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July Newsletter
Dear Newsletter Subscriber
Welcome to the UKFast Newsletter.
There’s a lot going on this summer at UKFast, so I’ve distilled our selection of tips and news into five concise sections. In company news, we’re quite literally laying concrete plans this month, while the tech tip is on getting closer to your solution using careful monitoring.
As the marketing world truly embraces the internet, we keep you one step ahead by looking at the next big phenomenon, Wikis, and how you can best use them. While our spotlight falls on a client who is setting its social responsibilities as high as its sales targets.
The hot topic gives you an insight into online development from a host’s perspective as I take an anonymous snapshot of the client base and how it is growing to give you an indication of the net’s biggest movers and shakers.
As ever, please get in touch with any comments on this newsletter or with suggestions for future editions.
In this months issue
July@UKFast
You may have noticed UKFast in the news this month regarding some of our new data centre plans. We’ve already discussed the energy improvements on the server side that are helping to make our product more environmentally friendly. Now, we are putting into motion the longer term hosting plans that will allow us to sustain the needs of the UK’s online economy for years to come.
This month, we’ve announced a partnership with property developer Ask:Goodman and Manchester City Council to build a green Internet exchange and hosting facility using the latest techniques to minimize carbon emissions and reduce energy usage. The purpose-built facility will be sited in Central Park, East Manchester and aims to be operational in the second half of 2008.
To put this need in perspective, a recent report estimated the electricity used by Internet hosting facilities and data centres worldwide at 0.8% of total world electricity consumption. Experts have become increasingly concerned about the contribution of these centres – which are the backbone of the Internet - to climate change.
This new development is the first in a series of data centre projects that all fall under the Project32 banner. It’s our intention to be able to offer the high level of performance you are used to within sustainable environments that secure your future online and add strength to the UK’s online business structure. We’ll keep you informed as we have more news on this.
The Research and Development team has been consolidating its many client area improvements this month. To make it easy for you to find out what is new in your client area we have created an updates page, which details each new innovation, where you can find it and how you can use it to further advance the performance of your solution with us.
We are also pleased to be announcing client achievements once again in the newsletter. The UK’s and probably the world’s favourite Science podcast, The Naked Scientists, is once again up for some gongs in the global Podcast Awards. This year they are shortlisted for the Best Produced Podcast and the Best Science/Technology Show. The awards work by public vote so please help us to bring the accolades home to the UK. Vote for the fantastic guys from Cambridge who strip science bare every week!
In addition, we’d like to congratulate the team at Historic Futures whose product myString was featured in our Spotlight last year. The supply chain traceability solution has been a huge hit, with Blue Chips right down to SMEs across the world signing up to offer their customers a history of their products. It’s great to hear the success stories. Please keep them coming.
Monitoring to stay ahead
This month’s tip follows on from our announcement earlier this year of CTmonitoring, one of our great in-house software solutions for monitoring server performance.
Measuring and monitoring how your server is performing is a must for any server operator. It's no good knowing after your server has crashed that you were using up all of your available memory and swap, or that the code change you've just made has increased CPU usage by another 5% during your busy periods.
Our Capacity Threshold Monitoring system allows you to do just this, monitor and measure various aspects of your server resources and get alerted to any problems before they occur. We’ve listened to your feedback and you’re hungry to be proactive with your solutions. CTmonitoring gives you a higher level of control and can even help you to identify potential hacker attacks.
The system can be configured to monitor various aspects of your server’s performance as chosen by you and you can also set the perimeters of the monitoring so that you are alerted only at times that represent a specific change in usage as preferred. For more details, please contact your account manager, whose details can be found in your client area.
Work wonders with wikis
A wiki is a collaborative website which can be directly edited by anyone with access to it, the most famous being Wikipedia. Ward Cunningham, developed the very first wiki in 1995 and called it WikiWikiWeb. ‘Wiki’ is Hawaiian for ‘fast’.
Wikis can be used for all sorts of purposes from building a community enthusiastic about a single topic for example the outdoors – WikiOutdoors to creating a worldwide travel guide - Wikitravel.
So how can wikis help your business?
Training wikis:
Training wikis can be used internally to build the skill set of staff as your company grows. You can easily store information so new methods of working and ideas for future projects are logged and made accessible to all employees. Further down the line you have created a wealth of material that can make its way online – and in online terms, content is king.
Using other people’s wikis:
Add your own entry to existing wikis which focus on your industry, creating inbound links and enhancing your search engine ranking. Alternatively, there may already be wikis out there with entries about your company. Editing these ensures all your details are correct and up to date.
Creating your own wiki:
Having your own wiki brings customers into your company culture, and in doing so, creates a valuable community of advocates for your brand. Amazon has created its own collaborative wiki called ‘Amapedia’, which lets customers write reviews related to the products they like the most, thus generating content to boost their brand.
Wikis are organic and for yours to be successful you have to give up some control. They grow and change as users add and edit content. This means that as a wiki owner you must remain vigilant.
Wikis are fast becoming the next must-have communications tool, so why not experiment and find out how they can help you.
Printerland - community investor
A few months ago we talked about corporate social responsibility and how it enhances corporate value and builds positive relationships with stakeholders. This month we’re highlighting a past UKFast Internet Awards winner placing community right up there with sales.
Printerland (LINK), a reseller of office printers is leading the way when it comes to considering the economic, social and environmental impact of its activities. The company celebrates success by giving back environmentally and socially. Most recently, after winning a national Oki reseller award Printerland responded by building sustainable homes in underdeveloped townships in South Africa.
Each time Printerland meets one of its ambitious targets, the team launches a new project either locally or globally. James Kight, joint managing director at Printerland looks for programmes that will have a positive impact on local communities wherever they are.
“We hope to show the positive social impact businesses can make through investment and action, creating a model that other companies can embrace,” he says. “Ongoing projects in the UK are mixed with one off ventures in other parts of the world.”
Printerland’s Rugby Youth Programme aims to improve the quality of children’s lives in local communities. The scheme promotes the need for children to live healthy, balanced and active lives as well as improving sporting skills at grassroots level. Since its launch, the programme has benefited hundreds of children from schools across the North West.
As well as contributing to local communities, Printerland has set its sights on tackling poverty housing on a global scale. A recent visit to South Africa involved the team sponsoring and taking part in “Habitat for Humanity”, a project which helped change the lives of twenty families in a Cape Town township.
We’d like to congratulate Printerland and ask you to let us know what you are doing within your community and beyond so that we can promote your endeavours.
For more information visit on Printerland, please visit their website - www.printerland.co.uk
The continued growth of the British Net
As the first choice hosting provider for many UK businesses, our statistics offer a very valuable view of the Internet as an industry. In July, each year, I take some time to analyse and draw interesting observations about the business economy in the UK. So this month I’m sharing the insight with you.
The best news is that the net continues to grow at a terrific rate and the vast majority of businesses are improving their online fortunes. We’re witnessing firsthand the emergence of new business forms, the continued growth of SMEs as they claw back market share from the blue chips and the consolidation of the dominant sectors.
Geographically, the areas of the UK (aside from the South East) that are building their online presence most consistently are the South West and the North West. Year on year both regions perform strongly but unsurprisingly it is London and the South East that leads the SME revolution, with 40 per cent of our new dedicated server clients coming from in and around the capital.
The first half of 2007 has also seen a record number of existing clients growing their internet presences by bolting additional servers into their solutions and strengthening their online capabilities. The sectors that are enjoying this kind of growth include e-learning, travel and finance. It’s great to see clients who’ve grown with us over the years reaching the level where they need sophisticated enterprise solutions.
On this subject, our enterprise clients continue to increase and achieve incredible things online. Accounting for around ten percent of new clients, they are really investing in the online future and some key areas in this bracket include retail, gaming and social communities.
One of the biggest growth areas, developing exponentially in the last year is environmental issues. In parallel with the escalation in awareness of climate change and other green issues, the net has seen an explosion of eco-websites across all sectors.
Congratulations to everyone helping to build the UK’s online economy. It’s great to see that companies across the UK are putting online at the heart of their business and reaping the benefits.
We always enjoy hearing about client success and are happy to publicise it in the newsletter. If you’d like to let us know more about your business, please email me.
Please get in touch with me if you would like more information on any of the articles mentioned above.
Until next time, I hope the summer season (when it finally arrives) continues to be profitable and 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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