Interestingly enough, many users have called into question the strength of the SLA – that so proudly is displayed as 100%. Rapidswitch will refund a user half a day’s fees for every hour of downtime experienced. To get a free month, Rapidswitch would need to be down for an unprecedented (for them) 60 hours – so they could be down for a whole day yet you would get half your monthly fee refunded, which is a pretty shocking SLA.

In an open letter Roz Ho, VP of Premium Mobile Experiences at Microsoft, apologises for the “recent problems”. She then claims that “most, if not all” of the data has been recovered and will be restored to the servers over the next couple of days.

Since the beginning of October, Sidekick users have had problems retrieving their data, leading up to the complete failure of the cloud-based service. Customers were advised to switch their Sidekicks off to prevent synchronisation attempts.

The host profile feature of vSphere 4 is useful in streamlining host profile set up and eases diagnostics.

As part of its ongoing testing of the VMware vSphere 4 platform and its rivals, eWEEK Labs puts the new host profiles feature to the test. Host profiles streamlines the configuration of new ESX hosts, and makes it easier for administrators to check for compliance.

New in VMware vSphere 4 is the ability to streamline the configuration of new ESX hosts. (ESX being the management component of the server infrastructure.) As part of my ongoing testing of the vSphere 4 platform, I put the new feature through its paces in the lab.

Host profiles help to solve the finicky problem of ensuring uniformity among the groups of physical ESX host systems that support the virtual machine environment. The host profile feature is a good addition to vSphere 4, but the need for it may be lessened by the abilities of the new distributed switch that was also added in this overhaul of VMware’s flagship data centre virtualisation platform.

During this week’s Converging on Microsoft podcast interview with Mike Schutz, Director of Product Management for the Microsoft Windows Server Division, we discuss the relevant steps necessary to secure servers running Hyper-V. Microsoft has a number of resources you will find helpful (links at the end of this article) and Mike’s interview is also a great place to learn what’s happening with Hyper-V security.

One of the most valuable tools Microsoft has for securing Hyper-V is their Hyper-V Security Guide. The Hyper-V SG layouts it out in three steps: Hardening Hyper-V, Delegating Virtual Machine Management, and Protecting Virtual Machines. Here are some added thoughts and commentary beyond what the document offers.

With a VPS Server, you will not have this problem since you have unlimited root access because your website is virtually isolated from other clients sharing the server. Other features that make a VPS Server a good choice include more available bandwidth and better data security. Although you are still sharing the server with other clients in a Virtual Private Server, at least you know that there is a portion dedicated only to your files, which means that you have your own operating system. A VPS is more secure because you do not share storage space with other clients. In a shared hosting service, once the security of one customer is compromised, the other clients sharing the same space may also be at risk.

Load balancing allows your website to continue performing in the event of server downtime due to server failure or planned maintenance. Managed server load balancing from delivers

• Load balancing to improve performance through efficient distribution of network traffic
• Firewalls in High Availability configuration
• Web servers arranged in active-active or active-passive pairs to provide failover redundancy
• Database servers replicated or clustered for reliability and performance
• Improved performance for your website and applications
• Service continuity in the event of a server failure

Load balancing is fully configurable to meet your requirements. You can specify round-robin, weighted round-robin, least connections or least sessions load balancing methods as well as stickiness based on IP address, cookie, session ID.

Rackspace offers Cloud Server hosting to cloud service provider customers, using technology from its Slicehost subsidiary. Customers currently manage their servers through a Control Panel GUI.

The coming API, built using a RESTful web service interface, will enable customers to have better control of their server instances in the Rackspace hosting centres. They will be able to write code that programmatically detects server load and scales the number of server instances up and down, for example.

The API introduces features that the Control Panel does not have. One is the ability to specify files when a server instance is created that will be injected into the server file system before startup. Rackspace says this is useful when inserting SSH keys, setting configuration files, or storing data that customers want to retrieve from within the Cloud Server itself.

A second new feature refers to identification of the server host. The Cloud Servers provisioning algorithm attempts to spread out customer virtual machines across hosts. Under certain situations, Cloud Servers from the same customer may be placed on the same host. Host identification allows customers to detect this condition and take appropriate action.

The API also makes it simpler to create shared IP groups and enable high availability configurations. Showing that it is au fait with iPhone popularity, Rackspace customers will be able to manage their clouds with an iPhone