Welcome to the High Availability Hosting Blog

We’ve successfully migrated all our Professional Web Hosting customers’ DNS and Email from the old web servers to new dedicated DNS and shared web servers.

All existing Professional Web Hosting customers will now enjoy quicker responce times, fewer errors and an updated SmarterMail web server, updated from v4.3 to v6.1.

Moving of the IIS / web sites will happen over next weekend, but we’re on track to switch off the old web hosting platform for mid-December.

More info on our Professional Web Hosting service can be found at:

http://www.thevirtualcloud.com/webhosting/

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!

Great news for new and exisiting web hosting customers, we are in the final build and test phase for the upgraded Professional Web Hosting service, due to go live in October.

The Professional Webhosting Service will include these features:

 > IIS7
 > DotNetPanel
 > Windows server 2008
 > MSSQL 2008
 > MYSQL 5.1
 > PHP5.2
 > SmarterMail 6
 > SmarterStats 4
 > 3Gb Disk space
 > 10Gb bandwidth
 > 100 email accounts
 > DNS editor

First website is £59 PA, additional websites are £39 PA including domain name fees (ev VAT).

Due to go live October.
Further annoucements will be posted here.

We’re now able to offer DNS resolution and Reverse DNS services to all customers of HA Hosting, The Virtual Cloud, and the Sheffield Data Centre. 

DNS resolution is essential for all servers connecting to the Internet, and Reverse DNS is ideal for customers who need reverse lookup for email servers, as well as those who need to confirm “ownership” of IP addresses for firewalls and secure services.

DNS Resolution

We have two DNS servers for clients to use within their server or application to resolve external addresses, contact us for the address details.  These servers will only resolve external addresses from within our network, and are not accessible from the outside world – preventing DNS spoofing.

Reverse DNS

All HA Hosting / Sheffield Data Centre customers can now submit Reverse DNS requests to us by emailing support@hahosting.com – we endeavour to have all requests complete within 24 hours.

Reverse DNS is currently not available to Professional Web Hosting customers due to shared IP addresses, we aim to offer dedicated IP addresses for web hosting in the near future.  Our Web Hosting platform is undergoing an upgrade, with Windows Server 2008 IIS7 hosting with a new Control Panel due soon!!