Dan is on the phone. 24/7. And the iPad. And the MacBook.

Good news everyone! I’m pleased to announce that we now have 24/7 on-site support!

We’ve always had technical staff available 24 hours a day for emergency support requests, but now we have staff working on-site at our Manchester datacentres at all hours of the night and day.

Not only does this mean we can offer an even better service outside of office hours – but also that we’re ditching all out-of-hours callout charges!

You can get straight through to the on-site staff any time by calling our support number, 0161 232 0125 (freephone: 0800 915 8772) or by raising a ticket via our support centre as usual.

Over the next week, we’ll detail the specifics of how this affects each of our services by email to our customers, but in the meantime if you have any questions please contact your account manager (or drop a comment below)

Daniel Keighron-Foster

Our overriding goal at Serverlove is to make “cloud servers you’ll love!”. That’s not just marketing-speak – we mean it. So that’s why we’ve constantly been listening to your feedback and, over the last few months, planning this new update…

Read more about the new features coming to the Serverlove control panel at the Serverlove blog.

Following the release of CentOS 6.2 in late December 2011, you can now deploy cloud servers running the latest version of this popular Linux distribution in just a few seconds

CentOS 6.2 is based on the upstream release EL 6.2 and includes packages from all variants. Read the full release notes.

Importantly. CentOS 6.2 extends ‘end of life’ to November 2017, meaning it will continue to receive updates some three years beyond the previous version. CentOS 5.7 will stop receiving updates in May 2014.

If you’re not yet using Serverlove and interested in trying out a cloud server with CentOS 6.2, sign-up for a free trial now.

ISO 27001, which relates to information security demonstrates our commitment to providing a high quality and secure service to our clients.

Should you require any further information please contact your account manager who will relay your query to our information security officer.

What is ISO 27001?

ISO 27001 (formally known as ISO/IEC 27001:2005) is a specification for an information security management system (ISMS). An ISMS is a framework of policies and procedures that includes all legal, physical and technical controls involved in an organisation’s information risk management processes.

According to its documentation, ISO 27001 was developed to “provide a model for establishing, implementing, operating, monitoring, reviewing, maintaining and improving an information security management system.”

More information on the standard is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_27001

[Edit]

A customer emailed us to point out that this does read a little like:

“friendly knowledgable hosting company takes final steps towards becoming faceless corporation”

I suppose the subject matter doesn’t lend itself very well to Melbourne’s usual friendly, chatty communication style to which you’ve become accustomed.  Rest assured that whilst we take data security very seriously (as achieving this standard shows) we’re still the same loving, caring bunch that we always were

Given that, we were interested to hear our customer Paul Stokes of The Daily Mash speak at last week’s #smc_mcr (Social Media Cafe) in Manchester. The Daily Mash is the UK’s “leading satirical news website” and is perhaps not suitable for readers of a nervous disposition. If you’ve heard of The Onion, you could say it’s a sort of British alternative and, by Paul’s own admission, attempts to be as outrageous and extreme as possible when it comes to satire and parody. After all, this, he says, is the key to avoiding litigation; the parody must be obvious to the reasonable person.

And the fact that they pride themselves on being “anti” social media is something of an enigma. But nonetheless, it works perfectly well for them. Despite being users of Twitter and Facebook – which they describe as their “free marketing tool” – The Daily Mash have no interest in engagement or conversation, which by accepted wisdom is seen a key part of any social media strategy.

The fact is though that they win on their content. Despite – or rather, because of – eyebrow-raising content, readers keep coming back day after day, enjoying the stories and sharing it across their networks of their own volition.

I guess this is a really a reminder that content is all important. You can share and engage and chit-chat as much as you want on social media, but if you’re just a lot of hot air, then maintaining those conversations or converting them into your desired outcome (be it sales, or otherwise) will be a challenge.

Here’s a documentary video about the thinking behind it:

We’re now based at Lovell House on the Manchester Technopark, just across the road from our datacentre facilities at Turing House and Reynolds House. So drop in for a cuppa and we’ll try to beat you at pool!

View Lovell House in a larger map

So what’s the problem? On the face of it, the program encourages the best of British young entrepreneurs to compete for an investment from one of the UK’s top business moguls.

However, when you start to look at the details, you’ll see that the program is driven by what I would consider to be some of the less desirable and possibly out-dated virtues of business. Profit is king here, and extreme short-termism.

This leads to, in my opinion, the team with the inferior idea winning each week’s task and the idea which might have longer term success is torn to pieces in a fierce blame-culture exercise.

Even within the winning team, candidates in ‘the process’ are encouraged to pick faults in each other and generally act in a pretty abysmal way towards each other.

I’m aware that this is turning into a bit of a rant, but in summary I think that this program is ethically falling quite short of the mark and encouraging would-be young entrepreneurs to exhibit what I consider to be pretty negative traits.

Daniel Keighron-Foster
Managing Director

Chris, Glenn and Gavin represent "Team Mowbourne"!

By Gavin Upsall, datacentre engineer

The end is neigh for my good friend and companion ‘Dave’. He was a young caterpillar trying to grow for a good cause, we had some laughs, we had some lows, we had some dramas, but we have been as one for the month of November.

I will miss the warmth he has given my upper lip and the tickles he gave to my nose. Strangers stared and laughed but they could never understand the unique bond between a man and his mo and what it means to have a friend like ‘Dave’ with you at all time… well until tomorrow morning that is!!!

A huge thanks to our impressive Team Mowbourne, Chris Ashcroft, Gavin Upsall, Glenn Absalom and Al Macleod (not pictured). You can still help raise money to support prostate cancer and testicular cancer initiatives by donating now.

But my favourite one is an old classic from the early days of YouTube.

What makes all these videos shareable? Why do I forward them round to my colleagues over email, Twitter or instant messaging?

As Geth from Young said at last night’s Feed, the key to a making someone share a good piece of content is for it to elicit an emotional response. Whether it makes you laugh, cry or – in the case of the Picard video – simply feel bemused at the ultimate cultish geekyness, it has to do that to make someone even think about sharing it with their friends.

And that really is it. “Viral marketing” is not a panacea, nor is it something for which there’s a secret formula. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that they term “viral marketing” is an opportunistic branding of a natural phenomenon. Dan Carrol expands on this in his guest post for The Feed last week.

Content is key, always has been and always will. None of the videos I’ve linked above intrinsically sell a product – but they’re bloody funny. Anyone producing content that they want people to share is going to have to compete with these and more. Take a look at James Webb’s blog post (and inevitable associated infographic!) about the most watched and searched for terms on YouTube. With so much high-quality – and low-humour content – there’s no way that anyone can guarantee that something can “go viral”. However, latching onto the (trends of the day can definitely help users discover and subsequently share your content if it’s any good.

In short, the best way to harness the viral effect is to make something special that gets you thinking and make sure it gets found by users. Anyone that tries to sell you a “viral marketing campaign” is selling you snake oil.

Rajesh Joshi

With RHEL you’re buying into nearly two decades worth of GNU/Linux experience, and with all that experience comes unparalleled support and top-quality user experience.  Your server will gain access to the Red Hat Network (RHN), which allows it swift access to critical security updates, something which systems derived from RHEL have to wait a little longer for.  Using RHEL allows us to call on Red Hat Support if you ever experience any issues with the operating system, meaning that the guys who made your chosen operating system are available to assist with any issues or queries.  We’re big fans of community driven support, but nobody can deny that it’s always nice to have the team behind a product ready and willing to help out if something goes wrong.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the preference of many businesses across the world, so we thought it time that we made it part of our offering to you lot.  After all, variety is the spice of life!

Chris Merrett