Mammoth VPS News

Over the last few weeks we've added a variety of new operating system images for VPS customers. You may have seen them roll into the options list if you changed plans, but we also wanted to quickly mention it here so people who weren't actively poking around are also aware of the new options.

New operating system images include:

• Debian 7.0
• Ubuntu 13.04
• Fedora 18
• OpenSUSE 12.3
• CentOS 5.9

We do our best to ensure we've always got the latest versions of our supported operating systems available, but if there's anything you're particularly keen to see supported please drop us a line via our support page and we'll see what we can do.

In addition to rolling out cool new features, we've had the chance recently to re-evaluate how some existing services have been performing. One of these services is our additional backup offerings - something which we're really passionate about because we know how important it is to maintain regular backups of your data.

We're happy to announce that as a result of this evaluation we have decided to drop backup price by 50%, reducing the cost from $0.20/GB to $0.10/GB.

We hope this will encourage more users to take advantage of our flexible backup system and allow harried system administrators to relax just that little bit more knowing they have a wider variety of backup options for their all-important systems and data.

Another new feature this week - we've added support for off-site backups of VPSs to be created on the Amazon S3 service. This will provide another layer of comfort for customers who want to know their data is backed up outside of our network.

Customers who have added this service to their VPS plan will have their disk images sent to their nominated bucket on Amazon S3 immediately after a successful local backup is made.

As the backup is stored in your own S3 bucket, you can download the disk image and manipulate it directly, allowing you to verify the contents of the backup or simply access the contents of your VPS locally in your own test environment.

Off-site backups can now be enabled for your VPS on the 'Change Plan' page in the 'VPS Details' section. They are currently charged at $0.20 per gigabyte per month.

More information on how to create your own S3 bucket for use with this new feature (and information on how to download and manipulate your VPS image locally) can be found in this article.

As always, we remind all users of any computer system that making a backup is only part of a good backup strategy. We strongly encourage our customers to make their own backups that are independent of our systems and to test both sets of backups regularly to ensure they're valid and that they'll restore as expected.

We're happy to announce we've released a new feature this week for VPS customers of Mammoth Networks - a firewall service.

This new firewall is a web-based system that works at the network level, providing enhanced security for your VPS by allowing you to selectively filter traffic before it gets to you.

An easy-to-use interface allows customers to selectively allow or block traffic to or from particular addresses (and ports). The firewalling is effective immediately upon completion of the request.

The firewall service is available now and is free for all VPS customers. To access it, log into mPanel, select your VPS and select 'Firewall' from the 'Manage' menu.

We've just rolled out another new feature on Mammoth Networks - two-factor authentication for mPanel accounts.

Two-step verification adds an extra layer of security for your account by requiring you to enter a verification code in addition to your username and password, when signing in to your account.

We're using the open source Google Authenticator project - clients are available on a variety of platforms, including Android and iOS.

For more information and to enable two factor authentication now for your Mammoth Networks account, check it out now in mPanel!

We've just launched a new feature on Mammoth Networks that allows users to set email alert notifications on certain types of VPS resources.

Customers will now be alerted when their CPU, disk activity, network activity, memory utilisation or disk utilisation passes certain levels. These settings can now be customised in mPanel by selecting 'Alerts' from your VPS Manage menu.

There are several different alert types; each can be selectively enabled or disabled and you can customise the threshold at which you are emailed.

We hope this feature will provide customers with better insight into their VPS usage and allow them to be more aware of significant changes which might indicate potential problems.

We're pleased to announce that we've just added the brand new Windows Server 2012 Standard to our list of supported operating systems for our VPS platform.

Customers looking to deploy Windows Server 2012 can do so right now by signing up and selecting it from our operating system list.

For more information please check out Microsoft's official Server 2012 site.

We are excited to announce that in September we will be launching a new website design. The new website design will align our hosting services with the broader Mammoth branding and provide a more cohesive product offering for our customers. We have also taken the opportunity to make the website easier to use through a permanently displayed menu bar, support for higher resolution screens and use of the latest CSS functionality.

We will also begin offering two additional hosting solutions: website hosting and domain name registration. With the addition of these services, the name "Mammoth VPS" and its associated domain name are no longer suitable. As such we will be broadening the name to "Mammoth Networks" and operating from a more succinct domain name - www.mammoth.net.au.

We want to make it perfectly clear to all our customers that these changes do not impact your VPS service in any way. It is the same team; the same company; and the same great VPS functionality, pricing, service and support you are accustomed to. Just with additional solutions and a fresh new look!

After launch, any bookmarked URLs will automatically redirect to the correct location on the new site. mPanel and its associated features will continue to work in exactly the same way they currently do.

We will send out a second email after the new website is online and would welcome all feedback/criticism you might have.

We've recently introduced a new system to block certain outbound network connections from newly-created VPSs.

By blocking the outgoing connections used for email, SSH and Remote Desktop you can prevent your VPS from being used for spam or brute-force attacks, which are both illegal and significant data transfers. Many customers who contact us about unexpectedly high data transfer on their VPS discover that their VPS has been hacked.

We hope this move will improve the security of the platform as a whole.

Approved customers can control this setting by logging in to mPanel and selecting 'Port Blocking' from the 'Manage' menu for their selected VPS. We encourage customers who don't explicitly need these services to leave them blocked to add another layer of security to their VPS.

Please note that the existing VPSs of current customers will not be affected by this change - but any new VPS created (even if you are an existing customer) will have this port blocking enabled by default.

If you are having problems or would like more information on this feature please feel free to contact support!

With a new year comes new plans! We've been revising our VPS plan offerings for 2012 and these new plans have just gone live.

There are two main changes for this refresh - the first is that all Linux plans (except Personal and Basic) have dropped in price. The second is that all plans have had a generous bandwidth increase. The details of the increases are outlined in the table below:

Another minor change is that we've rebalanced the virtual CPU allocation in each of these plans. After looking into how the majority of customers used CPU on the services, we decided that this change (in conjunction with the new bandwidth offerings) would offer the best value for customers, while ensuring customers who need more CPU are able to get it.

Existing customers may switch to a 2012 plan via the 'Change Plan' menu item within mPanel.