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Green Hosting – Why Modern Servers Matter

August 23, 2011 Hardware / Overview
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Discontinued Servers

These are the old Hostroute servers - now with all data moved to Dual Quad Core i7s

Servers use a lot of power – to give you an idea, a typical Pentium 4-based server uses around 0.5A at 230V. Hostroute previously had sixty of these servers, so it was using in the region of 6.9KW. Multiply this up by 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and the total energy consumed by the old Hostroute systems was 60,444 KWH in a year. From a natural gas power station, that’s releasing the equivalent of 23 Tonnes of CO2 per year (based on 385g/KWH).

Over the past two months, we’ve completed the migration of approximately sixty old Pentium 4 based Hostroute servers, to brand new, Dell R610 Dual processor, Quad Core with HT systems. Each individual *core* on one of these systems has more processing power than the P4 processor used in each of the old servers. Not to mention the massive 24GB of DDR3 RAM and the super-fast RAID10 SAS drive arrays. Because of this, we’ve been able to downsize 60 old servers in to 12 of these modern behemoths, with a massive increase in performance!

Each of the modern servers uses approximately 0.8A at a moderate load – so multiplying up again for 12 servers, you get 2.2KW, which is the equivalent of 7.5 Tonnes of CO2 released, cutting the overall energy usage to a third of what it was previously.

Exciting Times Ahead

June 27, 2011 Hardware / Overview / Support
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As of Monday, 27 June, Hostroute is under new management. We’re very excited.

The running of Hostroute has been taken over by Paragon Internet Group. We run some other hosting companies in the UK, where we’re known for excellent support and excellent hosting.

Over the next few weeks, there are going to be some big upgrades taking place. We’ll go into more depth about the changes in later posts, but here are some fundamental points:

  • We are going to make Hostroute better. A google search for ‘Hostroute’ shows many negative reviews – we intend to improve things such that no-one should feel the need to leave a bad review. Of course, we’re always open to feedback and ways of doing things better – just get in touch and we’ll be happy to hear your ideas.
  • Prices will stay the same or decrease – we won’t be increasing prices for existing customers at all.
  • We’re stepping up support. We think support is fundamental to web hosting.  For example, Hostroute has historically not had any weekend support. That doesn’t really work in a world where people visit your website (and you work on it) at weekends. From now on you can expect a reply within minutes, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, between 9am and 11pm. Just email us at support@hostroute.com.
  • Phone hours are also increasing. You can call us on 020 3137 7651 within the same hours (9-11, 7/365). That’s no longer just for billing enquiries – we’re all technical here and happy to help.
  • Hardware is getting a big boost. Pretty shortly we’re going to be rolling out some serious upgrades to all the Hostroute infrastructure. We’ve got racks of empty top-of-the-line dual quad-core Dell servers ready to migrate your sites to. You will notice a massive difference in loading times and performance on your websites.
  • As a sidenote, we’ll obviously keep you very much in the loop in terms of upgrades and migrations – we’re experienced and know how to manage a mass-migration with no disruption.

There’s so much we want to tell you about. Some of it will be specific – i.e. we’ve got a lot to offer to Resellers (we’re planning free billing software licences, free OpenSRS/Enom accounts and lots more!)

But all of that can wait until later posts. For now, we’d like to hear from you.

We’ve setup a forum at http://forums.hostroute.com and we’d love you to become a member. We have one area entitled ‘suggestions’ where we’d like your comments on what you’d like from Hostroute.

My name’s Seb – I’ll be posting on there (and this blog) quite a lot. You can also reach me (or anyone else you’d like to talk to here) on 020 3137 7651 and ask us any questions you’d like.

We all really look forward to working with you. I hope it’s clear that our intentions here are very good. In all the businesses we focus on making the customer happy, and that’s what we’re going to do with Hostroute :)

 

Seb