Welcome to the High Availability Hosting Blog

Special offer!!

We’re running a special offer at the moment on 1.5GB memory Virtual Machines, from just £25 per month you get the following spec VM:

• Dual core vCPU @ 3.2GHz
• 1.5GB dedicated memory
• 50GB SAN disk
• 2 Public IP addresses
• Unlimited bandwidth
• High Availability option included
• Web reboot console

Linux OS:  £25 per month
Windows OS:  from £30 per month

Full details are here:  http://www.sheffielddatacentre.com/servers/special_1.5GB.aspx

Contact sales@ hahosting.com or call us on 0114 2280022 to have your VM configured just for you.

A snippit from the web page:

1.5GB VM special offer £25 per month

Did anyone notice the power going off at the Sheffield Data Centre on Monday?  Nope?  That’s because our standby generator cut in and took over without interruption to service!

We had planned electrical works Monday (25th October) morning (Meter Plus onsite installing new equipment), and as part of a controlled failover the generator was started and mains power disconnected.  The mains was ws off for 16 minutes but service remained at 100%.

The work (which was planned well in advance) was pre-empted with a number of controlled start / stops of the generator and 2 complete data centre failovers beforehand, the longest being Sunday 24′th where the Sheffield Data Centre was running 100% on generator for 2 hours.

We’ve never had a utility power outage (we have a feed to a substation just outside the compound), but we’re confident that if we did there would not be a service outage!

Unlike other facilities which might have to get customers to shut down servers before maintenance, we can keep the lights on for up to 9 hours with the diesel onsite, and we’ve got fuel re-supply arrangements in case that’s not long enough!

…an example of High Availability Hosting at it’s best!

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!

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.

If you’re looking for a fully managed server rather than rack space – why not look at our VMware Hosted Dedicated Servers.

From just £59 per month, including:

• Server hardware
• Operating System licence
• Data Centre hosting
• SAN storage
• Hardware resilience
• 30 day money back guarantee

Servers run on a high availability VMware cluster – so in the unlikely event of hardware failure your server will reboot on different hardware – eliminating downtime caused by hardware faults.

We also provide and manage the Operating System licence, choose from Windows 2003 / 2008, CentOS, RedHat, and Solaris.

All your data is stored on SAN storage with redundant volumes and standby disks.

For more information, and to order online, head over to:

http://www.hahosting.com/servers/dedicated/default.aspx

Another milestone passed!  The computer room is on it’s own lighting and power circuits!  All the temporary lights and sockets have now been removed, and the final lighting grid (complete with emergency bulkheads) are in place.  The decorating is (nearly) complete – just the touch-ups left to do where people have been unkind enough to drill holes for wires and the like  ;-) 

 

Lights being installed in the computer room

Finished lights

High Availability Hosting Limited are proud to announce the construction of a 25 rack hosting facility in Sheffield, South Yorkshire.  The Sheffield Data Centre will go live on Wednesday 10th June 2009 for customers wishing to colocate a server, a full rack, or outsource an existing IT suite to us.

Located in Holbrook, South East Sheffield (S20), we’re ideally located for easy access from the M1, A57 and Sheffield City Centre.  The Data Centre will have 1050U of usable rack space, and be able to host a mixture 900 physical and virtual servers at full capacity.

Keep an eye on the blog for updates as we begin the two month fitting out period, we’ll update the blog regurally with new information and pictures as we progress.  Your questions and comments are always welcome, simply get in touch!!

Stuart Stones, Rory Delahoyde – Company Directors
High Availability Hosting Limited / The Sheffield Data Centre
www.hahosting.com
www.thevirtualcloud.com
www.sheffielddatacentre.com
enquiries@sheffielddatacentre.com