A blog about server hosting

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

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

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

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

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.