Mythic Beasts is now a verified Green Hosting Provider according to the Green Web Foundation.

We’ve demonstrated to the Green Web Foundation that all our UK and EU data centres buy as much renewable electricity as they use. This hasn’t changed our operations; internally we met this requirement in 2018. What’s changed is that we’ve now provided all the documentation to meet the certification standards of the Green Web Foundation.

Of course this isn’t quite the same as saying that all the electricity we use comes from renewable power. Ultimately, the electrical energy from a wind farm isn’t tagged to flow directly to the data centres we use and there is also no requirement that the electricity is bought at exactly the same time it is used. Similarly, the data centres have fossil-fueled generator backup which means small amounts of fossil energy are still used.

That said, we do believe that this is an important and useful step in the right direction. By getting verified under this scheme we, and the 429 other verified companies, apply pressure on the data centre suppliers to buy and use renewable energy which strongly encourages the marketplace to build more renewable generation.

Some of our data centre providers are very large well-resourced companies and they place very large long term orders for renewable power. This means renewable power providers can secure funding to build out renewable power generation. When they want to build a data centre, they also have to fund the building of an equivalent amount of renewable generation to power it.

Yesterday, the following not-so-subtle notice appeared on the admin interface of all Mastodon instances:

The Mastodon team announced on Monday that this release was coming, so we were ready for it:

Details of the vulnerability are still limited, but from what we do know it sounds serious (“Remote account takeover“).

All our managed Mastodon instances were safely patched just over an hour after the new packages dropped. One instance gave us a bit of trouble, as the new version appeared to tickle a bug in Elasticsearch causing ES to consume all CPU on the server. After we eventually pinned down the cause, it was resolved by an upgrade of Elasticsearch. Turns out the ES upgrade didn’t fix it, and we’re still working with our customer to get this resolved.

Managed open source hosting

Open source software such as Mastodon, GitLab and Nextcloud can offer a great alternative to the lock-in associated with proprietary cloud equivalents, but the effort associated with hosting them can be significant: backups, monitoring, security patching, and the investigation and debugging required when a supposedly innocuous software upgrade leaves your CPU usage wedged at 100%.

Our managed open source hosting provides the best of both worlds: the convenience of a “cloud” solution, but without the lock-in. Your data is yours, and if you don’t like our service you can take your data and host it somewhere else (although we’re confident you won’t want to). And because there’s no lock-in, you get straightforward pricing based on the resources you’re using, rather than loss-leaders followed by price hikes once you’re hooked.

Read more about our managed hosting, or drop us an email at for more information.

Recently Trend Micro, through their Zero Day Initiative, published a critical flaw for the Exim mail server. It’s described as allowing remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on the Exim server without authentication. On the face of it, any server running Exim and listening on the internet can immediately be taken over by an attacker. What makes this worse is that they claim they reported this in June 2022, and the Exim team have ignored fixing it.

ZDI say ‘The only salient mitigation strategy is to restrict interaction with the application.’ and have allocated a scarily high severity score of 9.8/10.

Mythic Beasts make pretty heavy use of Exim in our mail infrastructure, and mitigating the security risk by turning off email is a pretty severe step while we wait for a fix. On top of that amongst servers we manage for ourselves and clients there’s nearly a thousand installed copies of Exim that will need to be updated.

The Exim team have a different view on the severity, as do other reputable security specialists. Watchtowr have a nice write-up explaining that, by default, none of the six issues can be exploited. Cross checking to Mythic Beasts mail infrastructure we can quickly confirm we’re not affected, and we believe that none of the managed customers should be either.

As this is now not especially time critical, we can wait for the supported operating systems to release updated packages which we can install.

Patching

The security issue is definitely significant enough to meet our 0-day policy of patching immediately as it’s network listening software with a risk of compromise. Debian released packages with the most important fixes on Monday 2nd October. Because this issue covers a very large number of affected machines, some of which are absolutely critical we decided to stage the rollout. First we did our staging servers, then one of our core mailhubs. We then paused for a short while to check no functionality was affected. Then we completed the full roll-out to all managed servers both customer and internal. The final step is our audit – recheck the Exim package on every managed server to make sure the update had applied everywhere. The full rollout and audit completed in around three hours.

We’re expecting updated packages from Ubuntu shortly, which will then be rolled out to all supported managed Ubuntu customers when available.

Last year, we undertook a significant data centre migration, with the closure of Digital Realty’s Meridian Gate requiring us to move our entire presence there to Redcentric’s City Life Line. Having done it once, why not do it again?

This year, we’re planning a move out of Harbour Exchange (HEX), and starting a presence in Telehouse South. A lot of the things we learned during the previous move are making this move easier to manage, although it is still a prodigious effort, both physically and in terms of design and infrastructure.

One of the things we’ve been working on for some time is improved network infrastructure within our data centres. This introduces IP address portability so that IP addresses do not need to change when servers are moved between data centres, as well as significantly higher bandwidth uplinks for our virtual server hosts.

In the last year, we’ve live migrated over a thousand VMs across two data centres, with minimal interruption to service.

We’re about to start migrating all VMs out of our HEX data centre. We have two available London destinations, SOV and CLL. If you’re a customer with a VM in our HEX data centre, we’ll be emailing you over the next couple of weeks, to check if you have a preference (for instance because you have existing services in one of those data centres, and would prefer to be moved to the other to maintain fault-tolerance).

We will also soon be able to offer Telehouse South as a virtual server zone, in addition to SOV and CLL. This means we will continue to provide three London-based zones for our customers running distributed services. We’ll retain a small residual presence in HEX for connectivity.

 

Last year we enhanced our web hosting service with the ability to choose your own PHP verison. You can choose a different PHP version for each website hosted with us, so you can upgrade your staging site and test before you upgrade the production one. With PHP 8.0 about to go end-of-life, the addition of PHP 8.2 provides more options for migrating production applications.

Since the initial roll-out, we’ve added more PHP versions to help with moving and upgrading older applications. Not only is the newest version PHP 8.2 available, but you can also select the older 7.3 and 7.4 versions. We’re proud to sponsor Ondřej Surý who creates the debian packages we rely on.

Our hosting accounts still support unlimited websites, have free and automatic SSL through Let’s Encrypt to keep your sites secure, and include MariaDB databases.

We’ve just rolled out a price reduction for domain registration for the vast majority of the TLDs that we offer, including .com, .net and .org. We pay for most of our domains in US dollars, and thanks to the increasing strength of the pound against the dollar, we’ve been able to reduce our prices for all such domains by an average of just over 10%.

.ie domains

We’re also pleased to announce that we’re now able to offer .ie domain registrations. Unfortunately, ID requirements mean that we’re only able to offer these to corporate registrants, and standard .ie residency requirements apply. .ie domains have been a frustrating gap in our available TLDs for many years, so we’re very happy that we’re now at least partially able to fill it.

No-nonsense pricing

Our full price list can be found on our domains page.

We don’t offer loss-leading promotional pricing — we charge the same for new and existing customers alike, don’t ramp up pricing on renewals, and never charge transfer-out fees.

We offer small multi-year discounts for registration or renewals in advance, and pride ourselves on offering a good service for a reasonable price.

Other domains

We’re also a JISC registrar, meaning that we can provide .ac.uk and .gov.uk domains. We can provide credit accounts (subject to checks), allowing organisations to pay for domains via PO and invoice, if required.

DNS, APIs, DNSSEC, IPv6

Domain registrations include DNS with API access as standard. We also support DNSSEC, and naturally, our nameservers are IPv6-enabled. If you’re migrating existing domains to us, you can import zone files directly, via our control panel or the API. We also provide a Domain management API.

 

On Saturday the Debian team released the latest version of Debian, Bookworm. We’re pleased to announce that this is now available on our virtual and dedicated servers.

Bookworm is a fully supported operating system for our managed hosting and we already have it running on some of our internal production servers. Our preferred open source server management system, Sympl, has also been updated to support Bookworm. Other feature enhancements include much more control over PHP versions and settings. Our virtual server cloud has pre-built images for standard Bookworm and Bookworm with Sympl pre-installed.

There are many improvements in Bookworm, with PHP 8.2 support being the most anticipated by our customers. We would like to thank the Debian team for all their hard work in making this release.

We’ve been offering IPv6-only hosting for eight years now, and have demonstrated that many websites can forego the expense of an IPv4 address pretty easily. You can read more about how we do this on this blog post from 2020. This blog post itself is being served from an IPv6-only server!

A key part of this is our IPv4-to-IPv6 proxy. This listens for incoming traffic on a shared IPv4 address and forwards it to your IPv6-only server. In order to use the proxy, you need to tell it which hostnames to listen for, and which server or servers to forward traffic to. This can be done using our control panel, and as of today, it can also be done via an API.

Having an API for proxy configuration makes it possible to automatically add or remove backend servers, allowing you to spin up additional servers, or take servers out of service for failover or maintenance.

You can also use the API to add and remove hostnames handled by the proxy, and so can be used to automate the provisioning of new services.

Fine-grained access controls

As for our DNS API and Domain API, the Proxy API provides fine-grained access control for API keys. For example, you can create an API key that only has access to a specified domain or hostname, or you can create a read-only API key if you only need to read the current configuration.

Getting started

Our IPv4-to-IPv6 proxy is available to all customers with a Mythic Beasts server, including virtual servers, Raspberry Pi servers, dedicated and colo. You can find more information on the proxy service, and the Proxy API on our support pages.

We’re looking to employ a part-time finance and administrative assistant for between 15 and 25 hours a week. The duties of the role will likely include:

• dealing with invoicing and payment queries from customers;
• reconciling bank transfers with invoices;
• uploading receipts to Hubdoc and Xero;
• chasing up overdue invoices;
• dealing with some paper mail to the company;
• banking cheques;
• filing paperwork;
• administering annual leave;
• keeping a calendar of administrative deadlines; and
• other administrative and accounting duties.

Previous experience in a similar role is desirable, as is experience with Xero accounting software.

Mythic Beasts don’t have an office, so the job primarily involves working from home. We’ll provide you with a laptop and cover reasonable home-working expenses. Hours are flexible, but we would normally expect you to be available in Cambridge on Wednesday afternoons. Holiday entitlement will be based pro rata on hours worked, from a full-time allowance of 30 days per year, plus bank holidays. Salary is subject to experience. You will be eligible for company health insurance and membership of our employee share scheme after the qualifying period.

If you’re interested or would like to know more, drop us an email.

Over the years, we’ve gained a reputation for providing support that is above average for the hosting industry. Obviously it helps that the average is really quite low, and simply providing helpful answers in a timely manner puts you some way above it, but we’re proud of this reputation and work hard to provide the best support that we possibly can.

@Mythic_Beasts Not just the best support of any tech company, but the best support of any company that I have ever dealt with. Superb.

— John Robinson (@torrlaneHartley) October 12, 2022

So what do we do differently?

Perhaps the biggest thing is that we don’t have any dedicated support staff.

Our support rota

Our support queue is staffed by a rolling rota that includes all of our technical staff. The staff responsible for managing our routers, running our DNS servers, developing our control panel and maintaining all our other infrastructure, all take it in turns to do regular days on “first line support”. And, yes, this includes our founders & directors.

The most obvious benefit of this is that customers get straight through to someone who can actually deal with their issue — all tickets are effectively escalated to what might elsewhere be considered second, or more likely third, line support, but without the hassle of fighting your way past chat bots and scripted replies.

That’s obviously better for the customer, but conventional wisdom is that good technical staff are too expensive to put on first line support, and you won’t retain them if you do.

Our company trades on its reputation for good support, so cost cutting here would be a false economy, and you only have to look at the likes of Stack Overflow and Quora to see that many technical experts enjoy using their knowledge to help others.

It is true that our staff probably wouldn’t want to do support full-time, but mixing support with normal responsibilities actually provides some useful variety, and has a number of other benefits.

Been so impressed with the quality of support from @Mythic_Beasts while we moved Libreture to our new server with them.

I always aim to support independent businesses, whether buying ebooks or hosting websites. And Mythic Beasts make it an easy choice.

— Libreture – your ebook cloud library (@libreture) July 13, 2022

Direct customer feedback

One of the most valuable benefits of this arrangement is the direct contact between our technical staff and our customers. Our staff get to see directly what our customers want to do, and what parts of our website and systems our customers find confusing. They’ve also got a strong incentive to improve them so that they don’t find themselves answering the same simple questions again and again when on support, and because our “support staff” are also the people responsible for those systems, they’re in a position to actually fix them.

Perhaps one of the best measures of how well this works is that the average time to deal with a support ticket has gone up over the years. All the easy support tickets that we used to be able to clean up before the first coffee in the morning have gone, because the customer did it themselves the night before. The tickets in the support queue are getting harder, and this is good thing (and yet another lesson in the hazards of optimising for KPIs).

I have the dubious honour of causing a domain registration issue so awkward and peculiar that even @Mythic_Beasts hadn’t seen it before. Their support and advice was excellent though as always, can’t recommend them enough.

— John Leach (@johnleach) August 17, 2022

Why we prefer email support

Our rolling rota of support staff is one of the reasons why we insist on email for support. Having a written record of all communications on a ticket makes it much easier to hand tickets from one person to the next. Customers don’t have to spend time explaining an issue each time it’s passed to a different member of staff – although for more complicated tickets, we do quite often ask the person who first picked it up to carry on with it, even if they’re no longer on support.

How far will this approach scale?

We’ve operated this system for quite a few years and the amount of time we spend dealing with support queries has grown steadily with the company.

We’ve no plans to change this approach, but it’s quite possible that there will come a point where it makes sense to hire staff whose primary role is support. Like all things, the more you do, the better you get, and one of the costs of our approach is that using non-dedicated staff is inefficient — they’re more likely to have to look things up or check with colleagues when responding to tickets.

We have already taken the step of splitting out finance-related support tickets into a separate queue, which is dealt with by our finance staff.

If we do ever take that step of employing dedicated support staff we won’t compromise on the quality of support that we provide, and it’s likely to be in addition to, rather than instead of, our rolling rota, because of the benefits it provides to both us and our customers.

I’m struggling to fit into a tweet a satisfactory expression of the level and quality of the support @Mythic_Beasts provided to a party twice removed from myself (the account holder).

Customer service is King.

— Adam K Dean (@imdsm) June 26, 2022