Welcome to the High Availability Hosting Blog

We’ve today ordered 4 x Intel i7 servers to host Virtual Private Servers at the Sheffield Data Centre.

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.

We are investigating reports of a Node crash in our 2nd Hyper-V cluster.  Engineers have been called to site to investigate.  We are lead to believe all client machines on the affected node have been rebooted automatically on a new node.  More updates when known.

(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 last customers have been migrated from Exchange 2007 to our new Hosted Exchange 2010 platform.

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.

04/01/2011 17:30 – We’ve had reports of intermittent packet loss for some customers.  It seems to depend which way through Virgin Media’s network the connection comes in, so we’ve raised a ticket with Virgin Media Business (6 hour fix time).  Updates to follow.

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.

We’d like to wish all our customers, partners and friends a very Merry Christmas.  Whatever you’re doing this holiday period we hope you have a good time.

Warmest Regards,
High Availability Hosting Limited.

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 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):

—

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

—

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.

—

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

.

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.