Anu October Newsletter 2016

We are introducing quarterly newsletters so that our customers know what we have been up to in the past 3 months and what they can expect to come in the near future. We will send these out quarterly, and hope that you find them informative and enjoyable to read.

New Hardware

We have continued to invest in our hardware for virtual machines. We recently installed new Xeon / 128GB RAM / Pure SSD servers which vastly increase our capacity in our Amsterdam 2 datacenter.

Some of our customers deployments do not require such power and this is why we also have continued to expand our Atom platform – smaller, lower power servers to run less intensive services (small mail servers, single websites etc).

We will be going out to Amsterdam two more times this year to remove some ageing servers and install new servers to replace them.

New Mail Platform

Our new hosted email platform has been live for a month now – eliminating the stability issues and sluggishness on our old infrastructure that developed over time due to ageing hardware and growth of client base.

Minor problems were reported by a small number of clients but all issues have now been resolved.

New DirectAdmin Servers

The operating system powering the anuhosting.net DirectAdmin server will be end of life at the end of March 2017.

We have commissioned two new DirectAdmin servers. One runs CentOS 6 / PHP 5.5 / MySQL 5.6 / Lasso 8.6 which is a similar stack to the anuhosting.net server which will support all sites currently hosted on anuhosting.net, and one running CentOS 7 / PHP 7 / MariaDB 10.1, a cutting edge platform which new sites can be set up on.

Both new servers fully support TLSv1.2 encryption. If your site interfaces with PayPal, Amazon or other merchant providers who require TLSv1.2 you will need to upgrade as soon as possible as support for older versions of SSL and TLS is being phased out across the industry due to known weaknesses.

Whilst we will migrate all existing accounts on anuhosting.net over to the new servers by the end of March 2017, we are able to move your site over to our newer server earlier on request.

In addition to this, we are deploying a US based DirectAdmin server in our Chicago datacenter which will run CentOS 6 / PHP 5.5 / MySQL 5.6 / Lasso 8.6. We expect to be live by the end of October 2016. If your visitors are primarily US based you might prefer this location.

Australia

Later this year, we will be provisioning our first set of servers in Australia and therefore will be able to provide our customers with virtual machines in this location.

Over the past few years we have also deployed servers in Hong Kong, Ireland and Germany based on customer demand. We are able to bring additional capacity online in these locations as required. If you are interested in hosting in any of these locations please do not hesitate to get in touch.

OpenVPN / PPTP VPN

With the release of macOS Sierra, PPTP VPN support has been dropped. We expect that this will happen in the near future with other operating systems too.

Earlier in the year we deployed our new OpenVPN platform which many clients have already switched over to.

We will continue to maintain our PPTP VPN for the short term but it will eventually be decommissioned in favour of OpenVPN.

If you are interested in anything written in this newsletter or have any general feedback then do not hesitate to get in touch with Chris or Ashley by emailing support@anu.net.