Power and control are often what business leaders are lacking when it comes to the IT they outsource. A dedicated server however can provide businesses with the sought-after flexibility and superior performance they are lacking. Increasing numbers of organisations are outsourcing their IT function, but for those beginning this transition, it is critical they recognise that the hyperscalers are not the be-all and end-all.
This latest Intel CPU vulnerability exploits the same general mechanism that the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities uncovered earlier in the year. This mechanism is called “speculative execution” and refers to the technique where a CPU attempts to guess the work that will be needed in the near future and complete that work before it is needed.
cPanel is an industry leading web-based control panel that provides an easy solution with a large range of features to manage virtually every aspect of your website(s), including FTP, security, MySQL, creating sub-domains, multiple domains management and more.
The OpenStack Summit, now in its 16th iteration, took place last week in Vancouver, BC. OpenStack operators and developers from around the globe descended on the beautiful Canadian city made famous for the 2010 Winter Olympics to discuss all things Cloud Open Infrastructure, and I was fortunate enough to attend for my fifth summit (Tokyo, Austin, Barcelona and Boston previously).
GDPR is now a month away and most organisations with either a UK or EU presence or customer-base should be wrapping up their GDPR compliance programs. But what happens once May 25th rolls around and GDPR in the UK becomes our reality?
Early this year (2018) we were invited by our friends over at Hosting Advice to be involved in their series of Featured Experts from 2017. We were honoured to be asked and enjoyed taking part.
In fact, it got us reminiscing about our highlights of 2017 from Memset and around the Cloud Hosting world. So here are our some of our favourite moments from 2017:
2018 started with the news of Meltdown and Spectre, while not making a splash in the mainstream news, it has been front and centre for IT and tech publications. As most know by now, security researchers found design flaws which enable access to sensitive information across electronic devices including (but not limited to) servers; mobiles and laptops.
A new set of processor (CPU) vulnerabilities, known collectively as Meltdown and Spectre, have become public. These vulnerabilities take advantage of the way that modern processors execute code in order to speed up performance which can lead to information leakage between applications, users, etc.
The vulnerabilities impact on almost all Operating Systems and hypervisors in some way. Including most modern processors from Intel, AMD and ARM, and have existed for at least twenty years without discovery.
At Memset, maintaining a really strong SSH (Secure Shell) and TLS (Transport Layer Security) configuration and cipher set is something that we pride ourselves on.
Arguably it’s a lot easier and more cost-effective to monitor, manage and secure a few beloved pets than a giant, shifting herd of cattle. It’s certainly a more familiar and established approach, so the off-the-shelf products and employee skills are readily available to support it.
Our Cloud VPS provides customers with high-speed SSD storage to ensure that demanding applications get the disk performance they require. In feedback from customers, it was highlighted that some users require more disk space without the additional bundled RAM or CPU.
Providing bigger disk space on a Cloud VPS server has, until now, been inefficient for cloud storage providers, resulting in a reduced service and higher prices for the end user – something we at Memset were not willing to compromise on.
In recent years the hosting industry has changed significantly, we’ve noticed that what we once called Miniserver VM is now known as Cloud VPS. Therefore we are changing some of our service titles to fall inline with industry standards.
Cyber security breaches have become an endemic problem in modern society and business, from the likes of huge public incidents at Sony and T-Mobile, through critically impacted SMEs to individual people suffering life-changing cybercrime attacks and personal fraud.
Our Head of Security, Thomas Owen, discusses the data protection landscape in advance of Data Protection Day on January 28th 2017.
With just 16 months left to become compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), organisations should be in the full swing of making sure their systems and processes will comply by May next year.
Despite having policies on Open Standards and Open Source in place for nearly five years, over 90% of Government IaaS procurement is still based on proprietary software with non-standard interfaces from large US companies, Ken Smith from Memset explores.
Memset’s next generation Cloud VPS have introduced several new features which are not possible on the previous Miniserver platform. One such possibility is the loading and configuring of custom kernel modules. This blog piece will examine the zRAM kernel module and how to use it as a swap partition on a Cloud VPS.
A National Audit Office report has revealed that government spend on consultancy had increased again. Robin Pape, Memset's Public Sector Advisor explained why.
Large visual changes are coming to Memset.com soon. Here is a list and explanation of the improvements before they arrive.
If you are looking for cPanel VPS hosting, Memset, the UK’s leading provider of hosting services is offering a fantastic promotion this August. As well as offering a free cPanel license with all VPS packages with 2GB RAM or more this month, we now use the latest version of CentOS, CentOS7, as our underlying operating system for use with cPanel.
CentOS is an open source platform – an enterprise level solution with no commercial licensing.
To date, G-Cloud has enabled hundreds of SMEs and new players to gain a foothold in the public sector ICT market. However, with around 1850 suppliers and close to 20,000 services on offer, it's becoming increasingly difficult to stand out from the crowd.
There have recently been a number of high profile security issues with OpenSSL and its accompanying assortment of authentication and encryption algorithms collectively known as a cipher suite. These issues have weakened the security offered by TLS/SSL which is incorporated into many applications such as FTP, email, VPNs, chat protocols, as well as the secure browsing connection via HTTPS.
As of 14th July 2015, Microsoft will finally be ending the extended support phase of the Windows Server 2003 operating system.
What the end of support from Microsoft means to customers:
Named ‘The Oscars of IT’, these industry awards are the highlight of the year for IT professionals. The awards don’t just praise the successes of the big players, but celebrate the whole industry by recognising the excellence of individuals, projects and organisations in several categories.
Here at Memset we are always looking for ways to improve our service offerings to ensure that we provide the most reliable, secure, affordable and efficient products we can. As part of this cycle of continual service improvement, we have highlighted the way we provide customer service and overall account security as two areas where we believe we could be doing better. We would like to take a moment of your time to outline three important changes that we will be implementing in the coming weeks.
"G-Cloud has shown itself to be a model for efficient public sector IT procurement, establishing a dynamic marketplace for cloud-based IT services. We have simplified the procurement process through G-Cloud to make it more accessible to a wider range of companies, leading to more choice, better value for the taxpayer and growth for the economy." Francis Maude Minister for the Cabinet Office.
There are many drivers for cost savings when buying on G-Cloud some of these include:
The Cabinet Office led by Francis Maude is very much blazing the way in moving from more traditional "on-premise" based ICT infrastructure to more agile Cloud-based models. This has gone as far as being a mandate that all central and local Government should look at moving anything that is digital and also appropriate within security confines to a Cloud-based model with a hosting provider where applicable.
We're pleased to announce that you can now edit your firewall rules on the Memset website. We are always looking to add new functionality to the Memset control panel, and we're particularly happy with the new firewall editor because it has been one of our most requested features.
The new tools allow you to re-use the same firewall rule group for multiple servers, This can cut down on duplication, and make sure that your firewalling configuration is consistent.
We've all encountered somewhat abrupt HTTP 404 Not found pages when attempting to retrieve resources that don't exist on a particular web server. Whether someone has mistyped an address, clicked a broken link or attempted to access a file that never existed, a default HTTP 404 isn't pretty at the best of times and is generally fairly unhelpful.
Mobile is undoubtedly one of the fastest growing areas, as the pervasive use of smart-phones, tablets, iPads et al will attest.
Everything is now referred to as cloud; software, hardware, hosting, even your Windows PC is a cloud-enabled tool according to that annoying advert where a woman is uploading a photo to a social network to a jingle of "to the Cloud". Cloud is much misunderstood at the moment and also means different things to different people. Therefore, for the purposes of this blog, I will concentrate on Infrastructure as a Service or IaaS.
The internet is becoming an increasingly important sales channel for retailers, and there has never been a better time to dip your toe in the proverbial e-commerce waters and expose your business to a truly global customer base.
No matter how fast digital storage capacity increases (and, let's face it, it’s rising at an impressive rate), digital content and data storage demands seem to rise exponentially with it. Similarly, with the spiralling cost of properly storing and maintaining your company’s data securely, it’s always worth casting an objective eye over ways in which you can save valuable space and maximise your data storage efficiency. Regular assessment and a little forward thinking can save money and prevent you or your company having a storage surplus or shortfall.
Speed on the internet is, arguably, even more of the essence than it is in the real world. As bandwidth rates exploded so, exponentially, attention spans dwindled and now if your website doesn’t load quickly and reliably enough you may not get a second chance to impress, as copious online studies will attest.
My dear, late mother was never wanting for an aphorism, one of her perennial favourites being, ‘act in haste, repent at leisure’, which, as olde worlde as it sounds, is still highly applicable to the online world and, indeed, the process of choosing and securing the right domain name for your company, project or institution.
With each new phase of development on the internet, there has inevitably come with it a new set of security challenges. There’s perhaps no better current example of this than the denial-of-service attack. DoS attacks (also sometimes Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks) are a relatively unsophisticated way to effectively wreak maximum havoc on an organisation’s web-infrastructure and their ability to communicate with their online clientele.
The sky over Guildford lit up last night for the annual Guildford Lions firework display. Memset is delighted to sponsor the event every year as it brings the community together and raises an enormous amount of money for vital local charities. One of the charities supported this year was KatCanDo. They provide diagnostic, therapeutic and palliative equipment and other resources related to cancer treatment not automatically provided by the NHS.
Last week, as part of my work for Memset, I found myself climbing a steep and windy hill on the outskirts of a small town called Godalming in the Surrey countryside. What made it slightly strange was that I was surrounded by decades old graves and heading for an old chapel.
I often get asked by friends for advice on which operating system I recommend for a server. It's a hard question, particularly because they specifically ask which is for you the best operating system, and there's no right answer to that. I'm not the person who is going to deal with that system and it's not about what works best for me, but for you!
For example, what works best for Memset's customers? After posing that question to our database, these are the results I got:
Memset Hosting is proud to announce that it is sponsoring WXG (Web Expo Guildford), a one-day event at G-Live dedicated to bringing together the best of Surrey's design and development talent. As Memset is also Guildford based, we saw this as an excellent way of giving a local event a chance to thrive.
Prior to working for Memset, I spent six years working for a multi-award winning visual effects and post-production facility in Soho as a production systems administrator (a fancy term for an engineer). Before that, I was working in the web hosting industry. Between the two industries, I’ve encountered much frustration from clients, artists and producers who have failed to take responsibility for adequately protecting their own data.
If you rent a Windows Miniserver from us, you’re more than likely to be using our R1Soft-powered backup system. Utilising R1Soft’s CDP architecture allows us to take a complete copy of your Miniserver’s filesystem, from which you can restore any files or directories that you may need. The R1Soft CDP interface provides an easy way of restoring a select group of files quickly and easily. It can also be used to perform a “bare metal” restore of the entire server if you need to.
When I was asked at the age of seven what I wanted to be when I grew up I knew the answer; A Commercial Airline Pilot.
I even knew enough to be specific, a commercial airline pilot. My first trip of many into the skies was two years before aboard a mighty McDonnell Douglas DC-10.
I was enraptured with the whole experience of flight. How does this thing fly? How do we build aircraft that hold 400 people? Who are the magic people that fly these things? And how do you get to become one?
These days the number of people needing to work at home from multiple locations has gone up considerably. This can be due to a number of factors including cost, flexibility to staff, multiple offices, illness, disruption to public transport or even major events like the Olympics. The main challenge for remote working has been providing staff with the same access to all the systems and data that they need in order to carry out their job function and role.
If you sell a product then chances are you have a website, and if you have a website there is a good chance that you already have a transactional website or sell your products online. E-commerce sites enable customers to browse products in the comfort of their own home and also without the hassles or pressures of a City Centre or a keen salesperson.
Securing computers has always been a challenge even before the Internet was born, in those days security was mainly controlled by physical access and passwords. In other words, if you did not have physical access to the computer in question nor have the password then access was almost impossible.
It’s been a busy year for Memset. Not just launching new products and features, but we’ve also picked up a number of industry awards along the way. For the sixth year running, we’ve picked up PC Pro’s Best Web Host as voted by readers of the magazine. If that wasn’t enough we’ve won the ISPA Best Managed Service award as voted by other ISPA members as well as the BCS UK IT Industry Award for Small IT Supplier of the Year. Memset’s managing director also picked up The Toast of Surrey’s Business Personality of The Year.
They say information is power, but what if you have too much information? Remember the good old days when information and knowledge were found in a newspaper, you used to watch the news and if you wanted to brush up on an interest or hobby you bought a book about it? If you wanted information about what was going on locally in your area there was always a wealth of knowledge to be transferred orally; normally between men sipping pints in the local pub. Things were simple back then, Twitter was what birds did and business was conducted at the speed of Royal Mail or Fax machines.
We all know backups are very important but do we honestly do enough to ensure that we are fully resilient against failure - whether that be human or electronic?
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