011 21:00 – It seems the majority of customers affected by packet loss yesterday are coming in via PlusNet, whilst we can’t confirm this fully yet, we’re asking any customer who uses PlusNet as their ISP to contact us ASAP if they’re having a problem.