Archive for the 'Service Messages' Category

DNS, DNS, DNS……..

Published
by
Volkan
on 11 January 2009
in Behind the Scenes and Service Messages
. 0 Comments

Anyone notice some downtime earlier this morning? First of all let me apologise, this was due to our main nameserver crashing after an automated system update. We were first made aware of the situation around 04:00 this morning, and we managed to rebuild the server by 06:00 however during this time, DNS servers around the world and cached invalid IP addresses for many of the websites on our system. Once our nameservers were sending out the correct IP addresses the cache was updated and the websites should have magically reappeared! Most of the websites were up and running by 10:00.

Our sytems administrators with the help of an external company are trying to find out exactly what caused the crash, however in the meantime, we have moved our nameservers onto new hardware and moved NS3 and NS4 onto new clusters to ensure this DOES NOT happen again.

I hope any customer that has been with us for a while knows that this sort of thing does not happen often, and as for our new customers, I cannot apologise enough and I hope we have not put you off.

I want to take this time to thank all our customers, and to wish you all a happy and successful 2009! Good luck with all your ventures!

CDP Backups…Now LIVE!!!

Published
by
Volkan
on 20 December 2008
in Company News, Service Messages and Updates
. 1 Comment

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!

Published
by
Volkan
on 19 December 2008
in Company News, Service Messages and Updates
. 0 Comments

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
by
Volkan
on 18 November 2008
in Company News, Service Messages and Updates
. 0 Comments
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
by
Volkan
on 1 October 2008
in Behind the Scenes, Company News, Hardware and Service Messages
. 1 Comment

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’

Power Outages…

Published
by
Volkan
on 6 July 2008
in Service Messages
. 0 Comments

On the morning and afternoon of the 2nd of July we had two power failures. The first knocking out our VPS’s for 4 hours, and our shared platform for 5 minutes, the other in the afternoon knocking out all platforms for 5 minutes. Ok, 5 minutes is not long but it caused a number of problems for us.

Better yet, everyone else’s racks where still running! What went wrong?

Well according to the staff at BlueSquare, the nightshift staff where working on some nearby racks and managed to ‘dislodge’ out some power cables! After getting everything back up, we raised a ticket and got a reply with an apology which said:

we’ve moved the other customer’s cabling to avoid this from re-occuring.

Well then why on earth did this happen again! We are let to find out. We have also been looking into the new BlueSquare MK Datacentre. This would help us keep our costs low (even with the increased cost in power) as well us giving us much more room to expand.

Apologies for any inconveniences caused, and as usual we will keep you updated with any updates.

In the mean time we are fitting our own UPS units in all our racks to ensure if something like this happens again, your data will be available.

R1Soft - Continuous Data Protection

Published
by
Volkan
on 3 July 2008
in Company News, Hardware and Service Messages
. 0 Comments

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.