[M5Hosting] M5 Hosting Service Improvements

[Michael J McCafferty]

Dear Happy M5 Hosting Customer,

         As you know, we periodically send you an 
e-mail to notify you of issues that may affect 
the service you trust us to provide. I am writing 
to you today to bring you up to date on some 
service improvements that we want tell you about.

1)      KVM over IP - We now have KVM over IP for 
your use if you need to gain a console to your 
server. We have one port for each rack of 35 to 
42 servers so it’s only for troubleshooting or 
short-term use. It has been a real help for 
people troubleshooting ssh daemon problems, 
problems booting to a custom kernel, or if you 
have accidentally firewalled yourself out of your 
server, etc. We have actually had these for 
several months but never officially announced 
them. If you find yourself in need of one, just 
send an email to support and the NOC will connect it up for you.
         The KVM over IP units have also 
decreased the amount of time to get an Engineer 
on your issue because for some issues which 
require console access, there is no need to 
connect a crash cart, or to be physically adjacent to the server.

2)      Backups – We now have a dedicated server 
available for you to back up your data to via 
scp, ftp, or rsync. You can rent disk space on 
this backup server for $5/mo for 10G of space, 
$10/mo for 25G, $20/mo for 50G, etc.  You will 
have a shell on this system, so you can manage 
your pgp and/or ssh keys, as well as set cron 
jobs for file rotation, or just log in to 
restore, verify or manage the files. This too has 
been in use for a few months for a few beta 
testing customers. It’s working great. Now you 
too can have a place to back up your data to. 
Bandwidth to this server will not be counted 
toward your monthly quota. This server is also 
firewalled off from the Internet, so it can only 
be reached from/to your server on our network. This is a security precaution.

3)      New switches – Some older switches have 
been replaced with newer switches with faster 
uplinks. The older switches were 100Mbit on all 
ports, the new switches are 100Mbit and 1Gbit 
uplinks to our core. This will prevent any 
congestion in cases when customers use the new 
backup server or transfer data between their own 
servers which may be homed in different racks. 
When these switches were replaced, the cables 
used were also upgraded to higher quality 
snagless CAT 5e and CAT 6 for uplinks.

4)      NTP Time Server – We now have a stratum 2 
time server for you to use. The time server 
address is: time.m5hosting.com. This server is 
accessible from within our network only at this time.

         We have many more improvements planned. 
We will continue to announce them as they are 
complete or before they are made if they require 
service affecting maintenance. If you have any 
questions or comments regarding this message or 
the service improvements announced within this 
message, please let us know. Your feedback is how 
we know if we are doing a good job or not, and how we can do better.

Thank you very much !

Mike

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Michael J. McCafferty
Principal, Security Engineer
M5 Hosting
http://www.m5hosting.com

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