Although I won’t be covering everything from the past year, I am writing a quick blog post to update you on a few recent items. You may also wish to check out our 2009 blog archives.

KSplice Uptrack
As those of you who follow us on Twitter (@rochenhost) may already be aware we signed an agreement with Ksplice Inc. in October to deploy their Uptrack technology across all of our servers. Uptrack allows for seamless Linux Kernel updates without the need to reboot our servers, resulting in improved service and uptime for our customers. This is especially beneficial for customers using our Managed Virtual Server (MVS) service where Kernel reboots could take some time to complete. We are offering this service at no extra charge.

I am pleased to report that Uptrack is now successfully deployed and operational across the vast majority of our servers and we will have rollouts to all servers fully completed by the end of December. You can read more about Uptrack and how it will benefit our customers in the official press release here: http://www.prweb.com/releases/rochen-ksplice/rebootless-technology/prweb3069574.htm

Joomla Day in Viet Nam and Joomla Developer Conference in New York City
Brad Baker from Rochen’s team, who is also a volunteer member of the Joomla team, attended Joomla Day Viet Nam in Ho Chi Minh City on 1st November. Brad delivered a keynote address to the gathered community members on Joomla hosting and security. Brad reported back to me that the enthusiasm about Rochen and our services was strong, so we look forward to continuing to grow our customer base in Viet Nam through 2010. As one of the fastest growing centers for technology in the world, we believe Viet Nam is going to emerge as a market of growing importance for us.

Brad Baker (center seated) during Q&A session in Ho Chi Minh City.

Martin Rouf from our team and I both had the pleasure of attending the first Joomla Developer Conference this past weekend, held at Columbia University in New York City. On the first day of the conference Rochen made an announcement along with one of our customers, PICnet Inc, that we would be jointly contributing $10,000 USD towards the new Joomla Sponsorship Program.

Rochen believes contributing to Joomla in this way is the right thing to do for our customers as many of them use Joomla within their businesses, especially our reseller hosting clients. We also believe this announcement will benefit the wider Joomla community, even those who are not customers of Rochen. You can read more about this announcement and the sponsorship program in the official press release here: http://www.prweb.com/releases/joomla-hosting/sponsors-rochen-picnet/prweb3302454.htm

Chris Adams (right) prepares to speak at the Joomla Developer Conference in New York City.

Rochen was the lead sponsor of both events in Ho Chi Minh City and New York City.

UK Hosting
It has now been almost 6 months since we launched our UK hosting services, giving customers the choice to host on either a US or UK server with Rochen and pay in either US Dollars or British Pounds. Whether a customer chooses our US or UK location they will benefit from the same great customer support backed by enterprise services like Rochen Vault Managed Backups, in the knowledge that the entire service, including the physical servers and switches, are owned and managed by Rochen’s experienced engineers.

Based on the research we did before we launched the UK service we knew it was going to be successful, but it has outperformed all of our expectations. We were going after two key groups with the new UK service. Those targeting their website towards a UK or European audience and needed solid rankings in Google UK, Google Spain and other such indexes; and European businesses storing data that can’t be located outside of the EU due to data protection laws.

When we launched our UK hosting operation we did so completely out of existing cash reserves, so did not take on any debt. Today the operation is now cash flow positive and turning a nice profit. It is in fact the fastest growing area of our business ahead of our US hosting offerings, so we are extremely pleased with the outcome so far. Rochen is fully committed to both the US and UK / European sides of our business going into 2010 and beyond. It is important not only to look at the technical side of things when considering a web host, but the financial too. Rochen believes in steady and controlled growth that doesn’t result in a compromise of our high service standards.

VAT Rate Change
Starting in December 2008 the UK Government lowered the rate of Value Added Tax (VAT) from 17.5% to 15% to help with the economic situation. Some businesses did not pass this rate cut along to their customers and simply pocketed the extra 2.5% themselves as additional profit. Here at Rochen we passed along this rate saving from day one to our customers. As previously announced by the UK Government the rate will return to the 17.5% level on 1st January 2010 and as such the rate Rochen charges our customers will return to this level as well. Rochen only charges VAT to customers located within the European Union (EU), with a few exceptions.

Discount Promo Code
If you are not already a customer and are looking for some rock solid hosting this holiday season you can signup using the promotional code: XMAS and this will offer you 15% off your first invoice with Rochen. This code is valid through until 31st December 2009 and can provide even greater savings when paying annually with applicable plans. This beats any other public promotion we are currently running.

Finally, thank you to all of our customers’ through this year. I truly appreciate your loyalty more than you know. We have a lot of exciting developments in the pipeline for 2010. Everyone at Rochen wishes you a Merry Christmas and a Very Prosperous New Year.

- Chris

Chris Adams is the Founder and CEO of Rochen Ltd.

Here at Rochen our focus is on support. We’ve built our entire business on the back of our unrivaled support and careful configuration and management of our servers. To continue ensuring this remains our focus, we’ve just completed a major upgrade of our support Knowledge Base.

You can check out the new Rochen Customer Knowledge Base here. Now, when you visit our helpdesk, perhaps your question will be answered before you even have to ask us for help.

Let’s just review a few of the new articles and sections:

The Billing and Support Tickets sections contains articles such as:

• Adding alternate email addresses to My.Rochen.com profile
• What level of support can I expect from Rochen?

Under Common Issues some articles are:

• Can I access my account before changing my name servers / propagates to your servers?
• My site has been compromised, help!

We even have a Third Party Scripts section, with such articles as:

• Maintaining your website software/scripts
• Transfer a Joomla site to Rochen

… to point out just a few.

We encourage you to take the time to review the new Rochen Knowledge Base next time you are looking for help. You will find the ‘live search’ feature to be very handy, as it searches as you type to pull up articles that you might be interested in. Also, a ‘Related Articles’ section on each Knowledge Base article allows us to group together other articles on the same subject to help you even more. There are also plenty of animated tutorials to help explain things clearly for you.

Finally, last but not least, Rochen is pleased to welcome Adam Boswell on board as a new staff member. Many of you have already been helped by Adam, but when you see him around, be sure to say “hi”.

- Brad

Brad Baker has been a member of the Rochen team since early 2003 and is a founding member of the Joomla! Open Source Project. He currently is part of the Joomla LeadershipTeam, and also blogs here.

Currently Rochen has all of our servers located in Dallas, Texas in the United States at a truly fantastic facility called Colo4Dallas. As many of you may be aware from discussions with our team at events like Joomla Day UK, a couple of months ago, and in threads at our own customer forums, we will be launching UK hosting services as well very soon. This means you will be able to choose to host on either a US or UK server with Rochen.

Yesterday we executed a contract to take data centre floor space, connectivity and power in a brand new facility near London, England with a highly respected provider called Gyron Internet. As is the case in the US with our UK hosting setup Rochen will own outright all of the servers and network switches we deploy, allowing us full end-to-end control over the service. Rochen very much focuses on “performance hosting” so this type of control is critical.

The new UK data centre uses the latest enclosed hot isle technology allowing for increased density per square foot and reduced environmental impact in line with our green hosting initiatives. All aspects of the new facility including connectivity, cooling and power are fully redundant to a minimum of N+1 or 2N standards. We will maintain redundant network drops using Cisco’s Hot-Standby Router Protocol (HSRP) to all cabinets (as we do in the US already) and will maintain dual Power Supply Units (PSUs) in every server connected to separate and fully redundant Power Distribution Units (PDUs) with A+B circuits.

Connectivity will be amongst the very best of any UK or European hosting offering with redundant fiber rings running from the data centre to both Telecity Sovereign House and Telehouse North in London Docklands. We will maintain bandwidth to Tiscali, Interoute, NTT/Verio and Global Crossing. Additionally we will have direct peering to the London Internet Exchange (LINX) and Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMX-IX). This means that you will be able to reach a website hosted by Rochen UK within one hop from virtually any major Internet Service Provider (ISP) in the UK or Europe.

When we got asked about pricing for the UK service a few months ago we didn’t really want to get into a discussion about it. This was mainly because we didn’t know what our own exact cost base was going to be at the time and also to try and keep expectations measured. Well I am pleased to announce today some extremely aggressive pricing for our UK offering very much in line with the US pricing. All of the UK plans will come with the same great features we include with our US offering including Rochen Vault managed backups.

Rochen UK Hosting Pricing (billed monthly in British Pounds) -

Starter Plan – £4.95

Multiple Domain Hosting Plan 1 – £8.95

Multiple Domain Hosting Plan 2 – £12.95

Multiple Domain Hosting Plan 3 – £17.95

Reseller Hosting Plan 1 – £19.95

Reseller Hosting Plan 2 – £24.95

Reseller Hosting Plan 3 – £29.95

Reseller Hosting Plan 4 – £34.95

Reseller Hosting Plan 5 – £39.95

Managed Virtual Server (MVS) – £99.95

Free account setup. No minimum contract. Above pricing excludes VAT.

We expect to launch the Rochen UK hosting service around the second week of June. At that time you will see the Rochen website change slightly with a “UK version” released. Our entire team is extremely excited about this new offering and we look forward to working with everyone to grow our UK and European business over the coming months and years.

- Chris

Chris Adams is the Founder and CEO of Rochen, a web hosting provider specializing in providing a performance tuned hosting platform for dynamic database driven scripts.

There has been a lot of discussion in the hosting community lately about backups and the protection of customer data. This follows a large budget host losing entire servers worth of customer data after a failure and the very public collapse of the popular blog hosting provider Journalspace. Neither of these hosts had a proper backup strategy in place.

Rochen originally launched our Rochen Vault enterprise managed backup platform in May 2007 and it is included as a free of charge service with all of our shared and reseller hosting plans. It can also be added to full managed servers as well for a small monthly fee.

One of the most popular pre-sales questions we receive is: “what is different about Rochen Vault to other backup solutions?”

I hope I can help fill you in on Rochen Vault and why we think it is such a revolutionary solution through this blog post. Firstly, I will start by running through a few of the other backup solutions that are on the market and commonly used by many hosts and then explain Rochen Vault.

File Backups to a Secondary Drive

Most web hosting providers use low-cost backup solutions where your data is simply backed up once daily to a secondary drive in each of their servers. This works by simply copying your account files from one location to another on the server often using a free tool such as rsync. While this is a good fall back solution it is not a good primary backup method for several reasons: -

a) your data  is backed up to a drive in the same physical server so if the server is fried by a power surge, brownout or another catastrophic issue the chances are the backup hard disk is going to be destroyed along with the primary.

b) with a simple disk-to-disk file copy there are no integrity checks on the backups to ensure they are running properly and they are not corrupted.

c) in the vast majority of cases there will be less than a handful of diffrent points in time where your data can be restored from.

d) copying large amounts of files can take a lot of time and if you are hosted on an oversold server then it can raise the server loads for many hours slowing down your website and impacting performance while the backups run.

e) if the entire server needs to be restored in a disaster recovery scenario then the operating system (OS) first has to be re-installed, the control panel system has to be re-installed and then finally services like Apache and MySQL need to be re-configured. This all has to occur before a single file can be restored from backups.

Pros: Easy to implement, low cost solution

Cons: Low level of data protection, no integrity checks on backed up data, very few number of restore points, slow disaster recovery

Rochen Position: Here at Rochen we backup all of your data to a secondary drive in our servers once nightly. This is only used as a secondary backup system and a fall back to Rochen Vault though.

File Backups to a Remote Server

Some hosts are now taking the initiative of further protecting customer data by copying files with a tool like rsync to a remote server instead of to a secondary hard disk. While this is a good step to take, as it provides additional protection, it is still far from perfect. There are still no integrity checks on the data, very few points in time that you can restore to, slow restores in a disaster recovery situation and on oversold hosts it will still create load problems.

Remote backups also open another can of worms in that you are unlikely to be able to access the backup data on the remote server directly yourself so you will need to open a support ticket with the provider to restore for you. With some less than stellar hosts this is not as simple as it sounds. You could be waiting hours for what should be a simple file restore but is keeping your site offline until it is completed.

Pros: Easy to implement, provides additional protection over local disk-to-disk backups

Cons: No integrity checks on backed up data, very few number of restore points, slow disaster recovery restores, can often take a long time to get data restored

Rochen Position: Here at Rochen we push all of your data to an off-site remote location twice weekly. This along with local disk-to-disk backups is only used as a secondary backup system and a fall back to Rochen Vault though.

RAID is great but it is *NOT* a backup solution!

RAID is a great system as it mirrors your data over multiple hard disks but it is not a backup solution on its own. The reason RAID is not a backup solution is that it mirrors your data across all of the hard disks in the array in real-time. This means that if you mistakenly delete a file, your account is compromised resulting in files being wiped out or if simple data corruption occurs across the server then you are sods out of lock as the RAID system will replicate this to all drives in the array instantly with no way of recovering the previous state.

Don’t get me wrong. As I said above I think RAID is a fantastic and something all hosts should be running but it should not be mistaken for a backup solution. This is the mistake Journalspace made as they thought they had a solid backup strategy in place by running RAID and mirroring their hard disks but they ended up losing everything and their business has subsequently collapsed. Where RAID can help though is if a hard disk suffers a failure it can be swapped out with minimal to no downtime without any need to restore the server from backups. It is better to think of RAID as a redundancy system to improve site availability than as a backup platform.

Pros: Can improve site uptime in the event of a hard disk failure, can help improve disk throughput performance when running RAID10.

Cons: It is not backup solution, can be costly to implement if using RAID10 and/or Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) hard disks

Rochen Position: Here at Rochen we run between 4 – 6 Seagate Cheetah 15,000 RPM Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) hard disks in RAID10 to provide the highest level of reliability and performance possible in a shared and reseller hosting enviroument. Our RAID10 arrays are also all backed by hot-spare disks.

Rochen Vault

Rochen Vault works by taking a block level snapshot of the entire hosting server (including your files, MySQL databases and email) and storing it off-server on high performance Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliances. It runs at the kernel level and “images” each block on the hard disk to create a snapshot instead of backing up individual files. This provides the following benefits -

a) your account on the server is backed up multiple times per day instead of just once daily as with most traditional backup systems. This type of enterprise backup schedule is becoming more important for customers these days who may be hosting Joomla installs and running other dynamic scripts like WordPress or phpBB where MySQL and other data is changing more frequently than in the past with static HTML sites.

b) because Rochen Vault runs at the block level as a kernel module and not at the higher file system level it can take multiple backups per day without impacting system performance or adding drastically to the overall system load. While protecting customer data at Rochen is extremely important so is maintaining a fast and speedy hosting platform.

c) you can login to the Rochen Vault recovery site at anytime via: https://vault.rochen.com to restore data under your account yourself without even having to open a support ticket with Rochen.

d) unlike traditional backup solutions where only 1 – 3 different backups will be kept you have the ability with Rochen Vault to restore from dozens of recovery points over the past 30 days. You can restore individual files or an entire account. In fact you could even restore one file to a backup taken two weeks ago and another file to a backup taken 12 hours ago.

e) in the event that we need to restore an entire server in a disaster recovery situation we can do so rapidly without having to first re-install the operating system, control panel and reconfigure the services. We can kick off what is called a “bare metal restore” allowing us to re-image the entire server from a Rochen Vault snapshot.

f) all data Rochen Vault stores is not backed up on the local server but to dedicated high performance Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliances. We run a private network connecting all of our hosting servers to the Rochen Vault appliances and all backup data passed over the network is fully encrypted for good measure.

Here are some screen shots of the client side interface of Rochen Vault -

Rochen Vault runs directly through your web browser. Easily select from dozens of recovery points over the past 30 days.

Expand a recovery point and select to either restore an entire account or even individual files under an account.

Data restored from Rochen Vault to your account on the front-end web server is encrypted over our backend network.

The interface is very easy to use and once your restore is complete you will be presented with helpful confirmation screen.

Brad Baker from our team recently demonstrated Rochen Vault at the Melbourne JoomlaDay and received some extremely positive feedback regarding the system.

We are continually looking to improve Rochen Vault and over the coming months we will be adding client-side restore support for MySQL databases as well as files. MySQL data is already all backed up but a ticket most be opened to have us restore databases right now.

Next time you need to restore some data give Rochen Vault a try as we think you will be pretty impressed. If you have already used Rochen Vault then leave a comment under this blog letting us know what you think.

Thanks for reading and until next time!

- Chris

You may have noticed a lot of web hosting providers promoting so called “green hosting” recently. This is a trend which has taken off in the hosting world within the past year and in no small way. While pushing to be greener is certainly commendable virtually every hosting provider I have seen promoting such things either isn’t telling the whole truth or is flat out misleading the consumer. This does nothing but damage the reputation of the industry as a whole.

The Problem

So here’s an example for you. One of the largest budget hosting providers advertises: “all of our shared and reseller servers are now 130% wind powered”. This is complete nonsense. I know this for a fact as I have toured the data center in Dallas, Texas where they have their servers located as it is five minutes drive from the facility where Rochen have our own servers. Their data center has zero wind power. Not even a single server is powered by wind. This provider is not alone, there are countless others who claim to be powered by wind or solar when they are clearly not or claim to offset carbon emissions but provide no proof.

Rochen have been getting more and more potential customers asking about “green hosting” so we wanted to do what we could to address this concern but at the same time do it in an honest way that wasn’t misleading and would have real benefits for the environment as well as our business. We didn’t want to go the route the above provider and most others have which is just an outright scam. Besides, Rochen have a well enough educated client base that would see right through it anyway.

Rochen’s Honest Solution. Green Hosting Done Right.

I am pleased to say that we have taken many steps over the past couple of months, including offsetting our carbon emissions (and we have the certificate to back it up) and making other technological improvements. We announced these to existing customers at the start of November. These changes apply for all current customers as well as new customers. Our reseller web hosting customers can also take advantage of this new marketing tool.

You can read full details about the steps Rochen has taken here: http://www.rochenhost.com/about/green/

Don’t get me wrong, Rochen’s new “green hosting initiatives” are partly clever marketing (which I have nothing against) and it is an area that we still need to improve in over time. I do however strongly believe that the way we have gone about this will have real benefit for the environment while showing potential customers that we are not just out there jumping on the latest bandwagon and trying to scam them. One customer used a nice term saying that most “green hosts” are simply “green washing” and they were pleased to see Rochen was not. I couldn’t agree more.

I would encourage you to check out the above link to see what we have done and then let me know your thoughts by posting a comment to this blog. So here’s to planet Earth, doing what we can to help while keeping our marketing honest. Thanks for reading.

- Chris

If you have browsed around different hosting companies websites you are bound to have come across at least one that either offers unrealistic amounts of disk space storage or data transfer and then conceals what they really do offer through clever jargon in their legal agreements. Some providers have even gone as far as advertising “unlimited” disk space and “unlimited” bandwidth in an effort to pull in unsuspecting customers. In the industry we refer to this practice as overselling.

The keyword here though is advertising. That’s really all these oversold providers are doing. They are advertising (falsely in my opinion) something they can’t actually deliver. If a provider is advertising 750GB of disk space and 10,000GB of data transfer (or worse “unlimited”) for $8 per month, as an example, then something is not right. It is not possible for a provider to buy resources this cheaply and then once you factor in other outgoings like the servers themselves, support engineers and other costs of doing business it just doesn’t add up. Both disk space and bandwidth are a finite resource like anything else. Disk manufactures like Seagate and Maxtor have not designed hard disks with unlimited storage yet. Bandwidth providers such as InterNAP and Level 3 have not worked out a way to push unlimited data down their pipes yet.

False advertising is not the biggest issue here though. The biggest problem is that these practices impact your website load times and its overall performance. These providers are counting on the fact that the vast majority of users on a server will not consume the advertised amount of disk space or bandwidth and the few that do will be offset by the other paying customers. This is partly true but it does not stop very serious problems from occurring. By allowing a few customers to use these levels of disk space and bandwidth in a shared environment it can cause major stability problems for everyone else on the server. Their shared servers end up drastically overloaded which then hits your site load times. Worse still, they might just cut you off if you use too much yet you are still within their advertised limits.

There are two main reasons that many hosting providers manage to get away with these dubious practices -

• Through no fault of their own the average consumer of web hosting services simply isn’t educated enough and when they see these falsely advertised plans they think “fantastic, that’s a great deal” and they go ahead and purchase. If I didn’t know any better then I would probably do the same thing. That’s one of the reasons for this blog post to hopefully try and spread the word. Education is king.
• Due to the web hosting industry not only spanning across many states and territories but the entire globe there is little to no regulation on the way many providers advertise their service. There is no one to turn around and tell these providers what they are doing is unethical. Some of the providers doing this are well known brand names and huge multi-million dollar corporations.

Our aim at Rochen has always been to provide our customers with ample resources to run their website and provide seamless upgrade paths as they grow while not falsely advertising our service. Rochen not overselling is a huge benefit our customers have but it is also our heavy investments in infrastructure and systems like Rochen Vault that set us apart. Rochen’s commitment to proper, no nonsense, 24/7 support backed by certified engineers is another big selling point.

Speaking of Rochen Vault, I will try and blog in more detail about this another day, as it truly is a fantastic system that allows you to easily restore files or an entire account to points in time over the past 30 days. If you have had a problem with a script upgrade, mistakenly deleted a file etc. Within a matter of a few seconds you can have your site recovered and back online. Back to overselling and performance for now though.

We often get emails from users looking for Joomla hosting and web hosting services for other types of dynamic scripts (PHP / MySQL driven mainly) and they tell us that things are running slow with their current host. Nine times out of ten this is due to the fact they are hosting with one of these oversold providers and as soon as they move their website over to Rochen it is like it receives a new lease of life. All of our plans come with a full 15 day money back guarantee, so you can try this theory out for yourself completely risk free.

Rochen’s primary target market is those users looking for a truly performance driven hosting platform where their sites will load fast and they will not have many of the common hosting hassles they would with other providers. Whether it be a personal homepage, business site or providing reseller hosting for your own customers we likely have a solution for you. If you are not sure what you are looking for then drop us an email via sales@rochen.com and we will be happy to have a chat with you. If Rochen reverted to the ways of some of these providers then we would lose our core user base who demand performance at reasonable prices.

Before signing up with any provider examine their offering in great detail, see what added-value services they offer (e.g. Rochen Vault), see what their track record in the industry is like (Rochen has been around for over eight years) and see if they are misleading you with a hugely oversold offering. Also, try and calculate how much disk space and data transfer you actually require. This can often be tricky, but using Joomla as an example again, you can deploy a good sized Joomla site, store a good chunk of email and still have space left over out of 200MB disk space. In a lot of cases we see users vastly overestimating the amount of disk space they need to get started. Remember, as your site grows you can easily upgrade.

So join with me in saying yes to performance driven hosting and no to the misleading oversold plans. Thanks for reading and I hope you find this information useful.

- Chris

Chris Adams is the Founder and CEO of Rochen, a web hosting provider specializing in providing a performance tuned hosting platform for dynamic database driven scripts like Joomla! Rochen has hosted all of the official Joomla! websites since the project began in August 2005.