Welcome to the High Availability Hosting Blog

The first customers are now using our new Hosting Control Panel, based on WebsitePanel.

The new control panel will replace several web interfaces to our services, including DotNetPanel (for web hosting & DNS), WebsitePanel (old – for Hyper-V), and MPS (Exchange 2007).  Enabling us to have a single point of control for all services hosted at the Sheffield Data Centre.

The new control panel also takes us further towards Exchange 2010, through which mailboxes will be provisioned via WebsitePanel.

Customers who have a service on any of the original control panels will see their services migrated over the coming weeks.  Login details, and a link will be sent to each customer individually.

In the early hours of yesterday morning (16/11/2010), we successfully implemented some patches and enhancements to our Hosted SharePoint service, these included:

• Security / bug fixes.
• Performance enhancements.
• WebDAV (open SharePoint as a drive) fix.

Clients can now open SharePoint document libraries as if they were Windows folders, previously this functionality was not possible with our service.  To open a document library as a folder, you should:

• Click the dropdown at the top-right of the document list, labeled as “View: All Documents”.
• Click “Explorer View”.
• A folder view of your documents should now appear, you can drag-and-drop documents into the folder, and navigate it as any other folder.

We also have a fix for a small number of users who’ve had issues opening Office documents from SharePoint, the issue being you are asked for your login details sometimes 3 or 4 times to open the file, and again 3 or 4 times to save the file.   This only happens to a small number of users with Internet Explorer 7 and above.  We’ve implemented a fix server-side, but you may need to click an option within Internet Explorer too…  contact us if you’re affected by this “bug”.

If you’re not a Hosted SharePoint customer and would like to know more about the service, visit the following page on our TheVirtualCloud website:

• http://www.thevirtualcloud.com/sharepoint/default.aspx

TheVirtualCloud is our SaaS service, hosted in the Sheffield Data Centre.

Over the weekend we’ve updated the 3 x High Availability Hosting Limited websites:

www.hahosting.com
www.thevirtualcloud.com
www.sheffielddatacentre.com

The main updates are over on TheVirtualCloud – where the full Flexible Cloud Servers information is now live, along with prices, examples etc…

Take a look at http://www.thevirtualcloud.com/cloudservers/default.aspx for all the details!

Other updates include links between the sites, a full list of all services (all sites) on the homepage of www.hahosting.com, and the removal of legacy VMware hosting.

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!

For all customers of our Outlook Anywhere Hosted Exchange service:

Effective from 05/09/2009 – we are no longer using the Microsoft hosted spam filtering service to pre-scan email before it enters TheVirtualCloud.  We have implemented our own edge-based spam and virus removal servers within the Sheffield Data Centre.

The new in-house servers bring the following benefits:

• Full end-to-end control of email flow, making us able to immeadiately react in the event of an incident.
• No need to pre-validate domains with Microsoft before we can accept email.
• MX and Reverse DNS records point to our servers rather than a third party hosted service.
• Same day setup on new accounts and new domains!  No need to wait 5 working days before email is able to be accepted into our servers.  New domains can be setup the same working day.
• All email both inbound and outbound will be scanned for threats.
• In-house SMTP gateway for customers of HA Hosting, TheVirtualCloud and the Sheffield Data Centre.

The new servers use spam filtering technology from SpamAssassin as well as RBL lookups and rDNS checks, and virus filtering from ClamAV.  Email containing a virus will be blocked and the sender notified, and email identified as Spam will be pre-marked with “SPAM – Low”, “SPAM – Med”, or “SPAM – High” in the subject line, allowing Exchange 2007 and end-users to easily spot and junk messages.

No changes are required at a customer level, as all MX records pointing to “mailgate.thevirtualcloud.com” will continue to operate as before, the switchover happened silently behind the scenes and no email was lost.

These improvements are at no additional cost to customers, all prices will remain as before.

More information on Outlook Anywhere Hosted Exchange can be found at:

http://www.thevirtualcloud.com/outlookanywhere/default.aspx

The web site will be updated to include the new spam filter service in due course.

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.

It’s with great pleasure I announce that the hosting room of the Sheffield Data Centre is complete.

The first 4 racks are fully installed and (nearly) cabled.  We’ve this week placed an order for an additional 12 racks to meet customer demand, and we’ve started to show the first prospective clients round the building.

The “snag list” is nearly complete too, with only a few jobs remaining – most notibly the gassing of the air-conditioners which is scheduled to happen this Thursday. 

Today was also the day our 100Mbit fibre went live, with a connection straight through to the Internet.  We’ve now got a few days of testing and firewall building ahead, which is where the “fun” starts  :-)

So the question everybody’s been asking us… “when are you going to open??”.  Providing the air-con gassing goes ok, and the network build is complete and tested over the weekend, we’ll begin to offer colocation from next week.  So if you’re interested in colocation with us, now’s the time to email us and arrange a visit.

We’re booking people in to see us from next Monday (22nd), so either give us a call on 0114 228 0022 or email sales@sheffielddatacentre.com.  If you’ve already got your details registered with us you’ll be getting a more personalised invitation later this week, or you could queue jump and contact us!

And finally the usual update pics…

Computer room build complete

100Mbit fibre live

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

After the Sheffield Data Centre opens on the 10th June, we’re offering all colocation customers free bandwidth until 2010.

Single server customers (rack server or tower server) will enjoy 1Mbit free bandwidth, and full rack customers will enjoy 5Mbit free bandwidth.

Full rack colocation details here:
http://www.sheffielddatacentre.com/colocation-racks.aspx

Single rack server colocation details here:
http://www.sheffielddatacentre.com/colocation-servers.aspx

Single tower server colocation details here:
http://www.sheffielddatacentre.com/colocation-towers.aspx

You get 1 IP address included with single servers, and up to 32 IP addresses with full racks.  If you need more IP addresses this is possible but may require justification to RIPE, if you can justify it you can have as many as you want!!

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