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).
I think its now that we come fully clean about how we can get 99.9% uptime and guarantee your site to be backup within 5 minutes should something happen to the server your website/customers websites are on.
We have a system which pings the server every 15 seconds. Should there be no response after the 3rd ping phase (45 seconds) and we have no planned maintenance. The system will start to move sites to other working servers from the latest backup (backups are taken every 12 hours). Once the backup has been restored, then all A records, MX records at our name servers are then updated to start pointing traffic to the new servers.
Today at exactly 2:10pm BST, we had our 50th Beta tester sign up for a VPS which means we have reached our goal (which we honestly thought we wouldn’t make) and it means now that we have stopped accepting Beta Tester VPS’s.
So i would like to thank all of you who are currently beta testing our vps’s and other services and would like to continue to thank you for all your feedback on how we can improve our services.
We plan to lauch to the general public in the upcoming days.
Well it has finally come!
After a few weeks of testing and making sure that this Distro actually works fully, we are pleased to announce that the Trixbox 2.6 VPS disk image based on the CentOS 5 OS has now been released to our BETA testers.
If you are a BETA tester you should be able to make full use of this.
After the huge demand in VPS’s for BETA testing we have brought another 3 servers online for the public to test out before going live next week. Again, if any of you are still interested in testing out these VPS before going live, please email sales@chostwales.com
I would also like to take this opportunity that we have added the following Distro’s to our system (64bit of course):
Ubuntu 8.04
Ubuntu 8.10
Ubunto 9.04
Fedora 7
Fedora 8
Fedora 9
Today after many months of testing and provisioning our cloud here in the United Kingdom. Our VPS are now up and running and 99.9% sure that our system is running smooth now.
Just to make sure of this. We have launched these services for the next 3 days into public BETA testing. If you are interested in trying these services out, please email sales@chostwales.com
Enjoy Testing!