Dan is on the phone. 24/7. And the iPad. And the MacBook.

Good news everyone! I’m pleased to announce that we now have 24/7 on-site support!

We’ve always had technical staff available 24 hours a day for emergency support requests, but now we have staff working on-site at our Manchester datacentres at all hours of the night and day.

Not only does this mean we can offer an even better service outside of office hours – but also that we’re ditching all out-of-hours callout charges!

You can get straight through to the on-site staff any time by calling our support number, 0161 232 0125 (freephone: 0800 915 8772) or by raising a ticket via our support centre as usual.

Over the next week, we’ll detail the specifics of how this affects each of our services by email to our customers, but in the meantime if you have any questions please contact your account manager (or drop a comment below)

Daniel Keighron-Foster

Our overriding goal at Serverlove is to make “cloud servers you’ll love!”. That’s not just marketing-speak – we mean it. So that’s why we’ve constantly been listening to your feedback and, over the last few months, planning this new update…

Read more about the new features coming to the Serverlove control panel at the Serverlove blog.

With RHEL you’re buying into nearly two decades worth of GNU/Linux experience, and with all that experience comes unparalleled support and top-quality user experience.  Your server will gain access to the Red Hat Network (RHN), which allows it swift access to critical security updates, something which systems derived from RHEL have to wait a little longer for.  Using RHEL allows us to call on Red Hat Support if you ever experience any issues with the operating system, meaning that the guys who made your chosen operating system are available to assist with any issues or queries.  We’re big fans of community driven support, but nobody can deny that it’s always nice to have the team behind a product ready and willing to help out if something goes wrong.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the preference of many businesses across the world, so we thought it time that we made it part of our offering to you lot.  After all, variety is the spice of life!

Chris Merrett

Located at http://manual.melbourne.co.uk, it contains information and guidance sorted by service type.  The current set of articles is a starting point which will be built upon; if you have any ideas for further topics to be added, or any general comments, please drop us a line through the usual channels.

Daniel Keighron-Foster
Managing Director

I’m pleased to announce the opening of a new rackspace facility in Turing House!

Space in our initial 22-rack suite is available for reservation now, prior to the facility opening on the 4th April.  We’re running an offer on racks reserved before opening (see below).

The Facility

The new facility is part of our Turing House datacentre which we opened back in 2009.  Turing House contains all Melbourne’s managed hosting and shared colocation; due to demand from our customers we have now made unaccompanied rackspace available.

The facility is of the high specification you’d expect from us, and was designed and built by our team.  Customers will be offered 24/7 unaccompanied access to access their kit.

Connectivity

Our full range of IP Transit services are available from Turing House; additionally we can offer private fibre circuits back to Reynolds House.

Service Level Agreements

We offer our full suite of SLAs at Turing House, including a 100% SLA on power, 99.97% SLA on cooling and 99.95% SLA on connectivity.

Rackspace Pricing

We’ll offer our standard range of quarter, half and full cabinets from this facility.  Pricing is as follows:

4A quarter cabinet (11U) – £295 per month, no setup charge
8A half cabinet (22U) – £595 per month, no setup charge
8A full cabinet (48U) – £700 per month, no setup charge
16A full cabinet (48U) – £1100 per month, no setup charge

These prices can be discounted by up to 15% via our partner program.

Click here for full specifications and pricing.

Note: This pricing applies only to our Turing House facility.

What is cPanel?

The cPanel and WHM software package makes life easier for web hosts and the website owners they serve. It offers easy-to-use, powerful tools that perform essential tasks quickly, easily, and reliably.  Find out more about cPanel here.

How much do the licenses cost?

We charge £29 per month for cPanel licenses.  This allows unlimited domains to be added to your server.

Where can the licenses be used?

On all of our services, whether it’s a dedicated server or even rackspace.  As long as you’re running the server from our IP space you can buy the licenses through us.  That also applies to Serverlove cloud servers.  Just to be clear, you can’t buy licenses from us to use elsewhere.

Will Melbourne be offering Managed cPanel Servers?

Shortly…we’re ensuring that our Server Management team are au-fait with all aspects of cPanel’s operation before we offer this.

How do I order a license/licenses?

If you’re ordering a new server, you’ll be able to request this on our server configurator.  If you’re wanting to buy a license for an existing server, please contact your account manager who will be happy to organise this for you.

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.

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.

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.

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.