Chris Allen

Improving Our Exchange Platform’s Resilience

by Leave a Comment

Improving Our Exchange Platform

Hi everyone, this is a quick follow up from last week’s post of planned maintenance for our Exchange platform.
Our planned maintenance window for Exchange was completed over the weekend, with little to no disruption to service. The maintenance involved us moving the underlying Virtual Hard Disks to a new resilient, dedicated Ceph Storage pool.
This means the data is now spread across multiple disks, in multiple servers. The result of this means we can now lose a Ceph Server and service will be maintained as usual.
The benefits of having this system in place are obvious – a much more resilient Exchange platform. This will help maintain service due to the resilient design of the Ceph Storage pool. It should also give the platform a little performance boost – see some of the results yourself below!
Exchange before exchange after
As you can see, overall is there is a noticeable improvement in performance.
As always, we’ll keep the website and Status Page updated with any updates and maintenance that will be underway!

Keep Updated

The best ways to keep updated about any news or updates we’ll have is either through our Blog or by following our Social Media accounts:

Facebook

LinkedIn

Twitter

Update: Exchange Platform Maintenance

by Leave a Comment

Upgrading Exchange

 

Hi Everyone, here is another quick update about some upcoming, scheduled maintenance that will be taking place this Friday (20/03/2020).

 

We will be carrying out some essential maintenance on our Exchange Platform over the weekend, beginning on Friday 19th of March at 9 am.

During this timeframe, the Exchange platform will be operating at a reduced resiliency level. This slight reduction in resilience is so that the platform can be upgraded – increasing resilience in the long term. However, we are not expecting any outages to service. If you think this has affected you, please contact the support team via the usual methods for help.

There is no guaranteed end time for the maintenance yet, however, we are expecting it to be completed by Monday at the latest (foregoing any unexpected surprises). We’ll keep the Status Page up to date with the progress of the maintenance. Checking that will be the best place to find the latest information.

 

If you have any questions about the maintenance, don’t be afraid to give our support team a quick shout!

[email protected]

Thanks for your time!

The HA Hosting Team

Upgrading From VyOS to Mikrotik

by Leave a Comment

The Age of Mikrotik Cloud Hosted Routers is Upon Us!

 

Out with the Old…

For some years now we have been running our core v-router platform on the VyOS Open Source router and firewall platform.

VyOS has served us well over the years but the time for change has arrived.

 

…In with the New (Mikrotik)

You may have noticed in previous posts we have started having random issues with the VyOS platform. Also that we had moved our Edge BGP Routers to Mikrotik in advance of this work. This project as you can imagine has been many months in the planning and we are finally ready to reveal the fruits of our labour.

So without further ado, we present our new Mikrotik CHR based V-Router platform.

Mikrotik Logo

 

Maintenance for the Mikrotik Change

You will no doubt have seen we had a scheduled maintenance window set last Friday (13/03/2020) and this was the final turn-on of the new platform. There was only a minimal loss of service and fortunately, there were no further issues that were encountered.

The last few months we have been working hard in the background, creating a whole new V-Router structure. We have based our new V-Routers on the retrospective presented network ranges, in effect, a V-Router per each presented IP range e.g. 185.91.219.024.

 

What Does This Mean for Our Customers?

Well, in short, you will still be receiving the same great HA Hosting Service you’ve come to expect! But to expand a little bit more, this will allow us to run a more effective and robust network. This will also enable us to facilitate a stronger support base moving forward for troubleshooting purposes.

 

Stay Up To Date

We’re always working on and improving our Data Centre – Whether it’s huge changes or minor improvements!

The best way to keep up to date with what is going on here is through our Status Page, Blog and Social Media:

Facebook

LinkedIn

Twitter

Scheduled Maintenance: 13/03/2020

by Leave a Comment

Hi everyone, we have a very brief update on some scheduled maintenance taking place today (13/03/2020).

 

We have some scheduled maintenance planned for between 19:00 and 21:00 this evening.

This window will potentially affect customers on our 188.94.77.0 & 188.94.76.0 networks.

Customers should experience no outages to service during the maintenance. However, if you do happen to experience an outage or any issues that you think might be because of the maintenance – you can report it to us via a support ticket by emailing:

[email protected]

This scheduled maintenance is so we can carry out essential work to our core VRouter Network.

 

We appreciate your understanding of any issues that may occur and as always, we’ll keep the Status Page up to date with the progress of the work.

 

Thanks for listening,

The HA Hosting Team

Chris Has Finished Marketing Training

by Leave a Comment

Hello everyone!

Chris here again, for another quick update about what’s going on with me, marketing and HA Hosting.

 

15-Months Later

Some of you might recall that when I first joined HA Hosting, I made a blog post about starting both my job and my apprenticeship. Alongside HA Hosting, I was being trained by Watertight Marketing to help develop my Digital Marketing skills throughout the year.
15-months later I have finally finished the Apprenticeship, passing with distinction to boot.

via GIPHY

So, what does to be finished and qualified mean for me and HA Hosting?

 

More Time

At the very basic level, it means that I will have more time in the week to dedicate to improving HA Hosting’s marketing. This won’t result in anything flashy but means strategies/actions can have more time dedicated to thinking/performing them.

 

Enhancing Your Experience

What this should mean for you, is that over the next year various actions will be implemented to make the whole process of interacting with us easier. This could be anything from more valuable website content to simplifying and improving the process to get the support you want.
Whatever changes will happen, there always will be one thing that is at the forefront of decision making:

How can we improve how we help you.

 

Quick Thanks

To finish up I’d like to say a big thanks to Watertight Marketing and Working Knowledge. They have helped to develop me as a marketer and support me over the past year when needed. Without them, I wouldn’t have gotten very far!

If you’d like to know more about what makes Watertight Marketing’s methodology so good or are interested in why having a non-typical apprenticeship can be beneficial, I’ll leave links to both websites below.

Watertight Marketing

Working Knowledge

 

More to Come

Next week there will be another blog post from me. This will go into more detail about how the training with Watertight Marketing has impacted HA Hosting as a business. We figure this way it’ll show how worthwhile it’s been for us and how it benefits you. So if that sounds interesting, be on the lookout next week.

The easiest way to keep updated and know when it’s posted is to follow us on social media.

Facebook

LinkedIn

Twitter

How Colocation Can Benefit Resellers

by Leave a Comment

How Colocation Can Benefit IT Resellers

 

Quick Recap:

Many of you will know what Colocation is. For those who don’t or are little unfamiliar, here’s a quick recap.

Colocation is a service Data Centres provide which allow you to store your physical server(s) in their Data Centre for a charge. It is then the Data Centre’s responsibility to keep the server secure, powered, connected to the internet and cool. Another benefit is that due to being offsite, your server(s) is more secure than at your office – should there be a fire/flood etc.

 

How Can This Benefit IT Resellers? – Virtual Servers

If you’re an IT service provider and one of the services, you provide is server space/resources then Colocation can be a cheaper option for you to do so. Along with the benefits we mentioned above, you’d also be able to configure your server to use Virtualisation.

With this, you can create as many Virtual Servers as you’d like (depending on your physical servers’ resources of course) which can then be sold to your customers. This, of course, assumes they’re paying for server resources from you and not a physical server.

 

How Can This Benefit Resellers? – Physical Servers

Let’s say you want to provide physical server services to your customers – even colocation for example. This is fine if it’s your core service and you have the infrastructure in place to support it.

But what about if a customer requests it and you want to help, but it isn’t something you normally do? You could even resell your physical rack space.

Let’s say your bought Quarter Rack Colocation, that can hold 10 servers, you could then bring your customers physical servers to your rack. This is much more cost-efficient than setting up a mock-data centre setup yourself, especially if these customers would be few and far between.

Most Data Centre’s have strict ‘who can enter’ policies to ensure they’re secure, so in this scenario, you would have to be the one who worked on and installed/removed the server. But this also would allow you to easily manage your customers and their servers too.

 

Interested in Learning More?

If you’re interested in learning more about Colocation, you can find more on our blogs here.

Alternatively, you can get in touch with us, and ask us any questions you would like to know. We’ll do our best to help however we can.

To find out more about our Colocation, click here.

 

Want to Keep in Touch?

The best way to stay updated about we post and get up to here at HA Hosting is to follow us on social media:

Facebook

LinkedIn

Twitter