Technical

UK Servers are pleased to announce that with immediate effect all customers with dedicated, co-location and IP transit services will have their services protected by our in house DDoS filtering and scrubbing centre with upto 100Gb/s DDoS protection included to all customers at no additional charge.

Our monitoring and detection system uses complex algorithms to analyse traffic and route it through our filtering devices in the event of a large service affecting DDoS attack.
We have invested heavily in Riorey’s RG series protection devices which are known within the industry to be the most powerful DDoS Protection engine in the world filtering upto 72 million packets per second.

Over the last six months we have been integrating these devices within our UK network and are now able to offer all customers the protection from large denial of service attacks without having to route any traffic through third party DDoS protection.

Ben Yarwood, Network Engineer at UK Servers said:

“Over the last 12 months we have seen an increasing rise in the size and number of attacks against customers services, our new in house automated detection and filtering system means we can now filter DDoS traffic in house resulting in no increase in latency during attacks. We recently filtered an attack of 70Gb/s against a large retail site and the customers technical team they were completely unaware they were even under attack!”

With our new protection system customers can opt to have traffic permanently routed through our DDoS scrubbing centre allowing for “inline” protection if required, detailed attack statistics including the type of attack, country of origin(s) and scale are available as well as the option to customise the level of protection.

David Howes, Technical Director at UK Servers comments:

“We have been investing heavily in our core network over recent months and now have over 700Gb/s of external connectivity via peering and transit providers making our network one of the largest of any UK Dedicated Server provider. The benefit of this increase is the additional capacity leaves us best place to handle any large scale DDoS attacks. Downtime from a DDoS attack is incredibly damaging for the countless organisations that depend on being up and running 24/7/365.”

Please contact us if you have any questions or want to know how we can help protect your business against DDoS attacks.

Over the last few months we have been working away at improving capacity and redundancy in a number of areas of our network to ensure we continue to provide the lowest latency highest possible bandwidth services to our customers.

Since June of this year we have deployed an additional five Juniper MX series routers across our core POP sites bringing online over 2.4 TB/s of additional capacity.

We have also increased the number of core sites we operate from within the London Docklands and now have a prescence within Digital Reality Soverign House, Equinix Harbour Exchange Telehouse East, North 2 and West. We are able to offer dedicated servers, IP transit and MPLS cross connect circuits at any of these sites.

Additionally we have bought in an additional 150Gb/s of external IP transit suppliers and ontop of this now have direct private peering agreements with all the main UK ISPs (Virgin, BT, TalkTalk, BSKYB and Vodafone).

The extensive investment we have carried out over the last few months now sees us as having the highest external bandwidth capacity network of any privately owned UK dedicated server provider and will ensure we can continue to offer customers stable services over the years to come.

World Backup Day

March 31st is World Backup Day!  World Backup Day is a day for people to learn about the increasing role of data in our lives and the importance of regular backups.

Customers are growing ever more concerned with security and availability within their hosting environments but many overlook the importance of a proper regular backup schedule. We are increasingly find that we are migrating many customers without a backup strategy in place onto our servers with many assuming their existing provider is already taking backups. (If they don’t mention they are taking backups then the probably aren’t!)

A good backup strategy for your server will involve at a minimum storing backups on a different storage device to where your main data is held, ideally on a different server offsite and with multiple backups being stored depending on the use of your server.

UK Servers offers customers two choices of backups, CDP or FT Based all of which are stored at a different geographical location to your main hosting environment a minimum of 100 miles away:

– Our continuous data protection (CDP) is a high performance disk-to-disk backup service enabling Linux and Windows disaster recovery and bare metal restores. We are able to take a snapshot of your hard drive, and in the event of a hard drive failure or user error, provide a full restore of the disks within a short timeframe. You can configure the frequency at which you backup your data (hourly, daily, weekly etc) using the web interface and then rest easy knowing your data is available in the event of any drive failure or accidental deletion. The CDP backup system also allows for restore of a single file, folder or database through the web interface system.

– Our File Transfer (FT) based backup system is a remote storage space accessible via the following protocols: FTP, RSYNC, SFTP and NFS. We can configure and monitor the backup of specific files or folders as requested. Backups can be taken nightly, weekly and monthly and stored as required.

World Backup Day is an independent initiative to raise awareness about backups and data preservation.  To help publicise World Backup Day UK Servers is giving all new and existing customers 50% off all UK Servers backup services from 30th March – 4th April. Simply quote promo code: BACKUP50 on our order form to take advantage of this.  More information can be found at: http://www.worldbackupday.com/