Spirit Connect will shortly be releasing a new Windows 2003 / Windows 2008 hosting platform; it’s expected that we’ll be manually migrating all our Windows based sites into the new Plesk platform.
The single biggest feature of our new platform will be that we’ll now be in a position to offer anti-spam and virus filtering on our hosted email services. Many parts of our new setup will be configured in a distributed format – that being there will be dedicated Windows 2003 / Windows 2008 servers serving your websites and dedicated Linux mail servers serving your Email, SMTP and Webmail services. Mail will be distributed evenly across our mail servers; meaning that you shouldn’t have any mail issues like you’ve had in the past.
A small diagram of what we’re talking about is below:
Spirit Connect will also have 4 distributed DNS servers with primary nameservers hosted in Australia and backup systems hosted in the United States.
Using Plesk Expand and our own customized software; we’ll also be releasing a new range of Enterprise class clustered hosting plans using Microsoft’s Datacentre Edition Server which allows for clustering of web services in late 2008. This means we will be able to offer Service Level Agreements on high end clustered plans as one hosted site wouldn’t be able to take an entire shared server down. We’re also going to be rolling out hosted Microsoft Exchange in late 2008 on our own clustered system.
Spirit Connect is making quite an investment on this new platform; and we’ll be migrating all our shared and reseller hosting services over to the new Plesk Expand platform. There will be a new control panel; new physical server paths; new name servers; new SMTP relay servers; and some changes will be required by customers on their sites.
We’re trying to make this as painless as possible; but as the platform is completely different to the existing HELM one a lot of things need to be manually done by Spirit Connect. We are however extremely happy to let you know that we can import most mail email passwords from the HELM systems and have your POP3 accounts setup on the new Plesk Cluster for when you migrate over. We will migrate your website data but web stats; existing mail on the Windows servers etc can’t be moved across as they are in totally different formats to our new system so its technically not possible. We plan to keep these servers online for a few weeks after each migration so you can grab any data from the old servers. Microsoft SQL Database servers won’t be affected and will continue to be hosted on separate hardware in the Brisbane datacentre. Microsoft 2005 is also available at the moment; please contact sales for information.
We’ll be migrating HELM Servers in this order:
We strongly recommend customers make sure their contact email address is correct; and that they forward important emails we send out over the next 3 months regarding the Plesk migration to their ‘web savvy’ people incase its something is needed on their end; particularly DNS nameserver changes. After each migration we will send an email to customers asking them to check their website functions and make sure their contact forms are working OK; etc…
This migration is extremely important to Spirit Connect; and addresses a number of issues we’ve had with our Windows hosting over the last few years. Bottom line is as I’m sure many customers agree with is that our Windows service hasn’t been anywhere near as stable as our Linux hosting services; and this migration identifies; server availability and uptime; slow responses for dynamic content during peak times, anti-spam and anti-virus; stability of webmail of lack of features from MailEnable; unstable HELM (coming up with configuration errors when logging in which only server reboots fix); buggy permissions on websites particularly when using 2 FTP users to upload content. Manually needing to enable .Net versions 1, 2 and 3; Microsoft Access DB locking due to permission issues above… The migration will fix these issues; and you will notice a much higher quality of service; particularly with websites and email; there will be no changes in our pricing schedule.
We hope this has information has been helpful. The new platform goes into testing in early February; and we’ll be continually updating our blog Addicted to Uptime over the coming weeks with our current progress on things.
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