Welcome to the High Availability Hosting Blog

We’ve started carrying out power audit work at the Sheffield Data Centre, accurately documenting what each customer & device is allocated, and what it’s using.

All co-lo customers will be contacted over the weekend with regards to what they’re allowed, and if they’re using any excess, but for the sake of completeness here are the allowances (unless  by prior arrangement):

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Single Server

• 1 x power socket
• 1A power

Quarter Rack

• 4 x power sockets
• 2A power

Half Rack

• 6 x power sockets
• 5A power

Full Rack

• 12 x power sockets
• 10A power

Additional Resources

• Additional power @ £22 per month per Ampre
• Additional sockets @ £2.50 per month

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All prices exclude VAT.

Customers are not permitted to plug devices direct into the UPS, only into PDU’s provided by us.

Customers may provide their own additional PDU’s, but they should plug into our PDU.  We use our PDU as the measuring point for power consumed.

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Our wholesale energy prices have increased this year, we’ve decided not to pass on this cost to customers at this time, however we will be invoicing customers more activly with regards to their actual power and socket usage.

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

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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.

Last night our monitoring system alerted us to 4 BGP resets on our edge router to Virgin Media.

The first 3 resets lasted less than 2 minutes, the 4th lasted 11 minutes.  By the time the on-call engineer logged in at 02:10 everything was back to normal but we did get lots of log data to throw at Virgin Media.

Unsurprisingly, pi$$ed of customers contacted us this morning, we’re sorry you experienced an issue out of our control.

We (HA) tell customers when we’re performing scheduled maintenance, a rough time we’ll start, and a best-estimate of the duration.  It’s a shame not all suppliers do this.   We’re still waiting for an official statement from Virgin Media.

Over the last weekend we migrated our first customer VPS from VMware ESX 3.5 to Hyper-V 2008R2.

This is a significant milestone as it signifies the start of winding down VMware for customer servers.  All new VM’s or VPS’s have been provisioned on Hyper-V (controlled by Service Centre Virtual Machine Manager, in a HA cluster) since 2010.

All our own servers have also been migrated to Hyper-V with the exception of Exchange 2007 which is now winding down due to the launch of Exchange 2010.

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.

After nearly a year saying Exchange 2010 will be available to customers, we can now finally (and proudly) say the first mailboxes are now LIVE and handling email.

We have a brand new 3 node cluster (3 nodes, 3 databases, active/active/passive) in a single Database Availability Group, hosted on separate VM’s on separate nodes here at the Sheffield Data Centre.

We’ve got some more user testing to do this week, along with gathering feedback on various devices including iPhone, Android and Nokia, as well as Outlook on the desktop.

New customers who’ve been waiting for Exchange 2010 from us (there are a few) will start to see their orders processed this week.  Existing customers on Exchange 2007 will be contacted at the end of the month regarding the mandatory upgrade / migration.

No new orders will be taken for Hosted Exchange 2007, and the website will be updated to reflect this.  There will also be a budget Hosted Exchange mailbox (less space and without Outlook) in the pipeline too.

So, if you feel your email needs an upgrade, get in touch!  call us on 0114 228 0022, or email sales@hahosting.com

(Hosted Exchange 2010 now available from High Availability Hosting)

Whilst investigating a support request from a customer yesterday, we discovered some Mozilla Thunderbird users had problems sending email through our new Basic Mail service, powered by MailEnable.

If you use our web hosting email, or Basic Mail services, and have problems sending email (receiving is fine), try the following links for guidance on SMTP Authentication:

http://www.mailenable.com/Help/Files/configuringthunderbird.htm

http://kb.mozillazine.org/SMTP_authentication

Outlook users seems to be OK, as Outlook uses a different method for SMTP Authentication (by using the same credentials as POP3).

This information may be relevant to all customers who have been migrated to our new Basic Mail email service (also used for web hosting mailboxes) over the last weekend, or new customers using Basic Mail and having problems with Thunderbird.

Thanks to Sara for her help testing the fix!