Yahoo! ‘sorry’ for deleting Flickr account containing 4000 images
The importance of backing up your data his highlighted the massive error from Flikr this week.
http://www.neowin.net/news/yahoo-sorry-for-deleting-flickr-account-containing-4000-images
Remember to ensure that your suppliers are backing up your data. Oh, and just a cheeky reminder, we back up daily and off site, every 15 minutes for premium customers! Now you can’t get much safer than that.
Major players moving over to SSL
Google and Facebook have announced a move to the secure system of using https for security…it’s about time!
“With Google search over SSL, you can have an end-to-end encrypted search solution between your computer and Google. This secured channel helps protect your search terms and your search results pages from being intercepted by a third party. This provides you with a more secure and private search experience.”
http://www.neowin.net/news/google-begins-rolling-out-encrypted-searches
“Facebook currently uses HTTPS whenever your password is sent to us, but today we’re expanding its usage in order to help keep your data even more secure,” the company said Wednesday in a blog post. “Starting today we’ll provide you with the ability to experience Facebook entirely over HTTPS. You should consider enabling this option if you frequently use Facebook from public Internet access points found at coffee shops, airports, libraries or schools.”
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/26/facebook_https/
All of our web services (hosting, email, web apps, the IT range) are all over https from the outset because of this.
The IPcalypse is only 100 days away
“We’ve all known it’s been coming for a long time now, there’s even a new, alternative IP addressing scheme that’s been developed and implemented — IPv6 — but adoption has been slow, and now, things are about to heat up, as the time remaining before the estimated 166,741,530 remaining addresses run out. It was getting low, but this makes it seem much, much more real.”
http://www.neowin.net/news/the-ipcalypse-is-only-100-days-away
November Patch Tuesday
November’s Patch Tuesday has been completed for all WEBIT and Anything Hosted Windows based servers without interruption to service.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact a member of the team.
October Patch Tuesday
October’s Patch Tuesday has been completed for all WEBIT and Anything Hosted Windows based servers without interruption to service.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact a member of the team.
September Patch Tuesday
September’s Patch Tuesday has been completed for all WEBIT and Anything Hosted Windows based servers without interruption to service.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact a member of the team.
August’s Patch Tuesday
August’s Patch Tuesday has been completed for all WEBIT and Anything Hosted Windows based servers without interruption to service.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact a member of the team.
July Patch Tuesday
July’s Patch Tuesday has been completed for all WEBIT and Anything Hosted Windows based servers without interruption to service.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact a member of the team.
WordPress Updated
In keeping with best practice, we’ve updated our WordPress to their new major version “3.0″. Still looking into the new features to see how we can make use of them for our own blog, but for our customers as well.
For the rest of the year, we will be offering free WordPress blog hosting for all our existing and future customers if they host their main website or application with us. Call us now for details!
PHP 5.3.2 Deployed
PHP 5.3.2 MySQL 5.1.47 fully deployed and tested on our new High Availability FreeBSD 8 servers. Migration of current websites will commence throughout July with no downtime.
If you want view the info page, you can do so here: http://black.anythinghosted.co.uk/info.php.
BLACK and LIME mark the set of servers running on our XEN environment for Anything Hosted. We plan to deploy ORANGE and GREEN during August in our other data centre and finally upgrading RED and PINK in September. GREY, which currently handles most of our outgoing mail for our Exchange environment will be decommissioned towards the end of the year as the other servers take over its role.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact the team.
June Patch Tuesday
June’s Patch Tuesday has been completed for all WEBIT and Anything Hosted Windows based servers without interruption to service.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact a member of the team.
May Patch Tuesday
May’s Patch Tuesday has been completed for all WEBIT and Anything Hosted Windows based servers without interruption to service.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact a member of the team.
New Sharepoint 2010 “Teamspace”
Over the past couple weeks we have been testing a new SharePoint Enterprise 2010 installation for use both internally and externally with our customers.
Internally we will now be able to manage and collaborate documents with our staff more efficiently, whereever they are working around the globe. With integrated Office Web Apps 2010 and Project Server 2010, we see a full integration with the desktop applications and our Exchange Server, but also allow our staff to view and edit update documents without even downloading them (useful if they are onsite and have to use external/customer equipment).
For our customers, it means we can have a central location where all documents are held, securely. Exchange customers will have a seamless integration to this new service. We will be rolling this out to our customers over the course of May 2010.
It will be mandatory from June 2010 for all new projects for WEBIT and Anything Hosted to use our new Teamspace.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Office 2010 RTM Released
Office 2010 RTM has been released on MSDN and Technet for selected Microsoft Partners. We have already been using Office 2010 Beta and RC at WEBIT for many months and plan to deploy the RTM version across all our desktops and laptops over the coming days.
Outlook 2010 will be available to all our Exchange customers from April 30th. Volume Licence keys will be available from May 4th and download links will be sent to all our customers shortly.
April Patch Tuesday Complete
April’s Patch Tuesday has been completed for all WEBIT and Anything Hosted Windows based servers without interruption to service.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact a member of the team.
March Patch Tuesday Complete
March patch Tuesday was completed for all WEBIT and Anything Hosted infrastructure without interruption to service.
You can view full details here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/ms10-mar.mspx
New Media Breakfast
Just back from the New Media Breakfast at The Roxburghe Hotel, which I found very informative. Saw some crazy statistics and how the customer interaction has changed over the past few years. It seems we’re doing some things right, but we could do more on the social media front. We’re already putting a plan of action together, so watch this space. I may even start tweeting 
The bacon and egg roles were also a great start to what looks like a great day in Edinburgh.
February Patch Tuesday Complete
February patch Tuesday was completed for all WEBIT and Anything Hosted infrastructure without interruption to service.
You can view full details here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/ms10-feb.mspx
Visual Studio 2010 RC
Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate has been released to MSDN subscribers. There are some clear improvements over the Beta, namely on the performance side, which is great news.
We use Visual Studio to build our offline/Windows based applications that interact with our web based applications, for example, allowing you to continue working even without an Internet connection. We’re hoping the new version will lead to less effort and time spent on coding/building our apps, lowering costs for our customers.
Maintenance Periods
When a new customer approaches us for a new system or an update to their website we often get asked “So how long are we going to be down?”. The simple answer is that it won’t be noticeable. Too often we see websites that are undergoing “maintenance periods”. Why? Unless you have hundreds of thousands of hits and a large database to update there is no reason.
With the methodologies used by WEBIT and Anything Hosted, interruption to service is kept to a minimum. In reality, when we say minimum, we’re talking under 10 seconds…and that doesn’t include our High Availability service, which has zero interruption.
If you would like to learn more on how we work, methodologies used and why we consider ourselves to be in the top percentile of software development, give us a call.
Internet Explorer patch released – KB978207
Microsoft has issued security hot-fixes to patch a security vulnerability in Internet Explorer which saw Google fall victim to some targeted and sophisticated attacks recently. The vulnerability was unveiled when Google went public that they were targeted in a sophisticated cyber-attack. The breach, involving Internet Explorer 6, resulted in the theft of intellectual property. The hot fix is out of band from the normal “Patch Tuesday”, and WEBIT would urge all to update via Windows Update as soon as possible.
A restart of your computer will be needed.
All of our Microsoft based servers were patched earlier today without interruption to service.
January Patch Tuesday Complete
January’s Patch Tuesday has been completed for all our Windows based servers. With our improved infrastructure, there was no interruption to any of our services.
Happy New Year – 2010
All the staff at WEBIT and Anything Hosted would like to wish our customers, friends and family a Happy New Year and all the best for 2010.We have lots of exciting new things happening this year, so stay tuned!
Exchange 2010 Migration Complete
Our migration to Exchange 2010 has been completed successfully. All phases (1-6) were completed within the target timescales. We would like to thank our customers for their patience and understanding during the migration.
Our new environment has a much improved infrastructure, taking advantage of the new (easier) high availability offerings available in Exchange 2010 Enterprise and Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise, not to mention the new features 2010 brings.
Our new dedicated Exchange site will be ready early in the new year.
FreeBSD 8 Release
“The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE. This release starts off the new 8-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 7.X and introduces many new features.”
With most of our web servers running FreeBSD, we will be installing and testing the new version in a virtual machine and consider the servers in our portfolio to upgrade. All new virtual machines and servers will use version 8. You can grab more information on the updates/changes here.
Fasthosts in day-long email FAIL
Spotted this article over at the Reg:
“Customers of Fasthosts – the UK-based webhost – have been without both POP and web-based email for much of the day, complaining that such outages have become, shall we say, far too prevalent in recent months.
A half-dozen users have contacted The Reg about the outage, and countless others have complained via posts to the web. According to web posts, the problem began as early as Monday evening.”
Fasthosts are part of United Internet, which also includes 1&1 Internet.
Our Exchange 2010 Enterprise service boasts a 5 nines availability, if you want to switch, just contact a member of the team and we’ll set everything up for you.
Exchange 2010 Migration
The migration of all WEBIT and Anything Hosted staff mailboxes to Exchange 2010 Enterprise is now complete.
Over the next few weeks we will be moving our customers’ mailboxes to the new high availability environment. An email will be sent out on Wednesday this week detailing the planned migration date(s).
Exchange 2010 Available to Partners
Exchange 2010 RTM was made available to strategic Microsoft Partners today. A trial version can be downloaded by the public.
We’ve already started to download the new verion and plan deploy into our new Exchange High Availability environment shortly…watch this space!
Relaunch: 3…2…1…Go!
After a lot of hard work last week, the team have made our revamped sites live. You can visit the them below:
http://www.webit-tech.co.uk
http://www.theitrange.co.uk
http://www.anythinghosted.co.uk
Watchdog & (in)secure email
For anyone that watched last night’s Watchdog on how insecure email can be at wireless hot spots; I can confirm that all of our Exchange 2007 customers would not have been affected/at risk. Our Exchange 2007 Client Access Server requires access via an encrypted connection (https) for whole duration of your session. This differes from many other popular web based services that only require the secure connection when entering the password.
You can watch the episode online here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00nmv0l/Watchdog_29_10_2009/
As a reiteration, all of our applications and websites that require a username/password (usually for the admin panel) run over https and are forced to use https.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact myself or a member of the team and we’ll be happy to answer them.
New domain acquired
WEBIT and Anything Hosted have acquired www.microsoftexchangehosting.co.uk. This is going to be a great addition in building our Exchange 2010 arm of Anything Hosted.
Watch this space!
Exchange 2010 RTM
Microsoft Exchange 2010′s code is complete is on it’s way to General Availbility. Anything Hosted, WEBIT’s wholly owned partner hopes to launch E2010 before the end of the year for new and existing customers. All of us here are very excited to offer their new version, which boasts many improvements.
You can read more here:
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/10/08/452775.aspx
http://www.exchange2010hosting.co.uk/
Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Release Candidate is now available
Having used and installed Beta 1 of Exchange 2010, we’re excited that the next step is here; Release Candidate 1.
Over the next few weeks, Anything Hosted will be installing and testing this and offering feedback and results to Microsoft.
If you are one of our Exchange 2007 customers, please get in contact for a free testing account on one of our Exchange 2010 servers.