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Dear Newsletter Subscriber,

Welcome to February's Websight. Continuing our round tables this month, we held our latest industry discussion on the future of online news. With Rupert Murdoch's paid-for model central to the debate we invited experts from the North West's media community to discuss monetising content online.

Sharing our findings in our 'expert opinion' section, we look at how online communities are enabling news providers to compete on the internet.

In addition to our 'news', this month our 'spotlight' focuses on our partner Funky Pigeon. Having taken its online personalised gift service to the next level with a fresh face and the latest new coating technology, Bristol-based Split Ink Studio has seen a dramatic increase in traffic with its world ranking changing from 1.7million to just 253,000.

Also this month, we look at the benefits of Intelligent Backup in 'enhance your solution'.

Happy reading!

Best regards,

The team at UKFast

• UKFast news: News Corporation Encouraged to Offer Niche Content
- Providing niche content will encourage readers to bypass pay walls according to an online news round table debate.
• UKFast news: UKFast Launches New SafeDNS Solution
- After over a year in development, UKFast, the UK's Best Hosting Provider, has unveiled its new DNS platform.
• UKFast blog - Ensuring Information Security - Get rid of the padlock idea
- Information is a weapon, modern Generals will tell you this and confess that in relation to logical information and the world wide web, it provides the greatest of all strategic vulnerabilities to a first world country

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• Facebook and Twitter use up by 82 per cent
- We're spending a lot more time tweeting and Facebooking, says Nielsen.
• Microsoft IE loses ground to Google Chrome
- Recent market share statistics deliver good and bad news for Microsoft.
• IT industry to return to growth globally this year
- The global IT industry is likely to come out of recession in 2010 with public sector and utility spending being the recovery's chief driver, according to a report from Pierre Audoin Consultants.

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If you use online applications for email, databases, websites or e-commerce it means that your dedicated server solution deals with and stores vital information every single day. So, with a global focus on data protection, we thought it would be useful to discuss intelligent backup in this month's enhance your solution section.

In an ideal world, dedicated backup would think for itself. In working towards this, we have taken an intelligent approach to the process of backup.

On top of weekly full system state server backup we operate a daily incremental server backup that includes your system state. However, what makes intelligent backup unique is the burstable bandwidth quota and the option to customise the managed backup process.

The standard backup quota is 50GB and UKFast allows this quota to burst to 200GB. We are enabling you to actually use 300 per cent more space than your quota. The caveat is that your usage MUST fall below 50GB once in any 14 day period.

Should your total usage not fall below this 50GB limit in any given 14 day period, your backups will fail and it will no longer be possible to restore your data. In this situation, your Account Manager will contact you to discuss using our customised backup options.

You can choose a time that suits your server usage - if your quietest time is 4pm, then that's when we'll run your backups.

We'll also help you to customise your backups to only include the relevant files and folders, which offers several benefits; You will be able to backup ALL files which YOU consider to be mission critical, the time taken to complete a backup is significantly reduced so any impact on your server is minimised, and the time to restore data is significantly reduced. The quicker data can be restored to your server, should an incident occur, the sooner you will be online and fully functional.

• Tell UKFast what time is best for you for backups to run to reduce the impact on your server

• Nominate which specific folders and files you wanted to be backed up to ensure your quota is not reached and backups run successfully

• Take a dedicated backup server to increase the flexibility of backup implementation

• Request cross data centre backup for increased resilience and business continuity

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Following on from the focus groups that we have run with clients over the years our round tables continue to gather pace as a valued source of industry ideas and inspiration for aspiring companies across the web.

Focusing on online news in 2010, our latest bi-monthly debate offered a lively insight into the state of the media from some of its most attuned members.

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Sharing their time and thoughts on the changing state of online news were representatives from the BBC, Manchester Confidential, EN Magazine, Adfero and How-Do.

Identifying niche content and online communities as the most viable ways to monetise content online, the panellists acknowledged the challenges faced by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation and the threat that pressure from advertising may pose on editorial integrity in the future.

For more information on the results from the February round tables go to the press office on the UKFast website.

If you are interested in getting involved and hearing more about the upcoming discussion topics, please contact Jonathan Bowers on 0844 576 3909 or email jonathan.bowers@ukfast.co.uk.

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Funky Pigeon - www.funkypigeon.com

Bristol-based Split Ink Studio has taken its online personalised gift service to the next level with a fresh face and the latest new coating technology

Launched in October 2009 to replace its previous online offering remind4u, Funkypigeon.com offers a range of personalised gifts. Including an exclusive selection of high-profile brands such as Coronation Street, Dancing on Ice and limited edition photography of The Beatles and Elvis, it is currently ranked number two in the search rankings for personalised cards, one of the biggest search criteria for products.

Managing director Richard Pepper says, "We were already involved in gifting on the internet and thought greeting cards was the right way forward. It is fun and personal and because greeting cards are sentimental the more personal you can make a sentimental gift the better.

"I think our unique designs and the personalisation which enables you to incorporate your name or a loved one's name into an image offers something very different from the products that you can buy on the High Street."

After striving to improve the quality of its products with the purchase of the first UK-based Duplo Ultra 205A UV Coater, Funky Pigeon has also stayed faithful to its company ethos of 'quality with speed' by enlisting UKFast's expertise and upgrading its servers.

In only the first three months of changing its online presence from remind4u, Funky Pigeon has seen a dramatic increase in traffic with its world ranking changing from 1.7million to just 253,000 and an average 1600 sales per day.

Richard says, "I didn’t realise what effect speed has on our Google rankings. I could just never understand why I couldn’t get my ratings up previously.

"Eventually I brought a new team in who created the new Funky Pigeon website with SEO in mind, and by linking with the technology that UKFast delivered in terms of speed, we are now able to deliver pages to our users in one to two seconds rather than eight to ten, and that has made a massive difference to our visibility.

"The main challenge we face is getting our product in front of more people as when they see it they come back and buy from us again and again."

"We originally hosted ourselves and had our own servers, a fibre optic pipe and a backup generator which was what I thought we needed, but I increasingly felt more and more vulnerable having the servers in-house.

"We also had a situation when our electricity was cut off at a weekend and the generator ran out of petrol so the website went down. I felt it was time to go out and look to see who we could host with."

"When I met with UKFast's MD, Lawrence Jones, in Manchester I realised by working more closely with UKFast and using their expertise it would massively improve our opportunity as a business to be able to get out to the masses.

"Once we started putting better servers in and started talking to UKFast about what we should do with the website in terms of SEO and employed our own in-house SEO expert we found that our visibility on the internet has absolutely rocketed.

"I was amazed when we changed from remind4u to Funky Pigeon that within just three weeks we had a higher ranking on Google than we had previously.

"I've learned so much from UKFast that I don't just see them as our hosting company anymore."

With a potential daily audience of nine million through its exclusive licenses with ITV, Funky Pigeon is looking to gain on its Guernsey rivals, Moonpig.com, in 2010 with additional licensing agreements and new websites also adopting its iframe application.

Richard concludes, "My aspiration is to chase Moonpig.com but in perspective - the amount of sales that they currently represent are just two per cent of the UK greeting cards market, a market which is actually £1.4billion in size, so our aspiration is to equal if not better their traffic.

"The opportunities that online business affords you if you have the right product, the right price and the right service to get to a potential mass market are huge."

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We hope you found this month's edition an enjoyable read. We'll be back next month with March's talking points. Until then...

Best wishes,

The team at UKFast

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