a2b2.com Startup Blog

Occasionally its nice to see behind the scenes of a company so heres a little snippet of how we do things so part one cPanel license monitoring.

We supply a number of cPanel licenses as we are a cPanel partner NOC which means we get the lowest possible pricing but in these days of credit crunches it helps to watch every single penny. As such once a month we do a cPanel license audit to remove any licenses that are not needed due to cancellation, non payment or just for testing.

Using the very nice cPanel perl API its dead easy to pull out all the license IP’s which is then passed to a simple perl script that check IP port 2087 and if it doesn’t respond within 10 seconds the license is just removed. Simple. Effective and it works

We are doing a test roll out of live support chat via Web and IM. Currently during the testing phase we will only be supplying chat via M-F 9-5 GMT and this is subject to the guidelines at http://vaservhelp.com/wiki/Support

We will be refining these as we go along.

For website live chat please goto a2b2.com or cheapvps.co.uk and click on the live chat icon

For MSN etc please see details at http://www.cheapvps.co.uk/contact

Rgds

Rus

We are doing a first batch release of the following servers. We are doing an initial run of 10 servers with a 4 working day setup time. These are dedicateds not VPS server

Intel Atom 1.6Ghz
2Gb RAM DDR2
100Gb HDD
5 IP’s
500Gb Transfer

£0 Setup - £40/mo
£40 setup - £30/mo
£60 setup - £25/mo

Upgrade to 250Gb HDD - £5/mo or £20 one off

Test IP 92.48.88.8
Test Download http://vaserv.com/test.100M

cPanel - £15/mo
DirectAdmin - £10/mo

All prices exclude VAT @ 17.5%

This offer is not yet on the website so please email sales@a2b2.com with your

Name
Address
Hostname
OS

In this issue

- Free Hosting in Exchange for Guides/Articles
- Interest in Atom servers?
- New Part Time Servers
- Blog Relaunch

Discounted/Free Hosting

We are looking for some interesting articles/guides for our Wiki at http://vaservhelp.com/wiki covering things to do with a VPS/Dedicated/Shared Hosting. In exchange for this we will offer you a discount/free hosting for a period. If you have something that you would like to put up then please email me personally on rghf@vaserv.com and include a rough idea of what it will be about.

Quick Notes

- Please make sure its original or at least have permission to publish it. IF its been on your Blog we will accept it. If its been on Slashdot we probably won’t
- This is not hosting in exchange for reviews.
- Please check before doing anything as any duplications / unsolicited things will be refused

Atom Servers

We are looking at offering 1.6Ghz Atom Servers with 2Gb RAM + 120GB disk (or similar) + 500Gb of transfer UK based for around £40-45/mo. If you would potentially be interested please let us know so we can gauge if its worth going forward with it

Part Time Servers

We’ve launched a new niche service at http://www.cheapvps.co.uk/plans/part-time-servers where you get 50% discount for using the server 50% off the time. If you would like a new account or to move your existing VPS onto this platform please let us know.

Blog Relaunch

Its been gathering cobwebs but today I will be relaunching our blog at http://blog.a2b2.com/ although it has been a year since I last logged into it so its long overdue to be relaunched.

Rus

We’ve got a lot of spare hardware lying around which we want to clear..

Your server will be allocated in random order

It will be a random choice depending on which server I pick up

P4 HT, Dual Core P4, Core2Duo, Opteron, Celeron, Semperon
At least 512Mb RAM (upto 2GB)
At least 80GB HDD (upto 400GB)
1000gb Transfer
5 IP’s
Free DirectAdmin

[B]£45/mo + VAT[/B]

UK Based
Hosted at BlueSquare UK

Choice of IP’s

85.234.133.1 Euroconnex
Speed Test http://85.234.144.55/test.100M and

or
77.74.198.1 UK Servers
Speed Test http://77.74.198.14/test.100M

To order email sales@a2b2.com or see http://www.a2b2.com/index.php?showtopic=12

Two Celeron 2.x Ghz
1GB Servers
80GB HDD
UK Based
2000Gb Transfer shared

1 of Dual Opteron 246 - 2GB RAM - 250GB HDD - 1000GB Transfer - £75/mo

Hosted at BlueSquare UK

Email sales@A2b2.com to order

From today we we will be posting specials to this blog as well as few other sites so see what great bargins you can pick up

SMS / Text Message Support

From today we are pleased to announce new SMS/Text message based support. This support is aimed to be for when you are out and about and you need to reboot your server or something simple / quick that is covered by your support package. To use this just send a message to +44 (0) 7925 364369 which is less than 160 characters and include a short request and your IP.

e.g. reboot 85.234.133.209 - Rus Foster

Please note for obvious security reasons we will not reset root password or similar or do anything that will comprimise server security over this medium. It is recommended that you put the number you would send from as one of the contact phone numbers on https://secure.vaserv.com.

Please note this number is for SMS only and not voice calls. Of course as normal any questions please raise a ticket at http://support.vaserv.com

There are some days in the hosting world when you get a few tickets, an order or two and maybe the odd reboot but overall a relaxing day when nothing to worry about. Other days you get nightmares like today has been. In order today we’ve had

- DOS Attack launched at us
- VPS host machine null routed as we worked on it
- Same VPS host machine have a disk fail in its RAID and requiring a reboot and fsck
- The DOS attacked caused the switch to go funny meaning that also had to be rebooted to fix some latency / transit issues.

All of this in the space of 4 hours I can assure you makes for a very busy evening and very busy ticketing system. However all things seem to be under control now so we can start catching up and putting the pieces back together.