EasySpeedy News

After successfully having upgraded our entire backend systems and launched the new Control Center, we now have several new linux distributions available.

EasySpeedy has added Debian 5.0 (Lenny), Ubuntu 9.04, Fedora Core 10, openSUSE 11.1 and centOS 5.3 to the list of operating systems available. All customers can now freely install 32 and 64 bit versions of these distributions through the automated installation system in their Control Center.

We would like to wish you a happy and prosperous New Year. It's been a pleasure working with you, and we look forward to continue our business relations with you in 2009.

Below you will find a brief run-down of achievements, facts, and improvements that the fiscal year of an excellent 2008 brought to us. In addition, you will find a list of highlights, which will be implemented during the new year of 2009. Enjoy your reading.

Excellent uptime during 2008

Independent WebHostingStuff monitor uptime of web hosting companies throughout the world. Below figures are collected from WebHostingstuff's EasySpeedy Uptime Report

Continuation of our core financial business strategy since 2001

All equipment, network infrastructure and servers are owned by ourselves and everything is paid for in cash. Furthermore, we have no long term debts or financial obligations. Cash-flow is good and we are making an increasing profit sufficient to support new initiatives in 2009.

Green carbon footprint initiatives

In 2009, we will continue our efforts to optimize our energy efficiency and reduce power consumption to further decrease our carbon emission. We are taking any measures to make sure that we, a) adhere to the rather strict Danish laws in this area and b) use low-energy devices in our infrastructure as well in as our customer equipment. One of the main reasons for choosing Sun server equipment was (apart from reliability and performance), that Sun has very strong policies in terms of inventing and producing equipment that has the lowest power consumption possible.

The power, used in our Data Center, comes from the National Danish power-grid of which 20% is collected from wind energy (wind mills placed on both land and at sea). In 2025 it is expected that 50% of the power utilization in Denmark should come from wind energy. Denmark is one of the largest producer of wind mills in the world. If you would be interested in some statistics I am referring you to this official link: The Danish Energy Association

Equipment life cycle policy

Once, equipment is being phased out, we operate with 2 policies:

1. Sun equipment is shipped to Sun Microsystems and adopted into their Exchange program which include re-cycling of components.
2. Our Standard servers, which we build ourselves, are delivered to one of our National Recycling Program facilities.

To sustain the data privacy and security, all hard disks are physically destroyed at the point of end of life.

In addition, the European Union operates with the so-called RoHS compliance program which ensure that no equipment contains lead, mercury, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, polybrominated biphenyls (PBB) or polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE).

Certification as Sun Microsystems Advantage Partner

Since we entered into the Sun Advantage Partner Program in July 2008, we have become Sun Microsystem's largest Danish customer in the hosting segment. We are extremely pleased with the team-up, as we are taking advantage of Sun's educational program to further educate our staff in the Solaris operating system and hardware, which will be offered in 2009.

Upcoming highlights in 2009:

1. MORE SUN SERVER OFFERINGS
   Based on the Sun Fire product line approx. 8 more hardware configs. will be introduced from February and onwards.
   
2. AUTOMATED SOLARIS INSTALLATIONS
   The number of automated installations which can be initiated by yourself through your Remote Control Center will include Solaris very shortly. Solaris will be available on all Sun server configurations.
   
3. SPARC IS COMING...
   Three different Sparc configurations, based on the Sun T2 coolthread servers (32-128 cores), will be offered early quarter 2 at VERY competitive pricing. This new product line will, of course, be part of the EasySpeedy concept, and enjoy exactly the same features as any other of our server offerings, including the Remote Control Center features.
   
4. STORAGE ON DEMAND BASED ON SUN 7410
   Late 2008 we purchased 2 pcs. of Sun 7410 controllers (cluster solution) and we are currently testing this beast. Launch is expected during quarter 1.
   
   More technical information can be found here: Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System
   Storage is located on J4400: Sun Storage J4400 Array
   
   Following data protocols will be supported: ISCSI, http (WebDAV), and maybe CIFS, NFS. The latter has not yet been decided. The Storage file system is RAID-Z2 (a variation of RAID-6).
   
   Storage on demand will be offered in increments of 100GB at EUR 50 per increment per month. Increase and decrease of storage will be available on demand through your Remote Control Center. More details to be announced on a later date...
   
5. CONTROL CENTER IMPROVEMENTS
   Apart from improved design, a more user-friendly GUI, and helpful text information, the Control Center will offer increased speed. Our steady growing customer base has reached a number where heavy loads on the Control Center could cause unacceptable response times. Therefore, we are migrating the Control Center to a Sun SPARC CoolThread platform in February. You will be notified ahead of this move. Please note, that the migration will NOT affect your servers.
   
   The current Ticket system will be replaced with a new and more user-friendly system, which will be deeply integrated with our back-end office. The new Ticket system will be available, when the Control Center move has been completed.
   
   One of the major new features of the Control Center is the Control Center's new role based password management system. With these new features you will be able to assign passwords to individuals on different levels. Your bookkeeper can be granted access to the Invoice and Payment Management section, your System Administrator can be granted access to the server, and the Account Holder can have full access to all sections of the Control Center. In accordance to the EasySpeedy concept, you can design and initiate your password levels and structure yourself.
   
   Furthermore, in the future you will be able to address other departments than Support directly (Accounting/billing etc.) via the Ticket system for your fastest response and keeping your history of records.
   

Thank you very much for your business during 2008. We look forward to serve you even better in 2009.

Yours sincerely,
The EasySpeedy Management Team

We are proud to announce that we have qualified to become one of the two certified Sun Microsystems Advantage Partners in Denmark.

As an Advantage Partner, we have direct access to Sun Microsystems knowledge base world-wide, which can be of great value for our customers. Furthermore, we are entitled to offer any hardware configs. within the Sun product range, which means that we can offer custom built Enterprise grade solutions.

We have extended our Performance server range with new SUN hardware configurations.

The new servers based on Sun Fire x2100 hardware from EUR 129/mo and our new server line based on Sun Fire x4150 hardware from EUR 360/mo are available to dedicated hosting customers as of today.

All configs include 24/7 free KVMoIP built-in facility that enables you to attach your local keyboard, monitor, and other local devices directly to your SUN server.

See our high performance dedicated Sun servers »

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition is certified on several high performance, energy efficient Sun x64 server platforms, including the Sun Fire X2100 M2, X2200 M2 and Sun Fire X4150 servers.

Please see our Sun server range here »

EasySpeedy has added Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition to it's range of automated Free installs as of today.

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition comes with five years of security updates and maintenance. Some of the new and updated features available with the LTS release are:

• Expanded range of network infrastructure applications including authentication (FreeRadius), monitoring (Munin), VPN (OpenVPN) and backup (Bacula).
• Enhanced security with integrated AppArmor policies and increased kernel hardening.
• Over 500 maintained and supported server packages, together with access to more than 20,000 additional components built for 8.04 LTS.
• Integrated host firewalling to protect Internet facing servers.

See all Linux and BSD versions available »

We have extended our Performance server range with two new SUN hardware configurations.

Finally, servers with SUN hardware benefits are available to dedicated hosting customers at very reasonable prices - EUR 149/mo and EUR 199/mo.

Both configs include 24/7 free KVMoIP built-in facility that enables you to attach your local keyboard, monitor, and other local devices directly to your SUN server.

See our high performance dedicated Sun servers

We are proud to announce the release of our new enterprise server product line.

The enterprise server product line will become a valuable upgrade path for our existing customers while securing new customers an unmanaged hosting service with enterprise grade quality.

Enterprise server offerings will include following options:

• Servers based on Sun Fire X4000 series
• From 4 to 32 cpu cores per server.
• Both AMD and Intel based processors.
• Hardware-RAID using SAS disks.
• Dual power supplies in each server + A/B power feeds.
• and more....

Read the complete description of Enterprise dedicated servers

This is great news for both our existing SUN customers and upcoming SUN customers! KVM over IP simply means attaching your local keyboard, monitor, and other local devices directly to your SUN server! Instant availability 24/7. No need to ask for a pre-scheduled, time-limited "KVM/IP slot"...

KVM/IP requires NO special software or hardware modifications at your end. When accessing KVM/IP all you need is a web browser capable of running Java applets. All keyboard and video signals are, of course, fully encrypted.

Existing customers on the X2100/2200 M2 server series will have KVM/IP at no extra costs.

Fedora 7 was released on June 1, and we are proud to announce that it's available as of today in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions on all hardware.

As always you may install and reinstall as much as you like FREE of charges!

As of today, Open- and FreeBSD users can now take advantage of the new Rescue and Recovery tools that has been available to our Linux users for some time. With these tools you are able to mount your disk to fix errors, backup your data even if you system has crashed, and much more.

Offering quality bandwidth through our 4 carriers, Level 3, TeliaSonera, Netgroup (Global Crossing), and Danish Broadband marks an final step (for now :-) towards our vision of offering global gigabit connections in our redundant environment making sure that customers all over the world are exellent connected.

Thanks to valuable input, received from both customers and via pre-sales requests, we have decided to add and adjust following hardware:

Celeron is back - ES 2300
Cheap, at EUR 49.99 a month, and reliable as DNS server, web server, test server, and other similar applications, we have taken in this proven technology.

New AMD Athlon 3000+ with larger disk - ES 3007
Affordable, at EUR 69.99 per month, and very suitable for various low to mid-level applications, the ES 3007 offer value for money.

SUN server with larger disks - X2100 M2 - b
Very reasonable priced, at EUR 399 per month, now offering 2x500GB disks in RAID-1 suits e-commerse applications, large bulletin boards, image data bases and other disk hungry applications. Add the new 24/7 KVM/IP built-in facility that enables you to attach your local keyboard, monitor, and other local devices directly to your SUN server, and you are on an ultimate solution.

We are extremely proud to inform you that as of today we have successfully uploaded your new Control Center that has been on its way for quite some time. The new Control center is AJAX enabled, much faster, and previous minor bugs has been fixed. This new platform has been built for the future and will prove excellent for adding more value to our Quality Unmanaged Services.

Beside the completely new design and layout that allows for improved navigation and overview, you will find a number of new remote features, and more are to come...

Since July 2006 we have been planning, designing, and re-written our Remote Control Center and especially the auto-install system. This is by far the largest rool-out in the history of our company and the entire platform is fundamental to our future remote offerings and OS's availabilty.

The new Auto-Install System is AJAX enabled, offers faster installations, and follow our previous principle of offering auto-installation as if it was made by hand inserting CD's manually. In other words you are NOT installing an image while using our installation system.

Besides all the new technical stuff behind the scene, the new installation system offers real-time visual installation presentation on your local monitor, enabling you to follow your OS installation step by step.

Today, TeliaSonera has been added to our network providing our Scandinavian and European customers with excellent connectivity. Offering quality bandwidth through both Level 3, Netgroup (Global Crossing), and TeliaSonera provides our customers with world-class connectivity no matter in which part of the world you are located.

We are adding Danish Broadband on gigabit in the very near future.

We are proud to announce that final tests of connecting Level 3 to our non-live network has been completed successfully. Therefore, as of today Level 3 has been added to our live-network and is running beautifully covering almost the entire planet on their fibre network.

We are adding 2 more carriers on gigabit in the near future.

As of today we are proud to announce that Ubuntu 6.06 has been added to our list of available operating systems. Ubuntu is offered with both our Standard and SUN servers. If you need Ubuntu 6.10, you are free to upgrade to this version yourself.

As usual, our customers can change or upgrade his OS at all times, and FREE of charge. Such changes is performed through your Remote Control Center. Please see Remote control center flash Demos, or take a look at our distro list.

As of today we are proud to announce that CentOS 4.4 has been added to our list of available operating systems. CentOS is offered with both our Standard and SUN servers.

As usual, our customers can change or upgrade his OS at all times, and FREE of charge. Such changes is performed through your Remote Control Center. Please seeRemote control center flash Demos, or take a look at our distro list

As of today we are proud to announce that Fedora 6.0 has been added to our list of available operating systems. Fedora is offered with both our Standard and SUN servers.

As usual, our customers can change or upgrade his OS at all times, and FREE of charge. Such changes is performed through your Remote Control Center. Please see Remote control center flash Demos, or take a look at our distro list

A new powerful Standard product range is now replacing our previous range, offering even more value for money.

Generous amounts of RAM, disk space, and connectivity at 100Mbit speed will ensure that you get the most out of your budget.

As of today we are proud to offer unmetered bandwidth at 100MBit speed on almost all our servers.

Unmetered traffic means you do NOT have to worry about spikes in your server traffic increasing your costs, receive surprise traffic bills or keep track that you are not exceeding your monthly allowance.

• Unmetered data transfer, in- and out-bound
• Unmetered data transfer within our network
• Improved external and internal connectivity
• Genuine 100MBit speed
• No Extra Bills

Unmetered bandwidth applies to all servers except for the ES3005.

Our company company policies express very clearly that we will never favour new customers over exsisting customers.

This is why we are now upgrading all existing customers to have unmetered bandwidth at 100MBit speed.

This upgrade is FREE of charge and applies to all existing customers regardsless of server type.

Migrating to another server usually causes lots of extra work due to the change of IP's and DNS related issues. Today, we have released a powerful feature enabling you to take your IP addresses with you when you move to another server!

This feature also allows you to change secondary IPs' to primary IP's and vice versa, which is very helpful managing servers. The features in question can be found in your Control Center and is FREE of charge for all customers.

As of today we are proud to announce that CentOS has been added to our list of available operating systems. CentOS is offered with both our Standard and SUN servers.

As usual, our customers can change or upgrade his OS at all times, and FREE of charge. Such changes is performed through your Control Center. Please see Remote Control Center Flash Demos, or take a look at our distro list.

We are proud to announce that we will add a complete range of SUN servers to our offerings based on the Sunfire X2100 and X4100 family.

During next week (between April, 3rd and 7th) we will publish information on release dates and configs and pricing of the X4100 range.

Our top secure Data Center is located in Copenhagen, Denmark. Our building is designed to provide redundant facilities to Telecom's, ISP's, and hosting providers like ourselves.

Since 2001 our solutions have demonstrated best practices in the areas of infrastructure, operations, hardware, software, storage, security and overall service delivery.

We share our address with prominent international carriers like:

• British Telecom
• Colt
• Lambda Networks
• Telia
• Level3
• Tele2
• Cogent
• ... and many more.

All servers are now in their new home and less than 2% of our customers experienced more than our promised maximum of 2 hours unavailability.

Also, support issues in association with the relocation has showed to be less than we expected. Propagation of routing tables all over the Internet is ongoing and will take approx. another 24 hours before 100% completed. Until completed some customers in some areas could experience slow connectivity.

We are close to have outgrown our current data center, and consequently we have spent the past months carefully planning our relocation to larger facilities. A redundant infrastructure has been built in the new facility and testing has succesfully been completed.

Today is D-day. This morning we will start physically moving all servers to their new home.  Our staff and some hired hands will be working in round-the-clock-shifts until everything is running smoothly.

The transportation is also carried out by professionals.

We highly appreciate any and all good wishes we have received due to this announcement.

As of today we are proud to announce that the Debian based LAMP has been added to our list of available operating systems, replacing the now outdated SuSE LAMP server.

As usual, our customers can change or upgrade his OS at all times, and FREE of charge. Such changes is performed through your Control Center. Please note that the new LAMP server applies to all our hardware configs.

As of today we are proud to announce that FreeBSD 6.0 has been added to our list of available operating systems.

As usual, our customers can change or upgrade his OS at all times, and FREE of charge. Such changes is performed through your Control Center.

Please note that FreeBSD 6.0 applies to following hardware configs;

• ES2200
• ES2400 VALUE
• ES2400

Implementation of FreeBSD 6.0 on the AMD and Opteron platform will be released very shortly.

As of today we have decided to add more IP's to some of our hardware configurations. If you are already a customer, you will benefit from this upgrade, as we would never favour new customers over existing customers.

We have added 2 more configs. to the Standard hardware family. The new ES2400 Value comes with the more powerful 2.4 ghz processor, and the ES2400 SATA comes with a 250GB hard disk. Also both configs. comes with even more data transfer allowance.

Moving a server from one Control Center to another has now been automated, and can be initiated using the new "Mover Server" section in your Control Center. This feature enables you to administrate all your servers from one single interface, or moving your servers between different Control Centers at your convenience.

While offering you a wide range of operating systems, we are also in the process of offering ready-to-run application servers.

Today, we are proud to announce that our cooperation with Daffodil means that you can install the Daffodil CRM system directly from your Control Center by hitting a button.  

More application servers will be launched in the very near future. If you have any suggestions, please mail us at sales@easyspeedy.com and we will take your wishes into consideration.

4 weeks ago we were offering 17 distro versions. Now 23 versions are available on both 32bit and 64bit depending on the hardware.

Fedora Core 4
FreeBSD 5.4
Mandriva 2006
OpenBSD 3.7 (64bit)
OpenSuSE 10.0
DaffodilCRM - based on Suse 9.3 

Please see: Operating Systems and Server Details

Running a server not knowing if it has been compromised or not is the nightmare to any system administrator.

This is why we have added Forensic and Automount features to our Remote Recovery System located in all customer Control Centers.

The Forensic tool boots a minimal Linux distro into RAM, and allows SSH login. Using this recovery tool it is possible to perform most recovery operations, as well as more complex forensic tasks. It includes a complete build environment, and is capable of using slackware packages. It also includes a pre-built version of chkrootkit (from the slackware project).

The Automount tool boots a minimal Linux distro into RAM, automatically mounts linux partitions read-only, and allows SSH login. Using this recovery tool it is possible to perform most recovery operations.

See your personal action log for your server(s). The action log will currently inform about…

1. Server Reboots
2. Distro Installations
3. online/offline settings
4. Turn OFF server
5. Turn ON server
6. Hardware Reset
7. Software Reboot

Availability, prices, and speed remain unchanged.

Get daily, weekly, and 3 weeks graphs including breakdown of data usages on a daily basis. Furthermore the total data usage in the current payment period is showed in graphic.

As of today we are proud to announce that OpenBSD is available along with our current SuSE, Red Hat, Fedora, Mandrake and FreeBSD news mounting up to cover 17 different versions! Any customer, who would like to change his OS to another flavour, may as always do so, and FREE of charge. Change of OS is performed through your Control Center.

Over time, many of you have asked us if we could provide more powerful servers. Today we are proud to announce 4 new configs based on AMD and Opteron processors, including RAID-1.

We have added setup of reverse DNS to your Control Center. This service is FREE of charge and comes with all packages. Next time you log in you will see this added to the IP section.

Thanks to the Control Center and remote Server Tools we are not overwhelmed with support requests. However, we find that implementing a more seamless support structure would be appropriate in the future, as our customers base are increasingly growing. This new support option can be found in your Control Center.

We are proud to announce that we as of today accept payment for our services by wire transfer (bank transfer). The reason for this is that many of our potential customers have asked for another payment method other than credit card.

So, here we go! Please sign up and make your choice between payments by Wire Transfer, Visa, MasterCard, JCB, or the local Danish credit card, Dankort.

As of today we are proud to announce that Debian Sarge is available along with our current SuSE, Red Hat, Fedora, Mandrake and FreeBSD news.

Any customer, who would like to change his OS to another flavour, may as always do so, and FREE of charge. Change of OS is performed through your Personal Control Center.

As of today we have released the new PRO version. The PRO version is a combination of:

• More powerful CPU, larger harddisk, more traffic, and up to 20 IP's
• Enhanced Server Tools, offering you even more remote control of your server

Please see the hardware specs

Please see the enhanced Server Tools

Existing customers will be able to upgrade to the PRO version through their Personal Control Center.

We will be able to offer at least 25 different Linux/BSD distro's to our dedicated hosting customers by end 2005!

This is why we have been looking for quality people with excellent narrow expertise on the Linux/BSD application/kernel field to work with us.

The positions have now been filled, and Debian is the first on the list!

February 10, 2005: is on its way!

During March we will start offering Debian along with our current SuSE, Red Hat, Fedora, Mandrake and FreeBSD news.

Any customer, who would like to change his OS to another flavour, may as always do so, and FREE of charge. Change of OS is performed through your Personal Control Center. Please see Remote Control Center Flash Demo's.

By mid March you will be able to reformat your disk remotely. This feature wil enhance your ability to control your server remotely. Remote Control Center.

During March we will start offering remote EasySpeedy BIOS upgrade through your Personal Control Center. When we release new BIOS versions, you may upgrade at your convenience. As always, access to our range of remote Self-services is done through your Personal Control Center.

Generally we will implement any Linux/BSD distro available.

One major reason for implementing a specific distro is its compatibility to our auto-headless installation specifications and the Linux distro i question.

So, Fedora 3 has been added to our growing list of Linux news. You may also install Fedora 1 or 2 at your choice.

6 month ago we decided to rewrite our software infrastructure from bottom up to better facilitate our customers.

Peter, the head of our software development team, explains:
"A software infrastructure designed almost 3 years ago and growing organic involving everything from web, SQL/XML databases, network infrastructure monitoring, accounting, software installation systems, and server management using different programming languages, created hell in our development department.

With a growing number of customers, and endless delays in rolling out new services we needed to take a fresh look at our code base. This led to our decision of rewriting all our software in Java, using JBoss as our platform.

Now the work has been completed, and we are able to implement Control Center features more quickly as well as offering multiple Linux/BSD distributions".

With acknowledgement to following Open Source Projects:

And well, as Peter says: "all this could not have been done without using IntelliJ IDEA, http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/ ;-)"

FreeBSD 5.2.1 has succesfully past our tests against our automated headless installation systems, and is now available as of today.

For new customers a FreeBSD 5.2.1 installation will be an option through the Control Center along with any other of our available Linux news.

Existing customers, who want to move away from their running Linux distro to a FreeBSD installation, can do so from their personal Control Center. Our automation system will take care of removing the Linux distro and automatically perform a FreeBSD 5.2.1 installation on the server.

Generally we will implement any Linux/BSD distro available.

One major reason for implementing a specific distro is its compatibility to our auto-headless installation specifications and the Linux distro i question.

So, Fedora has been added to our growing list of Linux news.

We are running the final tests of FreeBSD against our automated systems, and expect to launch FreeBSD 5.2.1 as an option in the Control Center during the 3rd. week of June.

For new customers a FreeBSD 5.2.1 installation will be an option through the Control Center along with any other of our available Linux news.

Existing customers, who want to move away from their running Linux distro to a FreeBSD installation, can do so from their personal Control Center. Our automation system will take care of removing the Linux distro and automatically perform a FreeBSD 5.2.1 installation on the server.

While porting to our new infrastructure our web site has not been available for a little over 12 hours due to unexpected complications. We apologize.

The good news is that none of our customers' servers has been affected.

As of today we have added two more carriers to support full BGP (border gateway protocol) route announcements.

Song Networks has been added to serve our Scandinavian marked, and NGDC (Level 3) has been added to serve the European continent including Great Britain.

Data Transfer prices will remain as cheap as EUR 0.99 per GB no matter if the usage is international or domestic.

Within the next 2 weeks we will add two more ISP's to our network introducing Song Networks to serve our Scandinavian marked, and NGDC (Level 3) to serve the European continent including Great Britain.

Our Flat Rate Data Transfer policy is not affected and all prices will remain EUR 0,99 pr. GB no matter if the usage is international or domestic. The amount of data transfer purchased can be used for any up-coming months, following the exact principle of refuelling your car.

We acknowledge the need for our customers to be able to empower full control of their server. This is why we offer 4 different ways of handling instant reboot directly from your keyboard 24/7.

1. Software Reboot your server, which is equivalent to hitting Ctrl+Alt+Delete on a Windows desktop computer
2. Hardware Reset your server, which is equivalent to hitting the reset button on your desktop computer
3. Turn OFF your server, which is equivalent to hitting the Power OFF button on your desktop computer
4. Turn ON your server, which is equivalent to hitting the Power ON button on your desktop computer

We have reasons to believe that we will be welcoming an average of at least 200 new customers each month during 2004. This is why we have already scaled our back-bone and infrastructure to meet our customer's requirement of excessive speed.

The feed-back from existing customers has been exciting. Especially gamers tell us that the Ping has improved with access now ranging from 5-15 m/s, but also customers with large image libraries have experienced improved performance.

As our customer base grows we'll continue to implement improvements as we are always planning to stay ahead.

As of today you don't need to drop us a mail if your server freezes or if it for other reasons needs to be reset. Simply go to your Control Center and activate the reset button. Seconds after your server will be up and running again.

The reboot tool is part of the EasySpeedy Total Automation system, which is designed to automate all elements of our hosting business to the benefit of our customers.