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.

We’ve just rolled out a number of improvements to our server monitoring service. This service allows customers to receive SMS, email and prowl alerts about individual services.

Shared monitors for managed servers

Firstly, customers of our managed hosting service can now get access to the monitors that we have in place for your services through our control panel. Not only does this allow you to immediately check that we’re monitoring the right things, but you can add yourself to the alert list and be notified directly at the same time that we receive an alert.

We’ll be rolling this out to existing managed hosting customers in due course, but drop us an email if you’d like to be enabled quickly.

Satellite monitoring nodes

Secondly, we can now deploy “satellite” monitoring nodes, allowing us to deploy a monitoring server behind your firewall that can report status back to our central monitoring system. This makes it possible to monitor machines and services that are only accessible from behind your firewall.

New monitor types

Thirdly, we’ve added some new monitor types:

• DNS Black list monitoring – get an immediate alert if your mail server ends up on a black list
• HTTP Status Code – check that a URL is returning a specific HTTP code
• TCP connection – check that a server is accept TCP connections on an arbitrary port

More flexible alert lists

Finally, we’ve made alert lists more flexible, allowing you to add multiple groups of contacts to each monitor.

All of our servers come with free ping monitoring included. Enhanced monitoring of individual services can be added for just £5+VAT per month, and is included for managed hosting customers.

Nat Morris, UK Network Operators Forum director recently gave a presentation to DNS Operations, Analysis and Research centre, which included this remarkably nice slide:

What is Anycast?

Normally a server has a globally unique IP address, and the Internet knows how to send traffic from any other machine in the world to that IP address. With Anycast we share a single address across multiple machines, and your traffic is sent to the nearest machine with that address. This means that UK customers can be answered from a server in the UK and Australian customers from a server in Australia allowing you to have very fast responses to things like DNS queries because you’re always served by a server that’s close by, rather than your query having to travel half way around the world.

To set up an Anycast network, you need your own address space, your own network number (ASN), multiple BGP-aware routers that can announce your address space, and multiple servers that can answer the queries. Typically this would require a pretty hefty budget, but if you’re Nat Morris and you know what you’re doing with software routing on Linux, and you know all the right providers then you can bring up a global Anycast network with 10+ servers and sites on an annual budget of well under $1,000.

The key to doing this is finding ISPs, ideally well-connnected ISPs in key internet hubs, who will provide you with a BGP feed to your hosted server. That’s where a UK clueful hosting company comes into the picture having excellent connectivity, inexpensive virtual machines (VMs) and a willingness to support customers with more unusual configurations.

Quick introduction to BGP and routing

Normally when you have a VM you get a default route, which looks like this:

# ip route 
...
default via 93.93.128.1 dev eth1 

which says that to get to anywhere on the internet, send packets to our router at 93.93.128.1.

Over BGP, instead we send you the whole routing table:

# ip route 
...
1.0.7.0/24 via 5.57.80.128 dev eth3.4  proto zebra  metric 1 
1.0.20.0/23 via 93.93.133.46 dev eth6.220  proto zebra  metric 142080 
... 
500,000 more lines like this

For every block on the whole internet you have a different gateway depending on what you’ve decided is the preferred route. At today’s count this is about 490,000 entries in the routing table. Don’t type ‘route’ if you’re logged in over 3G!

So for this VM, instead of having a default route, Nat has four full BGP sessions, two to each of our two routers to the site. On each router, one session provides 490,000 IPv4 routes, the other provides 18,000 IPv6 routes, and the VM gets to decide which router to send data to.

The other side of the BGP relationship, and the important bit for Anycasting, is that we receive an advert from Nat’s VM for his /24 of IPv4 space and /48 of IPv6 space, which we then advertise out to the world. The 10+ other providers in this Anycast setup will do the same, and hosts will direct traffic to whichever is nearest.

Filtering

As Paul Vixie pointed out in the first question to Nat, the main customers of VMs with BGP are spammers who hijack address space for nefarious usage. At Mythic Beasts we filter our announcements and our customer routes, so if Nat messes up his configuration and accidentally announces that his VM is responsible for the whole of Youtube we’ll drop the announcement rather than expecting one very small VM to handle one fifth of the internet.

BGP on a virtual or dedicated server

If you’re a DNS provider or a content delivery network, you’ll probably want to have an Anycast setup at some point. At Mythic Beasts we remember what it was like to be the little guy which is why we offer full BGP routing (including IPv6 BGP) as an option to any virtual server, dedicated server, colocated server or router. Providing you own your own ASN and IP space we can transit it for you and we can keep the start-up costs very low and scale with you. You can locate your VM or server directly with us in Telecity, mere tens of metres from LINX and LoNAP for minimal latency and maximal available bandwidth.

If you’ve no idea what an ASN, BGP, LIR, RIPE are, we can help arrange your ASN, IP space and BGP config.

It’s a Wednesday, which means more new top-level domains! This week’s new gTLDs are .camp, .education, .glass, .institute and .repair.

To celebrate all the domain name possibilities, we’re running a one week promotion on new registrations for all new gTLDs launched so far this year, with 33% off one year registrations, and discounts on longer registration periods too.

A full list of discounted domains is available on our Domains page.

The promotion will end at midnight on 9th April, so you can get next week’s new domains at the reduced price if you’re quick.

We’re pleased to announce that we now support Direct Debits as a payment
method. By setting up a Direct Debit, payment for any invoices on your account
will automatically be taken from your bank account a few days after the invoice
is issued.

To set up a Direct Debit on your account, click here and log in with your account details.

The addition of Direct Debits also allows us to support another new feature:
automatic renewal of domain registrations. If you select this option, your
domains will automatically be renewed for one year 21 days before expiry, and charged
automatically to your Direct Debit.

You can configure the renewal behaviour of your domains using the Services tab on our control panel.