In Brief: Come down to the James Squire Brew house (King Street Wharf, Sydney) for a chance to have a few drinks with guys (and gals) from your friendly hosting company. In addition to this, we’re lucky to have special guests Tom and Scott of Github fame dropping in and you’ll have the opportunity to have some beers, tell stories of 14′ kangaroos, and discuss all things Github.

Anchor will be putting on drinks from 6pm.

Details:
6pm, Monday, Jan 18th
James Squire Brewhouse
22 Promenade King St Wharf, Sydney

If you follow Australian business news you may have read in the technology news yesterday that auDA has terminated Bottle Domains (Australian Style Pty Ltd) registrar accreditation. This means if you have a domain registered with Bottle Domains or one of its resellers, you will not be able to renew your domain name with that company.

It is possible to transfer .au domain names to another registrar within your registration period free of charge. The remaining period of registration will be carried over to that different registrar. Once your domain name is within 90 days of expiring you will be able to renew your domain name.

If you would like to transfer your domain name to Anchor Systems, you can complete the free domain transfer process online at https://www.anchor.com.au/domain-name-registration/domain-transfer.py, you will need to know your domain name password to complete this process.

If you need to retrieve your domain password, you should ensure you have access to the email address listed on the whois information. You can check your domains records by using our whois tool located here.

If you are unsure on how to complete any of these steps or retrieve your domain name registry key/password please contact our support line on 1300 883 979.

• Ref: http://www.auda.org.au/news-archive/auda-15042009/

Due to recent growth Anchor is looking for full time customer service guru for immediate start, please find full details of the job listed in-line below:

Anchor Systems is a leading Linux based web hosting provide in the Australian market. We are growing organisation and require intelligent, passionate people who want to learn everything there is to know about Linux system administration and web hosting in general.

Our customer service representatives:

* show initiative and are self motivated who are capable of working in a dynamic fast-paced environment that requires quick learning and intelligent solutions

* have an excellent command of the English language as well as good phone manner

* get a buzz out of assisting end users

* are keen, creative and able to accurately identify problems

* endeavour to provide the absolute best possible customer experience

* have a little experience with either Linux or Windows problem diagnosis

* are familiar with end user applications such as Outlook, Entourage, Internet Explorer, Firefox, WS-FTP, CuteFTP, SSH

* have an attention to detail bordering on obsessive compulsive and have an attitude of doing things right, the first time

Responsibilities in this position include:

* Order processing: Domain name registration, renewals and transfers. Adding DNS records, provisioning of new shared hosting accounts, managing SSH/FTP accounts, addition of databases and users. SSL certificate procurement.

* First Level technical support: end user email configuration, updating DNS records, password resets, follow up calls, FTP/SSH support as well as field other general support enquiries.

* Basic system administration: Webserver configuration, basic changes to apache/IIS configuration. Database administration, covering both MySQL and PostgreSQL including user account addition, database
imports and exports. Mail configuration on both postfix and sendmail.

* career opportunity to move into a Linux system administration role
* casual work environment
* dual head workstation
* pool table, foosball table and beer.

If you feel you would be suitable for this role, Please send your CV preferably in plain text, PDF or if absolutely necessary, word format to jobs@anchor.com.au

Our new colocation space will be ready to go very soon! In the last couple of days we’ve had the new racks installed and the basic network infrastructure connected. The power rails in each rack will be powered up on Friday, and the network hardware will be installed. We expect to have live equipment in there in less than a week.

This will mostly be a photo post, they speak for themselves. To keep things interesting we’ve got photos of some of the high-level building infrastructure. This is the heavy-duty, redundancy-everywhere stuff that keeps you up and running, guaranteed. If you’re interested, follow the link on each photo; there’s a little more detail on what you’re looking at.

You can see most of the new floorspace and racks in the photos there. Once it’s online, we’ll have doubled our entire operating capacity. I’d say we’re growing rather nicely.

Photos are Creative Commons licensed

Anchor’s colocation requirements have been growing steadily over the past few years, so we’ve recently taken the plunge to significantly increase our total datacentre floor space which will allow for many new racks. At this point we’re in the early stages of fitting out the suite, so we thought it an ideal chance to give our readers some insight into the process of fitting out a data centre.

A long view of the new Anchor suite area

The plan is to produce a new blog post for each step; and, of course, take plenty of pretty pictures along the way!

A handful of our new racks, some still in their wrapping

You can see above a few of the shiny new extra-wide racks that have already been delivered. The keen-eyed might also be able to see the tape marking the locations of the first few racks to be powered up shortly, with the under-floor power installation happening right now. The suite’s cage will be going in real soon now.

A long view from the opposite end of our new suite area

Redundant air-conditioning units

We’ll keep the blog updated as things progress, so check back soon for the next post!

If you’re familiar with the hosting services provided here at Anchor you’re probably aware that we’re big fans of Linux and open source software in general.   That said, it may come as a bit of a shock for you to realise that we’ve actually been doing Windows hosting for quite a number of years now.

It all started with a couple of isolated dedicated servers running Windows back in 2004…Since then we’ve deployed a shared Windows hosting server which is now running hundreds of websites and taken on multi-server Windows hosting environments.

One thing that has been interesting to note whilst making this transition; sure a lot of us here would prefer to be working with Linux systems, but, at the end of the day, the principles behind running robust, reliability and scalable hosting remains quite identical. Whatever the platform.

To re-enforce our commitment to providing a high quality Windows hosting infrastructure we spent the latter part of 2008 hiring staff with a specific skill set surrounding this environment. In addition to this we’ve spent some time looking at the new version of Windows and have published an article in our wiki discussing Windows Server 2008 for Web Hosting

Windows 2008 hosting is now available across all our dedicated server range as well as on all our virtual private servers .

After dabbling with a variety of different virtualisation technologies over the last 2 years we’ve launched a Virtual Private Server (or VPS) offering based on VMware ESX server.

We’ve chosen ESX server for a number of reasons not to mention the ability to perform a sufficient level of monitoring on the host system and have the virtual machines behave in just about every respect the same as a traditional dedicated server would.

A VPS can offer a more affordable step between shared web hosting and dedicated servers but it also creates a more flexible hosting environment. Additional resources can be added to a server with as little effort as a reboot, and they can be added rapidly (hours vs days) in the event that increased performance is needed at short notice.

Learn more about the Anchor VPS service on our website.

On the back of a very strong 2008 for Anchor and despite the doom and gloom that has been flooding the media we’ve taken the plunge and decided to double our rack capacity in Global Switch’s Sydney facility.

We’ve picked up capacity for about 29 standard (600mm wide) racks but have decided to do a fitout with the larger 750mm x 1070 mm APC server racks. The large racks should make server installation and cable management that bit easier, as well as helping with cooling. One of the nice fringe benefits of the APC racks is the oh so simple mounting of the managed power rails (which we use on all or co-location). Saves having to fiddle with custom mounting brackets.

We’re hoping this new space will see us through for some time although early indications seem to suggest that the space will sell fast!

We’re madly completing the fitout and expect to be live within about 2 weeks from now. Photos will be posted as work progresses.

Unfortunately as much as we’d like to to let the servers fend for themselves over the end of year period whilst we take a well earned break we can’t, there’s always someone that forgets a password or decides to break their website during the holiday period.

Anchor will be available on all business days – that excludes public holidays and weekends over the break. We will operate on reduced staff numbers on other days reflecting the reduced support load.

There will be a provisioning embargo in place for dedicated servers and co-location services between the 17th of December and the 5th of January 2009. Note that this embargo only applies to provision of new services – it does not effect support of existing services.

Throughout the holiday period – dedicated server & co-location customers will continue to receive 24 x 7 support using the after hours telephone number. All systems will continue to be monitored and suitable response provided as required.

Important dates to remember:

• Wednesday 17th of December : Dedicated server & co-location provisioning embargo begins
• Thursday 25th of December : Closed
• Friday 26th of December : Closed
• Monday 29th December -> Wednesday 31st December : Open
• Thursday 1st of January : Closed
• Friday 2nd of January: Open
• Monday 5th of January: Business as usual. Dedicated server & co-location provisioning embargo ends.

Happy holidays from the Anchor team!