Welcome to the High Availability Hosting Blog

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!

As of the end of October, our Outlook Anywhere, Microsoft Exchange 2007 based email packages will recieve a massive price reduction. 

We will be  reducing the cost of our 1GB Outlook Anywhere package to £6.50 per month per user.

That’s a huge percentage discount that I’m not going to calculate. Yes this applies to existing users, just contact us to review your account.

Full details will be on the website shortly.

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.