ElasticHosts blog

LA and Toronto data center openings add to existing locations to provide continent wide IaaS

Los Angeles, US — January 16th, 2012: ElasticHosts, the cloud server provider, has today announced its launch into North America. The company will open two new data center locations in Los Angeles, USA and Toronto, Canada, adding to its existing locations in London, UK and San Antonio, Texas. With a central, east and west coast presence sitting alongside London, ElasticHosts will now be able to provide its elastic, easy-to-use, pay-as-you-go cloud hosting to customers across North America.

The ElasticHosts offering enables businesses to take advantage of on-demand, scalable cloud servers. Capacity is billed by the hour ensuring customers only pay for what they use. The user interface has been designed to suit all levels of IT expertise so is simple and easy-to-navigate, allowing organizations to instantly create, increase or decrease computing capacity. Customers can also scale their CPU, RAM and disk space independently to whatever sizes they need, rather than trying to match these needs to a set of pre-defined hosting packages. As a result, customers only pay for what they need, when they need it.

Richard Davies, CEO at ElasticHosts, explained: “In the current economic climate, businesses are under pressure to reduce costs. As such, IT spend is under increasing scrutiny and businesses need to justify any outgoings. For too long they have been overpaying for unnecessary server capacity because they were tied to fixed term, pay monthly contracts. The cloud hosting we provide lets businesses bypass this issue by letting them scale up and down, with costs instantly reflecting any changes. In addition, our goal is to offer scalable cloud computing but without the complexity often seen with this kind of solution. The benefits of cloud — costs savings and improved efficiency — are attractive to people of all levels of IT expertise, and cloud hosting should therefore be designed to suit this wide range of IT skill sets.”

With multiple data centers across North America, customers have the choice of where to locate their websites or applications to ensure their users get the best possible experience. Where there is a geographically diverse set of users, organizations can mirror and load balance their websites and application across multiple ElasticHosts data centers while still benefiting from the on demand model. Additionally, in offering a data center in Canada, ElasticHosts can provide North American cloud hosting that does not fall under the US Patriot Act, Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) or the forthcoming Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). This means that Canadian and European businesses which do not want to operate in US jurisdiction can still enjoy the benefits of North American cloud servers with fast network connectivity to US and Canadian markets.

To mark its US launch, ElasticHosts is currently offering a 5-day free trial to businesses. Prices then start from 6c per hour, or $44 per month.

For more information, please contact:

Spark Communications elastic@sparkcomms.co.uk +1 415 358 5219 +44 (0)20 7436 0420

ElasticHosts sales@elastichosts.com +1 415 358 5210 +44 (0)20 7183 8250

Happy New Year and welcome to the first ElasticHosts Cloud Server Newsletter of 2012!

We are very excited about the developments that we have planned for this year but first we need to let you know what we’ve been up to since the last newsletter back in the Summer:

• 16GB Servers, automatic repeat billing, firewalls
• Critical alerts by SMS and copied to extra email addresses
• Powered by ElasticHosts: Link to us
• Tutorials, global support and status page
• New Toronto and Los Angeles data centres
• Control panel revamp
• White-label program coming soon

Account updates and new features

If you have logged into your account recently you may have noticed a few extra options on the profile, subscriptions and server configuration pages. For instance, you can now configure a simple port blocking firewall in front of each of your servers.

We have also doubled the maximum server size to 16GB RAM in all zones except sat-p, made possible by an investment in larger hardware.

If you pay by credit card then you can set your account up to automatically renew your subscriptions each month and automatically top up your balance if it gets low, rather than having to remember to make manual payments.

On your profile page there is now an option to set up extra alternative email addresses and mobile numbers to receive important notifications. Together with automatic repeat billing, this helps keep your servers running smoothly.

Powered by ElasticHosts: Link to us

If you like hosting with ElasticHosts, why not support us by linking to us from your sites running in our cloud? As a thank you we will give you 10% of all the spend by any new customers referred by your link. Please see our website for tips on how to do this:

Cloud hosting referral program

Tutorial section

If you need assistance on setting up your servers, whether it is a simple configuration such as adding a static IP, or whether you want to achieve a load-balanced cluster of web-servers, you can find it all in the new tutorial section on our site. We will be adding new tutorials regularly, so please get in touch if you have any ideas or want to contribute yourself.

Cloud server tutorials

Global support and status page

During 2011 we expanded our support team and we now have native English speaking support engineers in the UK, USA and in Thailand, offering email and telephone support around the clock.

We also now have a status page, which we will update whenever there are issues affecting the services. Please check this site before contacting support if you think something is wrong.

http://status.elastichosts.com/

New Toronto and Los Angeles zones

We have two new availability zones in Los Angeles, California, USA and Toronto, Canada. These are already available to existing customers and we will be announcing a full public launch later in January. These zones are located in Peer 1 colocation facilities.

Cloud server data centres

Also, in December, we successfully migrated the entire London Peer 1 zone to their state-of-the-art green data centre in Portsmouth.

New state-of-the-art data centre for Elastichosts customers

Control panel revamp

Some of you may already be running our new control panel. This is still in beta and we expect to be launching it for everyone very soon.

We have also been revamping the rest of the site with design improvements and extra features such as an activity log — we hope you will be pleasantly surprised.

White-label program coming soon

We have been working on developing a white label service, which will allow businesses to offer cloud hosting to their own customers under their own branding from ElasticHosts data centres. This program will complement our existing ElasticStack platform but will appeal to resellers who want to get started quickly and easily without buying their own hardware.

So far, we have two white label systems in production and we are looking to expand this considerably during 2012. Please contact us right away if you are interested in finding out more about this and we will keep you posted on updates.

We’re pleased to report that this weekend’s migration of our lon-p zone to Peer 1’s new £10 million data centre in Portsmouth, UK, went smoothly. After a long night’s work, the migration went ahead with minimal downtime.

Now, all of our lon-p clients are hosted on brand new state-of-the-art server hardware, with a direct connection to PEER 1 Hosting’s carrier-class fibre network.

The new Portsmouth site is the flagship green data centre in the UK for our data centre provider, Peer 1. Within easy reach of London, it has a massive 11MVA power and room for 20,000 servers. You can see the new data centre in this BBC TV report:

Now that the migration is complete, you should see no disruption to your services. We’ve also migrated our existing IP ranges to the new data centre, so that all cloud servers will retain their existing IPs — no reconfiguration needed.

In fact, the only difference you may see is performance improvements, because during the migration, we took the opportunity to upgrade all of our server hardware to brand new equipment, so your servers are running on state-of-the-art kit.

In time, we’re planning to offer you larger cloud servers, with capacity up to 16GB, based on the new hardware. For now, though, we’re recovering from the late-night migration and updating our full list of cloud server data centres. If you have any questions about the move, do get in touch — support@elastichosts.com.

The joy of the cloud is that it makes it super easy to respond to changing demand. Say you write a web app. And it’s really good! In just a few weeks, you go from 10 users to 100,000.

In the bad old days, your app would have promptly fallen over, you would have had to buy new hardware and your sysadmins would have had to install and configure this hardware before your site came back up. These days, scaling up your server from a 2GHz processor to a 20GHz processor, or from 1GB of RAM to 8GB of RAM, is as simple as using an ElasticHosts cloud server pricing slider.

But what if you want to go to 10 million users? There’s still a limit on the size of a single server. To build a really high-traffic web application — and of course, to handle potential hardware or software failure safely — you’ll still need to branch out your app across as number of servers.

The good news is that the cloud makes this much easier too. Not only can you set up your high-traffic cluster as a series of virtual machines, managing the whole process from one command line, but you can connect them over a private VLAN and scale each element of the cluster up and down as you need.

Our new tutorial series looks at our recommended techniques for building a huge, high-traffic, redundant LAMP web application in the cloud. We have the following tutorials:

1. Set up a cloud LAMP stack on an ElasticHosts machine
2. Move MySQL to a separate cloud database server, connecting over a private VLAN
3. Create a second MySQL cloud database server for master-master redundancy
4. Add a second cloud web server and switch between the two using round-robin DNS
5. Add a front-end Apache cloud load balancer for sophisticated traffic balancing between our two web servers
6. Add a second HA cloud load balancer for complete redundancy throughout the stack

If you work your way through this series, you’ll have a completely redundant stack, balancing web traffic between two web and two database servers, and with failover of the load balancer, web and database server. Pretty cool, eh?

A warm welcome to our newest member of staff, Support and Pre-Sales Engineer (and official owner of the longest job title in the company) — Owen Tuz.

Based in London, Owen has joined the crack support team of Anna, Paul, Ardyn and James. He’ll be helping customers with all kinds of technical queries about the cloud, from load balancing to security.

He’s also specialising in helping brand new cloud users get off the ground — so if you’re just beginning a free trial with ElasticHosts, Owen is likely to be one of the first people you meet.

As well as being the newest member of ElasticHosts, Owen may also have the most diverse range of interests. He graduated this summer with a degree in Music from the University of Essex, and composes his own classical music, besides playing classical guitar and jazz bass.

He got into open-source development through “far too much time spent breaking and fixing computers” (we all know how that feels), and through setting up open-source composition software on Linux.

When he isn’t hacking or writing music, Owen says, you’re likely to find him playing chess or running. Welcome Owen!

Data security and the cloud has been in the news recently, following high-profile links from Sony and other companies. How does this affect you, if you’re an ElasticHosts customer? How secure is your data really?

The good news is that cloud servers you manage yourself – like ElasticHosts – should be a lot less vulnerable than cloud data or applications managed by third-party firms. If managed correctly, your database on an ElasticHosts server should be rather more secure than, say, your Gmail.

The key words in that sentence are “if managed correctly”. Using an ElasticHosts server gives you a lot of control over your data, but with great power comes great responsibility.

So in this post, we’ll explain firstly why cloud servers should be more secure than cloud applications, and secondly give you some tips for keeping your ElasticHosts servers safe.

Data risk with cloud applications

First of all, let’s look at cloud data and applications. If you store your email in the cloud with Gmail, then there are four possible ways it could be compromised:

1. Service provider. In theory, Google’s sysadmins could access your email. (Last year, a former Facebook employee made allegations that Facebook sysadmins had a master password allowing them to access any account.)
2. Lock-in. In the unlikely event that Google goes bust, your data could vanish. A more plausible scenario is that Google starts behaving in ways you don’t like. Whenever you use cloud applications, always make sure you can export your data if needed.
3. Jurisdiction. Google’s servers are in the US, and in theory, if they hold private data on you or your customers, this could break the EU Data Protection Directive on personal data. It also means that the US authorities could order Google to hand over your data.
4. Hackers. You’re reading your email over the public internet, so it’s vulnerable to compromise, including hard-to-detect ‘man in the middle’ attacks.

Data risk with cloud servers

In the case of cloud servers, only one of these areas is still a real vulnerability.

1. Service provider. Not an issue – we don’t have root passwords to your VMs, so even if we wanted to, we couldn’t log in.
2. Lock-in. Not an issue – it’s easy to move your data off your ElasticHosts servers, and you control your own backups (we’ll write about avoiding lock-in in a forthcoming post). We don’t tie you in to a monthly contract, so you won’t even lose financially if you leave.
3. Jurisdiction. Not an issue. You can choose ElasticHosts servers in the EU or the US, as you prefer. If you are a UK company using UK servers, then you are complying with the EU Data Protection Directive, and your servers are subject to UK law.
4. Hackers. Still an issue – your server is available via a public IP address. We’ll discuss how to reduce hacking risks in the remainder of this post.

Good security practices for cloud servers

So an ElasticHosts cloud server minimises service provider, lock-in and jurisdiction risk – but you can still be hacked. How can you keep your ElasticHosts server safe from hacking attacks?

Firstly, use strong passwords. Make sure your ssh, VNC and control panel passwords are all highly secure. Change them regularly. And don’t forget human error — make sure you follow a good password policy.

In addition, we recommend using some combination of the following on your servers:

• IP restriction. Restrict IP login to ensure that login isn’t allowed from any IP address other than your own.
• Firewalls. Set up firewalls on your sites.

If properly protected, cloud servers should actually reduce risk compared to physical servers, by removing the need to move and protect physical hardware – many high-profile data leaks have come from flash drives!

Our CEO Richard Davies recently wrote a guest post for ComputerWorldUK about how to spot fake clouds. Here is the full text:

The term cloud computing has become a constant fixture in the media — and indeed in the boardroom. It seems that you can’t have a conversation in IT without the term coming up at least once.

The reasons for this are clear; the economic outlook continues to look bleak and in these times of austerity everyone is trying to cut costs, and specifically avoid large capital expenditure, while still trying to do things more quickly. Cloud in its truest form, with its promises of reduced CAPEX and increased IT scalability, can deliver on this. But, and it’s a big but, we are increasingly seeing things being associated with cloud that simply don’t fit into the model of cloud computing.

It’s almost like cloud is a magical term and if it’s used to describe your technology, riches will befall you. Well I think that’s the hope of many marketing departments who are selling technology that isn’t cloud, but peddling it as if it is.

The three key benefits of the cloud model are the pay-as-you-go payment structure, its on-demand scalable nature and the self service provisioning it affords. For anyone attracted to the cloud model, these three attributes should be used as the acid test as to whether something is truly cloud or just hot air.

At an infrastructure level, we’ve seen many hosting companies launch cloud offerings but only a handful could meet the attributes outlined in our acid test. For example, many “cloud offerings” still require customers to ask the service provider’s staff to scale servers on their behalf, while others will lock customers into monthly or even annual contracts.

Many businesses have already started adopting cloud and a lot of these have enjoyed the kind of benefits they were promised. However that’s not always the case. The problem is the fake cloud scenario I describe above. Some businesses have found that the ‘cloud’ service they’ve been sold is not actually cloud at all.

Therefore, before rushing in and signing with a cloud service provider, businesses need to check that what they are signing up to really is cloud. True cloud is scalable, flexible and PAYG, but there are many supposed cloud offerings that don’t offer this. Instead, they are traditional contracts with the word ‘cloud’ included to take advantage of the buzz.

Cloud can without doubt help a business as it tries to become more cost and operationally efficient. But businesses need to be careful of fake cloud. My advice to any business is to insist on true cloud service, with fully automated self-service scaling and PAYG pricing from where they need it. The reaction of the prospective provider will tell the organisation whether this offering is truly cloud and will therefore offer the benefits they are looking for.

We think one of the things that makes ElasticHosts different is the quality of our support — and from these reviews it seems many of you agree.

But while we’ve always prided ourselves on our friendly, quick, one-to-one telephone and email support, we’re now also improving our online support section.

Even the most experienced sysadmin wants to read the manual sometimes!

So we’re happy to announce the first articles in our new support section. We hope this will become a complete guide to using ElasticHosts, as well as a useful set of resources for those building cloud servers more generally.

We’ll be building and expanding on this over the coming months, but already we have:

• Improved support home page: We’ve brought together all our support resources into one section.
• FAQ: FAQ covering all aspects of our cloud servers.
• API reference: Description of our powerful cloud server control API.
• New site-wide search: Now it’s easier to search the whole ElasticHosts site for the answer you need.
• Control panel demo video: Demonstrating common usage to get you started faster.
• Tutorials: If you’re just getting started with ElasticHosts, or if you want to carry out common tasks like adding a VLAN or a static IP address, this is the place to go.
• Partner tools: ElasticHosts is part of a growing cloud ecosystem, making your lives as cloud developers much easier. We’ve added articles describing how to use ElasticHosts with common tools such as libcloud and jcloud.

Preview of coming attractions — we’ll be adding a full guide to setting up a scalable, redundant LAMP stack to the tutorials section shortly.

Let us know what else we can add to make your lives easier — support@elastichosts.com.

ElasticHosts has partnered with Hybrid Sites to provide scalable, redundant cloud web hosting for LAMP sites without the hassle of server administration.

By nature, ElasticHosts cloud servers give you full root/adminstrator access and the power to install and run whatever software you want. But sometimes you simply want to build on an existing LAMP server, and that’s where ElasticHosts cloud sites come in.

Simple to set up

This type of hosting is perfect for all standard PHP & MySQL web applications. Hybrid Sites offers automatic installers for WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and many popular e-commerce, forum, CRM, wiki and e-learning environment applications — so it’s quick and easy to set up a site, letting you focus on building a business.

Easy to scale

Our cloud sites serve your website files for you, giving you the redundancy and scalability of the cloud without having to manage the server yourself.

Built on ElasticHosts technology, your site can scale from requiring a tiny fraction of a cloud server to multiple powerful cloud servers in moments when you get a spike in traffic, ensuring that your site is always online, and always fast.

Build a cloud site today

Get started today! Try our free 48-hour cloud site trial.

During the summer, we at the ElasticHosts office have been competing in the Enjoy Work sporting competitions run by Chiswick Business Park.

Anyway, our legendary Sales & Support Manager Anna Griffiths would like you all to know that she has been awarded the Player of the Season award!

Anna made it to the final of the rowing competition — a head-to-head race over 750m. She was a member of the second-placed dodgeball team, and played tennis alongside our Business Development Consultant Paul Gwyther — Anna and Paul were also placed in the individual competitions.

Meanwhile, the ElasticHosts football team, the Raindrops — regular members Richard, Jaime, Anna and Paul, with Anna as honorary manager — made it to the semi-final of the Plate competition.

We know that those of you who work with Anna won’t be surprised by this proof of her dedication, enthusiasm and team spirit. Well done Anna!