A blog about server hosting

With the release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, the more observant of you may have noticed Ubuntu snuck itself back onto the list of available operating systems for the UltraVM Cloud Platform.

Ubuntu 10.04 is the latest generation of the long term supported codebase, and brings with it a number of technological advances, including kernel modules enabling it to plat nicer in a virtualized environment, as well as adding support for our cloud platform.

After performing a closed beta and numerous performance tests, we have seen Ubuntu server out perform a number of already available Linux OS including CentOS, whilst the management tools available make it a breeze to maintain.

It is for this reason, that we recently made the decision internally to freshen our Linux environment, replacing a mixture of operating systems and architectures with Ubuntu 10.04. As we go through this process, we will be posting a number of useful tips & tricks to effectively manage your Ubuntu server.

Rob Greenwood – Technical Lead

This week I’ve been doing my bit for local, national and even international communities by speaking about and demonstrating the Melbourne skills….

On Tuesday I met with Tatsiana Ramanovich, a Master’s student at Manchester Business School, studying the Corporate Communications and Reputation Management course. We shared our experiences in launching social media strategies and maintaining related activities, interesting findings and challenges which we face in social media communications. Tatsiana very generously brought cake to the Melbourne office!

On Wednesday I was invited by the CEO of Manchester Science Park to speak to Dean Bing-Huei Lin, Professor Ming-Huei Chen and 5 other visitors from the College of Social Sciences and Management of National Chung Hsing University of Taiwan. NCHU is based in the City of Taichung, the third largest city in Taiwan.
The delegation made the visit to Manchester to learn about successful companies at Manchester Science Park and to listen to the Melbourne introduction and business model.

On Thursday, Steven and I  gave a Melbourne introduction to 10 visitors from Young Rewired State which is a collection group of young people using government data to create apps. We gave them a guided tour of the Datacentres to show them why our customers put their trust in us to keep them online 24×7. The guys showed their appreciation by parading around Piccadilly gardens sporting our new stickers (see below)!

After this I went along to the Northern Digital BLAB event at MadLab in the Northern Quarter, Melbourne was kindly asked to sponsor the event by providing drinks. The night was a fantastic success with 100 people attending and we were treated to talks from Brendan Dawes, Creative Director of Manchester’s Magnetic North and Technical Director of Brighton’s Plug-in Media Seb Lee-Delisle speak about their work, their ideas and their views.

Chris Marsh, Business Development Manager

Manchester’s digital and creative industry enjoyed burgers, chilli, pizza and free mojitos on Wednesday @ Atlas Bar for Manchester Digital’s Summer Barbecue which Melbourne was kindly asked to sponsor.

The event was also sponsored by CTI Digital, Fudge, and Creative Times.

Many thanks to Richard Hudson, Shaun Fensom and the rest of the Manchester Digital and MDDA guys for arranging such a successful event! We’re looking forward to the next one already!

Chris Marsh, Business Development Manager

So your sausages might not be sizzling on the BBQ anymore but hopefully we’ve got something to keep Summer alive with our fantastic amazing Summer Sale…

Any orders for new services placed during August will receive 3 months half price.

Dedicated Servers, Virtual Servers, Co-location, rackspace, Managed Backup and UltraSpam Anti-Spam all included of course. Click here for more information or contact your account manager.

On Sunday 25th July, three of the team from Melbourne Server Hosting took part in the Urbanathlon around East Manchester which consisted of running between obstacles on a 5Km trail.  Starting at the City of Manchester Stadium, we ran up steps, climbed walls, scaled haystacks, crawled through tubes, jumped over cars and made our way through various other challenging activities over changing terrains all in the name of charity.

In total, over 900 runners took part on the day to raise money and awareness for charities such as ‘Street Games’ a new National Charity delivering ‘Sport in Deprived Communities’, The North West Kidney Patient Association, The New Children’s Hospital Appeal, UNICEF and Brain Tumour UK.

Although it showed just how unfit we all are, we had a very enjoyable day and look forward to more events to raise money for charity soon.

Sim, Dan and Chris completing the Urbanathlon

Chris Marsh, Business Development Manager

We’ve had a referral program for quite a while. We get a lot of our new customers this way, and it’s always made me really proud just how often our customers refer us to their colleagues. It helps us know that we’re doing our job well.

Anyway, we’ve now made it easier for customers to make sure they get their referral reward every time they send someone our way.

Basically, if you’re kind enough to link to us from your website, you can now add a suffix containing your client ID, which means that anyone who you referred placing an order will notify us, allowing us to attribute the sale back to you.

After that you get your referral gift, which is a choice of:

• A case of 6 bottles of quality wine, sourced from family-owned producers, from local wine merchant Reserve Wines.
• An ipod shuffle in your choice of colours.  Don’t worry we won’t have it engraved with any terse ‘thank you’ message!
• A £50 (including VAT) credit to your account.
• A £50 donation to the charity of your choice.

(we’ll email you to ask which you’d prefer).

Find out more details of our referral program.

Last week the world celebrated Social Media Day and Melbourne Server Hosting were invited to support the Manchester event at The Study in the Living Room.

The event focused on the impact which Twitter and Facebook (amongst others) has had on society and business. John Greenway from Manchester Airport spoke about how Twitter helped keep in touch with the public during the ash cloud days and heavy snowfall during December and January. There was also talks from Martine Alexander on how Twitter has helped promote her Styling business, Rick Guttridge on how it is used with PR, Chi-chi Ekweozor on promoting and using social media on her charitable project 7 wonders in 7 days, and finally Dom Hodgson on the pros and cons you should be aware of when tweeting to the masses…

Nigel and the rest of the team from Studio Skylab put in great effort to make sure the event was promoted and went without any hiccups with video links to similar set ups in Portugal and California (we even made ABC News that evening which you can view on our Facebook page ).

Chris Marsh,  Business Development Manager

We’re delighted to announce that we’ve been able to reduce the monthly charges of our recently launched UltraVault™ managed backup service.

Due to a very competitive licensing deal we’ve just signed with the software vendor, R1Soft, we can now offer managed backup for just £5 per month per server, or free if you’re a managed server customer.  Data stored on the backup server is charged at the low cost of £0.50 per GB per month.

Existing customers will be contacted by their account managers to arrange to have the rental charges reduced from their next invoices.

To find out more information about the service please see our UltraVault™ Managed Backup section or speak to your account manager today.   UltraVault™ is available to customers with virtual, dedicated or colocated servers, and customers with rackspace.

The Big Chip 2010 Awards are only a few days away and we’re getting excited!  This year we took a rest from entering any awards (having won the big green chip award last year), but we’re once again thrilled to be sponsoring the Best Application of Technology Award.  We’ll be there en masse with a number of our staff along with some customers to cheer on the award winners.

We’re obviously a good luck charm, as four of our clients are shortlisted for big chip awards!

• 11 Out Of 10 are up for best e-business project;
• KMP Digitata are nominated twice for best e-business project;
• Cahoona are up for best not-for-profit project, best use of visual design, best newcomer and the tasty website award;
• PushON are up for best use of search and best digital marketing campaign.

We obviously wish all our clients the best of luck (along with all the entrants of course)!

Chris Marsh
Business Development Manager

We’re pleased to welcome you to our new website, launched back in May.

We’re still making a lot of changes and tweaks to the content, including adding case studies and testimonials that some of our customers have been kind enough to send to us, but as you’ll see the new site reflects our new branding, and in fact our new name.

Since we were established in 2000, we’ve been known as ‘Melbourne Network Solutions’, (or just plain old ‘Melbourne’ to friends) which at the time reflected the wider range of services we offered.  Since we’ve only been operating datacentre and server hosting services for the past 5 years, we felt it was time to update our identity, and hence we changed not only our branding, but also our actual company name to ‘Melbourne Server Hosting’.  We hope you’re as pleased as we are with the fresh, clean look that the designers have created, which underpins the identity on our new site.

You’ll notice on our new site, we focus a lot on “ten reasons we’re a better hosting company“.  In a really over-crowded industry, we feel that what sets Melbourne apart from a lot of our competitors, is the fact we care about our customers, we look after our staff, and we provide an incredibly high level of service at an affordable price, and treat you like a human being in the process.

So when we came up with the ‘ten reasons we’re a better hosting company’ concept, we really wanted it to show where we’re a cut above the rest.  We felt it was so important, that we commissioned a series of short videos to be produced, and invited some of our customers in to talk about their experiences with Melbourne.

I have to say I was deeply touched by just how complimentary our customers were.  OK we were bribing them with a buffet lunch but I’m sure their comments were honest and really seemed to come from the heart.  It makes the whole thing so worthwhile to hear that our customers are genuinely this enthused about what we do.  It also teaches us that we’ve set ourselves some very high standards to maintain!

You can see the ten videos on each of the “ten reasons” pages.

Of course we’re very keen to hear feedback on our new site and branding, particularly from long-standing existing customers who’ve seen Melbourne grow over the years, so I’d welcome any comments, positive or negative!

Below are some of the pictures taken on the day of the filming of the videos.

Daniel Keighron-Foster, Managing Director