100% Uptime Guarantee on mirrored Dedicated Servers

We have specially designed Mirroring solution to provide 100% uptime Guarantee. You can check detailed information on our Mirroring solution from http://www.eukhost.com/server-mirroring.php .

We setup 2 servers in 2 different datacenter buildings to implement Mirroring solution. This solution has been deployed by our Research & Development department using FAM and Rsync technology. Your 2 Servers will be setup on 2 different IPs, but the additional IPs added to the Server will be shared between both servers using our VLAN Networking architecture. If one server goes down for some reason then the second server will automatically bind IPs of the first server after downtime of 30 seconds with the first server. We have kept buffer of 30 seconds to avoid unwated switching of IPs. IPs get switched only after 30 seconds failure in response from the master server.

FAM takes care of flagging a particular file on the master server as soon as a file gets modified, it then sends signal to Rsync and Rsync takes care of copying that particular file to the Slave Server. This method will successfully copy any modified file within fraction of seconds without using any server resources. Your slave server will constantly monitor your master server and it will bind the additional IPs immediately if it fails to get any ping response from the master server for 30 seconds.

Our internal monitoring system will notify our system admins about this failure of master serverand we will then investigate and get the problem sorted to bring the setup back to Master -> Slave mode.

You will need to order 2 Dedicated Servers of similar specification to have such Mirroring solution. You may prefer to have higher specification Dedicated Server for the Master server and lower specification Dedicated Server for the slave server, but we recommend 2 Dedicated Servers of similar specification for better performance and redundancy.

Q. Why eUKhost VPS Hosting ?

Ans. Powerful, affordable and Fully Managed Linux/Windows Virtual Private Servers.

* Linux/Windows VPS Hosting plans are fully managed.
* Most Features of a physical dedicated server at an affordable price.
* Ability to Host Unlimited Domains.
* Manage hosting, email, applications and databases for all your domains in one place.
* Resell hosting.
* Full Root Access to your server.
* Install third party applications/software, modules and more at root level.
* Secure, isolated environment using hardened Virtuozzo virtualization technology
* Dedicated IP address
* No setup fee
* Knowledgeable customer support.

Q. How is a VPS different than shared hosting?

Ans. A VPS (Virtual Private Server) eliminates restrictions usually associated with shared hosting by giving you the power and flexibility of a dedicated server with your own set of services and customizable disk space. Shared hosting is limited in comparison to VPS Hosting as its users do not have administrative access and software configurations cannot be customized, despite the fact that physical resources are also multiplexed. With VPS Hosting, you can control your own unique file system and CGI-BIN, disk space, system resources and bandwidth.

Fully Managed UK Dedicated Servers.

Ans. Having eUKhost fully managed dedicated server provides you with the ultimate level of control over your experience. We at eUKhost provide branded server hardware from Dell Computers so that you receive the fastest servers with genuine hardware. With a dedicated server you have access to the full administration console to add domains and class of service levels along with the ability to install and run custom software/applications to meet your individual needs.

If you are interested in a fully managed eUKhost dedicated server, please contact our sales department for a quote based around your specific needs.

Q. What is burstable RAM in VPS Hosting?

Ans. Burstable RAM can be provided to users of Virtual Private Servers. Each Virtual Private Server has a guaranteed amount of RAM that it’s able to use at all times. At times it is possible that the usage may exceed the allotted amount of guaranteed RAM available, this is when Burstable RAM comes into play. Burstable RAM is provided to the user during times of high usage or traffic. This RAM is not in use by any VPS on a server and can be allocated to any VPS that may need it as long as it is available. So as long as those resources are available, you as a user will be able to go over that limit of guaranteed RAM.

In other words Burstable RAM is the RAM your VPS has the ability to use but it isn’t guaranteed to. Basically it’s for spikes in usage not consistent usage like Guaranteed RAM. For Example your if VPS has 384 MB Guaranteed RAM, and 1024MB Burstable RAM. This means that after you have used up your guaranteed ram, there is still 640MB Burstable RAM available for burst usage. For this reason we always keep some extra memory available on each server at all times as Burstable RAM.

Burstable RAM is never guaranteed to be available and should not be constantly depended upon for Virtual Private Server operation. If your VPS constantly requires greater resources than your package guarantees, we can quickly arrange an upgrade for you to a VPS Hosting plan with greater guaranteed resources.

FAQ’s on UK Dedicated servers offered by eUKhost.com

1. Where are your servers based ?
Ans : Our Servers are based in Maidenhead which is 25 miles west of London, UK

2. Which Datacenter in Maidenhead ?
Ans : BlueSquare Data center in Maidenhead.

3. Questions on Data center Connectivity, uplink for each Dedicated Servers.
Ans : In total we have 20,000mbits of network connectivity for our Servers. We have 2 x 10 Gbps links for our data center. Each Server in our data center is setup on 100 Mbps, fully-switched port on an edge switch. Each edge switch is then in turn plugged into two separate aggregation switches at 1gbit, with failover redundancy allowing either 1gbit link to fail.

4. Which ISPs do you use for network connectivity of your Datacenter / Servers?
Ans : Our network transit connections are currently to Level 3, Tiscali, and Deutsche Telekom. We also peer with approximately 150 ISPs at the peering points LINX, XChangePoint, and LoNAP.

5. What Brand of servers/Chassis do you use for the Servers?
Ans : We use only branded Chassis from Dell and we use latest state of the art Intel CPU’s for our servers.

6. What types of Hard drives (HDD) do you use and what is the speed of your drives ?
Ans :- We use SATA drives on our servers advertised on our website, all of our SATA drives have a speed of 7200 rpm. We provide SAS drives as well on some of our high configuration servers but for this you will need to contact our Sales Department from our helpdesk to get more details on the available configurations. SAS drives have a speed of 10,000 rpm.

7. What are the RAM specifications?
Ans : Our Servers advertised on our website are equipped with DDR2, ECC, SD RAM.

8. What is your uptime Guarantee for Dedicated servers?
Ans :- We offer 100% network and power uptime guarantee on all our dedicated servers.

9. Where is your Support staff based?
Ans :- Our support operations are managed from 3 different locations. Some staff members are based in the datacenter, some in our office in Durham and the rest of our staff members are based in our office in India.

10. Do you include a backup service with the Dedicated Server Hosting plans?
Ans : We include a 20 GB remote backup space for free of cost with all our dedicated servers but for that you will need to contact us on setup of your server to allow our system admins to login and setup the backup scripts.

11. Do you provide RAID Configurations with your UK Dedicated Servers?
Ans : We offer RAID 0, RAID 1 or RAID 5 with our servers. RAID 0 & RAID 1 configurations need 2 Identical drives but RAID 0 doesn’t help in case of HDD failure. RAID 1 mirrors data on 2 identical drives which allows you to swap drives in case of failure of one drive. In the event of a HDD failure on RAID 0, data will be lost. RAID 5 configuration needs 3 identical drives. RAID 5 provides data striping at the byte level and also stripe error correction information. This results in excellent performance and good fault tolerance. More information on RAID can be obtained from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

12. What Operating systems do you Support ?
Ans : We Support Debian 4.0, CentOS 4.5, CentOS 5, Fedora Core 6, Fedora Core 7 and RHEL 4 and FreeBSD 6.2 on our Servers while for windows we offer Windows 2003 Standard and Windows 2003 Enterprise only.

13. What control panels do you support on your Dedicated servers ?
Ans :- We offer cPanel – WHM, LXAdmin & Plesk Control panel on our Linux Dedicated servers for additional pricing whilst on Windows we offer Plesk control panel. You can install any other control panel as per your requirements but we won’t support those control panels. As a part of our managed service we will provide support for OS related problems only if the control panel is not purchased through eUKhost.

14. Is there any money back guarantee on Dedicated servers ?
Ans : We offer 30 day money back guarantee only in case of hardware failure or if the hardware is not as per the advertised specifications. We don’t offer any refunds for software related problems as you should communicate with our support team or the accounts person in charge of your account to get those sorted.

15. Where can I find your TOS ( Terms of Service ) and SLA ( Service Level Agreement ) ?
Ans :- Our TOS is located at http://www.eukhost.com/terms.php and our Service Level Agreement is located at http://www.eukhost.com/sla.php

16. Do you offer Load Balanced Servers ?
Ans :- Yes. We do offer Load Balanced servers on Linux as well as Windows Platform. We can setup a load balanced cluster using Cisco Load Balancing hardware or using windows load balancing feature which is inbuilt within the windows Operating System.

Q. What are Custom Branded Dedicated Servers?

Ans. Custom Branded Dedicated Servers are basically Dedicated Servers, as the name suggests, with “custom” whois information in the IP whois. As an example, please see below for the current eUKhost whois information.

netname: EUKHost-LTD
descr: Server Lan
country: GB
admin-c: PETE3-RIPE
tech-c: PETE3-RIPE
status: ASSIGNED PA
mnt-by: blueconnex-mnt
mnt-routes: blueconnex-mnt
source: RIPE # Filtered

Now, the idea behind Custom Branded Dedicated Servers is that we can swap EUKHost-LTD to match your company name. So, I’m sure many of you are now asking “Do I need it?”. For the vast majority of you, the answer is, quite simply, NO. The service of Custom Branded Dedicated Servers is mainly a service that would be offered to medium/large webhosting providers. For example, if you are a webhosting provider you may have good reasons for not wanting your customers to know, or easily find out, where your services are located. There is no deception involved here, it’s simple marketing. You don’t want your customers to know that they can get the same service with us directly. This can be for a variety of reasons. Such as, our service offerings may be cheaper than yours, offer more hard disk space, more bandwidth, more support. You have done the hard work by getting the client and it would be unfair for them to switch to us directly. We have no interest in competing directly with our clients or with taking their customers. This is the main reason that we offer Custom Branded Dedicated Servers. Another reason behind Custom Branded Dedicated Servers is the benefit of receiving abuse e-mails directly and not having to have us forward them to you. As an example, one of the websites you are hosting has been compromised and is sending out spam messages. In the current system we will either have to spend time contacting you directly and if we are not able to do so in a timely manner, we may suspend your account. obviously this would have serious implications for your business and may ultimately lose your clients. In this case, Custom Branded Dedicated Servers could prevent this from happening.

Okay, so we have given some example as to who Custom Branded Dedicated Servers are useful for. Now, let’s look into the type of client that definitely don’t need Custom Branded Dedicated Servers. If we are not providing the same service as you provide, there is no reason for you to consider custom whois information. Your clients could, in theory, see our name mentioned and then visit our website. If our website is not offering the same services, they will have no reason to consider moving. If you host a forum advising people on the best fishing spots in the UK, your visitors or customers couldn’t care less where your website is hosted from. If it’s a personal hobby site, again, your visitors don’t care where your website is hosted.

There are also some technical limitations involved. It’s not possible to offer Custom Branded Dedicated Servers on a small number of IP addresses. It’s also not possible to rename currently assigned IP address whois information, please keep this in mind. A similar service is not currently available on individual VPS services and it’s not currently possible for shared hosting. Costs can vary and as always subject to RIPE guidelines. Please contact sales@eukhost.com for more information.

Q. Do You offer load balanced apache servers and mysql dedicated servers?

Ans : Yes. We offer load balanced apache servers (Web Servers) as well as MySQL servers. We are hosting a couple of biggest forums in the world which use multiple apache servers and high configurations quad core xeons for MySQL. Clustering of multiple MySQL servers is expensive but clustering of apache servers is quite simple and the only cost involved in it is for the dedicated servers. Basic dedicated server configurations are available at http://www.eukhost.com/dedicated-server-hosting.php but high configuration quad xeon servers can be setup as per requirement.

Please contact our sales department for custom quote.

For Load Balanced Web servers’ architecture, we will setup 2 or more similar configuration Web Servers which will be behind the Load Balancer. Each Web Server will have a public IP assigned to it as well as a Internal LAN IP. We prefer LAN over VLAN as internal communication of the Web Servers and Database Server(s) can be completely isolated from external traffic. After the implementation of Load Balancing routing rules on the Load Balancer, we configure Firewall rules to allow web traffic on the Web servers to pass trough the Load Balancer. Our Office IP and Customers IP will be the only IPs to have remote access of all Servers. No other IP will be able to access any of the Web Servers or Database Server(s). Load Balancer will take care of equal distribution of traffic on each of the Web Servers and each of your web servers will then pass on SQL queries to the Database Server. Web Servers will allow only inbound connection on port 80, while SQL servers will allow only inbound connection on port 1433 if using MSSQL on the Database Servers or port 3306 if using MySQL on the Database Server. Database Servers will allow incoming SQL queries only from the LAN IP of the Web Servers. Inbuilt TCP / IP firewall settings of Linux 0S (Load Balancer) will be utilized for this setup and this will eliminate any requirement of additional Hardware Firewall. Firewall rules on the Web Servers and Database Servers will be configured using inbuilt IP security Firewall if Windows or TCP/IP based host access control policy if using Linux Servers. We have expertise in setup of such Load Balanced secure clusters and there’s absolutely no reason to be concerned about server security, Load Balanced routing rules or Firewall settings.

We also use some specific Load Balancers procured from Cisco and Juniper for such Load Balanced clusters. We prefer CSS 11000 (Cisco) & Juniper TX2200 for high-end clusters.

Q. Can anybody give me some advice on what is my best option as the bandwidth and disc space under both VPS Hosting and Semi Dedicated Hosting is plenty. One of my websites is a small html site with no extras and has a small amount of visitors while the other site is much larger with around 6000 hits a week

Ans. We setup only 6 Semi Dedicated Hosting accounts on one server which maximizes each client’s access to server resources, and since you have only a percentage of the server, you will only pay a fraction of the cost over a dedicated server. All Semi Dedicated hosting accounts are hosted on Dual Quad Core Intel Xeon E5420 processor servers which are much more powerful than a Single Core or Dual Core Xeon processor server. The servers come with 12 GB RAM which ensures that each account hosted on the server gets at least 2 GB of Guaranteed RAM.

Semi Dedicated servers are an ideal solution for hosting data such as resource intensive websites or business application software. They provide a secure environment for client data and clients can also enjoy the full power of the processor and hardware. The clients retain complete control and remote access to the server at all times.

Our Semi Dedicated Hosting servers fill the gap between VPS Hosting and Dedicated Server Hosting. So if you need more resources than a Virtual Private Server but aren’t quite ready to upgrade to a dedicated server yet, eUKhost’s Semi Dedicated Server is the answer for you.

Q. Do you offer Private LAN between Dedicated Servers ?

Ans. Yes. We do offer Private LAN or VLAN between Dedicated Servers. Private VLAN is configured using routing rules on the router that connects your servers to Internet while Private LAN is configured using a Dedicated Switch for multiple servers LAN or using a patch cable incase of only 2 Servers.

Private LAN configuration is considered by those who need highly secure environment. You can disable public access for your Database servers or any other server with mission critical data and allow public access on the front web servers only. We have similar setup for some of our customers who have heavy traffic websites or forums. We disable remote access for database servers completely and only web servers are allowed to communicate with the database servers on private LAN. This way no one can ever access your database servers and nothing can go wrong on the webservers as well as those will allow only http traffic. less open ports on server makes it more secure.