Welcome to the High Availability Hosting Blog

Due to customer demand, we’ve increased the inbound & outbound attachement limits for customers on Hosted Exchange 2010 to 40MB (up from 10MB).

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)

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

.

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.

A few customers on our new Exchange 2010 platform have had issues with the “autodiscover” settings for Outlook (particually the ones running Mac’s).  The Autodiscover has either prompted an invalid certificate, or not auto-configured some mailboxes.

We’re pleased to say we’ve got a solution in place now by moving the Autodiscover redirect to a new IIS site and adding a 302 redirect to the actual autodiscover.xml on Exchange.

Customers running Outlook for Mac, PC, and phones have reported earlier problems now fixed.  We’re contacting our other Hosted Exchange 2010 customers now advising them to use the new autodiscover DNS name.

We’ve now had real customers on Exchange 2010 for the last 10 days, and the feedback has been great!  As a result we’re preparing to roll out Hosted Exchange 2010 to existing customers (migrations from Exchange 2007), and process new customer orders.

Pricing will be announced later this week, but there will be 3 new packages:

• Exchange Basic
• Exchange Standard
• Exchange Unlimited

Public Folders

Public Folders will no longer be available in Exchange 2010 (due to the way Hosted Mode works), so we’ll be migrating Public Folders to “functional mailboxes” which will be accessible to all users.

Outlook 2010

All users to the Standard or Unlimited services will get a copy of Microsoft Outlook 2010 for PC, or Microsoft Outlook 2011 for Mac.

Availability

Hosted Exchange 2010 is available now.  Contact sales@hahosting.com to order.  The website will be updated in due course.

Our web hosting platform migration to our new hosting servers starts tonight at 22:00.  All customers with hosting or mailboxes on our legacy servers were informed individually last week.

Hosting will be migrated from our Windows 2003 / SQL2005 / ASP.net 2 servers to new Windows 2008 R2 SP1 / SQL2008R2 / ASP.net 4 servers, email will migrate from SmarterMail to MailEnable 5, with new versions of PHP and MySQL, all controlled via our Hosting Control Panel on WebsitePanel.

A combined total of hundreds of websites, mailboxes, databases and files will be moved in 8 stages over the next 3 nights, updates will appear on the blog once each stage is complete.

UPDATE 23/09/2011 23:00 – SSL for webmail.hahosting.com has been created, and existing customer MX records pointing to webmail.sheffielddatacentre.com have been migrated.  “No longer in use” domains shut down.

UPDATE 24/09/2011 23:30 – All websites have been migrated to new web servers, traffic is slowly dropping off the old servers as DNS propagates.  No errors encountered so far, but contact us if your site has an error!

UPDATE 25/09/2011 02:00 – First batch of email accounts has been moved to from SmarterMail to MailEnable, customer testing with selected accounts to happen over next 24 hours.

New webmail – https://webmail.hahosting.com

UPDATE 26/09/2011 06:00 – All customer email accounts have been migrated to MailEnable, all MX records have been changed.  Any customer who has problems logging in today should email support@hahosting.com