SoftData Internet Hosting Blog

Posts Tagged ‘web host’

We are growing at an unprecedented rate. Because of the many new customers we have decided to replace all our servers with brand new hardware during September this year.

The move should be transparent to our users, but we will have to allow for 1 hours down time as we switch on the new servers and turn off the old.

We apologise for any inconvenience, but this will allow us to provide a better service with more power, more memory and more disk space.

We will announce more once we have a firm date.

Hardly a day goes by without emails or phone calls asking us about cheap web hosting. Well, we just dont do cheap hosting. We know there are cheaper hosting deals out there, but in the end you get what you pay for.

Apart from the amount you get with SoftData Internet with your hosting acount ( very often charhed as extras from so called cheap hosts ) , how many do a complete backup of every site, every day ?

We now offer special monitoring services for those with mission critical web sites:

URL Monitoring

HOW IT WORKS

Retrieve a selected URL, checking for multiple strings of text within the page to ensure your site’s availability and to ensure that content has not been changed without authorization.

The given content cannot span over a line break and cannot be more than 5 consecutive words. We ask that you please provide us with static content as dynamic content cannot be used for this type of monitor. Also, the monitoring device will search for the given content in all parts of the source code; header, footer and body. Please keep this in mind when specifying a content check.

We strongly recommend NOT searching for the content “OK” with this type of monitor.

Please provide us with a working URL and a content string of up to five words within the page that should be verified.

Example:

https://example.com/loginpage.com

(Check for content: Welcome to the Login Page)

IMPORTANT – Before monitoring is enabled, we ask that you provide us with detailed emergency instructions as to how you would like us to respond to an outage or failure. Also, please provide a list of primary and secondary emergency contacts in case of such an event. These contacts will be recipients for any Rackwatch related ticket notifications. We must have the contacts and emergency instructions on file before any monitors are deployed.

To assist you in writing these, here are some questions you can answer:

1. Would you like us to troubleshoot the issue or just notify you?

2. Would you like us to work on it for a certain amount of time before we do contact you?

3. Specific troubleshooting instructions (such as custom scripts or what to do for a specific error)

4. A set of primary and secondary contact numbers. Emails will be created when a ticket is created, please ensure that the email you want to be contacted on are listed as technical contacts for the account.

URL Synthetic Transaction Monitoring. £40.00 per month each (5-steps or less).

A script of up to five steps through your website that simulates how a typical user interaction transpires. These scripts are repeated every ten minutes and triggers an alert if any of these five steps cannot be completed. For example, if a customer goes to a website but cannot complete the process of adding a product to the site’s shopping cart, this would trigger an alert. URL Synthetic Transaction Monitoring gives you the piece of mind that your website is functioning properly at all times.

We continue to have queries about upgrading to version 9 of Plesk.

Unfortunately there are still many unresolved security issues, so for the moment we will not be upgrading our servers. As soon as a stable version is released we wil upgrad.

We will be closing our phone lines at mid day today until January 5th 2009. Urgent messages should be either left on our answer machine, or better yet raise a ticket on our support site at http://www.softdata.co.uk

Every business that has a web site should choose their web host  carefully. SoftData Internet are extremely proud of their web hosting services.

1 Reliability. It is vital that you choose a web hosting company that is reliable and has a good reputation. We are currently running at 99.9% up time. The only down time has been to upgrade our services, and we have managed this in minutes out of office hours.

2 Operating System. Most websites are hosted on a Linux platform and most web site owners prefer web hosting that uses Linux servers for Web Hosting. Our servers run on Linux and we use the world famous Plesk system for our customer control panels. All the services you would expect, mysql database,php, asp etc are provided as standard.

3 Email . We provide unlimited email accounts, and each one is protectd from viruses by DRWEB and from spam by Spamassasin. You can recieve and send your emails from any email client and we also give you a web based interface so that even when you are away from the office, so long as you can get onto the web, you can manage your emails.

4 Backups. We back up every site every single day, so no matter what the problem might be, within 2 hours we can restore yesterdays site for you.

5 We are local. When you phone us you use a standard phone number, not a premuim rate line, and of course you can even come and see us personally.

Click here to visit our hosting web site

We have just upgraded one of our linux servers to the latest version of Plesk, and wil be following this by upgrading the rest of them at 7 pm this evening.

Down time should be no more than half an hour.

We have just revamped our web hosting site

It really does your business no good at all to have a hotmail or other free email account. At SoftData Internet Hosting we give you unlimited emails@yourdomain.co.uk . These are proper pop3 boxes ( we can also supply you with smpt mail ) . Each email can have unlimited aliases, ie. info@yourdomain.co.uk could also have fred.bloggs@yourdomain.co.uk as an alias.

These email accounts can be installed into Outlook, or Outlook express , and we also give you a web facility so that you can pick up and reply to emails from anywhere that has a web connection.

Spam Assassin is included as standard, and we allow you to have your own white lists and black lists for full peace of mind.

We also give you free anti virus on the server with Dr.Web (R)