A summary of 2009's technology!

[Dominic]

As a fast-growing hosting company we are constantly updating our hardware and software, to ensure we can always provide the best possible hosting. I thought it would be interesting to run through a quick summary of what we've done in 2009!

At the start of the year we were ordering quad core, SAS RAID 5 systems with perhaps 4 - 8Gb RAM. These are great systems (Dell PE 2900s/2950s), and very good systems. We also had some older servers which were dual core, RAID 1 systems with 2 - 4Gb RAM. These were also very reliable machines, plodding on as they do.

But of course modern scripts require ever more power - particularly database-driven sites such as vBulletin, Magento and so on.

Throughout 2009 we gradually upgraded all our servers to dual-quad-core (8 CPUs!) systems with 8Gb+ RAM, and a minimum of 15K SAS RAID 5 (using at least 4 drives with a hot spare). We upgraded all our servers - including our oldest clients - unlike perhaps some companies where it's not clear if older clients benefit about the newly-advertised features.

Over the past few months yet more new equipment was released, so we placed orders for Dell's new systems - in our case the excellent R710. Fully kitted out with the dual quad-core Core i7 (try saying that 3 times backwards) processors, 12Gb+ RAM, and this time 6x10K SAS drives in RAID 10. Using the smaller drives let us pack in more of them, making RAID 10 viable - bringing with it greatly increased I/O performance. We also launched RAID 1 solid state drives in our Athens server for our Business+ hosting accounts - zero latency file loading makes complex scripts such as Magento perform better than anything we've seen before!

We were also able to consequently increase the frequency of our off-server backups, and now perform these twice or four times daily on most servers, via the R1Soft system.

We also relocated our backup systems to off-site locations, so every website hosted on our Shared/Reseller/Premium hosting is automatically backed up to a separate physical building, as standard - absolutely free of charge.

Lastly, we have significantly upgraded our network capabilities mainly thanks to choosing excellent suppliers, even obtaining a new IP range to facilitate all the SSL-driven eCommerce sites we host! We also now use a pair of high-performance firewalls in a high-availability pair, with full redundancy should they or any point in the network fail.

I'm currently itching at placing orders for 2010, starting with more R710s and upgrades to our backup capacity

Happy New Year to all!

[wufuquan]

I Love Vidahost.

[Chrissy Poo]

Your doing an amazing job guys. Looking forward to switching from shared to VPS in the next few months. Reading the above just makes me want to do it sooner