David Hurst

We’ve really taken a giant leap forward in our hosting services from Higher Sites with the introduction of a new server farm. It’s been 6 months in the planning and testing phase, and on the 1st June the servers were installed into a datacentre in Manchester where we have rented a cabinet. Suffice to say our hosting expenses have risen considerably, but the ability to offer a completely customised hosting solution is worth the extra £££.

Previously, we have been running the Plesk control panel on our servers, not because we don’t know how to manually configure Apache, more because we like the simplicity of the interface which allows all our staff to help with support calls. Alas, the biggest problem with this is the lack of configurability and the inclusion of the QMail email server (MTA). What a pile of festering crap that is. It’s unreliable (in this configuration) and falls over when levels of spam rise too high. There are no decent management tools for it either. We got so fed up with all the hours wasted clearing out spam-ridden mail queues that we had to do something about it.

We chose Debian Linux as our OS. Rock-solid. Stable. And as anyone who has used apt-get will know, quick and easy to configure. The hardware came from Dell (for all their faults, they really do make excellent server kit). We opted for 1U AMD Opteron based servers in dual dual core and single dual core configurations. The rapid rails kit makes physical installation quick and easy, and the quality of the hardware is faultless. We did think their hard drive upgrades were a bit pricey so we bought and installed these ourselves, but otherwise the machines are factory standard. No driver issues whatsoever with Debian.

For our mail server we chose the Postfix MTA coupled with Courier for POP/IMAP access. We configured our installation to use MySQL for the email configuration - man is that sweet! So easy to use, and now we will be able to build our own bespoke email control panel - that really is great for us. We intend to integrate it with our CMS and a new customer account management and domain name purchasing tool.

We’ve also seperated the web servers from the MySQL servers, and each machine has a redundant backup, thanks to the wonders of MySQL replication, BIND master/slave synching, and of course rsync.

Ever since I first started managing Linux web servers 8 years ago, I have wanted to set up a server farm with wholly owned equipment. Now, through the wonderful expansion of my company Higher Sites, I have been able to realise that goal. Whilst it may not seem like such a big step to go from dedicated servers to own equipment co-located, it does open a world of opportunities.

For Higher Sites customers, it means even better service, even better reliability, more security and better features - all at no extra cost to them. So, if you need high quality hosting with personal support, follow the link above.