Limited special offer on our Dallas, Texas, USA Cloud

The deal:

Get 50% off a cloud machine – for ever!*

Simply use the promo Code Dallas2011 when ordering one of our cloud servers, and choose the Dallas Cloud to deploy your machine!

Choose any Cloud Machine from 256MB of RAM to 16GB of RAM of avail of this incredible offer!

From just €4.98 / £4.48 / $6.97 per month!

More freebies!

With this offer, you also get the following absolutely free!

- CloudLinux, Windows Web Edition, Jumpbox Licenses
- Auto Backups and On-Demand snapshots
- Firewalls
- Comprehensive 24/7/365 support
- Let us Migrate you for free!

As well as class leading availability, high availability, automated failover, CloudFlare templates and more!

When Ordering, click on the Promo Code box, enter the code and click the submit box to register. Only proceed when the price displayed registers the discount!

For those of our audience who are technically minded – the specs!

This platform is a near identical replica of our existing Dublin and London installation, with some improvements and simplifications. Storage is provided by a pair of NetApp 3270 clusters each with a 1.9PB capacity and able to handle massive IO and maintain speedy performance and ultimate reliability at all times. By only using high end SAN storage, rather than local disk, cheap SATA drives or ‘home made’ commodity SAN, we ensure our cloud machines can maintain high IO with low latency and do so reliably, all the time. We’re fast becoming the home of many database driven, intensive and ecommerce sites as a result!

On the compute side, our Hypervisor nodes are HP DL380 latest model servers with 12 Cores of Intel Xeon X5670 processors, at 2.93Ghz with 12M Cache and 6.4GT/s. With these high performance nodes, coupled to a massively redundant, cisco powered SAN and Network back-plane we can offer screaming performance while maintaining class leading reliability.

On top of this physical layer, runs our Cloud management platform, xen powered, by OnApp, it ensures reliable running, provides full API and user interfaces, and can hot migrate work loads (cloud machines) as required to maintain reliable running and maximum performance for all customers.

As a ‘true’ cloud, the dediserve cloud platform allows you to scale in real time, entirely automatically on demand, and can recover from any physical failures with zero or minimal impact to running servers, entirely automatically with self-healing technology.

* The small print:
- Offer is open to new customers
- Offer is limited to cloud machines only, deployed in Dallas, TX (not Virtual Data Centers)
- Offer is limited until the end of September 2011
- Offer is first come, first served, limit of 1 server per customer
- 50% Discount will be applied in perpetuity, as long as the account is maintained

We are delighted to announce our new Partnership with Cloudflare! Cloudflare offer an exciting cloud based reverse proxy service that improves the performance and security of your site and is perfect for high traffic or demanding websites and apps!

Simply deploy one of our new cPanel / CloudFlare templates and you will be up ad running in seconds, with full access to and control of your CloudFlare settings all from within your dediserve cloud machine!

Locate the Cloudflare link in your Cpanel

Click to Activate Cloudflare for the account

Signup or provide login details for your cloudflare account

Your Account is now being protected and accelerated by cloudflare

What is CloudFlare?

CloudFlare is a performance and security service that we provide to our customers. On average, a website on CloudFlare loads twice as fast, uses 60% less bandwidth, has 65% fewer requests and is way more secure.

What is the association between Dediserve and CloudFlare?

CloudFlare is a third-party vendor that is offering CloudFlare to Dediserve customers through a partnership. This partnership is in beta.

We are continually striving to make the service the most effective, so let us know what you think. You can contact either Dediserve or the CloudFlare Team at support@cloudflare.com.

How does CloudFlare’s technology work?

CloudFlare works as a reverse proxy. What this means is that once your website is part of the CloudFlare community, your web traffic is routed through CloudFlare’s global network.

CloudFlare’s network stores copy of your static files closer to your visitors, which means they are delivered more quickly than before. We cache resources such as CSS, JavaScript and images. You do not have to make any changes on your end, CloudFlare’s technology automatically decides which resources to cache based on file extension names. We do not cache dynamic content. CloudFlare also does compression for every request.

CloudFlare’s network also blocks threats and limits abusive bots before they hit your server, which means less wasted bandwidth and server resources for you.

Where are CloudFlare’s data centers located?

CloudFlare’s network currently has 12 locations. San Jose (US), Los Angeles (US), Chicago (US), Washington, DC (US), New Jersey (US), Dallas, Amsterdam, Paris, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo. At each of these nodes, CloudFlare does caching and bot filtering. We will be adding additional data centers in London and Miami in July 2011.

What types of websites can use CloudFlare?

Almost all websites can use CloudFlare. CloudFlare works for both static and dynamic websites.

CloudFlare is not suitable for websites that stream video or audio directly from their origin server. If you use YouTube or Vimeo for the videos embedded on your website, then that is compatible with CloudFlare.

My website has SSL. What do I do?

If you have SSL, your website can use CloudFlare, however there is an extra step. If your SSL is on its own sub-domain (i.e. SSL), then ensure that this sub-domain is marked with a gray cloud. If your SSL is on your root domain or www, then you have to upgrade to the paid, Pro service and follow the directions outlined here.

Will CloudFlare accelerate and protect my root domain?

CloudFlare can only accelerate and protect CNAMES. Since your root domain is an A record, we recommend that you forward your traffic to ‘www’ through your .htaccess file. If you do not forward the traffic, then any traffic to www.mydomain.com will be accelerated and protected by CloudFlare (and shown in the statistics) and any traffic to mydomain.com will not be served by CloudFlare.

Are there sub-domains I shouldn’t enable with CloudFlare?

Sub-domains on CloudFlare are marked with an orange cloud. Sub-domains not on CloudFlare are marked with a gray cloud.

The CloudFlare network can only proxy web traffic over port 80 and 443. The following sub-domains should be marked with a gray cloud to prevent performance issues:

cpanel

direct

ftp

ghs.google.com

mail and webmail

mysql

nameservers (NS1, NS2)

secure* (unless you enable CloudFlare SSL)

View the full list of sub-domains here:

http://www.cloudflare.com/wiki/What_subdomains_are_appropriate_for_orange_/_gray_clouds

Can I enable CloudFlare on a wildcard (*) sub-domain?

No, for security reasons, CloudFlare does not proxy traffic to a wildcard sub-domain. You have to explicitly list the sub-domain as a CNAME in your DNS records to be able to activate CloudFlare.

Can I enable CloudFlare on my root domain (i.e. mywebsite.com) that is an A record?

If you activate CloudFlare through Dediserve, CloudFlare can only accelerate and protect CNAMEs, not A records, which often includes the root domain. If you have traffic that goes to your root domain and you want to accelerate and protect the traffic using CloudFlare, you can add a redirect to ‘www’ in your .htaccess file. You should work with Dediserve, but as a general outline, a redirect looks as follow:

RewriteEngine On
# Rewrite added for CloudflareInstall - mysite.com
# Wednesday 25th of August 2010 04:59:42 AM
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} ^80$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

I activated CloudFlare from my Dediserve account. Do I also get an account on CloudFlare.com? What is the difference?

Once you activate CloudFlare on Dediserve you also get an account at www.cloudflare.com. The basic statistics and settings are shown in your Dediserve control panel. To see more statistics, your Threat Control panel and all the CloudFlare settings, you have to log in to your www.cloudflare.com account.

(Hint: To access your account the first time, enter the email address associated with your Dediserve account and use the “I forgot my password” feature).

I tried CloudFlare and have an issue. What should I do?

When you enable CloudFlare, there should be no noticeable difference to your website. If your site is loading slowing after enabling CloudFlare, there is most likely a problem. First, disable CloudFlare by clicking the orange cloud so it becomes gray. Second, report the issue to Dediserve. The Dediserve team will work with CloudFlare to resolve the issue.

We are pleased to announce the roll-out of our new R1Soft CDP3 Enterprise Edition Template which is built on the  Centos 5.6 x64  operating system. Continuous Data Protection (CDP) 3.0 Enterprise Edition reduces server backup windows from hours to minutes. Works over existing TCP/IP networks and allows you to do incremental back-ups every 15 minutes.

CDP3 Enterprise Edition Provides high performance backups for up to 30 or more servers with one central CDP data repository and user interface.

Performance improvements include Bare-Metal Restore, which quickly and efficiently reestablishes large file systems for disaster recovery.

To celebrate our partner agreement with R1Soft we are currently doing a special price of only €10 per license per month per server, for CDP 3.0 Enterprise Edition which provides a saving on the retail price of €250 once off plus €50 per annum.

Simply deploy your dediserve cloud server using the “CentOS 5.6 x64 w/ CDP Enterprise 3.0 R2″ pre-built template. Once built you can sign up for your CDP license – Here or simply click “order” from within your dediserve control panel. The template is available on both London and Dublin.

If your machines are currently in one location, why not buy a machine in the other and avail of this template to have complete offsite backups, with file level and bare server restore!

As revolutionary and Cost effective as Cloud Hosting now is, the fundamentals of server management remain very much the same, meaning security is still a hugely important part of managing your server.

In this post we can going to look at some simple security steps that we recommend to all customers who deploy windows machines on our cloud platforms.

1) Install a good Antivirus, e.g. ESET NOD32, AVG, Kaspersky, AVAST.

2) Configure your firewall to only what you need, e.g. Disable all un-needed Incoming Rules

3) Lock down certain Services to YOUR IP. Within your advanced firewall settings, doubleclick your inbound rule for RDP (port 3389), click scope and add your IP address into the “Remote IP Address” section.

4) Turn off Auto-Update. Update manually regularly, and be sure that hotfixes/security patches will work with the software you are running

5) Take regular backups before running the lastest update, so you can easily roll back if it breaks something..

Feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments below and i will add to the list.

There is much hype and confusion about cloud. What is it, what defines it? Providers try to confuse you that shared hosting or legacy style VPS servers are ‘cloud’ or worse still, dedicated servers are cloud!

Here is the ‘official’ definition:

The five characteristics of the cloud computing model were originally defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technologies (NIST) and have since been refined by a number of experts. The model has been published many times before, but if you’re like me you need to see something several times before you really internalise it.

Frankly, I recommend that you memorise this list; you’ll have the vague term “cloud” thrown at you many times in the future, and understanding these five characteristics will help you judge whether the latest offering you’re being shown is really cloud computing. And as an added plus, you’ll be able to finally explain cloud computing to your friends and relatives.

1. On-demand self-service. You can quickly and easily configure the computing resources you need all by yourself, without filling out forms or emailing the service provider. An important point is that what you’re using is service-based (“I need 15 computing units”), not resource-based (“I need an HP ProLiant DL380 G6 with 32GB of RAM”). Your computing needs are abstracted from what you’re really being allocated. You don’t know, and in most cases you shouldn’t care. This is one of the biggest hurdles for IT departments that want to create their own internal cloud computing environment.

2. Broad network access. You can access these resources from anywhere you can access the Internet, and you can access them from a browser, from a desktop with applications designed to work with them, or from a mobile device. One of the most popular application models (such as iPhone apps) is a mobile application that communicates with a cloud-based back end.

3. Resource pooling. The cloud service provider, whether it’s Dediserve or your own IT department, manages all of its cloud’s physical resources; creates a pool of virtual processor, storage, and network resources; and securely allocates them between all of its customers.

4. Rapid elasticity. You can grow and shrink your capacity (processing power, storage, network) very quickly, in minutes or hours. Self-service and resource pooling are what make rapid elasticity possible. Triggered by a customer request, the service provider can automatically allocate more or less resources from the available pool.

5. Measured service. Also described as subscription-based, measured service means that the resources you’re using are metered and reported back to you. You pay for only the resources you need, so you don’t waste processing power like you do when you have to buy it on a server-by-server basis.

Dediserve nails every one of these 5 defining characteristics – does your provider?

We’re delighted to announce some more new cool features in our customer management interface! We have listened to your feedback and are happy to roll out two new requested features:

1. IP Management

You wanted to be able to add new IP’s or remove old ones on the fly through your management interface. This can now be done quickly and easily, it also automatically updates your machines network interface with the new IP – meaning it’s ready to use instantly. Simply click Order IP, click Order Now and the IP is added.

2. Disk Management

You wanted to be able to add additional Storage to your machine without getting extra RAM. Now simply click on the “disks” tab in your web management interface, and click “Order extra disk space” which allocates more storage resources to your machine. To add to your server simply click on “edit” beside the disk you wish to increase and then select the amount of storage you want on that disk. [Note: resizing a disk may take a little bit of time and will mean downtime as the system needs to power down, resize the volume and boot up again].

As always if you would like to see any additional features added let us know and we can add it to our roadmap!

We are currently offering the following Special deal for the rest of the month of February:

- Looking to Migrate from shared hosting and upgrading?
- Want more control over your sites and e-mail?
- Want a server dedicated to the running of your sites?
- Want full root access to manage and install whatever software you like?

For the rest of the month of February – we are offering the following:

1GB Dediserve Cloud Server (44.95 per month – Free Set-Up )
Easy to Use Server Management Interface for reboots, back-ups , re-installs and more.
Free 100 Domain Plesk License – FOREVER – to easily add domains, set-up email and manage your accounts.

We’ll also give you the above completely FREE for the first month to allow you to migrate your sites and settings.

This is a perfect first step for people wishing to resell hosting or improve performance on their current reseller accounts whilst saving on costs.

Use Coupon Code – FreePleskForLife –  when signing up here

So Sign Up Now and Start Moving your hosting set-up into the Cloud.

This is only applicable to new sign-ups. Terms and Conditions Apply.

What is Cloud Computing?
Is best described as Spreading your infrastructure needs and requirements across traditional technologies and hardware using virtualisation technologies to provide a higher level of redundancy and availability than was previously achievable at a vastly reduced price.

What is Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)?
Companies no longer rely on hardware vendors for their hardware needs. By outsourcing to a IaaS provider they can easily scale up and down their hardware requirements, without incurring the expense of buying or managing their own hardware.

What is Cloud Storage?
Is the term used when you store your companies data or personal data across the internet onto a cloud infrastructure. As your data is stored across multiple SAN storage devices and not in a single physical location this is referred to as cloud storage.

What are Application Stacks?
Application stacks are a pre-bundled selection of software which allow users to quickly deploy or configure a server by installing all the necessary software or operating system via a one-click install.

What is SAN Storage?
Storage Area Network devices are the large highly redundant and highly reliable servers that sit at the back end of all cloud computing infrastructures and provide the large amount of storage space needed in a typical cloud computing set up

What is a Node?
Used when referring to a physical server within a cloud infrastructure. A node does not contain any customer data and is only utilised for its CPU and RAM

What is Self healing architecture ?
When a node or SAN storage array fails there are additional nodes and SANs which quickly and automatically take the load ensuring continued, uninterrupted service.

What is Failover?
It means that when a node or server fails there is another one in place to immediately take the load and continue serving your webpages or application without interruption.

What is Multi-homed?
Is a process used to increase the reliability and redundancy of the network connection to the hardware, as it removes any single point of failure by bringing multiple internet connections into the platform.

What is Software as a Service (SaaS)?
This is where companies are using software that is not installed on their actual PC , but rather connecting over the internet to access the likes of google docs, email, company intranets and communication tools such as VOIP and messenger services, these are hosted by third partner providers and companies pay for access to the online tools as they need them.

What is Virtualization?
Is taken traditional hardware technology and better utilizing it to get maximum use of it and reduce the costs of deploying additional servers/ this is done by software providing a complete simulation of the underlying hardware, and allowing you to deploy multiple virtual server on a single physical hardware server

What is Os Virtualization?
Is where the virtualization technology sits on the operating system level of the server and allows for multiple isolated user-space instances.The restriction on this type of virtualization is that the multiple virtual machines all have to run on the same operating machine as the overall physical machine.

What is Para-Virtualization?
Allows the virtualization software to sit on the actual hardware level of the server , giving a far greater level of control to each of the virtual machine , users can modify their virtual servers down to a kernel level and install whatever operating system they like, this is what dediserve uses.

What is Virtual KVM Acces?
Is the level of access you receive to your para virtualized virtual server, allowing for you to perform functions such as hard reboots as well as complete power downs

Are we missing anything? Anything you would like to know, feel free to ask and we will add it to the list.

One of the more popular templates from the huge range that we currently offer, is the e-commerce template Magento.

Magento provides feature-rich eCommerce platforms that offer merchants complete flexibility and control over the presentation, content, and functionality of their online channel.

By selecting the magento template on any of our cloud machines, it allows you within minutes to have the default magento installation up and running and ready to configure.

Our Cloud platform is proving to be a more popular alternative  to legacy technologies down to the cost savings and flexibility, allowing retailers to maximise profit margin from their e-commerce platform.

By allowing them to scale up during a busy period (eg. christmas) and scale back down in february or March when the demand is no longer there, it ensures retailers are not left paying for under utlized hardware for the other ten months of the year, but able to cope with the demand to ensure they can take the increased influx of online orders.

Talk to us today about helping deploy your e-commerce platform.