Rack Pack Blog

Our Kempsta biggin’ us up!

Posted by Rack Packer - 25/08/09 at 03:08:18 pm

This is currently doing the rounds on Twitter, and is worthy of a mention. There is nothing worse than being put on the spot. No take that back. There is nothing worse than being put on the spot and having a mic thrust in your general direction and a camera being present to record your discomfort.

This was the situation that our Mark recently found himself in whilst attending OpenSoho 10 last week. No sooner had he arrived then he found himself being asked about iomart hosting . We doff our caps to the man for managing to keep his cool under pressure, for not using any naughty words, neither slobbering like a rabid dog nor trying to sell a server or two to the very personable reporter (ignore that - he should have tried to sell a server), and generally giving a great account of himself.

Kempsta we salute you!

iomart wins managed hosting contract with digital marketeers ChilliBean

Posted by Rack Packer - 24/08/09 at 11:08:21 am

It’s always good to start the week with some good news (just ask any English Cricket Fan this morning) and we’ve kicked off our week with the announcement that we have secured a contract with digital marketing company ChilliBean.

The London based company was founded in 2005 and has quickly grown to establish a foothold in the digital media market. Its clients include some of the biggest names in global advertising, such as Sony and Saatchi & Saatchi, who trust it to manage and distribute their commercials to local agencies in key global territories. The local agencies then download and distribute the adverts across television, cinema and websites in country (ChilliBean estimate that they transfer at least 40 terabytes of data per month).

Given this buisness model, ChilliBean needed a data centre services partner whio not only understood their business but also had a resilient and secure infrastructure in place. We’re just delighted they selected us, and we look forward to working with them over the next few years.

This deal has also given us the chance to incorporate another tenuously linked music video. This time, and rather obviousl, it is the Buggles with ‘Video killed the Radio Star’ (the first music video ever shown on MTV, but you knew that anyway).

All right Pop-pickers? Counting down the Managed Hosting Top 10

Posted by Rack Packer - 20/08/09 at 04:08:10 pm

We’re so fed up with the monsoon that is currently raging outside our window (BBQ summer..Doh!) that we thought we’d cheer ourselves up by creating the iomart Managed Hosting TOP 10 hosting themed music chart. It may be a totally ridiculous exercise but at least we get to hear some great old tracks and judging by some Tweeps nominations some rather obscure ones as well!

If you want to get involved (and let’s be honest, why wouldn’t you?) simply send us via Twitter your nominations for a web hosting themed song (If you could include a link to either the track or the video – that would be fabtastic).

We’ll then create the final Hosting Top 10 playlist and circulate.

Starters for 10. The babetastic Kate Bush and ‘”Cloud”busting’. Now that’s a tune…Not Arf!

iomart Hosting bags PC Pro Environmental Innovator Award Nomination

Posted by Rack Packer - 18/08/09 at 09:08:13 am

iomart Hosting is delighted to announce that it has received a nomination for Environmental Innovator of the Year from the Editorial Team at PC Pro. The PC Pro Awards are now firmly established as an integral and keenly anticipated part of the IT industry calendar, and are considered amongst the most prestigious of the Industry gongs.

iomart Hosting has been nominated in the Environmental Innovator category. This is one of five awards which are the gift of the PC Pro editorial team: three are focused on business, and voted for by PC Pro’s team of Real World Contributing Editors, one for Environmental Innovator of the Year (decided by PC Pro and Sustain IT), and one for Technology Innovator of the Year (decided by the extended PC Pro editorial team, with over 20 people casting a vote).

Other companies nominated in the Environmental Innovator category are: Asus, Gigabyte, LG, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson & VeryPC - pretty top companyand we’re delighted to be included! iomart hosting was nominated for the development of it’s Managed Hosting control panel which details customer power usage and consumption direct from the data centre.

The awards will be presented at a pucker black tie do at London’s Hurlingham Club on the 30th September.

Service News: 17.08.09 Issues with Peering Partner

Posted by Rack Packer - 17/08/09 at 01:08:41 pm

A Notice and Update for our Customers

Today between 11.54am and 12.10pm a part of the iomart Hosting network suffered a minor interruption to its peering arrangements, which may have resulted in some connectivity loss for a few of our customers.This was a highly unusual incident and was caused by the failure of an upstream peering partner to effectively route our inbound and outbound transit.

Typically, when a peering route fails, it fails completely and stops advertising our routes and serving our traffic. Should this happen all traffic should normally and automatically route through one of our other available peers and all our customers would notice would be a momentary blip in connectivity and momentary packet loss as the routes are picked up and re-advertised.

We maintain systems to continually monitor our network and these detected the drop in network traffic. After investigation, we re-advertised our traffic through to our other peering partners.

We are now involved with high level discussions with the affected peering partner to understand the reasons for the failure. We will continue to route our traffic through our other peering partners.

Please rest assured that we are taking necessary action to ensure that this incident remains an isolated case. We would like to take this opportunity to aplogise those customers that were affected and to thank them for their patience.