IPv6-only Virtual Servers

February 24th, 2014 by

Some months ago we announced that we were planning an even cheaper version of our entry-level VPS Lite virtual servers.

It took a little longer than planned, but we’re now pleased to announce the launch of our IPv6-only VPS Lite, for the ludicrously low price of £5+VAT/month (or even less if you pay annually). This virtual server comes with 4 billion IPv6 addresses, but no IPv4 connectivity.

The world is running out of IPv4 addresses, and whilst we’ve got an allocation that isn’t going to run out any time soon, issuing an IPv4 address with every server we sell will ultimately be a barrier to our growth. If you’re happy to have a server without an IPv4 address, we’re happy to give you a discount, and that’s exactly what we’ve done with our IPv6-only VPS Lite.

IPv6 usage is currently running at about 3% and doubling roughly annually, so now is a great time to get familiar with IPv6.

Whilst these servers probably aren’t suitable for fronting a website just yet, we’ve already got a number of customers who run IPv6-only backend networks, with everything behind their load balancers on single-stack IPv6.

Although these Virtual Servers themselves don’t have IPv4 connectivity, the host server does, which means that you can get to the admin console, virtual serial console and VNC over an IPv4 connection.

If you’re a technology professional and have no idea what any of this means, we suggest you start your training by placing an order here.

New Top-Level Domains

February 14th, 2014 by

As you may be aware, ICANN, the body responsible for domain names has introduced a lot more “Top Level Domains” (TLDs). This means that you’ve now got a lot more choice than the traditional .com / .net / .org / .co.uk, etc.

You can now have names under .bike and .gallery, and very soon you’ll be able to have names under .kitchen and .land. Many more new TLDs have been approved, and will start appearing online in the coming months. (Given the quantities we drink, we’ve been wondering whether we should rebrand as mythic-beasts.coffee.)

Below is a list of the new TLDs being released in February. You can find prices for these domains on our domains page.

Congratulations to http://mikaellelebreton.photography/, our first customer (that we know of) to get a website up and running on a domain released this week.

5th Feb 12th Feb 19th Feb
.bike .camera .construction
.clothing .equipment .contractors
.guru .estate .directory
.holdings .gallery .kitchen
.plumbing .graphics .land
.singles .lighting .technology
.ventures .photography .today

Update 2014-02-26. Four new domains will open up today: .diamonds, .enterprises, .tips, and .voyage.

Meaningless codes

February 13th, 2014 by

Given just how much of our lives involves using apps, websites or embedded computers, you might think that an initiative to teach children the basics of how to create software and not just how to use it would be uncontroversial.

Well, that’s the stated goal of Year of Code, and whilst you might be able to find fault with its execution, that’s not the angle that Jeremy Paxman chose to take when interviewing Year of Code’s director, Lottie Dexter, on Newsnight last week. Instead, Paxman decided to ridicule the very notion using the curious argument that because he couldn’t understand some computer code, it was therefore meaningless, and by implication, worthless. That he can’t get his head around what code is, let alone what it means, rather confirms the importance of this initiative.

Here at Mythic Beasts we have some pretty strong views on starting coding young, so Pete took his Raspberry Pi and attempted to explain what coding is in terms that even Jeremy might understand, through the medium of a musical e-Card and via a few lines of Perl that can generate just about every pop hit ever. To read Pete’s views, or just to see a video of him playing the piano, click here.

Single Point of Failure

February 10th, 2014 by

The Tower Bridge Lifeboat station put up a picture on Twitter of what London would look like today if the Thames Barrier wasn’t closed.

I’ve annotated it with the four biggest nodes from the London Internet Exchange.

london-flood

It’s not known exactly what fraction of UK Internet traffic passes through these four buildings, but almost every major ISP or content provider exchanges traffic there, Mythic Beasts, Facebook, Twitter, Google, BT, Virgin, Yahoo, Microsoft, Akamai, Netflix, Talktalk, BSkyB, Vodafone, and hundreds of others. Very slowly regional exchanges are starting to be built, largely by LINX itself.

Monitoring service improvements

February 4th, 2014 by

We’ve just rolled out some improvements to our monitoring service. All server products, including virtual servers, get access to our basic ping monitoring service, allowing you to receive SMS and email alerts if your server goes off-line. For £5/month you can add enhanced monitoring, which allows you to confirm that individual services such as a web server are working correctly. Customers of our Managed Hosting service not only get access to enhanced monitoring, but also get the benefit of having our staff respond to the alerts for them.

The new features are:

Temporary silencing of alerts

You can now silence alerts for a set period. This is handy if you’re doing maintenance, and don’t want to be constantly pestered by alerts, but also don’t want the risk of forgetting to turn the monitor back on again afterwards.

Prowl notifications

Prowl is a notification system for iOS, allowing you to receive alerts on an iPhone or iPad. The advantage of Prowl notifications over SMS is that they’re not limited to 141 characters, so we can include a more verbose message, including direct links for silencing the alert. They’re also delivered over the internet, rather than the mobile network, so will work if you have a wifi connection, but no mobile signal.

Support for an Android equivalent (such as Notify My Android) is on the to-do list.

Improved email alerts

The email alerts previously included the same dense text that we use for SMS alerts. The new style notifications are now more verbose, and include links for silencing the monitor, and in the case of web alerts, a link to the page that failed.

Monitoring of arbitrary TCP ports
We provide monitors for most common services, including HTTP, SMTP, IMAP and POP3. You can now also monitor any TCP port. This check simply confirms that the host is accepting connections on this port, and then closes the connection.