Welcome to the High Availability Hosting Blog

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

Today (Saturday) we’ve completed the decommission of our original Hyper-V cluster built for TheVirtualCloud.

All VM’s running on that cluster were migrated to our new HVS cluster over the last month, with the final 3 moved last Tuesday morning just before we installed new iSCSI SAN switches.  The legacy servers are now unpatched and ready to be de-racked.

Our new Hyper-V cluster runs on custom built hardware, controlled by Microsoft System Centre Virtual Machine Manager, with a client interface via WebsitePanel.  Full information on the product offering can be found at:

http://www.sheffielddatacentre.com/servers/

TheVirtualCloud decommission

Decommission of TheVirtualCloud services is well underway with DNS, SharePoint, Control Panels, and now Hyper-V all moved to brand new platforms.

Web Hosting, Legacy Basic Mail, and Exchange remains (in that order).  New web hosting and mail servers are already in use for new customers, and the Exchange 2010 SP1 build plan has been signed off.

Web Hosting and Basic Mail customers will be moved to new servers before the end of September.  Exchange 2010 builds are due to start at the end of September.

Today we’ve said farewell to Amanda, our client backup server.

Due to be replaced at the end of September, but retired early due to a failed disk.  Customers are already using our new hosted backup based on StoreGrid, so it seemed the right time to switch Amanda off.

Our new Remote Backup service has already been well received with clients, with positive feedback on the ease of use to configure and schedule backups.  The ability to backup changed and moved files as often as every hour has already saved time for one customer who was able to recover a file from 2 hours previous, rather than the night before!!

Prices start from £9 per month, including 1 server licence and 10GB storage.  Extra storage and server licences are available from just £5 per month.

If you’re interested in knowing more, contact us at sales@hahosting.com or call us on 0114 2280022!

The SSL certificate on clientaccess.hahosting.com has been renewed today.  Anyone who had issues logging in today will find those issues resolved.

Firstly, Happy New Year to everyone!

2010 was a great year for High Availability Hosting limited, with a huge increase in customer orders, over double 2009’s revenue for colocation, growth in Virtual Dedicated Servers, and significant improvements in the infrastructure at the Sheffield Data Centre – including the go-live of the diesel generator, cooling system refit, and increased network capacity.

2011 is set to be our best year yet, building on the growth experienced in 2010.

2011 projects

Here’s a sneak preview of the projects planned for 2011:

• Hosted Exchange 2010 SP1 launch
• New dedicated Managed Firewall VMware cluster
• Additional monitoring, centering on “service” rather than “servers”
• New Hyper-V hardware cluster
• New web hosting service launch
• WebsitePanel to replace DotNetPanel throughout all hosting
• New improved QOS, bandwidth billing, and usage reporting
• Second Evaporative Cooler in the data centre
• Sheffield Data Centre maintenance refit
• New Active Directory

There’s probably more little projects on the list that have been missed off, but you get the idea – it’s going to be another busy year for us!

3rd birthday

It’s also HA’s 3rd birthday this February, we’re planning an Open Day for the Sheffield Data Centre, where people can come and meet us, see the Data Centre and chat about our services, as well as witness a generator fail-over.  No date has been decided yet, but it’ll be sometime in February!

We’re also planning some special offers and discounts for new customers who sign up in February.

Watch this space for more news, and have a prosperous new year!!!

:-)

VAT Increase January 2011

The UK Government has announced it will increase the UK standard rate of VAT from 17.5% to 20% on Tuesday, 4th January 2011.  For more information, please refer to http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/vat/forms-rates/rates/rate-increase.htm

Therefore, invoices raised on/after 4th January will reflect the new higher VAT rate of 20%

If you pay by Credit Card, you do not need to take any action and the new higher price will automatically be charged. However if you pay by Standing Order or BACS, you will need to amend your payment to the new higher price.  We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause but you will appreciate it is entirely beyond our control.

Holidays are comming…

Finally as the holiday season quickly approaches, we wish you a Merry Christmas and you all the best for 2011.

We will be on call as usual over Christmas, and all support tickets will still get answered.  Emergency callout remains the same (although it may take longer to get to site if Stuart keeps eating all the mince pices… *smile*).

Best wishes,
Rory, Stuart and the team.

We’ve this week updated our 3 websites:

• www.sheffielddatacentre.com
• www.thevirtualcloud.com
• www.hahosting.com

We’ve refreshed some out-of-date content, added some new information, restructured the menu’s to make them easier to navigate, and fixed some spelling errors etc… (thanks to everyone who pointed them out to us… ahem!)

We’ve also posted the first signs of Hyper-V which (quietly) started going live this week.  We’re now taking orders from existing customers for Hyper-V based dedicated servers, and we’ll be opening up orders to the world at large soon.

If you get chance to have a look at our updated sites, and want to feedback anything to us (good or bad) please do!  Some of the changes this time round came from user feedback!

Thanks,
Stuart.

We’ve today updated the HA Hosting website:

• Removal of Solaris server hosting
• First mentions of Hyper-V hosting (coming soon)
• Graphics updates

Hyper-V Virtual Dedicated Servers will be available soon, new lower pricing and specific details will be posted soon.  In the meantime if you’d like to know more about our Hyper-V Virtual Dedicated Servers, contact us!

As of 01/01/2010 we will no longer be offering Solaris 10 Virtual Dedicated Servers for new orders.  Exsiting Solaris servers will continue to be hosted as before.

We are removing Solaris hosting from our list of Operating Systems in preperation for a new line-up of Virtual Dedicated Servers on our Microsoft Hyper-V cluster due to launch early 2010.

Details of our new server line-up will be posted on here as well as our website at www.hahosting.com in the new year.

The new websites for HA Hosting, TheVirtualCloud and The Sheffield Data Centre went live last night.  Information on every service we offer has been updated, some prices reduced, and new services introduced.  Along with a fresh new look based on a shared stylesheet and master page.

Major updates include:

• Single look and feel across all sites (and this blog!)
• Extra “value added” services added for VMware hosted Dedicated Servers (HA Hosting)
• Outlook Anywhere – now with same day setup (TheVirtualCloud)
• New Professional Web Hosting service added (TheVirtualCloud)
• SharePoint Hosting service added (TheVirtualCloud)
• Updated colocation services added (Sheffield Data Centre)
• New bandwidth offers and options added (Sheffield Data Centre)
• Extra services (firewalls, rDNS, Backups, SAN) added (Sheffield Data Centre)
• Extra data centre information, power, cooling, network etc… (Sheffield Data Centre)

Blog posts on specific services (such as the new Professional Web Hosting) will follow next week, in the meantime if you get a chance, check out our new websites at:

• www.hahosting.com
• www.thevirtualcloud.com
• www.sheffielddatacentre.com