Archive for the 'Company News' Category

Global Switch London 2 Rackspace

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Volkan
on 25 May 2009
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Global Switch London 2

Global Switch London 2

In an effort to continue offering the best possible services, Express Hosting UK are proud to announce our latest point of presence at Global Switch London 2. The Tier 4 facility located in the London Docklands is Europe’s largest purpose built datacentre with 10 floors and a gross size of 705,498 square feet. The datacentre boasts N+N redundancy on mission critical components, delivering an optimal operating environment to clients 24×7.

The datacentre is powered via 2 x 132kV mains incomers and diverse A&B supplies are distributed via 11kV ring main units. All power and cooling systems are supported by 33 no-break RotaryDiesel UPS sets and in the unlikely event of a full power outage the DC features diesel generators (with 4 x 119,00 litre tanks) which will support 50 hours at full capacity with 8 hour, 24×7 fuel delivery callout contract in place.

Full details and specifications of the datacentre can be found here.

Over the next couple of months we will be moving our VPS and Exchange services to this new facility, full details on this will be published nearer the time. Customers who wish to have their dedicated servers located in this new facility should contact sales for more information.

Rackspace & Colocation

Express Hosting UK can provide full 47U racks at this facility starting from £1649 per month.  Single server colocation, IP transit, direct datacentre interconnects and manage backup solutions are available at this facility. Please contact sales for more information.

Express Hosting POP at new Greenwich Datacentre

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Volkan
on 7 April 2009
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New Greenwich Datacentre

New Greenwich Datacentre

Express Hosting UK are proud to announce that in the next month we will be setting up a point of presence (POP) at a brand new datacentre in Greenwich, London. The tier 3 datacentre is strategically located about 1 mile from docklands meaning customers have all the connectivity benefits of being in the centre of the UK internet infrastructure while being on a different power grid to the docklands, thus enabling us to offer both 16a and 32a racks at affordable prices.

The datacentre has a total technical area of 11,200 sqft, with two large server suites (540 m2). The building features N+1 redundancy on 5 x 500kva Diesel Generators (parallel synchronized to feed the entire site) and CRAC air con units keeping the server rooms and all technical areas at a cool 23oC. The DC also has N+N redundancy on the UPS banks (2 x 500kva synchronized Emerson UPS units) and in terms of fire protection, all the technical areas have an Argonite (waterless) fire suppression system with VESDA (very early smoke detection apparatus). Last but not least the Greenwich datacentre has 24/7/365 security with automated and motorized CCTV equipment. Access is strictly controlled, by PAC cards (for outer doors) and biometric hand scanners on all sever suite entrances.

All the datacentre specifications will be up on our website soon, but we can start offering rackspace in the following sizes:

42U Rack - 16a Power
42U Rack - 32a Power

48U Rack - 16a Power
48U Rack - 32a Power

Racks are available with single power feeds or dual (A + B) power feeds, and single or multiple network ports. Multi-homed BGP4 bandwidth is available from 10mbps to 1ogbps.

*Update*

Our website has now been updated with more information about this datacentre. Please follow the link below:

Greenwich Datacentre

Best for Windows Servers

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Volkan
on 1 April 2009
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One month after launching our new range of dedicated servers, we are having trouble keeping up with demand! Nevertheless we have been voted “Best for UK Windows Servers” by the Dedicated Server Directory and our Customers.

Best for UK Windows Servers

Best for UK Windows Servers

We would just like to thank everyone who voted for us and we will strive to provide the best level of service as always!

New range of Dedicated Servers!

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Volkan
on 24 March 2009
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UK Dedicated Servers

UK Dedicated Servers

For those of you who have not noticed, we have launched a new range of dedicated servers that are proving very popular indeed! As always we strive to provide the best possible service to our customers, and for this reason we decided to go with the Dell Poweredge range of dedicated servers connected to our Cisco powered backbone. All our dedicated servers are built to order within 24 hours meaning all our customers can benefit from fully bespoke systems without the high costs and setup times usually associated. We have four base packages to choose from, and they are based around the Poweredge R200, R300 and 1950 range of servers.

EX-DED 1 - Dual Core Intel Xeon, 1GB RAM, 1 x 160GB SATA HDD
EX-DED 2 - Quad Core Intel Xeon, 2GB RAM, 2 x 250GB SATA HDD
EX-DED 3 - Quad Core Intel Xeon, 4GB RAM, 2 x 500GB SATA HDD, Hardware RAID
EX-DED 4 - 2 x Quad Core Intel Xeon, 8GB RAM, 2 x 500GB SATA HDD, Hardware RAID

These are our 4 main base packages, however we have many upgrade options available including HD upgrades to higher capacity drives or SAS drives, memory upgrades, and CDP Backup options.

All the servers come with 24/7 KVM over IP and Remote Reboot as standard. These two important features ensure that you have full control over your server, just as if you were standing in front of it, they provide a backdoor into the server should there be a problem. For example, if for some reason your server becomes unresponsive, you would usually have to open a support ticket and request a reboot, with the remote reboot port simply login to the interface and push the power cycle button! Similarly if you have made a mistake in your network configuration, you can simply login via the KVM over IP (Keyboard, Video, Mouse over Internet Protocol) and modify the settings as if its your local machine. These two features make sure you are never locked out of your server! These features are available through our VPN service ensuring that these tools are kept safe and away from hackers.

Of course as always cPanel is available for an additional fee, but if you prefer something simpler we can offer Webmin which is a free control panel. If you are a Windows fan, we can offer you Windows Server 2003 Standard with our dedicated servers.  All prices shown are for unmanaged servers, however for an additional £50.00pm we can offer a fully managed service where we take full control of your server so you don’t have to worry about patches, security updates, software issues, software installs, monitoring and all the worries that come with a dedicated server!

These servers are currently only available at our BlueSquare datacentre, however we have plans to expand to a docklands datacentre (TBA) in the near future, giving customers a choice in where they want the equipment located.

As always if you have any questions, just open a support ticket!

Happy Hosting!

Exchange 2007 Hosting

Published
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Volkan
on 4 February 2009
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UK Exchange 2007 Hosting

We are glad to announce our Exchange 2007 Hosting servers are now live! If you already are familiar with Microsoft Exchange then you know all the great features which it brings to the table, for those of you who don’t use it, the Exchange platform is enterprise email system. Most emails use POP3 (Post Office Protocol v3) and SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) to send a receive emails, you can view emails by either using our Webmail service or download them to your computer using a number of different programs (Outlook, Outlook Express, Mac Mail etc.). For most people this is not a problem, however many users work from two or more different computers and the only way get your mail on all your computers would be to use Webmail which just does not have the same features, let’s say, Outlook.

Microsoft Exchange Hosting solves this problem, all emails are stored on our servers, then you setup your Outlook to synchronize with our servers which means you can setup multiple computers to synchronize with our servers, meaning you will have the same emails, contacts and calendars on however many machines you want! When you get an email, the email will be “pushed” to all active computers, and once it has been read, it will be marked as read on all active computers! Wait…it gets better! Exchange can also be synchronized to your Smartphone (Windows Mobile, Blackberry, iPhone etc.) meaning your emails will also be “pushed” to your mobile device when you are not in the office!

However if you find yourself somewhere without a laptop or phone just get yourself to any computer and you can access “Outlook Web Access” which is basically Outlook in your browser and any changes you make will be synchronized through all your setup devices!

Please click here to view a video demo of what Outlook Web Access can do for you.

Most larger companies have internal Exchange servers, however many SMEs cannot afford the setup and running costs of the system. We can make it easy for you with prices starting from as little as £9.99 per month.

As always all our Exchange servers are top of the range HP servers running on our fully redundant network. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us!

For more information on Exchange 2007 Hosting please click here.

CDP Backups…Now LIVE!!!

Published
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Volkan
on 20 December 2008
in Company News, Service Messages and Updates
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Finally……We have R1Soft CDP Backups up and running on all platforms! It look long enough, but after 5 months of testing we are happy with the latest versions of the software and have installed CDP Agents on all our cPanel servers which (at the moment) are backed up twice at day at 00:00 and 12:00.

The best bit is that you guys now have access to restore backups from one of ten backup points! Did anyone notice a new button on cPanel??

R1Soft CDP working with cPanel 11

R1Soft CDP working with cPanel 11

cPanel clients can now choose to either restore backups of their whole /home/ directory or choose individual files and/or folders to restore in the event that (and we have all done it!) you have deleted the wrong file! Cliking the “R1Soft Restore Backups” button will take you to our CDP Server at which point you are presented with a file struture (tree) on the left hand side, and a list of files on the right hand side (just like navigating with Windows Explorer).

The first item you will need to expand is Disk Safe0 and then /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00 once you have done this, you will be presented with a list of backup points (Date and Time)

10 Backup Points

10 Backup Points

Once you find the time you would like to restore from and you expand that point, you will find a folder called /home/ and once you expand this, you will get your home root directory just like how it is when you connect to your account via FTP or FileManager. From here, you can either select the whole /home/ folder or navigate to a specific area (e.g. /home/public_html/blog/ ) and select indivial files to restore.

Once you have ticks next to everything you would like restored, simply click the “Restore Selected Files” button on the top right of the page.

When you enter the restore page, there are two options:

Overwrite Existing Files
Encrypt file data over network

with tickboxes, so simply select if you want the backuped files to Overwrite Existing Files or if you would like the CDP Server to Encrypt file data over network while transfering to the cPanel server! You can even choose to Restore to Alternate Location!!!

Please do raise a support ticket if you need any assistance with this, however we have tried to make it as straight forward as possible. If you have a dedicated server or VPS and require this feature please contact us, even if the server is not hosted with EH!

cPanel / WHM 11.24 has arrived!

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Volkan
on 19 December 2008
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We are glad to annouce that cPanel / WHM 11.24 has finally arrived! All our shared hosting servers are now running cPanel 11.24 and if you have a cPanel Dedicated Server with us, your cPanel should update automatically within the next few days!

After weeks of intense testing and feedback all the great new features and optimizations present in cPanel 11.24 EDGE and CURRENT are now in our RELEASE build.  11.24.4 includes many updates and enhancements that have been discussed in past posts. Now, those customers who prefer to use cPanel’s RELEASE build get to find out what all the buzz is about.

Time for an upgrade! cPanel & WHM 11.24

Published
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Volkan
on 18 November 2008
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cPanel and WHM 11.24 Coming Soon to Express Hosting

cPanel and WHM 11.24 Coming Soon to Express Hosting

We are glad to announce that we hope to be upgrading our shared platform to cPanel & WHM 11.24 at the end of this month! What does this mean for you? Basically, everything will be faster!

cPanel and WHM 11.24 offer new features such as NSD and Dovecot while streamlining the code base. The end result is a sleeker program that minimizes system requirements. The x3 interface itself has also been streamlined, requiring significantly less bandwidth, as seen in the figures below. These new features will result in faster overall load times and improve your everyday web hosting experience.

The amount of improvements made to the core software can not be overstated. cPanel have improved interfaces for configuring mail servers, FTP servers, web servers, and name servers. DNS clustering has also been imbued with many speed enhancements which, coupled with NSD will make DNS functions run at top speed. cPanel’s backup system has been reworked to realize significantly higher speeds. This will make creating, or restoring from. incremental or compressed backups substantially faster.

Also introduced in 11.24 is the cPanel Accelerated initiative. This new track for cPanel caters directly to dedicated server owners and administrators. The backend engine of cPanel has many updates and is reworked to yield enhanced performance on dedicated servers.

Click to Enlarge Graph

There is a lot more you can read about: http://www.cpanel.net/products/cpwhm/cpanel11/new-features.htm

However we will leave it at that, and we hope to have our systems upgraded to 11.24 at the end of this month. Watch this space…

Rack Move Complete!

Published
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Volkan
on 1 October 2008
in Behind the Scenes, Company News, Hardware and Service Messages
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It only took 5 hours to complete but we managed to move our whole platform across the road from BlueSquare 1 to BlueSquare 3! We managed to keep downtime to a minimum (I think it was less than 30 minutes!) and I just wanted to say thanks to all our customers for making the move as easy as it was! We could not have done it while answering hundreds of tickets asking why the servers are down!

Moving to BSQ3 now means we have more space (and power) to expand on our services, namely dedicated servers and new backup solutions.

On that note, I would also like to thank our dedicated server customers for voting for us on the Dedicated Server Directory! Thanks to you we won the September award for ‘Best UK Windows Servers’

R1Soft - Continuous Data Protection

Published
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Volkan
on 3 July 2008
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We will soon be introducing a new backup system to all our clients. R1Soft are specialists in Continuous Data Protection, Long story short, we will be increasing our frequency of backups from once a night to many times a day (tbc). Even better than that, we can reduce our disaster recovery times from several hours, to less that one hour thanks to R1Soft’s ‘Bare Metal Restore’ feature.

We will be testing the new system for the majority of July and we will annouce the date we go live towards the end of the month. There is one feature which will benefit our clients directly, we will be offering clients the option of restoring backups of their hosting accounts from our backups, something that most hosts do not allow. This way you will no longer need to contact customer support to have a backup restored.