Dear Hampshire Heavies

As you may have noticed we have been having some problems with some other data center clients getting DDoS attacks which has flooded the main backhaul connection crippling the network for everyone.

Although these attacks have only been 10 to 30 mins odd it’s still as we well know a massive incontinence for our clients at peak times and we apologise for any inconvenience caused and have been working hard on a solution.

It is with great pleasure that we can announce Alpha-Networks is once again going to be joining the very small number of real GSP`s (>3 now) hosting directly out of central London data centers.


How will this affect your service?
At the moment when you connect to any provider outside of central London your connection has to first go to London then onto wherever the servers are located at your provider which add`s latency to your connection performance, I am happy to report once we have completed the move you should see 4+ms knocked off your ping as we will be hosting our servers in the main central London data center Sovereign House.


Proactive future proofing of our network
As part of this upgrade and service improvement we have decided to take a proactive approach to our IP allocations, at the moment we are sadly at the mercy of a supplier of ours who maintains ultimate control of the IP`s we are currently using, this isn’t really acceptable to us as we are tied to a single provider which is never good for us or our customers.

I’m happy to announce we have invested in securing ourselves a PI (provider independent) block of IP`s from RIPE the EU IP governing body which will give his full and ultimate control of ours IP`s regardless of our suppliers.

Some gamers who like low numbered IP`s will be pleased to know that our new allocation is a 31.132.0.0 range.

As part of the upgrade and move we will have a redunda nt bandwidth supply with no single fiber failure able to take us offline due to a redundant router ring.

We will also have multiple dedicated 1GB transit suppliers to ensure small to medium DDoS attacks (should they happen) will have zero effect on our network proformance.


IP Changes
As part of the above upgrades we will require all game server, CDS (Cloud Dedicated Servers), dedicated servers and voice servers to move over to our new 31 range, over the next couple of weeks we will be migrating everybody over to the new IP`s.
If you are a teamspeak customer please connect on ts3.alpha-networks.co.uk - no changes are required.

We will contact you with your new information once you have been moved.

We apologise in advance for the change but in the long run it will benefit us all.


Actual Physical Move
At some point we will have to move the actual hardware from our! current midlands data center down to London which will of course mean a fair few hours of downtime, thankfully with our new hardware the move should be a lot more efficient than past moves and should take less than 3 – 8 hours before services start coming back online.

We will be also doing minor server upgrades to enable us to add new SAN appliances to our system for better storage redundancy.

The move will be done in early morning hours so most customers shouldn’t even notice anything but improved performance when they get back online!

We will give advance warning of the move date once it’s been confirmed and we have migrated people to the new range.

Kind Regards,
The Alpha-Networks Team

Although these attacks have only been 10 to 30 mins odd it’s still as we well know a massive incontinence

great news!!

Will the shifting of ip's remove us from peoples favourite server list? I'm guessing it won't because of the whole "hh1.thehh.co.uk" thing we use, but as you can tell I haven't really got a clue?

Last time I checked a DDoS does not cause loss of bowel / bladder control.