According to a statement by Clook:

Our upstream colocation provider operates multiple datacentre facilities and we have recently been informed of their decision not to continue offering services at the London Hosting Centre (LHC) beyond March 2012. This facility houses approximately 75% of our core server infrastructure and we will therefore need to physically transition our equipment to their newer facility (Centro).

This decision comes following a detailed review of their facilities and a continued commitment to providing the highest quality web hosting services. With LHC not being an owned building, our upstream provider does not feel confident that 100% uptime SLA’s can be met into the future as they have limited or no control over certain aspects of building management.

The newer Centro facility is based within a dedicated 50,000 sq. ft. secure compound in Hemel Hempstead and has a specification exceeding that of LHC with 100% uptime SLA’s, enhanced security and a more robust network. We have had equipment at Centro for over two years and have experienced superb uptime throughout.

With the amount of equipment needing relocated, and the distance between buildings, the move is being split into three nights, each involving up to 6 hours downtime for the servers being moved. The maintenance windows schedule is as follows and the above link can be used to check which window (if any) your server is scheduled for.

Thursday 24th November 2011 – 10pm to 6am (GMT) Friday 25th November 2011 – 10pm to 6am (GMT) Saturday 26th November 2011 – 10pm to 6am (GMT)

The relocation is being performed by a specialist datacentre moving team, making use of specialist vehicles, with full insurance cover in place for all equipment. This is the same firm that we used in 2006 during our Redbus to LHC datacentre migration – which went perfectly – and we are extremely confident that this transition will go just as well. For anyone worried, you may wish to review our announcement from the previous datacentre move which we’ve made available here: http://go.clook.net/datacentre-migration-2006

Please note that aside from the downtime, there will be no changes to service or pre/post relocation tasks required by clients. All domains, email accounts, settings, server names, IP addresses and everything else will remain the same.

If you have any questions, comments or concerns regarding this datacentre move please feel free to open a ticket in Billing/Accounts or post to our forum thread here: http://go.clook.net/datacentre-migration-talk – forum posting (registration/login required) is preferred so others can benefit from questions being answered.

As anticipated, Clean Server and Spam Guardian have been redesigned for Plesk Panel 10. The antivirus and anti-spam services are now registered as additional Plesk services, simplifying management and integration with third-party provisioning tools such as Plesk Billing. “Back in 2003, 4PSA introduced email antivirus and anti-spam capabilities to Parallels Plesk Panel. In 2011, scanning and filtering are still crucial to any hosting service and 4PSA add-ons are preferred due to their accuracy and scalability. Both Clean Server and Spam Guardian support distributed workloads without affecting other hosting services,” said Elena Carstoiu, 4PSA’s VP of Sales and Marketing.

Clean Server and Spam Guardian feature new reporting areas that simplify provisioning of cloud services. They enable service providers to charge customers based on service utilization. Moreover, the latest versions also introduce IMAP quarantine folders for infected emails.

Total Backup continues to provide superior server level backup and disaster recovery functionalities with low I/O usage and remote storage facilities Total Backup is capable of encrypting the backup archives, which means that they can be safely stored on shared storage infrastructures, reducing costs and increasing flexibility.

4PSA add-ons for Plesk provide the best TCO in business. They can be purchased from the 4PSA online store starting at US $99.

Commended for its continued focus on employee engagement, Rackspace has ranked as one of the top ten companies for people, who love what they do, believe in the company and its future and deliver a great service.

Rackspace has, for the third year running, been featured in the top tier of the Sunday Times Best Employer Awards. The Awards, which are based on employee interviews, indicate that Rackspace has created a fun and caring environment that helps nurture and grow individual talent.

The Sunday Times notes that 89 percent of Rackspace employees that responded to the survey are excited about where the company is going, with 79 percent saying their work is great for their personal growth and 95 per cent stating that they are proud to work for the organisation.

Brian Thomson, EMEA Managing Director at Rackspace, comments: “We are very proud of all the progress we have made in our business over the last year and what is truly pleasing is that as the company has grown our ‘Rackers’ continue to feel valued in their roles.

“We are thrilled to see that our employees love what they do and are excited at where the business is going. Our continued success is without doubt because of our Racker’s tireless dedication to Fanatical Support and the passion they show every single day.”

Rackspace is one of the UK’s most successful and fastest growing providers of IT hosting services.

It has consistently been recognised for its excellence as an IT employer, with a number of accolades, most recently being one of only14 companies to receive a Laureate award from the Financial Times for being one of the best places to work in the UK and Europe 2009.

With over 20,000 users a day worldwide signing up to use their application, Nimbuzz had an urgent requirement for a best-in-class, highly connected facility which also offered them flexibility, support, and room to grow.

The Nimbuzz servers have already been installed in the recently constructed Interxion AMS5 data centre in Amsterdam.

This 7,000 m2 highly secure facility provides 2N UPS redundancy and N+1 backup generators, and gives direct access to 30 carriers and ISPs as well as the AMS-IX and NL-IX Internet Exchanges.

While providing high-density power configurations to customers as standard, it also features numerous energy-efficient design and operation measures and runs on a mixture of wind, biomass and hydroelectric-generated energy.

The Nimbuzz application supports social networks including Facebook, Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, ICQ, Skype, and local social networks such as Hyves in the Netherlands.

As well as providing one-stop access to social networks, since November 2009 Nimbuzz has also offered its own VoIP service.

“Nimbuzz is growing at a rate way beyond expectation both in terms of users and product features. We therefore needed a state of the art datacenter to handle such demands.

We are confident that Interxion will provide the capacity and service to cope with our rapid development, enabling us do more and grow faster,” said Evert Jaap Lugt, founder and CEO of Nimbuzz.

“Although we only moved to Interxion recently, we have already noticed significant improvements in service and performance levels. Interxion is a thoroughly professional partner with a high level of in-house expertise, and they have provided us with a secure, high-performance environment in which to grow.”

“We are delighted to be supporting a Dutch success story like Nimbuzz, and are well placed to expand with them, whatever their future needs,” said Michel van den Assem, Interxion Netherlands Managing Director.

“Nimbuzz is an extremely innovative company, and we specialize in providing secure, connected state-of-the-art infrastructure that supports and facilitates the latest and best applications.”

Launched this month and superceding the original SafeDNS, this version represents a new phase in DNS management.

Providing full administrative privileges to the user, the server control panel offers the freedom to control what web domains you host and where.

Completely designed by UKFast’s R & D department, the SafeDNS system is a simple and secure approach to domain hosting.

Some of the DNS platform’s exciting new developments include enabling the user to host an unlimited number of branded domains, performing updates in real time, changing MX, A-name and TXT records and setting up sub-domains.

Neil Lathwood, UKFast’s IT Director, says, “Our DNS server system is straightforward and extremely easy-to-use, whether you are technically minded or not.

“Designed and built in-house, we are so confident in the solution that we use it ourselves. With our competitors also adopting it, we can guarantee its effectiveness for DNS management.”

The agreement will enable Fortis Bank Global Clearing (FBGC) to provide its customers with low-latency access to the major financial markets in London from the Interxion Financial Hub – a close-knit community of Interxion-based capital markets participants.

FBGC will run their services from a highly secure private suite with industry-leading service level agreements and guaranteed N+1 power and cooling redundancy.

“Interxion is one of the key access points for the London markets, and their dedicated capital markets infrastructure will help us give our customers a competitive edge,” said Neil Singleton, Global Head of Market Access Architecture, Fortis Bank Global Clearing.

“By colocating at Interxion’s City of London, data centre we are able to provide clients with faster access to the markets, allowing them to increase their trading efficiency and grow their business volumes while being able to react faster to changes in the exchanges and trading venues.”

Fortis Bank Global Clearing N.V. will be housed in Interxion’s dedicated Financial Hub.

Designed for capital market participants, the Financial Hub provides one of the lowest possible latencies of any independent colocation provider to Europe’s leading liquidity venues, and already houses a range of trading venues, broker-dealers, proprietary trading firms, hedge funds, and financial service providers.

As a carrier-neutral data centre operator, Interxion also provides a choice of connectivity options for direct cross connects within the data centre, in addition to a wide range of network service providers for external connectivity.

High-density power configurations from 5 kW up to 30 kW per cabinet are available as standard, with industry-leading service level agreements and reliability and 24×7 secure access to equipment.

“As well as being one of the key clearing houses in Europe, Fortis Clearing provides an array of access and hosting services that will be enhanced by Interxion’s low-latency proximity-hosting offer,” said Anthony Foy, Group Managing Director, Interxion.

“Our City of London data centre is situated in very close proximity to the top five liquidity markets in London, so we are well placed to service capital-market participants’ low latency hosting requirements.”

Reporting a 690 per cent growth over the last five years, the UK’s leading hosting provider has followed its success in the Deloitte Fast 50 with a top half finish in their prestigious industry rankings for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

“We are extremely pleased to have been recognised by Deloitte as one of the region’s fastest-growing technology companies,” said managing director Lawrence Jones.

“This award has successfully concluded another year of tremendous growth and industry recognition.”

The Deloitte Technology Fast 500 EMEA Ranking identifies the top public and private technology, media and telecommunications companies headquartered in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

One of the industry’s most objective rankings, the results are based on revenue performance over the past five years.

Despite the economic downturn the average five-year revenue growth for the 2009 rankings has increased by 1,470 per cent for the top 500, exceeding the figures from the previous year.

Reversing last year’s outcome, the UK has also regained its position as the home of the highest concentration of Technology Fast 500 EMEA companies back from France.

Named the UK’s Best Hosting Provider for four years consecutively by the ISPA, UKFast has amassed over 3,000 clients including UKTV, Chelsea Football Club and Mulberry.

With a team that now exceeds more than 100 staff, it also covers all areas of internet provision, hosting sales, technical support, design and copywriting.

Commented Keith Pritchard, CTO of SMS: “The AS number allows us to connect directly to the Internet backbone and talk as peers to other networks.

“This in turn allows us to have multiple links to the Internet to all of our servers so that if a single link has a problem, there will automatically be other links used to get to our servers”.

Pritchard added that “eliminating third parties from our link to the Internet itself results in a more direct connections for our clients which in turn means better performance”.

The new network is fully functioning and after an extensive testing phase the roll out started in November.

By late December, all customers – with in total more than 12,000 mailboxes – were using the new network successfully. For most clients there were no changes needed and email applications started to benefit from the new network automatically.

However since all IP addresses changed customers who had to put an IP address into a DNS control panel when they joined SMS needed to update to the new addresses.

Simply Mail Solutions have issued help on the simple required changes and support continues to be provided by the UK technical team.

The acquisition, for an undisclosed sum, will enable Webfusion to extend its offering and provide XCalibre customers with access to a variety of products, along with 24×7 support.

The remaining XCalibre business will transfer to Flexiant Ltd.

Webfusion, in partnership with Flexiant, will trial the FlexiScale cloud computing platform and it is hoped that FlexiScale will eventually be offered as a service to Webfusion customers.

Thomas Vollrath, Managing Director of Webfusion, comments, “XCalibre has an excellent portfolio of hosting products and we are delighted to partner with them.

“The acquired Xcalibre customer base will benefit from an increased product set and more choice in entry level managed hosting packages.

“We look forward to the opportunities to widen our portfolio and present these customers with a greater choice of hosting and web security solutions.”

Tony Lucas, CEO of XCalibre, comments: “This partnership with Webfusion is very important to us and will allow us to strengthen our focus on the continued development of FlexiScale platform and other software products.

“Our roots are in hosting but our passion is development and going forward this experience will shape our transition into and growth as a software and services company, pioneering cloud computing.”

Customers of XCalibre Communications will become clients of Webfusion with immediate effect.

There will not be any changes to control panels or services provided.

In addition, customers will benefit from Webfusion’s UK-based data centre, round the clock support teams and access to a wider range of products and services.

Webfusion is part of the Host Europe Group, which is owned by Oakley Capital.

The new partnership is aimed at allowing LBi to offer more managed services to its customer base and will be located in the London City Interxion facility.

It will also allow LBi to deploy higher density power configurations to its users by supporting virtualisation programming and offer the company direct access with the London Internet Exchange.

The Interxion City of London facility has access to a 13 MVA redundant grid supply allowing it to support the latest and newest high density power configurations, so that LBi can use its newest blade server technology.

It will allow for LBi to optimize its availability due to its N+1x cooling and 2N UPS power as well as access for consumers through the LNX Internet exchange of over 28 different carriers and ISPs.

Managed Service Partner at LBi, John Russel, stated that the company’s aim is to provide clients with cutting edge cost effective services which the new partnership with Interxion will provide.

Additionally he stated that the new partnership will allow LBi to continue to grow in a central location.

Interxion also announced in August that it will sponsor next week’s Hosting Transformation Summit in North America as a gold sponsor.

The summit will be located at the Mirage hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada in the US.