Rack Pack Blog

All the latest news and information from iomart Hosting

iomart Hosting secures £200K managed DR contract with Servecentric

Posted by Rack Packer - 27/10/09 at 11:10:25 am

A good start to the week! We are delighted to announce that we have secured a £200K ($330K) contract with Servecentric to provide a fully redundant disaster recovery service from our City of London data centre. The deal runs for three years and supports a deal that Servecentric had already brokered with a large US multinational organisation.

Servecentric chose iomart Hosting as its UK mainland partner based on our technical infrastructure, flexibility and existing reference blue chip clients and because we were able to deliver the exacting criteria required by their US customer including meeting the highest levels of capacity, resilience and security.

Helga Muir, sales and marketing manager for Servecentric, said: “Servecentric has experienced a surge in multinational corporations choosing to move their European IT infrastructure into our facility in recent months. To provide additional support to these customers, we wanted a UK based data centre partnership that could provide the highest quality technical infrastructure, experienced technicians and company ethos similar to their own. iomart Hosting has proven its credentials in all these areas and we look forward to partnering on reciprocal business going forward.”

We are delighted that Servecentric has selected us for this contract and we look forward to working with them in the years to come.

October 27, 2009 | Tags: business hosting,customers,datacentres,iomart hosting,managed hosting | In General iomart Hosting News | Comments Off

10 steps to managing web performance during the holiday season or how to keep punters for longer than 4 seconds..

Posted by Rack Packer - 15/10/09 at 12:10:02 pm

Christmas and New Year might seem far off, but now is the right time to make sure that you get the most out of this year’s holiday season. This year E-tailers are expected to continue to increase their market share, but the seasonal peaks also raise serious challenges for these businesses to handle traffic surges and stay open. Research shows that the average online shopper will only wait 4 seconds before moving from your web page to a competitors, if it hasn’t opened fully and is ready for some fast paced buying action. Now only waiting 4 seconds is a bit rough ( i keep having a vision of Bono clicking his fingers and saying ‘every 4 seconds a surfer leaves your site for a rivals’), but we’ve gradually become a world where as the ad says ‘ Impatience is a Virtue’ (in fact we ran our own broadband campaign many moons ago, during the early adopter days, which urged surfers to ‘Be Impatient’ - I think we still own the trademark to this day). It’s hard enough selling anything in these recessionary times, without having to hope that your potential customer hasn’t got the attention span of a butterfly on acid.

So what can you do to ensure that you hold onto your hard fought prospect - short of slashing your margins and giving your products away? Well one thing you can - and should - consider is ensuring that your web site can cope with the seasonal traffic spikes that your web site will no doubt experience.

Now you can either go with a ‘Cloud Hosting’ option of purchasing additional computing power as and when you need it or you can de-risk the spike occurrences on your own site by building Best Practice load testing and performance monitoring into your development/test/production cycles.

So how do you take this second option? One of our Partners, Apica has produced a really nifty and useful 10 point guide on this very topic and it’s rather spookily called: 10 steps to holiday peak-proof web performance. The PDF can be downloaded here.

The steps include: Aligning web performance goals with business objectives, determining maximum performance, determining the response times at maximum load, verification of content size vs. Internet capacity, applying and verifying front end cache and load balancing and management.

So if you are a on line retailer or an e-tailer (as I believe you are now quaintly labelled) please follow the recommendations in this excellent white paper and you will be on your way to a prosperous and trouble free holiday season this year (and let’s be honest that’s something we could all do with).

October 15, 2009 | Tags: business hosting,cloud computing,customer service,customers,iomart hosting,news,web tools | In Rack Pack Updates | Comments Off

A Domain Name Campaign, Easyspace and Sir Roger..a picture tells a 1000 words!

Posted by Rack Packer - 12/10/09 at 04:10:31 pm

A few ’select’ images taken on launch day of the Easyspace Domain Names for a Domain Campaign. And in case you’re interested the location for the shoot was the Kelvin Grove Museum in Glasgow and the ’stuffed’ elephant is the world famous ‘Sir Roger’ (I kid you not…the exhibit is known as Sir Roger the Elephant!)

October 12, 2009 | Tags: domain names,easyspace,iomart Group,iomart hosting,news | In Rack Pack Updates | Comments Off

Easyspace launches ‘Domain Names for A Domain’ campaign to save Asian Elephant

Posted by Rack Packer - 12/10/09 at 09:10:25 am

Just Say No to dot.Gone!

Our sister company, Easyspace has today launched a campaign aimed at raising the awareness of the plight of the Asian Elephant.

Under the banner ‘Say No to dot. gone’ Easyspace will donate 5 pence for every domain name it sells over the next six months to elephant family , the only UK charity dedicated to the plight of the endangered Asian elephant.

Our colleague, Errol Vanderhorst, managing director of Easyspace said: “Easyspace has been associated with the Asian elephant ever since we adopted it as our company logo back in 2002. Concern about the destruction of its habitat led us to thinking about what practical steps could we take to raise awareness of its plight.”

“As a domain name provider, we felt that the term ‘dot.gone’ tied us in perfectly with the Asian elephant’s fight for survival. If we do not act now there is a very real possibility that the Asian Elephant will be extinct in the wild within the next forty years.”

Errol added: “It’s the important work that elephant family does in preserving the Asian elephant’s natural domain that has made it such a perfect partner and recipient for the funds raised through our ‘Domain Names for a Domain’ campaign.”

The campaign was launched under the watchful eye of Sir Roger, the famous Asian elephant which is one of Culture & Sport Glasgow’s most popular exhibits at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. The six month campaign will culminate in Easyspace sponsoring an elephant at next spring’s Elephant Parade in London.

Ruth Powys, director of elephant family said:” The Domain Names for a Domain campaign is the perfect public symmetry for what we are trying to do as a charity. The money Easyspace raise will help us to buy up land to connect two forest fragments in Kerala in India to create an elephant corridor. We are so excited to have their support.”

Rather shockingly, the Asian elephant’s population has decreased by 165,000 in the past decade alone, and estimates suggest that if action is not taken now, the Asian elephant could be extinct by 2050.

A campaign has been created for Twitter users and if you wish to show your support you can add a ‘Just Say No to dotGone’ twibbon to your avatar here:
http://twibbon.com/easyspace