Here’s a quick round-up of what’s been happening lately…

New domain names and .london

The .london domain name is now available for pre-registration (e.g. yourname.london instead of yourname.co.uk), with the new top-level domain proving popular with businesses. The pre-registration rules mean first priority goes to those with trademarks and, secondly, to those based in London.

Dot-London-domain-name-advertIf you’re interested in a .london domain name, please contact us and we’ll be able to handle the pre-registration process for you and secure your choice of name.

As well as .london, many hundreds of new domain name extensions are also now launching. These include:

  • .ltd
  • .company
  • .directory
  • .photo
  • .accountant
  • .hotel
  • … and many, many more!

If you are interested in securing a domain name that stands out for your business, or are looking to protect your brand name, then let us know and we can go through the options available.

Four Weeks of Improvements for our Customers

4 Weeks of ImprovementsFor our web hosting customers and to coincide with our birthday in May, we launched “Four Weeks of Improvements” to say thank you and show our clients that we offer so much more than most other web design / hosting companies.

Week 1 was about our latest Content Management System upgrade and the work we do several times a year to keep our customers’ websites running in top condition.

Week 2 was the launch of our new cloud hosting platform, which has brought new levels of reliability and performance to our customers’ websites. It’s a bit technical, but trust us – this is something that really will make a difference. In fact, throughout April and May, our main server recorded an uptime of 100.00% – a very impressive score! We hear of so many other hosting companies that have regular downtime and that’s just seen as the norm. That’s not our approach and we strongly believe in offering our customers the best service, so we’ve made this large investment without charging a penny more for our hosting plans!

Week 3 was the introduction of our new and improved visitor analytics service for our customers, which we’re implementing free-of-charge. This is a major step forward compared to the visitor stats software used previously. Take a look at the screenshots!

And Week 4 is a major free upgrade for our Microsoft Exchange customers (see below), along with a special introductory offer for those interested in having business-grade email and calendar hosting – see the email from us for more info.

Free email upgrade for Microsoft Exchange users

If you’re using our advanced Microsoft Exchange account for your email and calendars, we’re upgrading these from 10GB to a huge 30GB capacity – and at no extra charge! The process will be complete in about a fortnight’s time (mid-June).

Interested in a more powerful email solution? Our Exchange account comes with a free copy of Outlook 2013, synchronises your calendar across all your devices, and gets delivered to your computer or smartphone instantly (called “push email”). Get in touch if you would like to find out more!

Password security

You’ve probably read about the Heartbleed vulnerability on the internet, which is a serious bug that means hackers could gain access to people’s passwords. Some websites have forced their users to change their passwords.

Our servers and systems were not vulnerable to this Heartbleed threat, however we strongly recommend our web hosting customers:

  • Use a unique password for your website CMS access (a password that isn’t used for any other accounts on the internet).
  • Use a unique password for your email accounts.
  • Use strong passwords that include lowercase and uppercase letters, numbers and symbols, which will make it harder for brute force (dictionary) attacks to try to guess your password.

If you are not already doing this, we highly recommend you change your CMS password. You can do this by logging-in to your CMS and clicking on ‘Profile’. For your email accounts, you can change your password by going to the webmail area and clicking on the ‘Change Password’ link.