News | Page 2 of 3 | UK Servers

Launch of Ultra Low Latency Servers

We are now able to offer ultra low latency servers hosted in the London Docklands. These servers are hosted within Telehouse building within the London Docklands the the primary home of the London Internet Exchange since 1994. Our “Ultra” range of servers all feature high speed solid state drives, DDR4 memory and are provided on gigabit or ten gigabit ports.
We are able to provide same day setup on most configurations at this site and the ultra low latency network at this site are ideal for streaming, trading platforms and other applications where network latency is of vital importance. Telehouse is also ISO 9001:2008 and ISO 27001:2005 accredited datacentre meaning it is a great location for customers wanting secure PCI DSS hosting.

For more information on view our page on low latency servers

02 March

Addition of E3 v5 Skylake CPUs to Server Range

UK Servers has today announced a new range of Dedicated 250 Servers using the latest Intel Skylake E3 v5 CPUs. The Xeon E3-1200 v5 processors can support up to 64 GB of DDR4 system r e3-v5 am compared to just 32 GB DDR3/L memory on the older Xeon E3-1200 V4 processors. UK Servers Dedicated 250 Server will be utilising the Intel Xeon E3-1230 v5 with a multi-threaded quad core design clocked at 3.4 GHz base and 3.8 GHz boost. With Skylake, Intel is transitioning from their Denlow Platform to the new Greenlow Platform which is based around the C230 Series chipset.

Our 250 range of servers are available with linux or windows operating systems upto 64Gb RAM and we can offer same day setup on all of these servers. To find our more and configure/order your server today then please click here.

05 January

Sales Boost for Personalised Digital Printing Company

Pixa Prints offers a 24 hour service in printing photos onto a wide range of products such as calendars, mugs and canvas.

Specialist provider of printed merchandise Pixa Prints has benefitted from a busy Christmas period following a switch to load balanced clustered hosting services from UK Servers.

Pixa Prints first contacted UK Servers towards the end of last year wanting to prepare their website for the busy Christmas period. Formerly hosted on a large single dedicated server Pixa Prints had experienced issues with their hosting service in the run up to the holiday period in the previous year. One advantage Pixa Prints provides over their competitors is that they offer the despatch of any order within 24 hours, this is achieved through an automated online design tool and scripted ordering process which can often put strain on their hosting infrastructure when dealing with large files.

“In the six weeks leading up to Christmas we traditionally see around a 150% increase in our sales which puts increased demand on our hosting service. Our last server provider had tried to resolve this issue by increasing memory and hardware within our existing server, unfortunately our site was still struggling to cope at busy times and having been recommended by a client of ours we approached UK Servers to see how they could help us.”

The solution proposed to the client was an enterprise load balanced setup using a number of physical dedicated server machines. The proposed solution not only offers improved redundancy but helps reduce page load times by spreading the load between multiple servers. Anthony Parrington, one of UK Servers complex hosting specialists explains the solution: “Pixa Prints wanted to improve their page load times at busy periods without drastically overhauling their website, the solution we provided uses nginx load balancers that operate in failover with apache webservers to serve the pages. In addition to this we also setup an active-active mySQL replication cluster with auto increment offset to power the database backend for the customer. The benefit of such a solution is as the clients business grows we can simply bring online additional web or mySQL servers into the cluster to spread the load the increased visitors place on the clients’ website.”

The Pixa Prints platform runs on a Load Balanced Nginx Solution with mySQL Replication, this spreads the load at busy periods and gives improved redundancy.

As with any solution the proposal was put together according to the client’s budget as Greg Bales of UK Servers explains: “The proposed solution to the client effectively required a minimum of six separate machines, two load balancers, two webservers and two database servers. After taking time to understand the client’s budget we came up with a solution that virtualised a number of physical machines enabling both database and load balancers machines to run from the same physical hardware therefore allowing the client to increase the number of web and database servers he was able to run”

UK Servers were able to deliver the system on time and within budget for the customer, aiding in migration from the customers previous host. Richard Sands comments: “The server solution that UK Servers deployed for us has made a huge difference to our business particularly over the recent busy festive period. We were handling considerably more traffic this year and the site never slowed at all, coupled with the peace of mind that our hosting service can now handle multiple server hardware failures we are very happy with UK Servers”.

More information on our load balanced hosting clusters can be found here: https://www.ukservers.com/enterprise-solutions/load-balanced-hosting/ or alternatively please do not hesitate to get in touch with one of our experienced sales team.

05 October

Increased Capacity at Coventry Site

Additional Rackspace Available at Coventry Datacentre for Co-Location and Dedicated Server Clients

As a result of customer demand we are pleased to announce that plans are underway to bring online a further data hall of forty racks at our Coventry site.

Construction of the new data hall is already underway and expected to be completed in the coming weeks with many racks within the new data hall having already been pre-sold to both existing and new customers. With separate electrical switchgear and UPS systems to our existing Coventry data halls customers can opt to spread their services between the halls for increased peace of mind and redundancy.

In addition to increasing the number of racks at the site, new welfare facilities and build rooms are being constructed for customers aswell as additional office space to house our expanding customer service team.

If you have any questions regarding the new data hall or would like to get in touch to arrange a tour once completed then please do not hesitate to contact us

02 October

Come and Find us at Cov Expo!

Coventry Expo!
We are exhibiting at Coventry & Warwickshire’s Chamber of Commerce Expo at the Warwickshire Exhibiton Centre today, come and find us at stand 147 between 10:30 AM to 3PM.

Entry to the event is free and on our stand you have the opportunity to take part in our “Rack Race” challenge and be in with a chance to win a luxury hamper!

More information is available at: http://www.cwexpo.co.uk/

23 April

Centos 7.1 Released – LVM Cache Support

The Community Enterprise Operating System (CentOS) has announced the availability of first point release of CentOS 7. Derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1, this release has been tagged as 1503 and it is available for x86 compatible and x86_64 bit machines. Centos 7.1 is available to be selected to all customers wanting to purchase any of our dedicated server services and can be selected from our list of operating systems when configuring your server.

You can download the operating system from our 10Gb/s mirror located within our Coventry datacentre: http://mirror.cov.ukservers.com/centos/7.1.1503/

An important feature to note is the introduction of Logical Volume Manager (LVM) Cache (built on top of dm-cache) this allows you to use SSD(s) to act as fast persistent caches to speed up access to standard SATA hard drives. UK Servers is able to assist any customers wanting to set up their disks with LVM and use LVM cache on any servers running Centos 7.1.

The Release Notes explain the major changes:

As of March 2015 ABRT (>= 2.1.11-19.el7.centos.0.1) can report bugs directly to bugs.centos.org.
Support for new processors (Intel Broadwell) and graphics (AMD Hawaii)
Full support for LVM cache
Ability to mount ceph block devices
Updated Hyper-V network drivers
New libguestfs features
Full support for OpenJDK-1.8.0
Improved clock stability (for PTP and NTP)
Updated Networkmanager packages to version 1.0
Updated docker to 1.4.1
Updated OpenSSH to 6.6.1
New package: Mozilla Thunderbird
Update to numerous storage, network and graphics drivers
Technology Preview: Support of the Btrfs file system, OverlayFS and the Cisco VIC kernel driver.

31 March

World Backup Day – 31st March

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.

World Backup Day 2015

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-2015

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/

16 January

XenServer 6.5 Released – Available on all Servers

Citrix has announced XenServer 6.5, their newest release of the company’s commercial virtualization platform based on the open-source Xen Project hypervisor. With the update, XenServer now offers a full 64-bit kernel architecture, which allows customers to leverage the latest hardware and OS platforms, and supports enterprise-grade networking, storage and workload management.

As of today all UK Servers customers can opt to have XenServer 6.5 pre-installed on their dedicated server, the new 64-bit kernel architecture features significant improvements in networking and storage performance, providing customers with a virtualization platform for running new and existing workloads in their workspace and datacenter environments. The new release also re-introduces enterprise-class features for workload balancing (WLB) and distributed virtual switch controllers (DVSC).

Official update notes are as follows:

XenServer 6.5 introduces many architectural improvements which aim to improve overall performance and removes a number of scalability limitations in XenServer 6.2.

64-bit Control Domain Linux Kernel
- The new 64-bit Control Domain (Dom0) enables XenServer to accommodate many more PCI devices per host (NICs, GPUs, and so on), and allows the use of devices that are 64-bit only (including many Solid State Drive solutions).
New Xen Project Hypervisor v4.4
- XenServer 6.5 includes the latest Xen Project hypervisor available; v4.4 delivers many improvements. It vastly increases the number of virtual event channels available for Dom0, from 1023 to 131071, which translates into a correspondingly larger number of attached virtual devices.
Re-introduction and Improvements to Workload Balancing
- XenServer 6.5 sees the return of the WorkLoad Balancing (WLB) virtual appliance. WLB gives system administrators deep insight into system performance, allowing infrastructure optimization.
Distribute Virtual Switch Controller – new version included and deprecation rescinded
- The Distributed Virtual Switch Controller (DVSC) is fully supported within XenServer 6.5 and the deprecation notice issued at 6.2 is rescinded.
Newly Supported Guests
- Support is added for the following new guests:
- Ubuntu 14.04
- SLES 11 SP3 and SLES 12
- CentOS 5.10, 5.11, 6.5, and 7.0
- RedHat 5.10, 5.11, 6.5, and 7.0
- Oracle Linux 5.10, 5.11, 6.5, and 7.0
- Oracle UEK 6.x

XenServer 6.5 Full Release Notes

XenServer 6.5 Product Page

13 January

Customise your Server Quote Tool

We have today re-launched an updated and improved version of our online dedicated server ordering quote tool. When ordering dedicated servers customers can now fully customise a server to their specification with the ability to customise hard disks, RAID cards, memory and operating system.

The customised quote tool can provide upto 4,000 different server configurations however if you have a hardware requirement in mind that is not listed then please don’t hesitate to contact us and I am sure we will be able to help out! To customise any server simply click the order now button on any of our product pages and continue to configure

29 December

EU VAT Changes from 1st January 2015

From 1st January 2015 inline with EU legislation the rate of VAT charged to all of our EU consumers will change to reflect the current VAT rate of their member state.

This change only affects:
– Customers of UK Servers that are private individuals and are non UK EU residents.

This change does not affect:
– Any UK customers
– Any EU business customers that have provided UK Servers with a valid EU VAT ID.
– Any customers outside the EU region.

All customers affected by this change will have invoices generated from January 1st displaying the VAT rate of their member state. All customers with recurring billing enabled will have the credit/debit cards automatically charged at the new rate however we ask any customers paying by standing order to ensure that they update their payments to reflect the change.

More details regarding this change and how it may affect your business can be found here: http://www.thecourier.co.uk/business/money-2.174/money-matters-digital-services-vat-changes-gather-no-moss-1.749000

Page 2 of 31 2 3

Launch of Ultra Low Latency Servers

Addition of E3 v5 Skylake CPUs to Server Range

Sales Boost for Personalised Digital Printing Company

Increased Capacity at Coventry Site

Come and Find us at Cov Expo!

Centos 7.1 Released – LVM Cache Support

World Backup Day – 31st March

XenServer 6.5 Released – Available on all Servers

Customise your Server Quote Tool

EU VAT Changes from 1st January 2015

Menu

Categories

Recent News

Useful Links

Latest News

Network Status

Get in Touch