Lumison is proud to announce a number of exciting developments for our managed dedicated hosting platforms. In March, we have started deploying RedHat Enterprise 5 as standard, including fully support Dell OpenManage technology which now works fully with the latest RedHat platform. Our managed dedicated servers now also include 10-domain Plesk control panels as standard, with upgrades for multidomain packs and additional software support such as Java/Tomcat available on demand.

As part of this rollout, we have taken the opportunity to introduce a new method for supporting application and system software on our hosted platforms. RedHat Enterprise provides a robust and reliable hosting platform, as RedHat perform extensive regression testing prior to rolling out security and version upgrades. The disadvantage is that this means that the versions of certain software packages can appear a little out of date (e.g. PHP, MySQL and PostgreSQL to name but a few).

To support a number of our clients who need the latest and greatest version number of particular software packages, Lumison now can provide a variant on our SoftwareSupport and SysAdminSupport services called "Early Release". This means that we deploy the latest stable release of key applications, meaning that our customers are completely up to date with the community releases. Obviously, this means that regression and backward compatibility testing from RedHat will not be in place, but for customers who are delivering solutions with the latest maintainable software in mind, this solution is ideal.

For more information, or if you are considering hosting and this is of interest to you, please contact your account manager or call us on 0845 1199 911.