It has come to our attention, that a handful of hard drives in our server cloud have failed/show signs of potentially failing soon. Although this is not effecting the cloud. We have just taken the decision to replace these hard drives. Although we do not think this will effect any sites, we would just like to make customers aware that we are doing maintenance work.
We will be carrying the work out between 11:30-14:00 BST.
If any customers do experience any down time or problems with there site, can you please email support IMMEDIATELY as what might be effecting you could be effecting other customers.
I will post a new blog post once the update has been completed.
September 12th, 2009
admin
Due to the extreme popularity of our VPS’s and Dedicated Servers, we have decided to halt orders as we are currently spending most of our time currently looking after these customers and planning our next network expansion.
However, if you have any questions, please email us at sales@chostwales.com.
Just as a quick one to all you folks out there.
server1.uk.vps.chostwales.net tripped for some reason on the power connection resulting in an instant reboot of the node. We had to start all VPS’s manually and all of them should be backup and running now. If not please contact support.
We will provide more information when we can once the Datacentre has investigated this further.
All VPS’s (new plans and old plans) come with burstable ram.
The Bram (as we call it) is exactly the same as your guaranteed ram. So if you are on the 384mb ram plan, you will have another 384mb to use temporally. So you have a total usable of 768mb ram.
We’ve got some freshly baked deals that have just come out of the oven piping hot!. These include:
Double Ram on VPS
20% off all Web Hosting Packages
30% off Reseller Hosting Packages
Goto http://chostwales.com/offers/ to get your codes now!
A lot of people have asked how they can make use of the extra IP’s they are allowed to have on there account. Be it Reseller Hosting, VPS or Dedicated Server.
In accordance to RIPE (the European Regulator of IP’s) we have to be told what the use of the IP is (eg, name server or SSL certificate). So the quickest way you can get an IP assigned to your account. Please can you email support@chostwales.com tell us your domain (if your on a Reseller Account) or your servers main IP (VPS or Dedicated Server) so we can swiftly get these IP’s assigned to your account.
To give users a better understanding of our UK cloud infrastructure and how we have built it and how everything runs together, we have produced a basic illustration to show you how everything is built.
We have approx 30 servers that have all been clustered together to share system resources such as CPU and RAM and then we produce our VPS Nodes on our cloud which then we put our customer VPS’s on these. This is similar to how our Cpanel Web Hosting/Reseller Hosting servers work except from we setup each CPanel Web server with the following specs, Quad Xeon 2.4 with 3-6gb ram.
Our UK Cloud Infrastructure
Each Server in the node comes with the minimum specification of:
8 x 2.66Ghz Xeon Processor
24GB Ram
2 x 1.5TB Hard Drives Raid 1 (we are hoping to move over to a SAN soon)
100mbit Connectivity to the internet (switching to 1Gbit over the following weeks or a 1Gbit Connectivity for internal traffic.)
As most of our customers are asking this, we might as well post it publicly.
A lot of our competitors will offer you say 256mb guaranteed ram and another 256mb burstable ram which means if you go over your 256MB ram, you can use your other 256MB burstable ram for a short period. We have found from personal experience, 90% of those hosts majority oversell there services and you will find that if you go over your 256MB you will end up crashing services such as Apache (httpd web server) or exim (mail server) when they are spilling over into the burstable area for example.
So initially burstable ram may sound like a great idea for those times when you just might need to use an extra 100MB for a few minutes, but realistically, things end up crashing and not working. So we believe that on a normal computer you don’t this thing called burstable ram so if you go over the memory available, your CPU (processor) will have to work harder and may slow the performance down a bit, but not much. But at least its up and running and not crashing. This type of theory is similar to what will happen on a VPS.
We have had a few customers point out some errors in the Cpanel and Plesk pre-generated templates that we have produced which have slight security exploits in them. So as a security precaution we have taken the decision to disable them for the time being till we are able to get them fully secured and ween out any security holes.
If any customers are already using a Cpanel or Plesk template install, please contact a member of staff ASAP at support@chostwales.com where a support representative will be more than happy to fix the security hole.
Sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.
Today (Wednesday 15th July 2009) we are launching our Cloud Based VPS to the general public!
VPS’s are constantly backed up nightly or twice daily to our offsite storage cloud in either France or USA
Although currently our UK cloud is up and running we plan to be bringing our USA cloud up and running within the next few weeks, but we are currently reassessing our plans for our cloud based in France and currently looking at other places in Europe (Germany probably being most likely).
Each VPS account comes with the following:
- Guaranteed CPU (depends on package)
- FTP off site backup storage matchable to your disk storage (on top of the nightly backup of your VPS!)
- 2 or more IP’s (depending on package or 50p extra per IP)
- RAID 1 redundant nodes
We also provide Managed VPS’s for a flat fee of £20 extra per month which includes unlimited hands on and support (please check our website for more information).