A blog about server hosting

At Melbourne, as well as the day-to-day of running our datacentres, we’ve always got lots of exciting projects on the go; like rolling out a new backup service, or the continuing maintenance and improvements to our customer management system. Many of you will know that it can become a project in itself keeping track of everything that’s going on, especially when it involves software development that may have several programmers involved.

It was with this in mind that we moved to using a software project management tool called Codebase to help track and organize the development of our in-house applications, and we soon realized it was a very good product indeed. In fact we decided it was so good – and that the people responsible for it were very much our kind of people – that we offered to sponsor them and move it all onto dedicated hardware in our new Turing House datacentre, which we can happily say they accepted! You can see details of the move on their blog.

The upshot of this move is that Codebase are now offering all Melbourne customers a free account worth £60 per year, which comes with 3 active projects, 10 users, 500MB disk space for Git, Subversion and Mercurial hosting, ticketing and more all over a secure SSL connection on our super-fast network.

Log onto your support account for more details and to sign up!

We hope you find it as useful a tool as we have

Andrew Turner, Lead Developer.

We have lots of partners; that’s companies who use our services, add their value, and then resell to their customers.  Some IT companies, others not so IT company-ish.  What they have in common though is that Melbourne highly values their business.  We’ve always gone the extra mile with our partners, but we decided it was about time to formalise this into a Partner Program.

So what’s in it for our partners?

• Discount on monthly hosting bills based on your spend.
• Free virtual machine for internal/development/demonstration purposes.
• Invitations to exclusive partner events.
• Datacentre tours for your customers, with use of Melbourne’s meeting facilities.
• Previews of new products and services that are in testing.

The requirements are simple to join the partner program -  you simply need to maintain a contributable monthly spend of at least £500 per month.  We don’t even mind whether you’re re-selling our services to others or simply using a lot of our services in-house to make up the contributable monthly spend.

To find out more, or to join the partner program, simply visit our Partner Program page.  Once you’ve filled in the (very brief) application form, your account manager will be in-touch to check over your account and ensure that you’re receiving all of the benefits.

Following our successful beta-testing, we’re pleased to announce the launch of our UltraCloud™ Virtual Dedicated Servers.

Priced from just £35 a month, you get all the benefits of a dedicated server; but UltraCloud™ has a number of additional benefits too:

* Is not reliant on any specific server hardware and has a “self-healing” architecture.
* Can be instantly scaled up or down, as demand dictates.
* Is greener than a dedicated server, using much less power.
* Has a 99.99% uptime guarantee.
* Costs less than a dedicated server, from just £35 per month.

If you’d like to try out an UltraCloud™ server, visit http://www.melbourne.co.uk/virtual-dedicated-servers.htm to customise and order your server. The minimum contract is just one month.

Please note that we can put UltraCloud™ servers on the same security zone (VLAN) as other services, meaning you can mix virtual servers, dedicated servers and colocated machines on the same subnet.

If you need any further information about UltraCloud™, please speak to our friendly and knowledgeable sales team.

As a result of customer feedback, and as a recognition of the tough economic times our customers are facing, we have reviewed our charges for “helping hands” (i.e. on-site help) and are pleased to announce that helping hands in our Reynolds House datacentre during office hours is now free-of-charge, subject to a maximum usage policy.

The included allowance (which will not be rigidly enforced but serves as a guideline) is as follows:

Shared Colocation
2 x 15 minute incidents per year, per “U” of space occupied

Dedicated Servers
2 x 15 minute incidents per year, per server.

Rackspace
2 x 15 minute incidents per month, for quarter cabinet customers.
4 x 15 minute incidents per month, for full cabinet customers.

For a full definition of Helping Hands (i.e. what’s included and what isn’t), please visit our support levels definition page.

Should you have any comments or feedback, we’d love to hear from you.

Melbourne today introduces its new anti-spam service, called <a href=”http://www.melbourne.co.uk/antispam.html”>UltraSpam&trade;</a>.

The problem of weeding out indiscriminate unsolicited e-mails proved to be a major problem for the Manchester based outfit.  It could not find a satisfactory solution on the UK market.  In response it has launched <a href=”http://www.melbourne.co.uk/antispam.html”>UltraSpam&trade;</a>, based on <a href=”http://www.mailfoundry.com” target=”_blank”>MailFoundry</a>, a US industry-leading anti-spam appliance.

Spamming was first noted in May 1978, but the first instance concerned less than 10 recipients.  Today, over 100 billion spam e-mails are sent every day.  Spam accounts for over 80% of all e-mails worldwide.

In addition to time wasted removing them, spam is the source of much of the fraud, viruses, identity and financial theft experienced on the Internet.  The Californian legislature estimated that US organisations lost $13 billion in 2007 alone to this one source.  The problem is no less serious in the UK.

Steven Allan, Melbourne’s sales director comments: “An employee spending 20 minutes a day removing spam doesn’t sound much.  But it amounts to a full day a month, 12 days a year; it is a lot of time if you have 10 employees.  And then there is the threat of a virus taking out an enterprise’s IT systems”.

Melbourne’s <a href=”http://www.melbourne.co.uk/antispam.html”>UltraSpam&trade;</a> service costs from just &pound;10 per month and a <a href=”http://www.melbourne.co.uk/antispam.html”>30 day trial of the service is available. </a>

We are currently developing the infrastructure and software to offer a virtual dedicated server solution.  This would enable customers to have either individual virtual dedicated machines, or to form a dedicated cluster of physical servers with the virtualisation software pre-loaded, on which virtual servers can be added by the customer independently.   We’re inviting customers to beta-test the service at the moment.

The system is based on the Xen virtualisation platform, but with a custom-designed web frontend allowing customers to view details of machines, stop or start machines, and view the console output of the machine.  Additionally customers with dedicated clusters will be able to provision/edit/remove virtual machines, and manage other aspects of their cluster.

The system will have SAN storage (with SAS drives) and therefore will support auto failover and restarting of virtual machines if any server hardware fails.

If you would like more information or would like to take part in the beta-testing which we will be starting soon (either testing a single machine or a dedicated cluster) please contact inbox [at] melbourne.co.uk.

Depending on the uptake we may have to limit the number of beta places available.  We expect the live service to be available towards the end of the year.

Following successful beta testing with selected customers over the last few months, we’re pleased to officially launch our UltraLoad™ Shared Load Balancing service and our shared SAN space.

UltraLoad™
The shared load balancing solution, UltraLoad™, works along the same lines as our shared firewalls, meaning you can benefit from the reliability and performance of high-end failover devices, but on a shared basis. You maintain full control of the UltraLoad™ virtual appliance through a unique custom-developed web interface.

This service is available for less than £100 per cluster per month. For customers who need a dedicated pair of Load Balancers, we also have higher-end options available. You can find out more on our high availability clusters page. The service is delivered with our standard 99.95% network SLA.

Shared SAN Space
In terms of shared SAN space, we now have available space on our Dell EqualLogic SAN, using 15k RPM SAS drives. We are able to sell space in chunks of 50GBs, connecting your hosts to the iSCSI SAN network directly (for which you would need a dedicated network card in each host, or two network cards if you wish to multipath through two switches). The service is offered with a 100% SLA if you connect using multipath.

Pricing starts at £100 per month for a 50GB block.

Subject to demand, we expect to shortly introduce a lower-priced alternative using SATA disks. Please contact us to register your interest as the introduction of this will be driven by demand.

We’re pleased to announce that our new, unique service called UltraLoad&trade; is now live.

Load balancing is something that has been the preserve of larger organisations due to the large costs and complexity involved.

Our unique take on this has been to decimate costs, by providing access to shared load balancers, eliminating the need for costly dedicated hardware, when only a fraction of its resources are being used.

Furthermore, a friendly web interface allows customers to make the initial setup, and add/edit/remove hosts from a cluster, without having to visit a command line.

We believe this service is unique within the industry, and shows Melbourne’s commitment to reducing costs and complexity associated with hosted services.

Full details of the service, which is available to dedicated server and colocation customers alike, are available at http://www.melbourne.co.uk/dedicated-servers-high-availability-clusters.htm or by contacting our sales team.

Today sees us launch our new support site at http://support.melbourne.co.uk.  This is the first release and part of a long-term project to centralise all aspects of managing your service and account with Melbourne.

Cosmetically you will notice some minor changes, but the main improvements at this stage are with the underlying database technology, and backend access for our staff, which will enable us to find your services in a much quicker and better organised manner, ultimately meaning we can provide a quicker and more accurate level of service to you.

We advise all customers to log in and become familiar with all aspects of the system, in particular remotely power-cycling servers, rather than waiting until it is needed in an emergency!  If you do not have your logins to hand, please submit a support ticket by emailing support@melbourne.co.uk.  It is important that all customers are familiar with the operation of the system in order to obtain support.

In future we hope to integrate the following aspects of account management into the site:

- integrated bandwidth, power and VLAN graphs
- self-managed server monitoring
- managing all aspects of billing
- viewing previous tickets and work requests
- forward and reverse dns management
- ordering new services
- ordering domain names and SSL certs automatically
- re-provisioning servers automatically

We welcome any feedback you may have at this stage, both with the current release and the planned improvements.