Welcome to the High Availability Hosting Blog

We’ve replaced the front doors of the remainder of our colocation racks with rear doors specially purchased to improve airflow.

This week Racks 7 to 16 have had their glass front doors removed and perferated rear doors installed.  The locks were also changed round so customers with their own keys can continue to access their equipment as before.

We tested swapping around doors last year as a trial, and with improved hot air containment and extraction in the first hot aisle, overall temperatures were lower and airflow greater.  With summer around the corner (somewhere) we’ve replaced the 2nd aisle’s doors as well.

With customers taking occupancy in the 3rd cold aisle, now was an ideal oppertunity to get this work done.

The black perferated doors were specially shipped by our supplier – Orion, and fit the racks perfectly. They also add to privacy as now you can’t see as easily into racks, but have a greater airflow.

New Rack Doors April 2011

For more information on our colocation packages, check out http://www.sheffielddatacentre.com

We’ll be launching the latest version of the Sheffield Data Centre website next week…

All the services of TheVirtualCloud will now be alongside colocation and rack space on www.sheffielddatacentre.com, along with updates to Cloud VM Servers, Hosted Exchange, and Colocation.

Lots of new info, lots of updates.  We’ll blog it when it goes live!!

Sneak preview of homepage:

Sheffield Data Centre January 2011 home page preview

Last week the Sheffield Data Centre website (www.sheffielddatacentre.com) was updated to show the new single server (1U, 2U, 3U, 4U, mATX tower) prices and inclusive bandwidth options.

Due to customer demand we’ve scrapped the Pay As You Go @ £0.12p bandwidth, and instead added inclusive amounts of 1TB, 2TB, 3TB or unmetered bandwidth to our rack space.

• New prices for single server space at the Sheffield Data Centre are at the following address:
  http://www.sheffielddatacentre.com/colocation/colocation-servers.aspx

Existing customer?

New customers & servers will be subject to the new packages now.  We’re looking to move existing game server customers onto the new packages before Christmas, and existing business customers with contracted rack space early next year.

All ports will be 100Mbit burstable.

We’re also one of a handful of colocation hosts who offer unmetered ports.  Subject to fair use we will let you have unmetered throughput to and from the internet for just £95 per month per server. 

(Fair use means when the network is saturated we may employ traffic shaping to ensure a fair connection speed to all users).

Contact us (box on the right) if you want to know more, or visit us at www.sheffielddatacentre.com

We’ve started to gather statistics on bandwidth usage on the Low Latency Network used for gaming.

We currently provide an “all you can eat” service with no QOS or Traffic Management for £5 per month.  Unfortunately due to massive demand and unfortunately some abuse we’ve had to re-think this strategy.

Later this year we’ll be introducing an allowance on the connection, and charging (at a low rate) for additional usage thereafter. We’re using MRTG to monitor port usage between now and August, and will use this data to give us an average baseline for and come up with a generous inclusive allowance for our gaming customers.

MRTG is non-intrusive and won’t impact your gaming performance.  Stats will be available to each customer, along with throughput graphs and totals.

The “Low Latency Network” will remain just that – a network which is logically closer to the WAN switches and devoid of Traffic Management.  Unfortunately the 100% free bandwidth could never last forever, and was actually discontinued for business customers earlier this year.  We hope establishing a baseline of actual usage rather than plucking a number out of thin air will be a fair way of determining the allowance.

I’d like to also remind everyone that Web Hosting on the Low Latency Network is strictly prohibited.  Gaming control panels are fine, but general hosting & downloads is not allowed as this eats into the bandwidth allocated just for gaming.  Any user found web hosting on this network (we do check) will be instantly cut off and asked to discontinue.

If you’ve got any questions you can email support @ hahosting.com where we’ll be happy to help!

Attention all Gamers! 

Built with the help of two local gaming clans, the new Low Latency Network (LLN) at the Sheffield Data Centre is a dedicated VLAN logically closer to the edge routers than the usual colocation networks.

Because of it’s placement, the Low Latency Network is unaffected by traffic shaping, QOS, bandwith monitoring, and other admin which can affect not the speed, but the latency of network traffic.

The LLN is plugged straight into the WAN switches, with connection speeds in multiples of 10Mbit (managed by us) and no bandwidth throughput restrictions.

Gaming Server Colocation prices start from just £32 per month for a 1U server, or £40 a month for a tower server.  All servers include 1 IP address, 1 amp power and 15 minutes “remote hands assistance” per day.

See http://www.sheffielddatacentre.com/colocation/gamers.aspx for more details!

We’ve simplified and enhanced our bandwidth offers even further, with great deals for all colocation customers regardless of type.

Full Rack / Half Rack

• 5MBit free until January 2010

Then either:

• 5Mbit dedicated for just £50 per month!
• Pay-As-You-Go for just £0.25p per Gigabyte.

Shared Racks (single server slots)

• UNLIMITED inclusive bandwidth.*  40Mbit connection to the rack, use as much as you like, no limits.
• 5Mbit dedicated for just £50 per month.
• Pay-As-You-Go for just £0.25p per Gigabyte.

*The only caveat with the Unlimited Inclusive Bandwidth, is all servers in the rack have access to the same connection, if you require dedicated guaranteed bandwidth, or reporting on throughput, go for Dedicated or PAYG.

These new fantastic bandwidth options are open to both new and existing customers, for more information check out the pages at http://www.sheffielddatacentre.com/colocation/ or email sales@hahosting.com for more info.

Hello!  Firstly, hope you like the new look blog.  We’ve moved the blog from the old home on the Sheffield Data Centre website  to a dedicated site here at www.hahosting.info – the new blog will have news, info, updates and media from HA Hosting,  TheVirtualCloud and the Sheffield Data Centre.  All the content from the original blog is here too.

This new look and feel for the blog is a sneak preview of what our websites will look like when they’re updated next week.  All  our websites will have a shared theme and flow into each other with common menus and headers.

We’ve got a lot going on right now, and we’ll be posting detailed updates later, but here’s what we’re up to in November:

HA Hosting

• Trials are being planned of Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 with failover clustering for Virtual Dedicated Servers.
• Upgrade of the Client Control Panel due before christmas.

TheVirtualCloud

• New web hosting infrastructure on Windows Server 2008 is starting to be rolled out.
• Outlook Anywhere Hosted Exchange price reduced to just £6.50 per month for a 1GB mailbox.
• First trial customers for our upcoming Hosted SharePoint service are now live.
• Replacement DNS Name Servers are now live, customer migrations due soon.

Sheffield Data Centre

• Energy Saving Evaporative Cooling technology delivered to site, awaiting installation.
• Ground works for the site generator have started.
• Low Latency Network for gamers has been successfully trailed.
• Free Bandwidth Forever is being offered in the shared colo racks.
• 5Mbit for £50 per month package coming soon.

In the short term we’re working on the new cooling system in the Data Centre, preparing the network for the Unlimited Bandwidth Forever deals, and completing the rollout of the new web hosting infrastructure.  Detailed updates for everything will be posted soon, so watch this space!

Many of you have asked us what happens to our “free bandwidth” offers after they run out in January.

In order to stay competitive, as well as offer something extra other colocation providers don’t, we’ve come up with 3 options for bandwidth after the free inclusive bandwidth offers expire.  Of course existing customers can benefit from these now if they wish!

Pay As You Go
Simply pay for the bandwidth you use.  Your servers will be connected to the Internet at speeds up to 34Mbit, and bandwidth (throughput) is charged at £0.50p per Gigabyte.

To give you an idea what 1GB is capable of, it’s enough to transfer:

 > 48 photos, or
 > 150 high quality songs, or
 > 1 movie, or
 > 300 emails

Pre-Pay
Get 200 Gigabytes of bandwidth (throughput) when you pay £50 (equivalent to £0.25p per Gigabyte!) in advance.  With no time limit, the bandwidth is valid until it runs out.  When you do run out simply pay another £50 for another 200GB.  Your servers will be connected to the Internet at speeds up to 34Mbit.

To give you an idea what 200GB is capable of, it’s enough to transfer:

 > 9,600 photos, or
 > 30,000 high quality songs, or
 > 200 movies, or
 > 60,000 emails

Dedicated
If you need dedicated throughput or fixed costs (for example for remote backup) then our dedicated bandwidth starts from £33 per Mbit per month.  Deals on 5Mbit and 10Mbit are available, and you can go up to 100Mbit.  You can also burst over your allocation by up to one third (33%). Contact us directly for a quote.

To give you an idea what 1Mbit continuously can transfer, over a month you could move approx 316GB of data.  The same 316GB would cost £158 on Pay As you Go!

New customer deal
We also have a fantastic deal for new customers launching soon, watch this space or contact us if you’re looking to move in to the Sheffield Data Centre now!

Due to an outage last night at our previous colocation provider (one of many outages this year), we took the business decision to move our exising servers and SAN storage early into the Sheffield Data Centre.

The following services are now fully colocated within the Sheffield Data Centre:

• High Availability Hosting – VMware dedicated server hosting
• The Virtual Cloud – Web hosting, Exchange Hosting, Spam / Virus filtering
• Sheffield Data Centre – this website & blog
• Core networking / AD services / DNS services

All services were successfully migrated for 03:00 this morning (1st July), and DNS started to propagate quickly.  We worked through the night to ensure all applications were working post-migration.

We apologise for any inconvienience this may have caused (especially with slow DNS propagation beyond our control).

- Stuart.

The latest update to the Sheffield Data Centre website is now live at:  http://www.sheffielddatacentre.com

We’ve included options for 16A and 32A full racks, 8A half racks, and single servers up to 4U.  We’ve also simplified our pricing for extra power and bandwidth, with extra power at only £22 per month per Amp, and extra bandwidth at only £33 per month per synchronous Megabit.

The current lead-time for half racks and full racks is around 5 working days, and lead-times for single servers are as quick as next day subject to space.

The response to our go-live has been fantastic, with potential clients already queueing to come and see us.  If you’re interested in visiting us give us a call on 0114 228 0022 or email sales@sheffielddatacentre.com

We’ve also got some advertising going live next month into some local Sheffield publications, as below.

Sheffield Data Centre Now Open advert