Welcome to the High Availability Hosting Blog

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)

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!!!

:-)

In the early hours of yesterday morning (16/11/2010), we successfully implemented some patches and enhancements to our Hosted SharePoint service, these included:

• Security / bug fixes.
• Performance enhancements.
• WebDAV (open SharePoint as a drive) fix.

Clients can now open SharePoint document libraries as if they were Windows folders, previously this functionality was not possible with our service.  To open a document library as a folder, you should:

• Click the dropdown at the top-right of the document list, labeled as “View: All Documents”.
• Click “Explorer View”.
• A folder view of your documents should now appear, you can drag-and-drop documents into the folder, and navigate it as any other folder.

We also have a fix for a small number of users who’ve had issues opening Office documents from SharePoint, the issue being you are asked for your login details sometimes 3 or 4 times to open the file, and again 3 or 4 times to save the file.   This only happens to a small number of users with Internet Explorer 7 and above.  We’ve implemented a fix server-side, but you may need to click an option within Internet Explorer too…  contact us if you’re affected by this “bug”.

If you’re not a Hosted SharePoint customer and would like to know more about the service, visit the following page on our TheVirtualCloud website:

• http://www.thevirtualcloud.com/sharepoint/default.aspx

TheVirtualCloud is our SaaS service, hosted in the Sheffield Data Centre.

We’re planning to apply some patches to our SharePoint servers this coming Tuesday morning (16th) around 02:00.

As part of the patching, the web server will reboot twice, so we’re suspending access to SharePoint from 02:00 until around 03:00.  The patching is to address 2 points:

• Security / OS patches.
• WebDAV upgrade.

We’re not execting any customer impact due to the time allocated, however please contact us if you’re likely to be:

a; awake, and…
b; using SharePoint at 02:00 on the 16th November

Cheers,
Stuart.

17/06/2010 04:30 – SharePoint is now back online.  Due to issues moving the master config databases to a different SQL installation, plus issues installing a SharePoint rollup patch we have decided to roll-back all changes made by un-doing the VMware snapshot.  No data was damaged and SharePoint is back as it was before the change started.  We’ll review the data we collected and re-attempt the upgrade soon.

17/06/2010 00:30 – SharePoint hosting is now currently offline while planned upgrade works have started.  We aim to have the service back and running within 4 hours.

Last week we (quietly) launched our Flexible Virtual Servers hosted on Hyper-V.

Since we had a number of back-orders from existing clients to fulfill, we’ve been working hard to provision these new servers first – as well as creating documentation, support access, procedures etc (I know, bit boring but has to be done…)

Demand has sure outstripped supply, at least on the first cluster nodes we’ve built.  So much so that this weekend we’re upgrading the memory in the first 2 cluster nodes, before looking at buying more physical servers as we move forward.

Flexible Virtual Servers will be available to new customers in May.  Pricing will be formally announced shortly, as well as updating the websites, but I can give an example server here:

• 1 x Opteron 2.0Ghz CPU
• 1GB memory
• 25GB SAN Disk Space
• Unlimited Bandwidth
• 2 x IP Addresses
• Linux OS

£38.50 per month!

Windows server OS + £5 per month

You’ll be able to configure your server as you want it, with anything from 128MB to 3GB memory, a variety of Operating System options, 25GB to 1TB disk space, inclusive bandwidth.  The “smallest” server, will start at just £7 per month.

If you can’t wait, or want to know more, contact sales(at)hahosting.com or call us on 0114 228 0022.

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.

Evaporative Cooler
Our new cooling system went fully live this month, replacing the conventional air-conditioning units which have now been powered down (but remain as standby / backup units).  Due to the different way the cooler chills the air the process of changeover took 3 days but went without a hitch or service impact. We have now reduced our cooling energy usage by about 75%!

Evaporative Cooler System Live!

Hot aisle containment
Planned from when the Sheffield Data Centre was still on paper, we have implemented hot aisle containment on the first block of 6 racks (4×2 – comms, vmware, customer).  Hot exhaust air is now contained and evacuated from the computer room without mixing with the chilled air being pumped in.  The net result is the computer room runs cooler, the hot air pumps need less energy, and chilled air isn’t contaminated with hot air causing an imbalance.  It also looks cool!
 
Containment of the next block of racks is due to start next week.

Hot Aisle Containment

Hot Aisle Containment - entrance to hot aisle

Standby Generator
The generator has been tested, and re-wired ready for connecting to the Sheffield Data Centre.  Only problem is every time we arrange the concrete slab laying and crane to move the generator, it snows or gets too cold for the concrete to harden quick enough.  Another attempt will be scheduled for the near future, watch this space!
 
New Mailgate (spam / virus filter) going live
We have implemented a new spam / virus filter based on ESVA, having been tested by a small number of users, we hope to make it fully live before the end of Feburary – the exising Windows / SmarterMail server will then be switched off.
 
With additional ESVA servers (loadbalanced), we are planning to offer a spam / virus filtering service for users outside our own hosted email.  Email will first be sent to us for screening before being sent back to your existing mail server.  Users will get a daily quarantine email showing whats been blocked, along with options to release or block the message.
 
Hyper-V
Final designs for the Hyper-V and VMM (Virtual Machine Manager) servers are now being drafted, we hope to start testing sometime in March.  Prices have not yet been fully set, but are looking around £35 a month for an entry level Windows / Linux server.  Contact us if you’d like to trial a Hyper-V Dedicated Server.

As of this morning (19/01/2010) we have altered the settings on our mailgate spam filters to make them more aggressive.

From now on:

• Spam marked as HIGH will automatically be deleted.
• Spam marked as MEDIUM will try to be delivered to your junk folder.
• Spam marked as LOW will continue to be delivered, but prexifed for your information.

The thresholds on each setting have also been lowered to make the system more sensitive.

If your a TheVirtualCloud email customer, and you don’t get an email you were expecting, and you think it might have been deleted, open a support ticket with us with your email address and the the email address of the sender you were expecting the email from. We can then tell you if it’s been captured.