We’ve just rolled out a beta of our snapshot functionality for our virtual servers.  This allows you to take an instantaneous image of your servers disk space which can then be restored at a later date to either the same or a different server.  This can be used for cloning a virtual server, for backups, or just to take a copy of your server before making significant configuration changes such as an operating system upgrade.

Snapshots are stored in our distributed storage cloud, which replicates the image across three separate data centres.

The system is in beta testing at the moment, and during this beta we’re offering free storage for images.  Once the beta is complete, storage space will become chargeable, but we’ll contact all customers who’ve made use of the service prior to issuing any bills.

If you want to try it out, simply use the snapshot panel for your server in the customer control panel, or use the snapshot command on the admin console.  Hopefully it’s self-explanatory, if it’s not, tell us and we’ll make it better!

Jessie

The new stable version of Debian, named “Jessie” was released on Saturday.  The new version is now available for use on all of our Virtual Server hosts. Jessie is fully available at the Mythic Beasts mirror and we’re included in the default menu so you can easily install directly from our mirror.

Mythic Beasts make extensive use of Debian and would like to thank all the Debian developers by donating our usual firkin of beer from the every excellent Milton Brewery to the Summer Debian UK barbeque so everyone within the Debian community can have a pint on us. Possibly more than one.

Following on from recent upgrades to RAM and bandwidth for our Virtual Servers, we’re pleased to announce upgrades to Virtual Server storage options.

We’ve launched a new range of SSD Virtual Servers, offering the ultimate in I/O performance. The range starts with our VPS2 SSD which replaces the 40GB disk in our standard VPS 2 with a 10GB SSD drive.

Like our spinning rust-based Virtual Servers, our SSD storage is local to the host machine, and connected as RAID 1 mirrored pairs to a controller with a battery-backup unit.  This allows us to safely enable a large write cache, further boosting write performance.

We’ve also doubled the disk space available with all of our full HDD-based Virtual Servers, so our basic VPS2 now includes 40GB of disk, 2GB RAM and 1TB of monthly bandwidth.

Existing customers can upgrade to the new storage capacity by typing “upgrade” on the admin console, and then adding new partitions or resizing existing partitions to make use of the new capacity.

Taking a break from our usual articles about upgrades for VPS customers and mocking the hopelessly incompetent, we’d like to announce an upgrade for dedicated and colo customers in our Cambridge data centre. We’ve finally completed the upgrade of both of our links into Cambridge, so have increased bandwidth quotas, and reduced excess rates to just 7p/GB.

Details of the new specs can be found on our Dedicated Server, Colocation and Mac Mini Colo pages.

We’ve just added an option to allow Virtual Servers to get full access to the CPU extensions available on the host server.

By default, virtual servers see a subset of CPU features that is available consistently across all of our hosts. For most users this has no impact on performance, but for some applications, such as performing certain types of encryption, speed can be substantially improved if certain processor extensions are available.

We’ve noticed significant improvements in OpenVPN throughput and latency after turning on this option on some of our servers.

CPU mode on our virtual servers can be configured using the “cpu” command on the admin shell.

Our Virtual Servers come with a virtual CD drive, allowing you to load an ISO image from our library and install an operating system of your choice, configured exactly how you want it.

We’ve just launched our “Bring Your Own ISO” feature, allowing you to upload your own ISO images, giving you complete freedom to install your choice of operating system, or to run a “live CD” distribution.

All users have a free 5GB allocation on our storage cluster for images, and files can be fetched from anywhere on the internet via HTTP, HTTPS, git, FTP or rsync.

Customers can upload a boot image via the “Boot Media” option on our customer control panel.

800GB of RAM – just some of the new memory added to our hosts over Christmas

As many of our existing VPS customers will be aware, over the holiday period we had a number of late nights in data centres, installing additional RAM into our virtual server hosts.

We’re now pleased to announce new specs for our Virtual Servers with a doubling of RAM at every price point.

Combined with the substantial upgrades to Virtual Server bandwidth allowances announced last month, our basic server now comes with 2GB of RAM and 1TB/month of bandwidth for £12.50+VAT per month (or less if paid yearly).

But that’s not all. Whilst we had the lids open, we also added additional CPUs meaning that for most hosts, CPU contention has been halved, giving a further boost to performance (RAM remains, and always has been, uncontended). Our higher spec servers have also received an increase in the number of virtual CPUs allocated.

Naturally, our servers retain all the great features that our customers are used to, including:

• Full IPv6 connectivity
• Virtual VNC and serial consoles
• Choice of independently-routed data centres
• DNS services for your domain
• Installation from your choice of ISO image
• Optional BGP feeds for AnyCast services
• Optional Server Management

Most existing customers will have already received the new RAM allowance. If you were on a host that didn’t need a hardware upgrade, your VPS won’t have been rebooted. Simply shutdown your server, run “upgrade” on the admin console, and reboot.

We’re not done yet. Watch this space for further upgrades and improvements to our Virtual Servers.

We know from experience that some of our customers get very busy at Christmas.

We know what you got for Christmas…

As an early Christmas present to our Virtual Server customers, we’ve just rolled out a substantial bandwidth upgrade across all our VPS range. Our 1GB VPS 1 server now comes with a 1TB/month bandwidth allowance, a ten fold increase on the old quota, with similar upgrades across the range.

You can find full details of the new allowances on our virtual server specs page.

All of our virtual servers come with IPv6 connectivity, VNC and serial consoles, free DNS services for any domains hosted on your server, and freedom to install the OS of your choice.

We’ve got more upgrades planned for our virtual servers in the near future, so watch this space.

Back in 2000, Mythic Beasts started by offering web and email hosting services on a single shared server. Since then, we have expanded in just about all possible directions, but we still offer shared hosting for web and email. It remains the most cost-effective way to establish a permanent online presence.

A single Mythic Beasts hosting account can support multiple domains. This has become particularly important with the current proliferation of new top-level domains, and the opening up of the second-level .uk domain space. With our shared hosting, you can have example.com, example.co.uk, example.uk, and example.club all hosted on a single account. And you can choose between serving the same content, redirecting to a canonical name, or serving different content.

Until now, enabling additional domains has required an email to support and a manual step at our end to link the new domain to your hosting account. But our dev team has now exposed this through the Customer Control Panel, and you can add your new domains instantly.

Here’s how it works now.

1. If you have registered a domain through us, you can add the standard configuration through the Customer Control Panel. The standard configuration sets up the “bare” domain name, example.com, for web and email hosting, and www.example.com for web hosting. There is no charge for this, and you can add as many domains as you like to your hosting account.
2. For all other cases, whether subdomains, or domains registered with other registrars, you will still need to email support. A one-off setup charge of £10 (inc VAT) will be levied per domain /subdomain. Or you can batch up to 5 domains in a single request for £20 (inc VAT). EDIT 2021: This is no longer the case, additional domains and subdomains are free to add and this can be done through the Control Panel.

Although SSL for websites (HTTPS) has been commonplace for e-commerce sites for years, the vast majority of “ordinary” websites still use standard HTTP. In recent months, two things have happened which look set to change that:

• Firstly, on 8th April 2014 Microsoft finally ended support for Windows XP; and
• Secondly, two days ago, Google announced that HTTPS support would be seen as a positive signal when ranking websites in search results.

Whilst the importance of the second of these probably needs no further explanation, the relevance of the first may not be obvious.

Until now, one of the barriers to widespread adoption of SSL over HTTP is that, unlike non-SSL websites, each site requires its own IP address, and IP (or at least, IPv4) addresses are in short supply. This is because the HTTP request which specifies which website is being requested is only done after the SSL certificate has been presented, so if you have multiple sites on a single IP address, there is no way for the server to know which certificate to present.

A solution to this problem has existed for some years in the form of Server Name Indication (SNI). SNI is an extension to the SSL protocol, or more accurately its successor, the TLS protocol, which allows the site name to be included as part of the TLS negotiation so that the server can present the correct certificate.

Unfortunately, one widely-used platform had no support for SNI: Windows XP. With the ending of support for Windows XP, adopting SNI suddenly becomes a much more acceptable proposition.

Cheaper HTTPS hosting

The practical benefit of this is that hosting providers such as ourselves can offer much cheaper hosting of HTTPS sites, and that’s exactly what we’re doing. Buy one of our SSL Certificates and we’ll add an SNI-based HTTPS service to your Hosting Account at no extra charge.