A blog about server hosting

New product and service information, along with general ramblings about the web hosting industry from the Melbourne team.

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The five dangers of Virtual Servers – Part 3

June 9th, 2010

Welcome to the third installment of “the five dangers of virtual servers”.  In my previous post, I talked about the danger of interference from other customers’ VMs on badly-configured platforms. So let’s move on to the next potential pitfall:

Danger Three: The danger of not having a Service Level Agreement (SLA)

It’s one thing to say that a service is reliable, but quite another to put a money-back guarantee or Service Level Agreement (SLA) on it.  Obviously what you want is a working service, not a money-back guarantee, but it certainly puts an emphasis on the provider having a standard to work towards.

Many providers say SLAs are a waste of time, and marketing hype. If they truly believed this, surely they’d offer an SLA anyway as they have nothing to lose?

Some virtual server products come without an SLA; some even charge you extra for an SLA. In short, any decent high-availability virtual server offering should have an SLA on both the network connectivity, but more importantly the availability of the “virtual hardware” of your virtual server.

A decent SLA should provide a realistic and achievable service level (100% SLAs are usually vanity only, or exclude so much that they’re almost pointless) and a penalty for the host if the SLA is not achieved. It should also be clear what the SLA covers. For example, a lot of network/connectivity SLAs cover only the provider’s own network in their data centre, and not their upstream providers. That means your server may be inaccessible but if it was due to their provider and not their own internal network, you’re not covered.

Our own UltraVM™ Cloud Servers come with a 99.95% ‘hardware’ uptime and network guarantee, although in reality 100% uptime is both our goal and what we achieve.

Daniel Keighron-Foster, Managing Director

Good luck at the Big Chip Awards!

June 9th, 2010

The Big Chip 2010 Awards are only a few days away and we’re getting excited!  This year we took a rest from entering any awards (having won the big green chip award last year), but we’re once again thrilled to be sponsoring the Best Application of Technology Award.  We’ll be there en masse with a number of our staff along with some customers to cheer on the award winners.

We’re obviously a good luck charm, as four of our clients are shortlisted for big chip awards!

  • 11 Out Of 10 are up for best e-business project;
  • KMP Digitata are nominated twice for best e-business project;
  • Cahoona are up for best not-for-profit project, best use of visual design, best newcomer and the tasty website award;
  • PushON are up for best use of search and best digital marketing campaign.

We obviously wish all our clients the best of luck (along with all the entrants of course)!

Chris Marsh
Business Development Manager

The five dangers of Virtual Servers – Part 2

June 8th, 2010

In my previous post, we were talking about the danger of hardware failure in virtual machines.  Let’s move on to the next…

Danger Two:  The danger of interference from other customers’ virtual servers.

There are several ways in which one virtual server can interfere with another, when they’re running on the same node.  However, when security is properly implemented, this risk is completely mitigated, and the solution is just as secure as a dedicated server.

A responsible host will have thought out these issues and put safeguards in place to ensure that one virtual server cannot impact upon another.  Here are some questions to ask your potential virtual server provider:

  • Will I have my own VLAN or are all virtual servers on the same network segment?
    This is important, as virtual servers on the same VLAN are on the same broadcast domain.  This means if someone enters your IP address in their network configuration incorrectly, they could take your virtual server offline.  It also means you’d receive their broadcast traffic. Finally, it means that there is complete lack of firewalling between your virtual server and others, unless a software firewall is put in-place (see the next point for more on this).
  • Will I have the protection of a hardware firewall?
    With a separate VLAN, it’s possible to protect a virtual server in the same way as you would a dedicated server.  This means that not only traffic from the outside world, but also to other neighbouring customers, is allowed through only if it meets the firewall rules you’ve set.
  • Are the kernels shared with the host operating system?
    Slightly more complex this one; basically some virtualisation technologies share the host node’s base operating system kernel with the virtual servers, for various reasons, usually so the provider can put more virtual servers on a node.  However this means that any kernel vulnerability could mean that a compromised virtual server can effectively take down the whole of the host node, which basically means all the virtual servers running on the node will be taken down too.

It kinda goes without saying that our UltraVM™ cloud servers pass all these tests (otherwise why would we have written this blog!).  Take a look at the feature-set, and visit back for danger 3, 4 and 5 later this week.

Daniel Keighron-Foster, Managing Director

The five dangers of Virtual Servers – Part 1

June 7th, 2010

In this short series of blog posts, we’ll be looking at five important considerations you need to make when choosing a virtual server.  It may seem that all virtual servers, or cloud servers, are similar, but like everything technical, the devil is in the detail.

Danger 1: The danger of hardware failure

One of the benefits of virtualisation should be an improvement of service availability, so it’s important that the topology of the cluster is well thought out, such that a failure of a major central component such as a network switch, or even just the physical node (server) that your virtual server is running on, doesn’t cause your virtual server to go offline.

Use Centralied SAN Storage

The best solution uses centralised SAN storage, so that if the physical node (server) you’re running on fails, your virtual server will automatically re-start on a spare node.

An added benefit of this is that your hosting service can take nodes out of service for maintenance without affecting your virtual server. That means you’re truly available for the maximum amount of time possible.

Look for an option of fast disks (i.e. 15,000rpm SAS disks) to keep the I/O throughput of your virtual server tip-top.

Use Hardware Resilience

Nodes should be dual-uplinked through two switches, to both the frontend (i.e. the internet) and also the backend (i.e. to the storage) such that the failure of a network switch or uplink cable (or just someone accidentally un-plugging it) does not stop your virtual server from running, or being accessible.

The centralised SAN storage should be built with resilient/failover power supplies and controllers, such that the failure of any component within the SAN does not take offline any virtual server.

A decent service provider will offer the option of offsite backup space to be mounted to your virtual server to give you a self-standing off-site copy of your important data.

Daniel Keighron-Foster, Managing Director

Welcome to our new site

June 4th, 2010

We’re pleased to welcome you to our new website, launched back in May.

We’re still making a lot of changes and tweaks to the content, including adding case studies and testimonials that some of our customers have been kind enough to send to us, but as you’ll see the new site reflects our new branding, and in fact our new name.

Since we were established in 2000, we’ve been known as ‘Melbourne Network Solutions’, (or just plain old ‘Melbourne’ to friends) which at the time reflected the wider range of services we offered.  Since we’ve only been operating datacentre and server hosting services for the past 5 years, we felt it was time to update our identity, and hence we changed not only our branding, but also our actual company name to ‘Melbourne Server Hosting’.  We hope you’re as pleased as we are with the fresh, clean look that the designers have created, which underpins the identity on our new site.

You’ll notice on our new site, we focus a lot on “ten reasons we’re a better hosting company“.  In a really over-crowded industry, we feel that what sets Melbourne apart from a lot of our competitors, is the fact we care about our customers, we look after our staff, and we provide an incredibly high level of service at an affordable price, and treat you like a human being in the process.

So when we came up with the ‘ten reasons we’re a better hosting company’ concept, we really wanted it to show where we’re a cut above the rest.  We felt it was so important, that we commissioned a series of short videos to be produced, and invited some of our customers in to talk about their experiences with Melbourne.

I have to say I was deeply touched by just how complimentary our customers were.  OK we were bribing them with a buffet lunch but I’m sure their comments were honest and really seemed to come from the heart.  It makes the whole thing so worthwhile to hear that our customers are genuinely this enthused about what we do.  It also teaches us that we’ve set ourselves some very high standards to maintain!

You can see the ten videos on each of the “ten reasons” pages.

Of course we’re very keen to hear feedback on our new site and branding, particularly from long-standing existing customers who’ve seen Melbourne grow over the years, so I’d welcome any comments, positive or negative!

Below are some of the pictures taken on the day of the filming of the videos.

Daniel Keighron-Foster, Managing Director

http://www.melbourne.co.uk/about-melbourne/ten-reasons-we-re-a-better-hosting-provider/

The Best Place to Work

May 11th, 2010

As a new starter with Melbourne, I’m extremely pleased and excited to be working for a company who have been nominated for the Crain’s Best Place to Work 2010.
The nomination has been made because of the positive comments made by the guys here on life at Melbourne, how we’re treated and why we like coming to work!

We don’t have a ‘us and them’ mentality, we’re open plan and its almost (dare I say it) a social atmosphere where a bunch of pals get together and play hard as well as working hard.
We’re encouraged to bring ideas forward for the business, we have authority to make decisions because of the expertise and experience we have and we all have a say

Many of our visitors comment that it is the type of place which they’d like to work themselves because of the atmosphere and environment – not just because of the pool table and spacehoppers!

Whether we win the award or not, the fact that we’re up for this shows what a great company Melbourne really is.
(But keep your fingers crossed for us on June 17th!)

Chris Marsh
Business Development Manager

Root nameservers transition to DNSSEC

May 5th, 2010

Today marks one of the biggest changes to the root nameservers, which provides DNS resolution to the internet.  The implementation of DNSSEC will dramatically reduce the effectiveness of man-in-the-middle attacks such as the Kaminsky exploit, which caused widespread panic in July 2008.

The change sees a digital signature applied to DNSSEC enabled lookups, which the majority of DNS resolvers now request by default. The addition of the digital signature will substantially increase the size of the UDP packets sent back by the root nameservers.

How will this affect you? (Geek speak)

Standard DNS traffic uses the UDP protocol, which is designed to be faster and less resource hungry than TCP. Normal UDP packets are also quite small, generally under 512bytes. Because of this, some older DNS servers and legacy firewall equipment may be preconfigured to automatically reject UDP packets above 512bytes on the basis that it’s most likely malformed or malicious.

Should communication over the faster UDP protocol fail, most modern DNS servers will automatically fail over to the much slower TCP protocol. This fail over is there to ensure DNS resolution can continue uninterrupted in case of DNS or firewall failure, however, it should not be relied on as a permanent method of communication due to the nature of TCP and the amount of DNS queries. Generally, a DNS server consistently communicating via TCP will be much slower to respond, and under much heavier load.

What can you do?

Firstly, DNS can communicate over both TCP and UDP. Therefore, all customers must ensure that the relevant firewall rules are present to allow both protocols, not just UDP. Allowing TCP at this point should reduce the impact of the changes made today, as should UDP fail, TCP can take over until the DNS servers can be updated.

If you are using Melbournes DNS resolvers (recommended), then we have already made the relevant steps to ensure that this issue will not affect you. Any customers running there own DNS resolvers are recommended to switch ASAP.

Finally, for customers who must run their own DNS resolvers. Please ensure that you are running the latest version of the software released by the vendor, and that any legacy firewalls are removed to stop the UDP packets being blocked.

As ever, Melbourne Support are happy to assist in any way they can. For further assistance, please raise a support ticket to discuss the options available.

Rob Greenwood, Technical Lead

Free Codebase account for all Melbourne customers

March 31st, 2010

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.

“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 :)

Get that warm, fuzzy feeling from Melbourne

March 20th, 2010

Customers with a managed server or two from us, will already know that warm, fuzzy feeling that you get when you know someone else is looking after the day-to-day management of your servers, leaving you to get on with whatever it is you do for a living.

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

UltraVault™ Managed Backup & CDP now available

March 8th, 2010

We’re pleased to launch the availability of our new UltraVault™ Managed Backup and CDP product, available to all customers.

Melbourne’s UltraVault™ Managed Backup is an automated offsite Continuous Data Protection (CDP) solution that runs on both Linux and Windows servers.

Offering both continuous data protection and bare metal restore abilities, UltraVault™ is a true data protection offering, not just a backup product.  UltraVault™ is ideal for the administrator looking for automation capabilities beyond our standard offsite NAS offering.

For full details visit http://www.melbourne.co.uk/ultravault.html or contact your account manager for a quotation.  For customers with managed servers, upgrading to our UltraManaged™ service level means that you’ll get UltraVault™ included in your package and a whole range of other benefits.