Welcome to the High Availability Hosting Blog

Firstly, Happy New Year to everyone!

2010 was a great year for High Availability Hosting limited, with a huge increase in customer orders, over double 2009’s revenue for colocation, growth in Virtual Dedicated Servers, and significant improvements in the infrastructure at the Sheffield Data Centre – including the go-live of the diesel generator, cooling system refit, and increased network capacity.

2011 is set to be our best year yet, building on the growth experienced in 2010.

2011 projects

Here’s a sneak preview of the projects planned for 2011:

• Hosted Exchange 2010 SP1 launch
• New dedicated Managed Firewall VMware cluster
• Additional monitoring, centering on “service” rather than “servers”
• New Hyper-V hardware cluster
• New web hosting service launch
• WebsitePanel to replace DotNetPanel throughout all hosting
• New improved QOS, bandwidth billing, and usage reporting
• Second Evaporative Cooler in the data centre
• Sheffield Data Centre maintenance refit
• New Active Directory

There’s probably more little projects on the list that have been missed off, but you get the idea – it’s going to be another busy year for us!

3rd birthday

It’s also HA’s 3rd birthday this February, we’re planning an Open Day for the Sheffield Data Centre, where people can come and meet us, see the Data Centre and chat about our services, as well as witness a generator fail-over.  No date has been decided yet, but it’ll be sometime in February!

We’re also planning some special offers and discounts for new customers who sign up in February.

Watch this space for more news, and have a prosperous new year!!!

:-)

We’ve been testing a diskless (SAN attached) dedicated server / web hosting appliance, and following better-than-expected results on testing, we’re ready to roll out a small number of servers for customer use.

The server comes complete with an Operating System, Control Panel, web, SQL database, and email server software and hosting in the Sheffield Data Centre, from less than £10 per week!

Specifications as follows:

• Disk:  25GB SAN Attached (no local storage)
• Memory: 2GB
• Processor:  Dual-core Intel Atom 1.66GHz with HT (4 logical processors)
• OS:  Windows Web Server 2008 R2 x64
• IP Addresses:  2 public
• Bandwidth:  1TB per month, burst up-to 50Mbit
• Software:  IIS7.5 (web server), WebsitePanel (control panel), MailEnable (email server), SQL 2008 R2 Workgroup (database)
• DNS:  Access to our dns1 and dns2 servers to host your zones
• rDNS:  Server name reverse DNS registered (for email server)
• Term:  6 month contract

All for just £43 per month (equivelent to £9.92 per week) + £40 setup fee

Upgrades:

• 2GB to 4GB memory:  £25 one-off
• Extra disk space:  £1 per 10GB per month
• Extra IP address:  £1.50 per month
• SSL Certificate:  £40 per year

Being SAN attached, in the event of a hardware problem, we can simply plug a new server into the switch and you’re back up and running without a rebuild!

We’ve only got a few at the moment, so if you want one email sales@ hahosting.com (take out the space after @), or use the “contact us” form on the right.

All prices exclude VAT.

We’re trialing Universal Rack Rails for single server colocation.  In the past we’ve always insisted people have rails for their servers, but since there’s a shortage of rails on eBay at the moment, and getting the exact set isn’t always easy (so many variants…) - we’re trialing Universal rails in Rack 10.

We attach the rails to the side posts in the rack, and your server simply sits on top.

• We’re charging a one-off fee of £25 for the rails.

Contact us (box on the right –>) if you’ve got a server without rails you’d like racked at the Sheffield Data Centre!

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

Just a quick update to say all the planned weekend works to cable and connect power to the generator charging system were successful with no service outages.

Ongoing works this week include installing a power usage meter and the emergncy stop breaker to the Automatic Transfer Switchgear. All non-service affecting.

Once the electrical works are complete we’ll post some pics!

Cabling works for our standby generator are finally underway, and should be completed over the weekend.

We have plans to connect the Automatic Transfer Switchgear to the generator TODAY (06/08/2010), and connect & test the power to the auto-start system over the weekend.

Next week we’ll run a series of tests of the auto-start system, transfer controllers, and the generator iteself (without switching supplies), with a view to a full failover test toward the end of August.

Later than originally planned – delays have been caused by human resources (lack of people time!!), weather, ongoing client projects, and other data centre engineering works.  We’d like to thank everyone who’s showed us their support and kept a keen interest in our expansion!

All client and core equipment is protected by UPS anyway, but the generator will add an extra layer of redundancy should there be an extended power outage.

Regards,
Stuart.

www.sheffielddatacentre.com

After several delays (mainly caused by bad weather, contractor delays, and Christmas!) we’ve finally had the footings dug out and concrete poured for the generator enclosure.

The grass banking was dug out on Tuesday 23rd, and concrete poured Thursday 25th.  Blockwork has been delivered and the enclosure itself is scheduled to be constructed next week.  Once the encloure is complete we’ll pull the thick generator cables through and move the generator itself into position.

We’re confident that (if there’s no more snow – which apparently doesn’t help concrete set!) the generator will be in position mid-March!

Digging out the footings

Ready for concrete

Concrete finally poured!

The generator, in storage. Waiting to be positioned.

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!

… not our words, but the words of Now Then, a local Sheffield magazine which last month featured the Sheffield Data Centre in it’s “traders” section of their well circulated free magazine.

They write “These guys have a 100 Mb/s connection. That’s faster than public transport.”

… faster than a bendy bus I suppose.

They go on to write “In short, the Sheffield Data Centre is well located and equipped with all the mod cons. It provides high speed access in a secure and controlled environment, ideal for businesses with internet presence, retailers, manufacturers and online companies.”

After talking to us, the producers of the magazine are now looking to move their hosting away from their current provider to the Sheffield Data Centre, so next time you read their magazine while on a bus, think of us!

The full article is available here (click for larger image):

Now Then magazine SDC article

- Stuart.