For a limited period, we’re offering 3 Months Half Price on our popular R200 Dedicated Server.  That means 3 months from £34.50 per month!

The offer applies to the hardware of the server only – CPU, memory, disk – addons and software are charged at the normal rate.

Customise and Order an R200 Dedicated Server for more information.  While stocks last.

Well we’ve taken the best parts of our standard ‘off-the-shelf’ server management, and created our sexy, all-singing-all-dancing, UltraManaged™ service (well you wouldn’t expect us to call it anything else would you)?

The key benefits:

• 2 Hour hardware swapout, day or night (as opposed to 4 hours as standard)
• Included access to our UltraVault™ Managed Backup Service
• Dedicated Support Contact, and quarterly account reviews
• More included general help per month (60 minutes as opposed to 30 minutes)

At the price tag of just £150 per server per month, it’s very good value when you consider that the Managed Backup and general help would cost the same separately!

We’re not pro-actively marketing this new management level just yet, so the details aren’t on our website.  However, you can find a comparison of different server management options in the up-to-date version of our Dedicated Server Support PDF.  Contact your account manager if you’re interested in upgrading.

Daniel Keighron-Foster, MD

As an example, lets try the following HTTP request..;

GET /path/to/index.php HTTP/1.0
Dummy-Header: GET /index.php HTTP/1.0
Cookie: sessionCookie=Token

The good news is that although an attacker can execute the request and pass through arbitrary data, he will not be able to see the response. However, the originating client will see something different from what was initially requested.

We have done some testing with web firewalls such as modsecurity and have yet to find a way to block such requests. Looks like we will need to wait for upstream patches, particularly Apache, Microsoft and possibly a temporary release from modsecurity.

To track the exploit, see http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/120541

Rob Greenwood, Technical Lead

From our point-of-view we’re seeing virtual servers as a great alternative to our entry-level dedicated servers, and a great deal faster than older dedicated servers running on deprecated hardware.

That said, they’re not perfect for everything, and there are many applications where only dedicated will suffice.

Here are some of the aspects of virtual servers to consider:

• CPU is burstable. With a virtual server, you’re allocated a smaller slice of a higher-end CPU than you’d have in a low-end server.  In our case, we’re using Xeon L5420s  and L5520 processors in our virtual server nodes.  These are faster by quite a stretch than the CPUs found in our entry-level servers.  Obviously you don’t have all of this power at your disposal, but  when there are idle cycles, you are free to grab them.  And given that the average CPU usage on our VM nodes is < 10% on average, the end result can be much faster than that 3-year-old chip in that cheap dedicated.
• I/O is burstable. Slow disk IO is usually the most criticised short-coming of VPS, but it only happens on overcrowded boxes.  In our case, you’re connected to a SAS or SATA SAN (dependant on which storage you pay for) which is running RAID50, connected by a 2Gbps iSCSI connection to the host node.  The End result? Much faster disk I/O with our SAS option, when compared to the disks you find in a low-end dedicated server.
• Better Resiliency. Compared to a cheap dedicated, you’re getting a slice of a machine which has redundant power supplies, fed from two UPSs, dual uplinks to both frontend and storage networks, and RAID50 storage, with hot-spare disks on our high-availability SAN (with off-site replication too).
• Better for the environment. Because hardware is better used, less electricity is consumed per virtual server.

Good candidates for virtualisation:

• Servers which have low CPU and/or memory usage, but with occasional peaks.
• Servers which can be scaled horizontally, for example web servers behind a load-balancer.
• Single-service servers, i.e. those running a single website or email.
• Servers which need to have CPU and/or memory upgraded for short periods, without excessive downtime associated with hardware upgrades.
• Staging environments needing a fraction of the resources of the live environment they mirror.
• DR environments which usually need very little resource but need to be scaled upwards quickly.

Bad candidates for virtualisation:

• Servers needing access to multiple CPUs or masses of memory (i.e. the largest VM we offer as standard has 4GB of RAM and 2 CPU cores).
• Servers needing huge amounts of storage space.  This is due to the high cost of SAN-based storage.  Once you get above a certain threshold, it becomes cheaper to use a dedicated server fitted with a RAID5 SAS disk array.

Mix-and-match

The great thing about the way we can provision servers means that your virtual and dedicated servers can sit on your own private network (VLAN), and communicate with each other freely.  This means that you have the flexibility to use the right mix of servers based on the individual requirements of each element of your hosting platform.

Our technical team, in conjunction with our account managers, can help to advise on what’s right for any given situation.

This new mid-range server bridges the gap between the entry-level R200 and the higher-end R710.  It supports 2 x Intel 5500 series Xeon processors, up to 64GB of RAM, and up to 4 internal 3.5″ disks, meaning a capacity of up to 3TB in RAID5.

In line with our environmental policy, we’re offering only Low Voltage Intel processors as standard.  This means lower power usage for the server and also that we can fit more of them in a cabinet’s allotted power allocation, meaning best efficiencies all-round.

Customise and order your PowerEdge R410 online now.

This offer is available on the Dell Poweredge R200 Dedicated Server, provided the base unit is in-stock.  This is clearly indicated when you order the server.

Alternatively, customers happy to opt for a 12-month contract on their server will get free setup instead.

You’ll be pleased to hear that we’ve now changed the inclusive bandwidth for all Dedicated Servers and UltraVM™ virtual servers, starting from September.

Servers now come with 1TB monthly transfer included as standard – that’s 5x the previous allowance of 200GB – without any price change.  Recently the wholesale bandwidth price has gone down and we wanted to pass this on to you.

Please note that this new allowance only applies at this time to our Dedicated Servers and UltraVM™ virtual servers, but will be rolled out to shared colocation in the coming months.  Rackspace customers can take advantage of reduced rates on wholesale (per Mbps) bandwidth by contacting us to renew their contracts.

The new model supports 2 x Intel 5500 series Xeon processors, up to 144GB of RAM, and up to 6 internal 3.5″ disks, meaning a capacity of up to 5TB in RAID5.  This model replaces the PowerEdge 2950 which was discontinued by Dell this month.

In line with our environmental policy, we’re offering only Low Voltage Intel processors as standard.  This means lower power usage for the server and also that we can fit more of them in a cabinet’s allotted power allocation, meaning best efficiencies all-round.

Customise and order your PowerEdge R710 online now.

Visit our dedicated servers section to view the new Core2Duo and Dual Core Xeon servers on offer, starting from just £69 per month!

As usual these servers come with our complete business-class SLAs, including 4 hour hardware swapout guarantee, 100% Power SLA and 99.95% Network SLA.