Deployment Scripts allow you to automate many aspects of configuring a newly provisioned Linux VPS. You can install new software, configuring options from easy-to-use web interfaces, set up and run system services, and much more - all without having to even connect to your VPS.

Customers can build their own scripts from scratch or use existing ones from our Deployment Scripts Library - we've currently got examples that will allow you to automatically install things like a LAMP stack, WordPress, or MySQL. We'll be adding to this library over time, and we're more than happy to publish customer scripts if they think they'd be useful for others.

We've also tried to ensure that our system is compatible with Linode's fantastic StackScripts system, which offers a huge variety of pre-made scripts for customers to tinker with.

We hope this new feature is useful for VPS customers - we look forward to expanding on the library over time to make things even easier for customers to automatically provision new online services.

Deployment Scripts are available right now and are free for VPS customers to use. Enjoy!

We've recently added two small new features to our Service Status website which we hope provide more information for customers:

- A new summary module on the home page that gives at-a-glance information about the status of core elements of the service - the network, web hosting (for shared hosting customers) and VPS hosts. Any failures here detected by the third-party monitoring services of Pingdom will be reflected there within a few minutes, allowing customers to quickly see if there are any current service-level issues.

- A new Uptime History page. This page retreives uptime summary data from Pingdom for every major top level component at Mammoth Networks - routers, VPS hosts, DNS servers, and more. Information about the previous month, year to date, and previous year is available.

While these are minor additions, we hope that these changes will make it even easier for everyone to understand the state of our services.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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 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.