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August Newsletter
Dear Newsletter Subscriber
Welcome to the UKFast Newsletter.
The UKFast Internet Awards are now open. It’s time to show your online quality and with seven categories this year, including a brand new Best Newcomer award, we’re looking forward to discovering the cream of the UKFast network. There’s more on this in the Company news.
In our top tips section, Neil Lathwood looks at secure working on the technical side while our marketing team brings you the latest on getting the most out of online video advertising.
Our spotlight this month covers Halogen and in particular client Dan Innes and his Big Four Challenge. Dan has been cycling, swimming and running many, many miles to raise money for the Alzheimer’s Research Trust. We finish with a hot topic on censorship and whose responsibility it is to regulate the Internet.
As ever, please get in touch with any comments on this newsletter or with suggestions for future editions.
In this months issue
August@UKFast
It’s been a great month for us at UKFast. The network team has just opened a brand new suite at MANOC2, while back in the R&D office our programmers have put live the new bandwidth graphs section in your client area. You can now see your bandwidth usage through the Services tab by clicking on a chosen server and scrolling down through the details.
Over the next month we will be adding further functionality to your admin control panel including the opportunity to view Capacity Threshold charts and enable and disable server performance monitoring. With all this in the pipeline, our attention now turns to the UKFast Internet Awards.
Entering their third year, our network awards are bigger and better than ever with thousands of websites all with a chance of taking a coveted trophy home. As a bonus for each nominee we will be running a preliminary server audit on every entry and will make this available to you free of charge once the judging process is complete.
This year there are seven awards up for grabs and here are the categories:
Best Newcomer –If your site is less than 12 months old and destined to join the likes of Lastminute.com, Amazon and Facebook in the annals of internet history then this award is for you.
Best Web Design – we’re looking for eye catching and effective designs that seriously attract the target market and encapsulate a company’s ethos.
Best Web Functionality – does your site have a track record for turning visitors into clients? If navigational mastery’s your thing, you’ve a good chance of success here.
Best Community Site – including social networking, this award recognises websites that bring people together with a common goal. Previous winners have been dating and music websites.
Best E-commerce Site – With over £4bn spent on the internet in July, if you’ve got a product you should be selling it online. This is often one of the most competitive categories in the awards, so we have split it in two…
Best Enterprise E-commerce Site – An award for the very serious online businesses using three or more servers to power a site that keeps the money rolling in 24/7.
Internet Innovator – The entrepreneur who is changing the shape of the web and putting their mark on it in virtual indelible pen! There are many of you on the network and previous winners have gone on to great things...
As ever, entering is very simple and takes less than 5 minutes. They’re only open to clients so you need to log in and answer one specific question geared towards the award you choose. You are of course, allowed to enter more than one award – if you’re eligible you can enter them all! The deadline for entries is Friday 5 October 2007.
Best of luck. Why not do it now. Here’s the link again – UKFast Internet Awards.
Secure server maintenance
This month we’re looking at good working practices in regard to server maintenance and Neil’s top tip is about working on your server securely.
The majority of server administrators will always login under the Administrator account (for Windows servers) or the root account (for Linux servers) and perform routine maintenance or checks of the server. Doing this means that any changes or actions that are made under these accounts could result in accidental data loss or configuration changes causing loss of service.
It is recommended that additional accounts are created for staff/developers to access the server in the same manner however this will mean that mistakes on a live environment won't be as critical or would be denied due to lack of permission. If a user then needs to make a change or upgrade, they can still perform these same tasks by providing the Administrator or root password.
You can also take this a step further on Linux servers and configure your SSH server to deny access to the root user by default which will then mean that you require a standard account to first gain access and then su - to root level afterwards.
Advertising with online television
Last month was the wettest July ever recorded in UKFast history. Figures have just revealed that during this time online shopping sales almost doubled to hit a record high. In line with this, the popularity of IPTV has also risen and smart companies are taking advantage of this new media format using online television advertising.
How can internet television advertising be useful for your business?
Localisation
Because of the in-built addressability of IP, your IPTV adverts can target viewers by location, time of day, viewing habits or even individual computer screens within a single household.
IPTV advertising is much more personalised. Whilst viewers are watching the same content, the ads that are played out to them can be varied according to demographics, shopping habits and personal preferences, so that advertising becomes a lot more relevant and engaging. Feedback
Viewer responses to advertisements can be collected - in real-time if desired – providing you with valuable feedback. You can monitor accurately who is watching what ads, when and for how long, thus maximising your campaign efficiency.
Internet users are more likely to click through to a full advert than with traditional online formats and with the introduction of 4oD (Four on demand), BBC iplayer, Joost and InVideo on You Tube, the potential for advertising with online television is well worth exploring for any business.
Dan’s Big Four Challenge
Halogen has been a great client of UKFast’s for a long time. They provide strategic marketing communications services to property companies, investors and developers as well as the public sector. Director Daniel Innes took on his Big 4 Challenge this summer to raise money for the Alzheimer’s Research Trust and we were on hand to cheer him on.
Throughout his challenge, involving triathlons and cycling Etapes, Dan updated us on his progress. You can read his full diary on the UKFast sponsorship pages but for now here’s a summary of his venture:
The King Sturge property triathlon at Dorney - The (750m) swim was my first in open water, and I seemed to keep veering off to the right (my tracking was off!) Once I was back on track I’d lost a bit of ground, but finished as best I could to start on the bike.
Once underway, zipping four times around the rowing lake, I had a bit of a battle with one guy who always overtook me at exactly the same place on the headwind straight, but then I always returned the compliment on the tailwind straight. The run to the finish has never been a strongpoint of mine, and I just wanted to get it all over with as quickly as possible. My how it hurt! Final time 1hour 19minutes.
The British Etape du Tour from Greenwich to Canterbury - We set out at just after 7am, and steadily took on the 193 km. I’d joined my fellow ‘Exiles’ cycling friends, but between the group of 5 of us, a mixture of punctures, chain breaks and food/water stops meant our overall time for the day was 7 hours 53 minutes – a little slower than anticipated, and about 3 hours slower than the professionals! Nevertheless, a long day in the saddle!
The French Etape -Over 8,000 of us lined up before dawn and streamed out of Foix in the Pyrenees towards our first climb of the day. It was easy to jump into a peleton on the downhill but it is on the up hills where the race is won and lost. Five huge climbs make this Etape the hardest ever.
The ascent of the Port de Bales was probably the worst - a constant 2 hour slog of hairpin after hairpin. My only real problem this time around was cramp in my left leg up the third and fourth climb, but plenty of electrolyte (salts) drink, energy bars and a couple of quick stretches and I was back on my way.
By the time I reached the Col de Peyresourd – I was in a partly euphoric state. I finally made it down into Loudenveille, 196kms later, and crossed the line in 9 hours 49 minutes – somewhere in the top 2,000.
The London Triathlon - The swim was pretty brutal – it was 1500 metres in 27’:54”. Transition into the bike was a torrid affair but everything went well here and I had a pretty fast session – 1hr 04’06”.
Then came the awful bit. No, REALLY awful. I pulled on my running shoes and just felt terrible. As I ran out of the Excel centre into the sunshine, I immediately felt strange, and soon realised that I was going to be a long long time over the 10k.
All in all, my finishing time for my first Olympic-distance triathlon was 2 hours 36 minutes and 8 seconds. Thank you so much if you’ve sponsored and helped me to well and truly smash my £2,000 target. Sponsors have been an inspiration to me, and were certainly in my mind over those last 10k! – THANK YOU!!!
Dan has so far raised £2,745 for the Alzheimer’s Research Trust which is the UK's leading charity for research into Alzheimer's disease and related dementias. The charity also provides free information on dementia and the treatments available.
Read his full diary on the UKFast site
If you too are pushing yourself to the limit for a good cause please do let us know about it. Email me at jonathan.bowers@ukfast.net and let us help you spread the word.
Joining the Great Firewall of China
The question of internet censorship and regulation is particularly topical this month. Yahoo! is facing legal action from human rights group The World Organisation, accused of bowing down to Chinese authorities and providing information on search users that has in part led to their arrest and incarceration.
At the same time, back in the UK, the Conservative party’s plans to regulate content for the UK’s youth have been met with firm criticism by ‘founding father’ of the internet Vint Cerf.
Cerf who now works for web heavyweight Google as a ‘Net Evangelist’ developed some of the protocols that the web is built upon. He believes the web should remain a reflection of society and any problems it reveals should be regulated within society and not through an online framework.
Where the Conservatives advocate a centrally controlled Internet, Cerf recommends that any control comes from the edges of the net – in the hands of the users themselves to choose what they might view and censor. With this in mind, let’s look at the world’s biggest net censors. According to Reporters Sans Frontièrs there are thirteen internet ‘black holes’.
Europe is responsible for only one of the offenders and that’s Belarus. The government has a monopoly on all telecommunications and has this month set up a working committee to restrict online free expression. The Americas also have a single entry in the list and unsurprisingly it’s Cuba where only two per cent of the population have internet access and the authorities blame the US embargo for the low number of users.
Africa is home to two black hole nations; Tunisia and Egypt. While the Egyptian government do not filter out many websites they take an extreme line on cyber dissidents with bloggers being arrested and held for months at a time. Tunisia might have hosted the 2005 WSIS summit on the Internet’s future but it is one of the most repressive online nations in the world with all cyber café’s state controlled and most web content under close police supervision.
As you might expect Asia is the major continent involved. In the East, Burma leads China and Vietnam, where, in café’s the computers execute a screen grab every five minutes to keep track of user habits. North Korea continues to be the internets largest black hole where only a handful of officials have a connection rented from China and the domain name .nk has not yet been launched.
The other five nations all hail from the Middle East. Iran, Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan are renowned for filtering access to websites, while Syria takes a lead on imprisoning cyber dissidents and Turkmenistan is the region's North Korea with only one per cent of citizens online and a tight control on the media and information.
We’re very lucky in the western world that any debates about control of the net tend to be about regulation rather than censorship. I’d like to know your thoughts on regulating the net. We’ve talked about the ISP’s role within this debate before. Do you think that organisations like UKFast should be taking a lead? Or perhaps the government themselves should issue guidelines in the country? Is it best left up to individuals to decide what can and can’t be viewed online? Email me your thoughts and we can follow this up with a more local debate on regulation.
Please get in touch with me if you would like more information on any of the articles mentioned above.
Until next time, I hope business booms and you are getting a share of the consumer online spend. I look forward to speaking to you at some point soon.
Best wishes,
Jonathan
For more information on the range of UKFast products and services go to http://www.ukfast.net
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