If you are already a customer of Rochen, you may have noticed within the past few days a new “Google Apps” icon has appeared within your control panel.

Recently we have seen more of our customers adopt the powerful collaboration tools that Google Apps has to offer. E.g. calendar, docs, groups etc. Some customers also take advantage of the email functions.

Rochen customers have always been able to use Google Apps in conjunction with their account, but as with most hosting services have had to make manual MX and CNAME record changes to their DNS zone file.

This is all a thing of the past, Rochen customers can now integrate Google Apps with a few clicks using a simple but powerful new tool within their hosting control panel.

I have attached a couple of screenshots below.

The new Google Apps integration tool can be found under the “Mail” section of the hosting control panel. More information on Google Apps can be found at: http://www.google.com/apps.

I welcome any feedback customers may have regarding this new tool. Rochen are working to build several more tools like this, so any feedback you may have as to where we should focus our development resources going forward would also be welcome.

- Chris

Chris Adams is the Founder and CEO of Rochen Ltd.

The thoughts and prayers of everyone here at Rochen are with those who have lost their lives in the terrible earthquake that struck Haiti on Tuesday, as well those people who survived this disaster but are now trying to find clean water and food and begin rebuilding their lives.

Google have posted a series of satellite images on their blog showing the truly devastating impact of this natural disaster with before and after images: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/posted-by-soandso-soandso-team.html

Rochen has made a donation to the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) in the United Kingdom. The DEC is an umbrella organization for 13 humanitarian aid agencies, including the British Red Cross and Oxfam. These organizations are actively working to deliver immediate assistance on the ground in Haiti.

In addition to making a financial contribution towards the relief effort, Rochen counts amongst our loyal clients organizations like the World Food Program (WFP). We are working, as always, to ensure our hosting infrastructure remains operational and running at optimal performance so that organizations like the WFP can get on with the work that really matters to the Haitian people.

If you have the means to do so and would like to help with the situation in Haiti you may find the following links useful -

http://www.interaction.org/crisis-list/earthquake-haiti

http://www.dec.org.uk

Thank you for reading.

- Chris

Chris Adams is the Founder and CEO of Rochen Ltd.

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.

I can’t hold back any more, I’m seeing still, so many people who do not keep their Joomla sites up to date, and then end up being exploited/compromised and cause more stress to themselves.. so.. again.. please Keep Your Joomla Sites Updated and Secure!

A simply way to do this, and with minimal effort is to use this great free component: Update Manager for Joomla! – Joomla! Extensions Directory – it will enable you to update your site, all from your Joomla backend. What could be easier?

BTW It’s not just Joomla that needs to be kept up to date, but any scripts you run. Joomla, along with scripts like Wordpress are very popular and as a result attract the ’script kiddies’ and others who once a patch is released, work out how to scan for compromised sites and exploit … YOU.

So, avoid being blacklisted by Google, avoid the downtime and pain involved with recovering from a site compromise, and simply Keep Your Joomla Sites Updated and Secure!

If you are in the unfortunate situation where you’ve been ‘driving a racing car without a helmet or seatbelt’ aka not bothering to Keep Your Joomla Sites Updated and Secure and your site has been compromised, please see the following articles: How do I use Rochen Vault? and My site has been compromised, help!

- 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.

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.

Yesterday was an exciting day for Rochen. We finally launched our UK hosting services. You can find details in my previous blog that I wrote prior to the launch. I wanted to use this blog post to address some questions we have been getting as well as provide some discount promo codes. Everyone loves pictures, so I have included some of those too.

1. Can I expect the same level of service with Rochen’s UK hosting?

Yes, our UK service is pretty much a direct copy of our US offering. We have applied everything we have learnt in the US and used all of our best practices. Services like Rochen Vault Managed Backups are included free with the UK plans. Whether you are on a US or UK plan you can seamless login to Rochen Vault via: https://vault.rochen.com, for example. Technical support is all in one place too at: https://my.rochen.com.

2. What services does Rochen offer in the UK?

All of our shared hosting plans including the Starter Plan, Multiple Domain Hosting and Reseller Hosting are available in the UK. Our Managed Virtual Server (MVS) service is available too. The plans are identical to the US offering except we charge in GBP instead of USD. Simply select the US or UK option prior to ordering on the plan page.

Latest enclosed isle technology. Click to enlarge.

3. In the UK does Rochen own and manage all of the hosting infrastructure?

We own and manage everything. Rochen could have probably saved quite a bit if we had started out the UK service with lower capital investments by leasing servers. However, we were not about to start compromising our service standards, so if we were to offer a UK service it had to stand up to its US sister. All the infrastructure in the UK from the enterprise Supermicro rackmount services, to the Cisco switches and backup appliances are all fully owned and managed by Rochen.

4. Is the US or UK service best for me?

It really depends where the bulk of your site traffic originates from. Configuring Google Analytics on your site should be able to tell you. If the bulk of your traffic comes from within Europe or Africa then the UK service is best. If most of your traffic is coming from North America, South America or areas like Australia then the US service is probably best. Some European companies also need to host their data inside of the EU for data protection reasons, so the UK service would meet that requirement. If you host sites with traffic from different regions then splitting your hosting between both Rochen locations might be a smart move. E.g. a Reseller Hosting Plan in the US and another in the UK.

First shared servers. Click to enlarge.

5. I wish to change from the US to UK service. Is this possible?

This is not currently possible. The reasons behind not allowing transfers are purely business ones right now. We could end up with lots of people moving over and filling up the UK infrastructure. This would mean Rochen has huge additional capital and recurring outlays without any additional revenue. We will however allow transfers in the future. If you are upgrading though we can however offer a transfer. E.g. Reseller Hosting in the US to Managed Virtual Server (MVS) in the UK.

6. I wish to open a UK account in addition to my US account. Is this possible?

Yes, this is certainly possible. You can simply order a UK plan via our website. When ordering though please be sure to provide a different email address to the one you currently have on file with Rochen. This is to ensure your UK order is placed under a separate My Rochen customer portal login to your existing US account. Currently our customer portal can not support US and UK accounts under the one login. If you use the promo code UKCLIENT this will apply a 5% recurring discount for the life of your UK account. You must maintain both your US and UK accounts. Be sure to order under the same name and postal address as your US account so we can verify you are a customer already.

Neat Cabling. Click to enlarge.

7. I am not currently a customer. What’s the best way to signup for Rochen UK?

Simply visit our website at: http://www.rochen.co.uk, find the plan that best meets your needs and signup. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to email sales@rochen.com, post within our pre-sales questions forum or Twitter us @rochenhost.

8. Are there any discounts for non-customers?

Yes, you can signup using the promo code UK20 (expires Sunday, 21st June) to receive a 20% discount on your first invoice or UK15 (expires Tuesday, 30th June) to receive a 15% discount on your first invoice. These discounts apply to the UK service only as part of our launch celebrations. You can use the promo code DEAL for a 10% discount on your first invoice with the US service though. If you pay annually for a Starter Plan or Multiple Domain Hosting Plan then the savings can be significant.

Thanks for taking the time to read and do get in touch if you have any questions at all about either our new UK offering or any Rochen service!

- 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.

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.

Some members of the Rochen team have had the pleasure of attending and being the lead sponsor of three Joomla community driven events over the past few months. In addition to providing all of the joomla hosting services for the official Joomla websites, Rochen also sponsors many community organized events  around the world called Joomla Days.

Sponsoring Joomla Days  gives Rochen another way to help support the Joomla project and wider open source community as well as affording us a great networking opportunity to link up with both current and potential clients in the Joomla community. Meeting up in person adds an extra layer of value, although one that is hard to measure in pure dollar terms from a business prospective.

Brad Baker from Rochen’s team, who is also a member of the Joomla Core Team, attended Joomla Day Melbourne on February 7th and Martin Rouf and I attended both Joomla Day UK in Maidstone, Kent on March 13th and 14th as well as Joomla Day Las Vegas on April 4th. Rochen was the lead sponsor of all three events providing financial and logistical support to help keep the costs down for attendees.

Joomla Day Melbourne
Brad delivered a keynote presentation at the Melbourne Joomla Day on joomla security covering both the basics and more in depth steps you need to take to secure your Joomla site. It is worth pointing out that if you are hosting at Rochen then a lot of the security ground work is already done for you and you will not run into issues like file ownership or permissions problems here.

The organizers of Joomla Day Melbourne have not yet got the video of Brad’s presentation up, but you can watch his 2008 keynote here.

Brad Baker speaking at similar Joomla event in Vancouver. Sorry, we had no pictures of Brad from Melbourne. If someone has one please send it over.

Joomla Day UK ans Las Vegas
At the the Joomla Day in the UK I delivered a presentation to the whole group detailing the type of traffic Rochen handles for Joomla across the official sites (23 million page views for February 2009, in case you were wondering!) as well as some of the ‘cool’ things we are doing here at Rochen like our Rochen Vault Managed Backup system and our recent move into the green hosting arena. Both in the UK and Las Vegas Martin and I hosted a round table Q&A session on Joomla security answering people’s questions and addressing some of their concerns.  Rochen even managed to pick up a few new hosting and reseller hosting clients from the sessions which was pretty neat.

Chris Adams speaking at Joomla Day UK in Maidstone, Kent. Nearly 200 people attended!

Chris Adams talking to group at Joomla Day Las Vegas.

Rochen’s Las Vegas Dinner and After-Party!
To coincide with Joomla Day Las Vegas Rochen also organized a dinner at Valentino’s Fine Dining and an after-party at Tao Beach nightclub for any of our customers who wanted to attend as a way to say thank you for their business and also to gain valuable face-to-face feedback. We like to organize these type of events at least once a year and have hosted our customers in London, UK; Vancouver, Canada and  San Francisco, CA in previous years. In Las Vegas this year we had around 40 customers attend.

Rochen provided transportation to get our customers to dinner and the after party!

Rochen customers having dinner in private dining room at Valentino's in the Venetian, Las Vegas.

Rochen hired a private outdoor cabana at Tao Beach for the after-party. We look after our clients!

Jamie Foxx stopped by Tao!

Future Events?
We don’t have anymore Joomla Days on the Rochen calendar right now but we will keep customers posted via our forums when that changes. There is a good chance Brad will be attending an event in Vietnam later in the year and there is talk of a Joomla related event in New Orleans in late October. Likewise, we will keep everyone posted of the next Rochen dinner and after-party. Although not Joomla related Martin and I will be at HostingCon in Washington DC this August and PubCon in Las Vegas this November.

Special Thanks
That just leaves me with a few people to thank. Andy Wallace did a tremendous job with organizing Joomla Day UK, as did Toni Marie Swats with the Las Vegas event and Matthias Raab in Melbourne. Rochen provides the support we can for Joomla Days but these three people put hundreds of hours of work in to actually make these events happen with no financial return for themselves. Kudos to them all.

I also want to thank Allen Gunn (aka “Gunner”) from Aspiration for facilitating the Las Vegas event. I have been to two events that Gunner has facilitated now, the first being Joomla Day Mountain View at the Googleplex (Google’s HQ) in May 2007 and this event in Las Vegas. Both these events are amongst best I have ever been at. If you are looking for a facilitator for an open source event then drop Aspiration an email.

I want to give a quick mention to Matt Olander from IX Systems, Ryan Ozimeck from PICnet and Aaron St.George from The Uptime Institute for helping keep things on track at the Joomla Day and at the Rochen dinner and after-party. Aaron was our designated transportation coordinator towards the end of the night! Finally, a big thank you to everyone at Joomla and Rochen’s customers for making the trip to these Joomla Days and the Rochen dinner, we appreciate it more than you know.

So until the next Joomla Day and Rochen party…

- Chris

P.S. A lot of people at the events asked about Rochen’s Joomla security check list. You can find it here: Joomla Security Check-List.

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.

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