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On Friday, the day after our Christmas party, Orchard Hosting are moving 120m down the road to Studio 31 on Dale Street, so please update your records with the following address:

Orchard Hosting
Unit 3, Fourth Floor
31 Dale Street
Manchester
M1 1EY

Our phone number will stay the same, and we’ll collect post sent to the old address for a month.

A few weeks ago some clients were affected by a multiple hard disk failure on the Gugh server. As a thank you for their patience while we resolved the issue (we’ve also setup a DNS cluster to improve our setup in future) we offered them a hosting discount, beer, or a mug.

Well the mugs arrived from the suppliers today and we’re pretty pleased with them!

We have a limited supply, but if you’d like one, get in touch with me directly.

We’ve just finished building and implementing a DNS cluster for all of our web hosting clients. Our DNS cluster is four nameservers based in four different data centres (Maindenhead, Manchester, Seattle and Denver). Spreading the nameservers about over the world increases redundancy of the system.

A DNS cluster is a number of name servers that share records, so if we create a site on a server, it’s records are copied to the four nameservers which has a number of benefits:

• if a server goes down, sites are back online quicker after it’s back because DNS was never down
• we can easily transfer hosting accounts around servers without the need to change nameservers with zero downtime
• one set of nameservers for all of our servers
• if their is a server outage, mail is not bounced immediately, mailservers will know to try again later. (within reason).
• if there was a catastrophic server failure, we can quickly route traffic to a different server

We’ll be pointing all our old nameservers at the cluster, so technically, existing clients don’t need to do anything to take advantage of this setup, however, we would recommend changing your nameservers to:

ns1.orchardhosting.com
94.76.207.114

ns2.orchardhosting.com
93.189.4.152

ns3.orchardhosting.com
63.223.120.195

ns4.orchardhosting.com
76.73.57.82

As having four new nameservers rather than the existing two is more reliable.
All new registrations will have the new nameservers set automatically.