Service announcement update 31/01/10, 12:53 – A temporary fix to the break has been implemented last night and all services are restored to full resilience. It seems that the damage to the cable did not completely destroy it and other customers would have lost service if the cable was completely re spliced. Our service has been restored by way of a temporary splice and a maintenance window will be scheduled next week to complete the full re splice of the cable..

Service announcement update 30/01/10, 18:35 – The repair of the fibre break is progressing. Further details can be found on the Internet Connections NOC site at http://noc.inetc.co.uk/?p=64#comments. We expect the repair to be complete this evening at some stage. No service has been affected by this fibre break and both transit and LAN extension services remain unaffected.

Service announcement update 30/01/10, 13:56 – Pictures have been received of the damage to fibre cables on a pathment dig outside Telecity Manchester, that has caused the loss of one of our network legs. Fibre provider has been informed and are planning repairs for later today.

30/01/10, 11:25 – We are currently experiencing a service failure of one of the paths of our network, due to a fibre break in the Manchester area. Although this is not service affecting, please be advised our network is currently in single path mode and is at risk of outage, should this path fail also.

It is expected that this situation may exist for most of today, awaiting fibre investigators identifying the location of the break and splicing in a fix.

This service announcement will be updated as required and once the resilient path is back on stream.

We have a stock of “Limited Edition” dedicated servers pre-loaded with Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard and SQL Server 2008 Express. Of particular note (at this price point of £89/month) are the large, high speed dual SAS disks that these systems feature, which are well suited to intensive database-driven sites and applications. Full details below:

• Dell PowerEdge chassis
• Dual Core 1.86Ghz Xeon processor
• 2Gb RAM
• 2 x 231Gb SAS, hardware RAID-1
• 150Gb bandwidth/month
• Monthly fee: £89+VAT, no setup fee

The systems are available for instant deployment, and can be purchased from our online store. You can find more about our Windows servers here and if you have any questions, we’re here to help!

15/01/10, 09:15 – Yesterday’s outage was caused by a switch of our network supplier located in Telehouse in London. Once the secondary route was being used through this switch after the Level3 route was taken out for maintenance, it seems it highlighted a fault in this switch. This switch has now been removed from service. For further details, please see their blog via the link mentioned in our previous update.

14/01/10, 17:50 – Connectivity was briefly lost again at 17:43, but has now been restored again. It appears that although our route through Level3 is now working, the problem highlighted an issue with a switch connected to our other transit link which is now causing issues. Our network provider has more detailed information on their NOC status blog here: INETC NOC – Partial Outage

14/01/10, 17:17 – Connectivity has now been restored. The issue was related to BGP sessions from Level3 to our network infrastructure not re-establishing correctly.

14/01/10, 16.54 — Some customers may be experiencing connectivity problems. There appear to be issues with certain ISPs routing through to our Manchester datacentre. We will post further updates as our investigations continue.

Thank you!

Thank you all very much for your continued custom and support throughout the year. On behalf of everyone at 1st Easy, have a very Merry Christmas and our best wishes for a prosperous 2010.

Kind Regards,

Stephen Bell

Managing Director

If you changed the VAT rate within your Miva store settings last year, the following information will help you to revert back to the 17.5% rate which comes into effect on the 1st January 2010. If you have any problems, please contact our support staff.

Read the rest of this entry »

WebsiteSpark is a new initiative from Microsoft which provides free Windows server software (Server 2008 R2 Web, SQL Server 2008 Web), Microsoft development tools, professional training and marketing exposure for web developers and designers.

If you’d like to take advantage of the scheme, get in touch so that we can nominate you or your company as a “Web Pro”. In order to qualify for the programme, you’ll need to meet the following criteria:

• 1. Your main business is providing web development or design services
• 2. You have 10 or less members within your company (this includes staff, owners and contractors)
• 3. You’re willing to deploy at least one new website that uses Microsoft development tools, within six months of your enrollment to the programme
• 4. You’re enrolled on the Microsoft Partner Network (if not, don’t worry – it’s free to join)

As the name suggests, WebsiteSpark is designed to help kick-start online projects and increase opportunities for web developers by reducing costs and providing extra marketing exposure for participants. So, to play our part, we’ll also be providing the first month’s dedicated hosting service free of charge for companies that sign up to the programme via ourselves; you’ll also be added to our IT and Developer Directory – a networking resource for our customers to find technical services.

To learn more about WebsiteSpark — what you get exactly, how it works, and how to sign up — please visit our main website.

09/12/09, 17.49 — Some customers may be experiencing connectivity problems this evening due to a UK infrastructure issue centred at LINX (London Internet Exchange).

1st Easy have taken steps to resolve this issue as far as our influence extends by re-routing traffic outside of LINX to achieve a fully stable network; however, customers may still experience issues with their broadband connectivity, where their respective IPS have not managed to avoid the routing problems at LINX.

10/12/09, 10.00 — UK-wide LINX issue persisting; for full details, please see our network supplier’s NOC status blog.

We’re supporting the 3rd annual Ruby on Rails eXchange, organised by Skills Matter and taking place on the 3rd December 2009, at the Skills Matter eXchange, London.

The feature packed day will be structured around six talks and two Parkbench panel discussions, with sessions by leading experts Amy Hoy, Jason Davies (Non-relational Databases and World Domination), David Black (Rails Choices), Frederick Cheung (Databases – Have it Your Way), Sven Fuchs, and Andrew Chalkley (Building iPhone / Android Apps for a Rails Backend). Full program information and details on how to get tickets are available from the Skills Matter website.

Take advantage of this great opportunity to improve and share your skills and ideas with other members of the RoR community – and if you’ve already got tickets, enjoy the event.

As usual, attendees are welcome to take (no obligation) trial Rails accounts with us so that newly learned skills can be put to the test – sign up details are here.

As several of our customers can attest to, we have in the past had problems with those who need to access any /admin links on their web applications. This is due to it being picked up by Parallels Pro to redirect you to your site administration interface. We have previously been able to change this behaviour, but our changes have always been undone whenever updates have been applied to the server meaning that we have had to ask customers to use work-arounds on their sites.

We have now managed to find a Parallels-approved way of renaming the site admin link, which persists through server updates, so our customers can now have their /admin URLs back if they wish!

If you have a shared hosting account with us and you want to reclaim /admin as your own, please submit a ticket and we will do this for you.

If you have a managed Parallels dedicated server with us and wish to implement these changes, please follow the instructions here: How do I stop Parallels Pro/Ensim redirecting requests to /admin on my server? (or if that all sounds a bit technical, just submit a ticket)

Thank you to everybody that visited our stand at the Business North West 2009 exhibition in Manchester on Wednesday and Thursday.

It was a pleasure to meet so many of our customers and new businesses face to face, and we were delighted with every aspect of the show – from the excellent overall organisation (thanks to Scott, Emma and their team at Nationwide Media!) to the fantastic turnout and very positive discussions that we had throughout the two days.

Feedback from everybody that we talked with was very good for the event in general – keep an eye on the BNW09 website for post show reports.

We hope everybody enjoyed their 1st Easy “10th birthday” lemon cupcakes (and apologies to the cleaning staff for the trail of crumbs from our stand!).

If you visited our stand and would like to discuss anything in greater detail, give us a call on 0808 222 2221, or contact us via our website – as always, we’ll be happy to help.