Recently many overseas Web Hosting providers have become quite visible and appealing to Australians. These overseas hosting providers claim to give Australians relatively cheaper prices, making them believe they’re saving a serious amount of money. This leads to Australians going with overseas competitors, thinking that this is the better option for them. This is not the case. As you’ll read on further within this blog post, you’ll see why its important to factor in every outcome when choosing a Web Hosting Provider. “Quality vs Quantity”, a note that is constantly thrown down your throat through high school is extremely relevant to this issue. Quality- What you will get from Australian based Web Hosting providers. Quantity- The money you will save going with an Overseas Hosting provider. As you read those two points above, you immediately think of the money you will save going with an overseas competitor. But in reality, you may save money but there are many benefits of going with a local Australian Web Hosting that you can’t sacrifice. Some of the benefits are as follows. High Support Levels By going with an Australian Web Hosting Company, such as ourselves, you can be guaranteed your support requests will be answered as soon as possible. This saves time, stress and your business precious money. This can be compared to that of an overseas Web Hosting company, who could take days to reply to a simple ticket request due to time differences. Support levels are a very high priority….

The past few weeks have seen fairly large scale DDoS attacks directed toward customers on our gaming network, which has in turn, generated packet loss and issues on people being attacked; thereby, affecting the entire gaming network. To address this issue, we have been working around the clock to strengthen our DDoS protection; however, we have noticed that with every change we make, the attacks seem to circumvent it. Even with such issues, we all maintained proactive disposition and continued to combat the attacks as best as we can, while also notifying the networks that are attacking us to help clean infected servers. This past week, we have made more changes which are intended to curb such attacks and finally put them under control. Currently, the number of attacks has tremendously decreased from 100+ per week to well below 1 per day, which was made possible by our implementation of new policies and systems internally. We are pleased to say that our new systems are now in place to deal with such large scale attacks more effectively and efficiently. Whereas before, we had to rely on upstreams to drop a large scale DDoS attack, this can now be done in-house and will help mitigate the attacks. Rest assured that customers on our business network have not been affected by the attacks directed toward our gaming customers. Should you wish to discuss this matter in greater detail, please do feel free to give us a call directly on 02 72015063…..

In recent weeks, it has come to light that there is an ongoing, highly distributed effort to attack Wordpress websites with poorly secured administrator passwords. This attack is highly organised, using over 90,000 IP addresses in an attempt to guess the administrator password for WordPress sites. We are aware of these efforts and are deploying a series of counter-measures to protect our customers against this effort. We do, however, encourage our customers to take steps to ensure their WordPress sites aren’t compromised due to weak or insecure passwords. The following are several ways customers can further protect their WordPress sites: WordPress BulletProof Security Plugin The WordPress BulletProof Security Plugin is a free, multi-purpose security tool for WordPress intended to protect your WordPress site against a variety of security attacks. This tool is installed like any other WordPress plugin and provides a number of tools customers can use to improve the security of their site. If you are interested, you can find more details about the plugin at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bulletproof-security/ WordPress Better WP Security Plugin Another alternative plugin for WordPress, “Better wordpress security” provides extra features, and security measures which are widely used, and provides it in a single plugin which is easy to manage, and provides many methods for protection. If you are interested, you can find more details about the plugin at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/better-wp-security/ Deny Access to your wp-login.php Page based on Country Code Another method, which can assist, is by utilizing a rewrite which would deny access to your websites….

Buy new not OLD The most important thing when buying a server is to check the age of the server as many hosting companies are offering older style servers, and while these are OK for starting out they are no good for a production or high traffic website. Old servers have been used and the drives degraded, power supplies worked and all components heated and cooled many times. It’s always best to ensure that you ask for a NEW server from your supplier. Servers Australia only ever offer the newest and latest hardware and this means we can repair/replace any of the parts we have in production as we refresh our fleet every few years. Buying older hardware also means it may be harder to source the parts if and when the old server does stop running. Data Charges Getting a nasty surprise from your provider is never a good thing so make sure when buying a server you are given a nice data allowance and that you know the cost of excess data up front. As a guide in Australia you should never pay more than $1.10 per GB for excess data charges, as this is standard across the board and is also a reasonable rate. Buying data in bulk or in advance will generally save you 50% off on your data charges and is important to look out for. Control Panel or Not When buying a server, you need to decide if you want and need a control….

When it comes to online web hosting directories, there are too many to count. Unfortunately there are plenty of outdated lists with useless information on them. If you look hard enough you will find some decent ones with up -to-date information and correct listings. Luckily for you, we have just been linked on a great web hosting directory, Web Hosting Search. This directory lists hosting companies from around the globe and offers reviews on the various companies. Servers Australia has even been awarded and recommended as a top rated Web Hosting Company by Web Hosting Search. Check out their site and take a look around for yourself.   Dedicated and Virtual Servers Specialists - About Us

How can I tell if my provider is really running their own network and hosting me in Australia? I like to be on top of every issue we have at work, some call me a micromanager and some call me a pain in the backside, however I love my job, and I love my customers! I like to ensure that everyone is getting what they are paying for, and that is a quality service here at Servers Australia! So every day, I spend time with the Sales, Marketing and Support teams to ensure that everything is running as it should! However last week I heard two VERY interesting conversations, one was from tech support and the other was in the sales department. I heard one of our tech support staff explaining to a customer, that the reason they had issues with their site load time on their old host was because they were being hosted offshore, in the USA to be exact… however they were under the impression that they were hosted here in Australia because they were buying from an Australia hosting company, who claimed to be hosted here in Australia. This is very common issue, as customers generally don’t know if their host is being true and really is hosting them in Australia or offshore. You might ask, “Why does it matter?” Well there are many reasons, such as site load times, data security and privacy, connectivity congestion to the offshore site and the risk of undersea cable….

So you have a fantastic new website with amazing content, but you don’t have a way for the public to see it. This is the time for a good web host. There are countless companies offering web hosting online, with varying prices and differing levels of legitimacy. But what should you be looking for exactly? First of all, find a good web host. There is no point of having a website if the hosting company has constant issues with keeping the website live. The other important factor is price. You want to keep costs down, after all who doesn’t? Network Ideally, you want to find a company that has its own data center and network, rather than that being outsourced to other companies. This ensures that if a problem is to occur, the staff members of the company should be onsite to fix the problem as soon as possible. Finding these companies can be difficult, however they do exist. Check review sites to see what other people think of these sites to see how legitimate they are. If you can get a free web host that provides a good quality of service, then you’re laughing. The free plans will not offer as many services as some other ones; however you can always simply use them as a trial basis. If you feel an upgrade is necessary, then you know whether that company is worth dealing with or not. Disk Space Some websites can be small, other can be large, especially….

We are excited to announce our new special offers at Servers Australia for March 2012. Mad as a March hare? Yes we are! We are offering DOUBLE RAM & DOUBLE DATA on all our complete Starter Dedicated Servers Series for the whole of March! There are no limits of purchases per customer either, however this is not available as an upgrade option. See our

Servers Australia are offering free web hosting for life, to all Australian businesses. Go to our Facebook Free Web Hosting Page, ‘Like us’ then signup to receive your free web hosting. Please note this is available for businesses only and a limit of one per customer applies. Offer ends on 29/02/2012. We are also having a $40 per Mbit on all IP Transit Services Sale. This service can be used for Dedicated Servers, Co-location or directly by interconnecting at one of our POP’s in Global Switch, Equinix SY1, Equinix SY2, Equinix SY3 or the Servers Australia DC. Available to new customers for 12 month (minimum) signups, available till 13/03/12. We are also offering triple RAM on i3 server and E3-1225, Double RAM on E3-1245 Server. See our dedicated servers page here for a breakdown on the server details. Offer ends 29/02/12. Details on all our current special offers are available on Servers Australia Special Offers page here.

SSD RAID 10 IOPS Testing - H700 Perc RAID Card Testing R710 Recently we’ve been playing with H700 RAID cards with SSD’s. We have had some issues which will be outlined in future follow up posts with SSD’s & H700 Compatibilities. 6 x 256GB Crucial M4 Firmware 0309 all confirmed in a RAID 10 array. Testing tool : Fio 1.38 64bit Fio is quite easy to configure and setup in all major linux distribution. We are testing it on Debian which is quite easy to install J From CLI (command line interface) just run the following commands: This will update the Package Index. The APT package index is essentially a database of available packages from the repositories defined in the /etc/apt/sources.list file. To update the local package index with the latest changes made in repositories, root@server:/# Apt-get update This command will then install FIO from the remote repositories & any dependencies root@server:/# Apt-get install fio We then want to create the actual configuration file which will have all the variables for this test , because we are utilising SSD’s it’s a good idea to setup the configuration file with the following settings The easiest way to create the configuration file is like this: root@server:/# nano random.fio Then you want to paste the following in: [random] rw=randread size=1g directory=/iops iodepth=403 direct=1 blocksize=4k numjobs=16 nrfiles=1 group_reporting ioengine=sync loops=1 The second last step is to create a folder where all the working/testing will take place in , in our case we created /iops….