Articles tagged with news

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

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.

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!

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.

If you manage lots of ElasticHosts servers, or just like to create and manage servers quickly and easily, you may already know about our cloud server API.

This gives you an easy way to to create drives, upload and download drive images, and create and control virtual servers on our infrastructure. We also offer ready-made download tools to make life even simpler.

We’ve just made a couple of minor updates to the ElasticHosts API, in order to separate policy keys from value keys.

The changes are documented on our API page, but here’s a quick rundown.

VNC

When creating a server, you can specify the IP address for overlay VNC access on port 5900 using the vnc key. Specify auto to reuse nic:0:dhcp if available, or otherwise allocate a temporary IP at boot.

Previously, the API had a single key, vnc:ip. When the server started, this key changed value to the VNC IP address allocated.

Now, the API has a policy key, vnc. When the server starts this key stays unchanged, but an extra key vnc:ip appears with the VNC IP that has been allocated.

DHCP

When creating a server, you can specify the IP address offered by DHCP to network interface 0 using the nic:0:dhcp key. If unset, no address is offered. Specify an IP, or set to auto to allocate a temporary IP at boot.

Previously, the API had a single key, nic:0:dhcp. If auto was specified, then when the server started, this key changed to the dynamic IP allocated.

Now, the API has a policy key nic:0:dhcp, which you can set to auto or a static IP. When the server starts, this key stays unchanged, but an extra key nic:0:dhcp:ip appears with the dynamic or static IP allocated.

SMP

When creating a server, you can specify the number of virtual processors using the smp key. Set this to auto to calculate based on CPU.

Previously, the API had a single key, smp. If this was auto, then when the server started, this key changed to the number of cores allocated.

The new API has a policy key, smp, which you can set to auto or a number of cores. When the server starts, this key stays unchanged, but two extra keys smp:cores and smp:sockets appear with the number of cores allocated and the number of sockets (virtual CPUs) that these appear in.

It’s been a busy summer here at ElasticHosts! We’re happy to announce some significant new features for our customers:

• Firewalls: You have always been able to run software firewalls inside your OS, and we still recommend that for complex firewalling requirements. But we now also offer a firewall in front of your VMs, which you can configure to block ports before they reach your VM, for extra peace of mind. You can enable and configure firewalls on the configuration page for each server.


• FTP upload: We’ve added support for uploading ISO and drive images directly into your account using FTP. The username is your account UUID and the password is your secret API key. These can be found on the profile page in your account. The server is ftp.<zone>.elastichosts.com, where the zone is lon-b (London BlueSquare), lon-p (London Peer1) or sat-p (San Antonio Peer1).


• Choose your subscription dates: You can now specify the end date for your subscriptions, letting you sync up all your items to end at the same time and pick the time of month to pay your bill, which should make life more convenient. Remember that if you are on recurring billing we will take your payment 7 days before your subscription is due to expire.


• Burst everything: You can now choose to burst all ElasticHosts features, including IP addresses, VLANs, and firewalls. which were previously subscription-only — making your use of ElasticHosts more efficient.


• PDF invoices: On the billing page in your account, you can now right click on the payment lines in your transaction history and download your invoices in PDF format, which may be better for filing or printing.


• Alternative email addresses: On the profile page in your account, you can now set up extra email addresses to receive our notification emails, so you don’t have to rely on a single email address.

UPDATE 3rd November 2011: There were so many new features that when we wrote this post we forgot to mention one! You can also now run multiple VLANs on a single server. This can be handy if e.g. you have a server in your account set up as a firewall and want to have multiple private networks behind that.

Cloud platform provider launches range of new features to build cost-effective public and private clouds

London, UK — July 28th, 2011: ElasticStack, the cloud platform provider, has today announced a range of new features enabling businesses to build and quickly deploy a scalable, resilient, pay-as-you-go cloud infrastructure from low cost commodity hardware. New features include improved storage clustering, which reduces hardware costs by eliminating the need for a SAN (Storage Area Network) whilst still offering the same resilience. Another key update is the new Ajax user interface which makes deploying and managing cloud servers easier and faster.

Following its launch in 2010, ElasticStack has been adopted across the world by service providers and businesses who have built public and private clouds within weeks. The platform has always enabled significant cost savings by allowing businesses to run compute and storage on the same commodity hardware — eliminating the need for expensive SANs or dedicated storage clusters. However, the new release uses distributed block storage (network RAID) technology to offer improved storage redundancy and performance. This means that for the first time businesses can make their clouds as resilient as they would be with a SAN without the associated costs.

“Organisations traditionally used SANs to provide resilient shared storage for their clouds. They wanted to be able to move VMs between compute nodes and also to know that their storage was resilient to hardware failure. However, implementing a SAN or any dedicated storage cluster comes at an expense that ultimately increases the cost of your cloud,” explained Richard Davies, CEO at ElasticStack. “With ElasticStack you’ve always been able to run both your compute and storage infrastructure on a single set of commodity hardware, with VMs still free to move between nodes. Now, you’ll also be secure that if any node goes down then all of your storage is already replicated elsewhere and your cloud will continue running. Essentially we are bringing all the resiliency benefits of a SAN to your cloud, without the need to invest in separate expensive storage hardware.”

In addition to this, ElasticStack has also developed a new control panel which makes creating and managing cloud servers easier and faster. Built using Ajax, the new control panel is still simple for any user to understand and use, and is now also more responsive. Businesses building ElasticStack-based clouds can also now make use of an increased range of payment, CRM and SMS options — meaning they can customise currency and pricing based on their region whilst also integrating ElasticStack into CRM systems such as Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics.

“All of these new features are designed to help businesses become more economically and operationally efficient,” added Davies. “The new user interface makes self service much easier, while the improved cluster redundancy means organisations not only benefit from reduced hardware costs but now also have the resilience of an expensive SAN. Cloud computing should be on-demand, easy-to-use, truly scalable, cost-efficient, resilient and flexible. This new release delivers on all of these points and will enable both service providers and enterprises to build low cost, highly resilient clouds.”

The ElasticStack cloud platform has supported ElasticHosts’ own cloud servers in the UK and US since 2008. In 2010, the platform was made available to service providers and businesses looking to deploy private clouds. ElasticStack now powers production clouds on four continents, including US-based Open Hosting; Malaysia’s first public cloud service SKALI Cloud, and UK-based Serverlove.

For more information, please contact:

Spark Communications elastic@sparkcomms.co.uk +44 (0)207 436 0420

ElasticStack sales@elasticstack.com www.elasticstack.com +44 (0)845 686 8642

Today, we’re welcoming our first member of staff based in Asia: James Taylor, who is joining the Support team. James will be covering the hours between Ardyn in the US, and our UK team, to provide round-the-clock support to ElasticHosts customers.

James has deep experience of Linux administration, databases, programming, and IP networking. He also has a particular interest in security and monitoring, and hopes to add value to what we do in these areas.

James has achieved the enviable feat of a professional life run from a beach in Thailand. When not supporting ElasticHosts customers, James can mostly be found diving amongst schools of tropical fish, learning to read and write Thai, or taking care of his accumulating menagerie of pets.

In particular, James is a keen free-diver (diving without scuba gear) and can dive to 30 metres or remain underwater without breathing for a whole five minutes. We’re not quite sure how useful this will be for cloud security, but we’re still pretty amazed. Welcome James!

We’re at Internet World in Earl’s Court today, tomorrow and Thursday. You can find us on our joint stand E4000 with Peer 1, right by the entrance.

Come and say hello, and get a free temporary “airbrush” tattoo, in the design of your choice!

Above you can see CEO Richard Davies and Sales Manager Anna Griffiths showing off their ElasticHosts tattoos. (You don’t have to get an ElasticHosts tattoo, although we think they’re very fine.)

If you’re there, do drop by our stand to come and say hello!