1st Easy Blog

Christmas support hours

Our offices will be closed on the bank holidays Monday 26th December, Tuesday 27th December and Monday 2nd January.

As usual though, support for site and server-down situations will remain available as normal throughout the whole Christmas period, while colocation customers will have 24/7/365 emergency engineering cover and access to equipment via their established procedures.

Thank you

Thank you again for your continued custom and support throughout 2011, and on behalf of all the team here at 1st Easy, have a fantastic Christmas break and all the very best for a happy and successful New Year!

Kind regards,

Stephen Bell
Director

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[15:47] Global disruption occurring:

1st Easy are aware of a brief outage earlier today and potentially, ongoing disruption that customers are experiencing.

This blog will give you an immediate brief of the issues being faced across the globe today.

1) At approximately 14.10 today, all five routers of the provider we use reset their routing tables, all at the same time. This lost redundancy and caused a 2 -3 minute outage in routing delivery to our internal routers. Our routers were not affected by this, as we do not receive the global routing tables.

The reset of the routing tables cleared up after a few minutes and have remained stable ever since.

2) HOWEVER, it is being reported that many other ISPs were hit with the same issue today, may be even including LEVEL 3, which may be causing a majority of the Internet global disruption, as these erroneous tables hit each router within their global infrastructures.

The outcome of 2) is that many customers are still reporting connectivity issues to 1st Easy, that are not due to issues we can control. The outages across the globe, are causing disruptions to many ISPs globally and their customers in turn.

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Introducing the first of our guest expert blogs, from internet marketing strategists, Search and More.

Can we expect a double dip recession? Will Greece default on its debt, and trigger the collapse of the rest of Europe’s second-tier nations? Well, it’s possible, but the short answer is, we just don’t know. We’ve all got our views on the economy and its current state, but what we’re probably all in agreement on, is that money’s tight. And if you have to spend to stimulate your SME, then it pays to make sure the money you do spend is working hard for you.

This is particularly the case for internet and search engine marketing. No business wants to waste valuable resources on an advertising platform that just doesn’t deliver. Online advertising budgets have been squeezed to within an inch of their lives, so they need to be cost-effective, and they have to deliver. So, are there any steps your SME can take to ensure that it’s getting sufficient bang for its buck? Can you still run an efficient SEM programme and save a few bob at the same time?

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: analytics, Internet marketing, long-tail advertising networks, search engine marketing, SMEs
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When we publish our quarterly newsletter, apart from bringing you up to date with our latest company news, we aim to provide information and tips that we hope you’ll find interesting and useful. From looking at the stats that we get from our newsletters, we’ve found that a lot of the most popular links are related to SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing).

By rather cleverly putting two and two together, we’ve deduced that online marketing is perhaps an area where additional information would be useful. Because we’re not SEO experts (we concentrate on the hosting) we’ve asked internet marketing strategists Search and More to provide their informed insight for the first of our guest expert blogs. The article which Jason and his team have kindly contributed looks at how to get the most out of your online marketing budget with plenty of practical tips, which you can read here.

We hope that you find the article useful – let us know what you think!

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Tools were downed and monitors were switched off as another selection of 1st Easy volunteers emerged blinking into the sunlight to spend an afternoon at the Children’s Adventure Farm Trust (CAFT) in rural Cheshire.

Viv, Peter, Paul and our newest recruit Steve G helped out with lots of jobs that included BBQ building, bench staining, weeding and plenty of grass mowing. They were also lucky enough to meet the resident alpacas, who appeared to be equally curious in meeting our keen volunteers!

The five alpacas (all brothers) make up a popular and important part of visits for the children and young people that visit CAFT, where they have the chance to feed, stroke and talk to the alpacas, creating a new friendship with a special animal that is rarely seen in the UK.

To learn more about CAFT and the work it does to give fun holidays to disadvantaged and disabled children and respite to their carers, you can visit their website here.

Tags: CAFT, Childrens Adventure Farm Trust
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After a lot of hard work, today sees the launch our new branding and website. It’s our first major re-brand since 1st Easy launched, and with it, we wanted to better communicate the values and personality of our company and people, and show exactly why we’re different from a lot of other hosting companies.

In particular, we feel that our new tag line “Let’s talk hosting” sums up our approach to business perfectly: we’re always open and easy to contact, whether that’s at the start of a business relationship when you’re finding out what you need and maybe looking for advice, or later on as a customer if you require technical support for your hosting solution.

And as the phrase goes, “people want to work with people”, so we felt that it was about time that we stepped out from behind the scenes to show that your website is indeed “hosted by humans“!

There may be one or two instances of the old branding remaining in place as we continue to roll out our new look across our range of websites, but all of these will be addressed in the next week or so.

We’ll write more about the website, new content and developments in the coming weeks, but for now, please do take a look around and as usual, your feedback is very welcome (and if you spot any missing/bad links, James would like to know!)

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[16.30] Summary of events:
We introduced a new IntruGuard anti-DDoS system yesterday into the front end of our network, as part of our plans to better protect customer servers and data.

Unfortunately, during a configuration of this system, it crashed whilst in learning mode (which it shouldn’t do), completely blocking out all networks.

We have a fail-safe against this scenario with two NetOptics bypass systems, so that we can shut off the IntruGuard and effectively eliminate it from the network. This procedure was successfully carried out when it became clear after 10 minutes that the IntruGuard appliance was not going to recover itself. Engineers from IntruGuard are now diagnosing what happened.

Outage was measured at 13 minutes between first detection alerts and back up alerts on the network.

Apologies for the inconvenience, however, the plans being put in place will eventually ensure a stronger and more protected network environment.

[09:55] Service has been resumed. Further details on resolution once we have investigated.

[09:50] We are experiencing a network issue that is disrupting service. We are working to resolve this urgently, and will report back shortly with further details.

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We recently dispatched a crack team of painters to lend a hand at the Children’s Adventure Farm Trust. The (unexpected!) April sunshine meant that it was no problem rounding up some eager volunteers, who went on to spend a busy afternoon painting the farm’s fantastic new outdoor barbecue area.

1st Easy team members Steve, Dan and James were joined by our good friend Zoe from Hive Marketing, who completed their mission with just enough time to spare for a much needed ice cream (thanks Alistair!).

Based in the beautiful Cheshire countryside, the Trust provides residential holidays and activities for sick, disabled and disadvantaged children from all over the Northwest of England. With running costs of over £800,000 per year, they rely totally on charitable donations to be able to fund their work and continue to offer such a valuable and much needed service.

If you would like to learn more about the Trust, you can visit their website or contact Alistair Laing on 01565 830 053.

The afternoon’s action in pictures…

(Click an image to enlarge)

Tags: CAFT, Childrens Adventure Farm Trust
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Support for site and server-down situations will remain available as normal throughout the Easter period. Colocation customers will continue to have 24/7/365 emergency engineering cover and access to equipment via their established procedures.

Enjoy the long weekend!

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13/04/11: 10:10 - 1st Easy today announce that it has completed a dedicated server migration project from Reynolds House (Telecity IFL) to Teledata’s high security datacentre in Delta House, near Manchester Airport.

For the past few years, 1st Easy have been successfully and reliably using Teledata for parts of its hosting services, including backups and colocation services. In combination with sister company Internet Connections, who have now extended their 10GE fibre ring to include popping Teledata’s datacentre, 1st Easy have completed a 3 months migration of hundreds of dedicated servers from Reynolds House datacentre facilities.

Commenting on the migration, Stephen Bell, Managing Director of 1st Easy said, “We needed a direct relationship with the datacentre owners to maximise value to our company, work closely with our business strategies and to improve security, in the wake of increasing compliance pressures and political unrest across the world. Teledata was the ideal choice for this move and will continue to provide expansion of our dedicated server farm, SaaS platform hosting and secure colocation services, with the opening of their second datacentre floor wing (DC2), in the first half of 2011.”

About Teledata Colocation Datacentre Facilties

Teledata provides high levels of security, centred around the “ARC”, a fully BS standard approved, 24/7/365, bomb proof core security centre residing within Delta House. The ARC controls all access to the datacentre building and datacentre floors, without direct person to person involvement, avoiding hijacking or over powering situations at security officer level.

With high perimeter fencing, constantly closed entrance gates with fob access and biometric finger print recognition access to the datacentre floor space, it represents what 1st Easy believe to be the highest security facility in the North West and Manchester areas, critical for commercial businesses in today’s economic and political climates.

For more information or to discuss this announcement, please email sales@1steasy.com or contact 1st Easy on 0808 222 2221.

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