We have finally launched the first set of new products and services that we've been working on for months.

As of last night Blacknight VPS hosting is open for business.

The new VPS hosting is the perfect solution for people who want to run custom setups without incurring the costs of dedicated hardware.

For example if you want to experiment with JSP, Ruby on Rails, Light HTTPD or want to install custom DLLs on Windows.

With a VPS you have full control. The only limits are your imagination and your credit card limit!

What's a VPS?

VPS stands for virtual private server.

It's hard to put it into really simple terms, but it's a way to give you the control and flexibility of a dedicated server at a fraction of the price.

What are Blacknight offering?

We're offering a full range of Windows Server 2003 64 bit and Centos 5 (Linux) based virtual servers.

Can I get a control panel for this?

Yes. All VPS servers come with the Virtuozzo Power Panel which gives you control over the basic operations of your VPS.

If you're not comfortable managing your server over SSH / RDP then you can opt to get Plesk as well.

What about other linux distros?

We'll be adding other popular Linux distributions in the coming weeks. For the moment we're offering the most popular alternative to RedHat Enterprise

Will you be offering Windows Server 2008?

We intend to offer it as soon as it is viable ie. fully supported and tested

The entire system is securely hosted in one of Ireland's leading data centres, Interxion in Dublin, Ireland.

In the last few months we've mentioned a lot of upgrades and improvements to our network. Part of the reason for doing all this was to make way for the rollout of our Parallels network.

If anyone has any feedback we'd really love to hear it.

Let us know in the comments or if you'd prefer discretion email management@blacknight.com

Posted by Michele Neylon at 11:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (16) | TrackBacks (0)

Since we still have a number of clients using MS SQL 2000 we have made available both myLittleAdmin and MyLittleBackup for the older platform

MyLittleAdmin is accessible here

I'll post details of MyLittleAdmin as soon as they are available

For MS SQL 2005 users please see our previous announcement

Posted by Michele Neylon at 11:01 AM | Permalink

Since we run a firewalled network giving clients direct access to the MS SQL servers has always been a security issue.

With MySQL there are open source web frontends, such as PhpMyAdmin, that do a fantastic job at providing a web frontend to the database server. You don't need to be a hardcore DBA to manipulate your data, optimise or repair tables, take backups etc., etc.

But what about Microsoft SQL server?

While there are a couple of open source solutions out there none of them come even close to offering the levels of functionality needed.

So what could we do?

The solution lay in France with a little company called myLittleTools S.A.R.L..

They offer two web based products for MS SQL management:

• MyLittleAdmin - which allows you to control your database


• MyLittleBackup - which is a tool for managing backups and restores

This latest addition to our offerings goes well with our recent announcement of an increased number of databases with most of our ASP.net hosting plans (Windows 2003).

Posted by Michele Neylon at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Over the last few months we've seen a steady increase in requests for MS SQL 2005 databases.

Up until earlier today we were quite conservative in our allocation of MS SQL 2005 databases, but we've changed all that.

We're now offering a database per site on all MS SQL plans ie. if the hosting plan supports 16 sites then you get 16 databases, so every site can have its own database.

So what's that mean for our hosting plans?

Put simply they've just got that bit better !

(we also added more MySQL databases as well..)
If you want to compare our hosting plans, then have a look at our hosting comparison chart

Posted by Michele Neylon at 12:51 PM | Permalink

Earlier this week Rob Burke from Microsoft got in touch with us about Asp.net AJAX extensions.

It transpires that none of the Irish hosting companies were offering support for them (at least not officially).

Although we hadn't been supporting it officially it transpires that we had been running them on several of our Windows servers since late last year when they were still in beta.

We like to embrace new technologies wherever we can (bearing in mind any possible negative side-effects, naturally) so we were delighted to be able to work with Rob in getting it all working. You can see a demo of the Asp.net AJAX extensions here:
AJAX test site

So we can now happily say that we do offer Asp.net AJAX extensions!

Further coverage on Rob's blog as well as a mention on Paul's.

Posted by Michele Neylon at 3:29 PM | Permalink