1895 business card

I’m referring of course to our business cards: little rectangles of information that have been existed probably since Gutenberg was trying to sell his presses in the 14th century. I suspect the format has changed little too; this 1895 example bears a striking resemblance to some designs I’ve seen just recently.

But, just what is the purpose of a business card?
I suppose that during organised “networking” events they’re a part of the theatre practised during formal introductions. A well-designed business card should also act as an aide-memoir.

And given the fact that we’re a digital business, I’ve been wondering just how useful business cards really are? For me, they’re often bland, forgettable and filed away in a part of my drawer I rarely check. It doesn’t help that cards which try to “stand out of the crowd” often end up being examples of awkward “corporate quirk” or suffer from the deployment of gimmicks like QR codes.

At many of the events that I personally attend, a business card is rarely useful. Last week, I stuck my head into Northern Digitals which, to be honest, I go along to as a social event. A lot of my friends work in digital or creative industries and enjoy a pint or two. And a lot of our clients do as well. But because it’s such a social place, I always get chatting with someone new that’s turned up and want to keep in touch with them after the event.

But for me, rather than swapping a piece of paper, the best way to keep in touch is by exchanging Twitter usernames. I almost always follow new people that I’ve met in real life and it’s a far more interesting and useful way to keep in touch with someone you might end up doing business with. It also means you can dispense with the empty pleasantries associated with those staid post-networking emails and work with someone as a partner almost immediately.

This is just my opinion; I know many feel business cards still have a place in the right situation. But given the amount spent on printing cards and the impact that has on the environment, I’m unconvinced that they offer better value for me personally than simply swapping Twitter accounts with someone I meet over a pint. Others seem to agree. But, if we get the design of our new ones right, you might see me try them out…

What do you think? Do you have any examples of killer business cards or have you found you’ve done more business through your Twitter account? Drop a comment below or tweet us @MelbourneHost.

Josh R, Brand Manager, Serverlove.

The London Internet Exchange (LINX) suffered a major failure on Wednesday afternoon, leading to a significant slowdown of UK traffic.  LINX acts as a main peering point for UK ISPs, allowing them to exchange traffic directly, which is cheaper than sending it via transit carriers. LINX is fairly pivotal for UK Internet traffic, and this was shown quite clearly by how far-reaching the effects were when it failed.  The impact is visible in LINX’s 24-hour status graph.  To be fair, LINX is pretty reliable, so this isn’t an issue that crops up very often.

Over the last 48 hours, we’ve re-routed our traffic to avoid LINX.  This is because we keep spare capacity in place for eventualities like this.  Some ISPs don’t purchase extra capacity so have been forced to leave their LINX connection in-place causing slow service or unavailability for their customers.

Melbourne has always maintained that there’s too much reliance on London in the UK’s Internet industry.  It’s frightening how much of the UK traffic passes across LINX (estimates are between 70 and 95 percent of all UK traffic).  The design principals of the Internet obviously mean re-routing of traffic if a failure of any node occurs, but obviously if so much of the UK’s trafic passes through one point, it’s hard to re-route it without side-effects.

We’ve always sought to take advantage of our Manchester location in terms of resiliency.  We try to keep as much Internet traffic out of London as possible; in this respect we peer with other ISPs in Manchester wherever possible, so for example, customers will see traffic headed for Virgin, Microsoft, the BBC and some other notable providers, be handed over in Manchester, avoiding London completely.  To this end, we see approximately 20% of our traffic handed over in Manchester.

We’ve taken it one step further though, ensuring that we have connectivity that leaves the UK, without going back via London.  In this respect two of our three main bandwidth providers, Tiscali and Cogent, have routes leaving the UK which avoid London.  Tiscali have fibre leaving the UK at Southport which goes via Dublin and then on to the US, and a separate route to Paris.  Cogent have just brought online a route to Paris which avoids London and will next year bring online a route to Amsterdam which leaves the UK through Hull.

The above means in the event of a London-wide failure, Melbourne’s services would still be accessible to a world-wide audience.

Daniel Keighron-Foster, Technical Director. ]]> http://www.melbourne.co.uk/blog/2009/12/11/linx-london-internet-exchange-failure/feed/ 0 http://www.melbourne.co.uk/blog/2009/11/04/a-brief-word-on-honesty/ http://www.melbourne.co.uk/blog/2009/11/04/a-brief-word-on-honesty/#comments Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:18:53 +0000 Daniel Keighron-Foster http://www.melbourne.co.uk/blog/?p=154

Continue reading A brief word on honesty >

It was a fantastic night.  As we near completion of our new data centre we wanted to generate more awareness of what Melbourne is and what we can offer and this was the perfect result.

We have long worked with the digital media sector, but naturally we want to make more contacts within the industry.

The Big Green Chip award recognises businesses that have made an active and notable contribution to reducing their carbon footprint in their organisation or community.  So by winning in front of a large and well-connected digital media audience was simply magnificent.

Our submission included our work with:

• Installing cool aisle containment and blanking plates to contain cold air
• The switch to low-power servers for all our dedicated servers, which use approximately 25% less power than their predecessors
• The adoption of highly efficient UPS systems
• Our Virtualisation product UltraCloud, which drastically reduces the amount of power required for servers.

Our clients and friends AdInsight, who sat with us, also picked up the award for Best Newcomer, which made it an even more special night for us.

If you want to know more about our green initiatives please do not hesitate to get in touch.

And before I go we are at the ISPA awards and have been nominated for Best Dedicated Hosting.  If you are at the awards on the 9th July stop by and say, “hello.”  Hopefully we’ll still be coherant at that point.

Daniel Foster, Technical Director.

The Big Chips is the premier digital media awards in the North West of England.

It is a real bonus for the team and Melbourne. Of course the extra profile and recognition, especially if we win, will be fantastic.

The key thing is that it shows that we take the views of our clients to heart and undertake investment and action to satisfy their requirements.

Being green is a buzzword but for many clients and prospective clients our contribution to being greener is taken very seriously: it has real sway in the decision making process.

In order to ensure we are doing as much as we can we have taken initiatives such as switching (Jan 2008) to low power servers on all dedicated servers, highly efficient cooling systems and cool aisle containment.

So please before making your decision feel free to ask about how we are doing our part.

Our environmental policy document and a full list of our green initiatives is available online, please take a look. See you at the awards!

Steven Allan

It’s quite amazing that a company can claim service standard improvement as a virtue of having staff thousands of miles away from a) their customer base, and b) their physical server operations.

We’ve always been keen on getting the people who answer your tech support calls as close to your server(s) as possible.

Our UltraSupport™ charter details this, but essentially, we’ve abolished first line support, so that when you phone us (and incidentally, don’t have to queue to speak to someone), the person taking your call has the training and authority to handle approximately 90% of the calls we get.

We find that this results in superior customer service, and as such, the concept of offshoring this critical part of our service, to be completely unthinkable.

Some of the main findings from the report include:

3.6Mbit/s was the average speed received by panel members tested; consumers on the most popular broadband headline speed package, up to 8Mbit/s, received an average actual throughput speed of 3.6Mbit/s; and 83 per cent of consumers say that they are satisfied with their broadband service.

However, over a quarter of consumers claim that the speeds they receive are not what they expected when they signed up to their broadband service.

We reckon the report is over-simplistic and potentially misleading as consumers don’t necessarily understand the concept of contention, however the service providers don’t go out of their way to explain the underlying technologies and concepts. Consumers expect broadband to be always-on and to run at the maximum quoted speed at all times. This is obviously not in line with reality, and is the differentiator between DSL and more expensive leased line services.

The full Ofcom report can be found here.

Customers may notice higher latency and/or connectivity issues to the Middle East and Asia.

More details at BBC News Website