The fibre will be provided by BT for connection direct into their 21CN network, with onward Internet transit.  This brings our fibre connectivity N+1 in line with power and cooling which is already redundant.  BT also brings a second transit provider to us.

We’re all really pleased here at HA Hosting, as another fibre will enable us to trial several in-the-pipeline products, including the possible return to dedicated gaming colo.  The additional bandwidth has already been partially pre-sold to existing customers requiring extra capacity, and will allow us to meet future needs.

Due sometime in April, we’ll of course blog the install when it happens, and if BT have top open any more manholes, we’ll try to get pictures  :-)

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.

(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 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.

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.

Warmest Regards,
High Availability Hosting Limited.

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.

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.

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)