Update

Cool New Upgrades at HA Hosting

by Leave a Comment

Last week saw some new cool upgrades get installed at HA Hosting.

Cooling Filters

*Pun Intended*

At the end of last week, we had upgrades fitted to our Unit 9 cooling system in the form of a new cooling filtration system.

 

As you probably know, one of the most needed features for a Data Centre is proper cooling. Having many servers stored in the same place can make rooms get very hot. Not great for servers.

The problem is that sometimes bits of dust and other very small bits of debris can get drawn in too. This doesn’t pose too much of a problem on a small scale, however, if left over a long period, grime can build up. The problems this can cause range from dirtier looking servers to even damaging them in worse case scenarios. Having the appropriate filter systems in place prevents this.

cooling filter close up

It’s That Time of Year

Now it’s turned to winter and the temperature has dropped a lot we have turned off the water part of the cooling system, as the cold air alone is usually enough. Just like us, servers start to complain if they get too cold. Thankfully, our monitoring lets us know early!

This made it the perfect time for cooling upgrades, installing new filters into our system.

With the new (rather cool looking) filters in place, we should be covered for keeping our server rooms up to the standards we want for the foreseeable future!

 

Have a question about the new cooling filtration or anything about our Data Centre? Write a comment down below or get in touch!

 

Keep in Touch

If you would like to keep up to date with what we get up to here at the Sheffield Data Centre, then the best way is to follow us on our social media:

Facebook

LinkedIn

Twitter

CloudBackup & SSL Update (June 2019)

by Leave a Comment

Hi all, another quick update about some behind the scenes things we’ve been working on this week! 

 

CloudBackup Update 

We have updated all our storage nodes to latest version. We did this to keep our infrastructure updated, meaning there should be less issues and we are working in the most secure environment. The benefitting results of upgrading the storage nodes are: 

  • Improved storage node stability 
  • Likely performance increases due to software always being tuned to the latest version 
  • Ensuring consistency across the platform 

 

SSL on Storage nodes 

We have also improved security with new SSL certificate’s (Secure Sockets Layer) on the storage nodes as well. The reasons for changing the SSLs is to reduce the number of errors you may see in browsers such as Chrome, which constantly tighten what is acceptable on the internet. 

It’s important to have an SSL on web-based things such as websites and servers. You’ll know if something has got one as it will show a small padlock icon, representing that it’s secure. There’ll also be no security warning before trying to enter and most importantly means you can rest easy when accessing the storage nodes remotely. 

Plesk 17 Migration Update (May 2019)

by Leave a Comment

Plesk 17 Migration Update (May 2019)

Hey all, we hope you’re well! Here is another quick update on something that’s happened behind the scenes at here at HA Hosting this past week. In this past week we were hard at work and have migrated websites to a shiny new server running Plesk 17.

 

The benefits following this migration are: 

  • Ensure that you can run the latest applications including a newer version of Maria DB (version 10.3) 
  • It allows for the latest versions of PHP to be available for websites 
  • The performance of the server is noticeably much better due to these improvements

As a quick summary, the old server was running Plesk 12 so wouldn’t have been supported for too much longer. This mixed with the fact that a newer server would run faster meant an upgrade was in need! Hence the migration to Plesk 17. 

The upgrades mentioned above are great and means that we should be good for awhile now! And having the server’s performance be improved is always a good thing! When is a faster server ever bad? 😉

If there are any developments to do with either this or anything we decide to change/improve then we’ll be sure to let you know as and when they happen! We’re always looking to find ways to improve what we do here, so expect updates every so often! It’s important to us to keep you in the loop with what’s going on here!

If you have any questions about what we’ve been doing, then don’t be afraid to ask! We’re more than happy to have a quick chinwag! Or if you’re just looking to keep up to date on what’s going on you can find out either on our website or on our social media pages.

 

We’ll see you for next update some time soon!

 

Cheers, 

The HA Hosting Team