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Meet “Alcatraz” – Our customer management system

Published July 14, 2008 | By admin

Alcatraz Island: a prison surrounded by water.

On the surface i’ll admit it doesn’t sound like such a great name to call a customer management system.
We were thinking more along the lines of the security aspects the name implies rather than the concept of our staff feeling imprisoned while using it!

Alcatraz or simply “Management Client” is the system our staff use to manage customer accounts on a daily basis.
Take a look at the screenshot below: (click to view full size)

What will be immediately obvious to anyone who has worked in the web hosting industry before is that Alcatraz is an actual program and not a web site.
Most if not all off-the-shelf hosting management systems (such as Plesk etc) are web based and this can significantly increase the time it takes for a staff member to attend to a query.

Alcatraz on the other hand is super fast!

Features

Alcatraz was built from scratch to suit our unique way of doing things here at Studiocoast.
Some of the reasons why Alctraz is great:

Complete. A member of the Studiocoast support team only needs one program to manage every aspect of our web hosting services. From billing to hosting to payroll!
Fast. Setting up an account for a new customer for example takes less than 10 seconds. Best of all, only a single button needs to be pressed.
Powerful. Through the Storage tab our staff can access customer backups and restore them within seconds.
Extendable. New features can be added in record time thanks to a centralised system.
hostControl. Our web based control panel for customers links directly into the Alcatraz system. Restoring databases through the program is exactly the same as doing it through the control panel.
Did I mention it does everything?

Technical Details

If you’re a programmer you may be interested in how it all works behind the scenes:

Built on .NET 3.0.
Management Client and hostControl both connect to a central WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) server.
Server primarily utilises WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) to communicate with all the servers in our fleet.
(For tasks such as creating sites in IIS)

The Future

So what does the future hold for Alctraz?

At the moment I am hard at work on version 3.0 codenamed Blackbriar.
It will feature native support for IIS7 and MySQL 5.0 plus much much more.

Conclusion

I hope this post has been educational. If you have any questions about “Alcatraz” feel free to post in the comments below.
Perhaps you are a customer and would like to see some new features in hostControl. I’m all ears!

FTP 7 Passive Firewall Setup

Published July 7, 2008 | By admin

Just a quick note on FTP 7, the new FTP server software for Windows Server 2008.

A guide I found on iis.net describes setting up passive port ranges and opening them up in the firewall one by one.

I have found an alternative method which I think is a lot easier to setup:

1. Open up Windows Firewall with Advanced Security from Administrative Tools
2. Right click Inbound Rules and select New Rule
3. Select the Custom Rule option and click next.
4. Select All Programs and then click Customize next to Services
5. Select Apply to this service and select from the list Microsoft FTP Service
6. For all the next steps simply click Next accepting the defaults.
7. For the name call it something like "Microsoft FTP Firewall Access"
8. Click Finish

Enjoy!

Note: this rule allows access to any ports the FTP Service opens. This is usually port 21, and any passive ports it opens for client connections.

Hyper-V is live!

Published July 4, 2008 | By admin

Click here for our Windows Server 2008 VPS service utilising Hyper-V starting from $80 per month

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June 26 will forever be remembered in history as the day Microsoft released Hyper-V to the server masses.
Ok, well maybe it isn't THAT memorable but it is still a pretty important piece of software in the Windows Hosting arena.

Why? Well i'm glad you asked…

Hyper-V is a hypervisor-based virtualisation platform that allows multiple concurrent operating systems to share a single host computer.

Now while Virtual Private Server technology has been around for many years now in many forms, Hyper-V, like any hypervisor based technology, brings additional benefits to the table:

Performance
Both Intel and AMD provide technology to allow Hypervisor-aware operating systems more direct access to the CPU.
Previously, VPS software has had to emulate the processor in order to convince the operating system it has a CPU all to itself.
Isolation
In an effort to get around the performance limitations in older technology, products such as Parallels Virtuozzo sub-divide
a single operating system instance to give the appearance of multiple separate servers.
This method of virtualisation has many limitations as it does not provide true isolation. A misbehaving program on one partition could potentially
access the memory of another and cause corruption or worse.
Hyper-V on the other hand will have none of those shenanigans. Each operating system instance is completely isolated and it is almost
impossible for one to interfere with another.
Administration
Hyper-V comes with many administrative tools that make managing virtual servers a whole lot easier for system admins such as myself.
We will be integrating many of these features into our hostControl control panel for end users to access.
Friendly Product Licensing
Friendly product licensing from Microsoft??? It's true, Hyper-V licensing for virtual servers is simple.
One copy of the Windows Server 2008 Data Centre Edition license allows an unlimited amount of virtual servers on a single machine.

So what does this all mean for the end user then?

Purchasing a Hyper-V based virtual server from providers such as Studiocoast has the following benefits:

A server to call your own
Install whatever you want, whenever you want with full Administrative access.
Reboot the server yourself into you're blue in the face if you want, it is all yours!
Need more memory, disk space? No problem!
Each virtual server can have memory or disk space upgraded at the click of a button.
This allows you to purchase a server based on what you need now, all with a clear and easy upgrade path for the future.
Economical
A virtual server is much cheaper than a dedicated server and a whole lot more flexible to boot.
More uptime, less downtime
In the unlikely event of hardware failure, each virtual server can be quickly copied to a functioning server.
Virtual servers all use the same drivers regardless of the underlying server so hardware compatibility is never a problem.

So what are you waiting for? Check out our HyperVPS plans page.