Welcome to the High Availability Hosting Blog

Evaporative Cooler
Our new cooling system went fully live this month, replacing the conventional air-conditioning units which have now been powered down (but remain as standby / backup units).  Due to the different way the cooler chills the air the process of changeover took 3 days but went without a hitch or service impact. We have now reduced our cooling energy usage by about 75%!

Evaporative Cooler System Live!

Hot aisle containment
Planned from when the Sheffield Data Centre was still on paper, we have implemented hot aisle containment on the first block of 6 racks (4×2 – comms, vmware, customer).  Hot exhaust air is now contained and evacuated from the computer room without mixing with the chilled air being pumped in.  The net result is the computer room runs cooler, the hot air pumps need less energy, and chilled air isn’t contaminated with hot air causing an imbalance.  It also looks cool!
 
Containment of the next block of racks is due to start next week.

Hot Aisle Containment

Hot Aisle Containment - entrance to hot aisle

Standby Generator
The generator has been tested, and re-wired ready for connecting to the Sheffield Data Centre.  Only problem is every time we arrange the concrete slab laying and crane to move the generator, it snows or gets too cold for the concrete to harden quick enough.  Another attempt will be scheduled for the near future, watch this space!
 
New Mailgate (spam / virus filter) going live
We have implemented a new spam / virus filter based on ESVA, having been tested by a small number of users, we hope to make it fully live before the end of Feburary – the exising Windows / SmarterMail server will then be switched off.
 
With additional ESVA servers (loadbalanced), we are planning to offer a spam / virus filtering service for users outside our own hosted email.  Email will first be sent to us for screening before being sent back to your existing mail server.  Users will get a daily quarantine email showing whats been blocked, along with options to release or block the message.
 
Hyper-V
Final designs for the Hyper-V and VMM (Virtual Machine Manager) servers are now being drafted, we hope to start testing sometime in March.  Prices have not yet been fully set, but are looking around £35 a month for an entry level Windows / Linux server.  Contact us if you’d like to trial a Hyper-V Dedicated Server.

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/

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.