As mentioned in previous posts, there are essentially two networks that we will be provisioning.

1) Public network which is configured for high-availability and performance in mind. For this link we’ve provisioned two independent network suppliers:

- 100Mbps Fixed-cost link with Level 3
- 100Mbps Fixed-cost link with Hurricane Electric

Across our public network we will be doing all our own BGP routing using the Anchor AS18020 which allows us to completely control how our traffic is routed. Both of these connections are provided as a fibre hand-off which will give us the ability to rapidly increase this all the way up to 1Gbps on each link as necessary.

2) Out-of-bound network which will be used for the remote management of the infrastructure

- 10Mbps fixed cost link with Internap.

This link should provide the reliability necessary for us to continue to comprehensively manage the network from the other side of the world.

conveniently, both of these connections have already been provisioned and deployed which means we’re already operating all our Beta clients on a redundant network with plenty of excess capacity.

Nothing will drive them away sooner than hard-to-find contact information. Bring it to the front of your site for the holiday period, and include the hours your customer service team will be available each day.

Be sure you’re clear with your customers about cut off dates for orders to be purchased, shipped, and delivered well in time for the holidays. Make it easier to find by using direct language like “Shipping Deadlines” or “Shipping Cutoff” rather than polite euphemisms like “Shipping Info” and “Shipping Details”.

Freeze your code

The holiday season is not the time to be making big changes to your code base. Consider freezing your code in the next few days while the full development team are still available and monitor the environment closely to ensure likely problems are identified and resolved before the team takes off for a well-earned break.

Triage and simplify

If you’re a retailer, social sites or sports media publisher and you’re expecting a higher than usual workload over the holidays, consider simplifying to reduce load, by temporarily switching off non-essential resource-intensive code, data or content.

For example, adjusting a retailer catalog for a few peak days could mean a smaller product catalogue, which would be served more quickly and might reduce server load. Removing or disabling resource intensive features/functions, can ensure system resources are dedicated to core functionality.

Check and double-check your monitoring

If a server fails in the forest and nobody hears about it, did it ever really fail? Most definitely yes, but if you don’t hear about it, you can’t take action and while it’s down it’s doing harm to your business. Its safe to assume your team will be making fewer manual checks of the system over the holidays, so now is the time to test and re-test your automated monitoring to make sure that it trips for the right events, and that notifications will be delivered to team members who understand they’ll be responsible for responding over the holidays.

It may also be worth asking us to investigate whether the monitoring tools you are using are negatively impacting site performance.


Backup or be sleighed

We wouldn’t let you get by without any backup strategy at all, but now is a good time to ensure that your backup routine will be appropriate for the holidays, that key staff know where and how to begin rollback and recovery, and that you’re confident you can get it done quickly with your available holiday team members. If in doubt, give the Anchor team a call.

Test or hit Santa’s naughty list

Test early and often to make sure there’s enough capacity available while you’re holidaying, and that loads are balanced correctly. 
Make sure predicted traffic levels are reviewed by all your internal stakeholders and confirmed as realistic.


Check everything twice, and check from front to back — connectivity, to firewall, to application and web servers. Check more than twice to catch that Murphy’s Law instance if you can.

Wishing you a safe, happy and 100% uptime this holidays!

Anchor’s US hosting infrastructure is ready for business. We’re not so brazen/naïve as to think that it’s perfect, but we’re pretty damned confident that it’s ready to go.

This is where you come in. Starting in the first week of December, we want to give you a free VPS for three months and see how you like it. We want you to use it, a lot, and we’re not charging for anything – not for the server, not for the bandwidth, nothing. It’s the legendary Anchor products and service, for free.

The server comes sans-management, so you’ve got root and are welcome to run whatever you like on them. If this sounds like your idea of fun, APPLY ONLINE NOW to let us know you’d like to be part of the trial.

Get in quick if you’re interested – we don’t overprovision these things, so we only have a limited number to give away. Applications are subject to acceptance of our beta agreement, and the offer is good for CentOS or Debian Linux only. Have at it!

With over 98 data centres world-wide, Equinix are probably one of the most mature data centre vendors on the planet.

Given the extra advantage of having a presence here in Sydney where they’ve recently opened up their new facility – SY3 it was an easy selection as it also gave us direct access to Australian sales saff, based on local time zones.

The specific facility which we will be operating out of is their LA3 facility which is based within 3 miles of LAX, which makes it very accessible in the event that we need to physically attend the site.

Initially we will be commencing with a single rack in the data centre and be fitting this out with our core infrastructure and a number of hosts which we will be able to offer our initial hosting services.

At this point in time it is expected that we will be able to commence our public beta services towards the end of November. For a limited time period, a small number of clients will be able to have services hosts in the US on Anchor managed infrastructure — in return, we ask that you use the bandwidth/hardware extensively and provide feedback on various aspects of the service.

If this sounds like something that you would be interested in, please do not hesitate to email beta@anchor.com.au

1. Which facility provider should we be using? and;
2. Where should the data centre be physically located?

To make this decision we had a number of important requirements for each of the services we’d need to procure.

Data Centre Providers

1) Receiving the servers and network devices from the hardware vendor and verify received as ordered
2) Install kit into racks and record location for our internal documentation
3) Cable up the machine to both power and networking. Carefully following cabling diagrams prepared by Anchor and supplied to the technician.
4) Take care of the rubbish removal from the facility and disposal
5) Be available 24×7 for emergency response to failed servers/hardware
6) Provide a realistic service level agreement for these services so we can reliability predict mean time to repair after hardware failure.
7) Be capable enough to get the initial equipment to the point where we could access them remotely to bootstrap the environment.

Network Suppliers

The beauty of doing this entire “Internet thing” for a while is that we already have reasonable amount of experience when it comes to negotiating bandwidth contracts with telcos and other IP transit suppliers. We also have a pretty good idea on how we want to structure our connectivitity.

We also essentially need to deploy two networks:

1. Our public facing network connectivity which would be using need:

2. An out-of-band, management network. This network was going to be used to build up our infrastructure from day zero. When we say build up, we mean install operating systems, configure routers and get our primary, public facing network running. Once the environment has been bootstrapped we would be using this network for day to day management services and in the unlikely event that our primary, redundant network becomes unavailable give us a way in and diagnosing what specifically is going on. Some of the requirements for this link are totally opposite to the publiuc facing network:

Hardware Vendors

Historically we’ve used supermicro servers here at Anchor for all our dedicated server and virtual private server solutions. In more recent times we’ve been deploying Dell Hardware for various reasons. Some of these include improved performance, greater power efficiently but one of the biggest gains has actually been as result of the included DRACs (Dell Remote Access Cards), with these units we can get access to the machine consoles as if we are sitting in front of the physical machine. This means we’re able to do more and more work remotely without actually needing to be at the data centre in person. Obviously, when we’re deploying hardware on the other side of the globe this inclusion is absolutely imperative. With Dell’s Global presence it makes this decision very much a ‘no brainer’

The power rails which we use in Australia are APC devices which come with remote reboot capabilities. This allows for machines to be powered off and on remotely. We have done a fairly considerable amount of development using the devices both to track power usage as well as integration in provisioning systems. On this basis, we would be continuing with these units.

The final question is the switching infrastructure and misc items such as cables and rack cage nuts. For here the important thing was to find a supplier who was local, could delivery everything to the data centre and be vendors for HP (who we use for the our switching infrastructure) as well as the APC remote reboot devices.

The hunt begins!

On this basis, we’ve recently made the decision to commence a build-out of a US-based facility to offer an alternative point of presence based on the west coast of America.

What was the motivation behind this?

Over the past 2 years we’ve had the absolute privilege and pleasure of building and delivering various complex hosting environments in facilities other than our primary point of presence in Sydney, Australia. There obvious ones include Github, Stocktwits, GroupMe, Huggies, Leadformance and AffinityLive. We’ve had an awful lot of enjoyment building and successfully delivering custom solutions under our
remote management product. That said, however, there has been some challenges that we’ve come across and we are 100% confident that we can significantly improve our product offering by being in control of all aspects of service delivery.

Some of the problems we encountered whilst using other hosting providers included:

- Network outages during business hours whilst routing upgrades were being
completed,
- RAM upgrades and receiving RAM with errors,
- Receiving replacement drives with previous client data still resident on the
drives,
- receiving machines which had been built many months previously, left with default passwords and then subsequently compromised
- rapid deployment systems which actually don’t do either and;
- best of all, intermittent networking problems which couldn’t be solved by the network provider and we could only work around through changing the MAC addresses on the physical devices. Seriously? WHHAA?

For these reasons and various others, we’ve come to the conclusion:

This isn’t good enough for Anchor – We’re building in the US.

In this industry, reputation is everything and when you have high levels of dependence on suppliers then it can be difficult to be entirely in control of your own destiny.

Another factor in the decision making process was that, to my knowledge, there is no other managed hosting provider in the Australian marketplace which is providing, high-quality, premium style managed services using data centers in America. With up to 20% of Australian websites hosted in places other than locally, there seems to be a really unique opportunity to be providing premium support to our Australian customer-base whilst leveraging some of the benefits of having the servers physical located in the states — for example, much larger data bandwidth allocations and closer proximity to the American audience.

Over the new few weeks, we will be taking all our knowledge and skills that we’ve honed the past 10 years running a robust, reliable and premium hosting service. We’re then going to apply it to clean slate in a data centre facility on the other side of the globe.

Sound like a challenge? You betcha!

This is an very exciting time and upon completion we will be able offer high-volume bandwidth services with a US presence both to our existing to our Australian clients as well as extending our reach into the International market in the longer term. During this build up phase I am committed to providing a continous updates as to our detailed processes to give transparency into what goes into building up such an environment.

Someone who can take our thousands of pages of documentation and improve on it. Someone who will be posting content, right here, right now.

Interested? See http://www.anchor.com.au/about-us/jobs for a full job description.

This number is:

(888) 250 8847

This number is manned during our standard business hours and will allow you to get directly in contact with any of our qualified system administrators without any holding or difficult to navigate phone systems.

In addition to this, if you have a dedicated hosting environment or purchase a support pack which gives you 24×7 emergency access to Anchor you will also be supplied with an emergency support number.

We would recommend that all US clients record both of these numbers to ensure that they are always able to get in contact with us when required.

The width and breadth of online initiatives that we saw at the event (at other booths and through conversation) promises a bright future for Australian consumers. Personally we’ll be happy to get our online purchases come from a local address rather than having to deal with customs, however I digress.

While at the event Anchor gave away not one, but two iPad-2s!! The allure of surfing net and media from the comfort of your couch (or really, anywhere, be it bus or bed) was great as we saw just about everyone who passed stop to drop their card!

We had both a white and black iPad 2 up for grabs!

Choosing a winner is never an easy task, so we left it to fate and a winner was selected on Tuesday (via the blind grope/pull out card method). A big congratulations to our two lucky winners (below).

Fiona B, the winner of the Wednesday iPad draw

Kelvin K, the winner of the Tuesday iPad draw

A big thank you to everyone who stopped at the Anchor stand, furthermore thanks to everyone who not only had a go at our nerf guns, but refrained from shooting us in the face.

We will see you at next years Online Retailer!

OR is the online retailing industries event of the year, with companies such as PayPal, Google, IBM, Macquarie Telecom, NetRegistry, and of course – Anchor in attendance.

The event will be held at the Sydney Conference and Exhibition Centre.

Check out Online Retailer website for further information!

Anchor will be exhibiting at the event, So why not come along, and enter the draw to win an iPad – one will be drawn each day!

We are also offering FREE setup on our virtual private servers, and a hassle free migration for new customers. Head over to our stand and ask us for further information.

Hope to see you there!