At Host Media UK we believe in the freedoms of our customers and of the Internet. The internet allows those to voice themselves to others around the world! SOPA in it’s current form threatens this freedom.
Jonathon Lucas, Company Director

Even though we are a UK trading company, we have a large part of our company based in the US (servers & customers), and we will NOT be supporting the legislative measures recently introduced in the United States House of Representatives and Senate; HR 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), as well as S.968, the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). This is something our customers have asked us about and we want to ensure we will do everything we can to keep the freedom of our customers content.

If you have any questions regarding SOPA or anything else please feel free to contact management via support ticket.

We get so many questions about SEO that we thought we would put together some of the basics in getting started with SEO for your website.

The basics of search
When you type a query in the search engine, the query generates a significantly large number of results. Most users will likely find what they are searching in the first, second or third page. A search engine displays the results in the way it perceives the information relevant to the search query. As a webmaster, you need to understand how Google ranks your site.

How Google ranks sites
The first step is discovering your site through Googlebot, a robot that adds new and updated sites to Google Index. After finding new and updated sites, it processes the words in it, a process referred to as indexing. When you conduct a search query, Google matches the query with existing pages and decides the relevancy of the information. Over 200 factors decide the relevance of the information. PageRank is the most important. This is a concept entailing how other users share your information though the use of backlinks. Even though some sites use spam links to raise their ranking, Google recognizes them. The best way to improve your ranking in search engines is by providing fresh, unique and quality content.

SEO concept
Search Engine Optimization, is a concept aiming at improving the way sites interact with users and rank in search engines. It is the dream of any webmaster to have a website that performs optimally in organic search results. It involves making small modifications and improvements. Nonetheless, even though the concept uses the word “search engine”, it is imperative to focus more on your visitors rather than how your page will rank in organic searches.

Good content
To attract users to your website, your content should be unique, dependable and accurate. Each page in your site should have a unique title. It is important to organize your content in a directory style. This makes it easy for the consumers of your content to know where they are while on your site. The title tag is fundamental since it tells the user and search engine the contents of the page. When choosing a title, it is vital to choose one that accurately and uniquely describes the content in the page. It should be short and concise. This is because when you use long titles, a search engine omits some portions. It is also a good practice to desist from stuffing irrelevant keywords.

Meta tags
Make use of Meta tags to summarize succinctly the contents of the page. A Meta tag consists of a short paragraph or a number of sentences. By using Meta tags, you provide a snippet of your page, which a search engine may use. However, a search engine may sometimes choose to use another relevant section on your page as a snippet depending on the user’s query. However, it is advisable to make use of a Meta tag just in case a search engine cannot find a relevant section to use as a snippet for the user’s query. This is because words appearing on the query on the search engine appear in bold. This allows the user to decide whether the content will be useful. Some of the pitfalls you should avoid include, stuffing the Meta tag with keywords, copy pasting content into the Meta tag, using generic terms such as “The webpage talks about” or “this is a page about”, and a Meta tag that has no relation with page content.

URL structuring
Another important aspect in SEO is how you structure your URLS. You should structure your URLS in a friendly manner. This makes your site look better and organized. Long and cryptic URLS may intimidate your visitors and make it difficult for others to link your content. Structure the URL to contain relevant keywords. This provides the search engine and users with usable information about your page. In addition, it is important to keep in mind that the search results will display the URL and bold words that match the user’s query. It is thus good practice to make your URL as simple as possible to make it friendlier to your visitors.

Site navigation
The consumer of your content wants to be able to find quickly what they want. In addition, the search engine needs knowing which part of the site is most important or fundamental. You should visualize how visitors would access content starting from your homepage to specific contents. It is advisable to use text links, which is what visitors prefer over other approaches such as drop down menus or animations. Focus on simplicity.

Quality
This is the keyword when it comes to SEO. To improve the ratings of your site in organic results and keep attracting visitors, you need to create captivating, accurate and fresh content. Any visitor in your site will deduce the quality of your content. If the content is compelling, your consumer will likely want others to read it. They may share it on social media, forums, emails, word of mouth and other avenues. As a webmaster, it is important to take into consideration the fact that different users interpret and understand the content differently. It is advisable to create exclusive and unique content to cater for your different audiences. You may also want to use a tool such as Google AdWords for an approximation of how each keyword fares among user queries. Create content with your consumer base on mind rather putting more emphasis on search engines. Make the quality of your content the top priority and the rest will follow smoothly.

Simple and Accurate
Users will enjoy your site if it easy to follow and read. You should aim to write text that is easy to read. Follow the basics such as organizing it succinctly, logically and avoid grammatical mistakes. You may want to use short precise paragraphs and subheadings to make it easier for the visitor.

Promoting your content
A search engine displays “sponsored links”, which are paid advertisements and organic results. Search engines do not accept money to rank sites. Therefore, your own aggressive promotion of the site decides how your site will rank. With the billions and billions of sites in search engines, finding the right channels and ways to promote your content may make the difference in the success of your site. Many webmasters use backlinks to promote their content. It is wise to have a blog in your site to keep your base on tabs with what is new on your site. You can also use a RSS feed to keep your audience informed. Social websites such as Facebook, twitter, Google + among others are also an effective way to market your site. Since these sites base on sharing and networking, it is an effective way to reach your target groups.

In addition, you can also offline promotion methods such as listing your URL on posters, business cards, t-shirts, word of mouth among other avenues. You should also use webmaster tools provided by search engines to complement your site to perform optimally in search results. Some of the tools include Google Webmaster Tools, for Google search engine, Yahoo! Site Explorer for Yahoo and Bing Webmaster Tool for the Microsoft search engine.

Google Analytics
This is a high-level web analysis tool used to analyse traffic flowing to your site. It allows you to get valuable insight how visitors reach your site, how they behave, which content they view, and how your site is performing.

When choosing which location to host your site, it is important to consider some the geographical factor. This is because a page loads faster when it is close to the web server. It is also important to label your domain extension to distinguish the targeted audience. For example, if your audience is in the UK, you may choose .uk domain. You should also consider the specifications on your web hosting needs. Some websites have unique features that make the page stand out.

Google Website Optimizer
This tool by Google allows the webmaster to experiment on how various changes in the site will influence traffic. When used with Google analytics, it is a powerful tool to improve the performance of your site.

If you have any questions about hosting for SEO purposes then please do feel free to contact our Sales team.

We are very proud to be the official sponsor of the CFHour podcast show. We have been big fans of these guys over the past year and working together we hope to get more people listening.

CFHour is a weekly podcast which is primarily focused on ColdFusion (CFML). While they do discuss other technologies, ColdFusion is their primary focus. They will give you great insight and hopefully useful information on ColdFusion, internet technologies and anything else they deem relevant.

The Presenters

Dave Ferguson

• Twitter: http://twitter.com/dfgrumpy
• Blog: blog.dkferguson.com
• Email: dave@dkferguson.com
• IM (gtalk / aim): dave@dkferguson.com

Scott Stroz

• Twitter: http://twitter.com/boyzoid
• Blog: http://www.boyzoid.com/blog/index.cfm

The Producer

Matt Gifford

• Twitter: http://twitter.com/coldfumonkeh
• Blog: http://www.mattgifford.co.uk/

Visit http://www.cfhour.com/ to learn more…

We hope everyone enjoyed their Christmas and are looking forward to the New Year!

2012 is going to be a massive year for Host Media UK, we have many exciting new ventures and even more updates to our services to increase the level of service. We are also planning to get more involved with the communities with our team attending conferences & events around the UK & world!

Some of the changes we can give you a heads up on are:

• New Virtual Server locations
• New Virtual Server Operating Systems
  Install directly from SolusVM to get a number of different operating systems on your virtual server.
• Premium services including a site mover service
• Website improvements to help you with your hosting on Host Media UK
  - Improved website content
  - Increased number of video tutorials
  - Increased number of FAQ’s
• VPS Auto Installers
  As we love automatic services as well as developing our own services we are going to be releasing auto installers for our  VPS customers. As we already have instant setup virtual servers, we want to bring auto install to such services as Railo / MineCraft and control panels.

We hope you have a fantastic 2012 and a great New Year. We hope you also enjoy what Host Media UK will have to offer in 2012. As always feel free to contact us, and even speak directly with the management team to voice your opinions, we love to hear from you!

Have a Happy New Year!

At Host Media UK we love to hear your thoughts about our services, what you like and dislike. So to help us get ready for 2012 and help you more, we have created a little survey so you can share your comments and ideas with us in an easy way.

If you would like to share your ideas about any part of our company please click here to complete the short survey. You can suggest or comment on anything, we would love to hear your ideas!

Take the survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/3LH6GY3

Thank you from everyone at Host Media UK. We hope you have a fantastic Christmas and New Year.

Host Media UK was awarded Top Pick Web Host 2011 by the Web Hosting Search team, which is an award we were unaware we was nominated for but a welcome surprise when the WHS team got in contact to present the award to us.

These awards make us work harder to provide the very best solutions possible. We have a number of exciting new addons to our existing services coming soon.

We all wanted to say to our fantastic customers thank you so much for all your votes on all the web hosting award sites. We really appreciated it, without our customers support we would not have become the trusted hosting provider we are.

View all our awards

Since we started out in the hosting industry we have loved hearing our customers talk about us, this year we have seem a number of users on twitter sharing their experience hosting with us which has been great.

There has been 2 articles which we wanted to share and to thank those for sharing their thoughts about our hosting services:

HFUG - Hawaii Flash User Group : http://hfug.net/moved-to-host-media-uk/
SHAUN MCCRAN - Personal Blog : http://www.mccran.co.uk/index.cfm/2011/6/4/HostMediaUK-site-migration-complete

Thank you to both Shaun McCran and to the Hawaii Flash User Group for their reviews and the lovely comments. We hope we continue to impress and keep stepping up to the mark to provide a great range of hosting solutions for ColdFusion, Railo, PHP and more.

Thank you!

Over the past month we have had a number of issues on our CF3 Windows server which has caused both us and our faithful customers inconvenience. Due to this we have decided to give something back to all our customers on our Windows servers: We was going to have Microsoft SQL (MsSQL) services on our server at a chargeable add-on BUT due to the recent events we have decided to give our CF Wbase -WPro accounts free MsSQL services which will be effected immediately without any extra charges. You can confirm the number of databases and space you have on our ColdFusion Windows details page: http://www.hostmediauk.com/web-hosting/coldfusion-hosting/#fragment-2

Extra space is available at additional charges, speak to our sales team to learn more.

We hope you enjoy the free MsSQL databases and we hope to keep our servers stable & at the best level of performance.

Thank you!

The time has come we are sorry to say, the company Host Media UK has reached its UK limits for registering for VAT (Value Added Tax). This is something we have been working hard to avoid by working with smaller companies and international companies but we are legally bound by law to charge the extra 20% on all invoices.

What does this mean

The UK VAT (Value Added Tax) is currently set at 20% (Oct 2011) this means all prices will be increased by 20% when at the checkout stage.
For example: £10 hosting will now be £12 / £100 hosting will now be £120 etc.

Good news for VAT registered companies/customers

For the many of our customers who are VAT registered businesses it means they will be able to declare VAT expenses from us which will give them extra savings when using our services.

When will this happen?

We are currently speaking with our accountants who are preparing all necessary paperwork to sign that we will be fully VAT registered. This will be going through in a months time, but a detailed email will be sent to all customers to let them know of the change. Our website will be updated to have ‘Excluding VAT‘ under all prices to make our customers aware of the change.

We know this increase is an annoying element to businesses, we do not wish to have to charge the 20% VAT but as we are a legal registered trading company we are bound by law to be VAT registered.

If you have any questions or comments please do let us know, you can contact the management team on a support ticket and they will be more than happy to answer your questions.

Thank you for your understanding and with the increasing company size of Host Media UK we hope to be able to offer much more to our customers in the future.

We are really excited to announce of brand new website using the powerful Mura CMS on open source Railo CFML engine. This shows just how much we are interested in using CFML as well as hosting it.

You will notice a number of different areas as well as a couple new services, with more coming soon! One of the major updates is our new range of VPS’s which now include free INSTANT setup, no more waiting around for your virtual box to be setup. Included in the price of our range of virtual servers is our management support which no other hosting provider offers in the same level and price range.

Coming soon:

• Windows ColdFusion/ASP.NET Plesk Reseller Plans
  One area of ColdFusion and ASP.NET reseller hosting is that it is rare and expensive, with a major investment in recent weeks we now have the setup to give low cost ColdFusion reseller hosting just like our Linux based plans. You will soon be able to start reselling this great service as the prices you want to charge.
• Open Blue Dragon Linux Hosting Plans
  Our aim is to offer the entire range of stable CFML based engines, currently we offer Adobe CF & the open source Railo so this new offering will be a great addition to our CFML services.

We are still working on a number of little changes to our client area to make it easier to order through us. We also have a number of new features coming soon to the billing area.

If you have have any questions please feel free to contact our team 24/7.

Thank you,

We thought it would be a good idea to give everyone a little update on whats coming to Host Media UK in the next couple of weeks and what plans we have made to take the company forward.

Well as some of you may have seen if you follow @HostMediaUK on Twitter is our new website will be released within a weeks time. The design is a complete change from our current design with some branding changes just to freshen things up a little.

A useful company brochure will be released in the next few days which has been on the list of to-do’s for our team but this will allow companies to get a better idea who we are, and what we do in a nice PDF (following our new branding).

Moving to a new range of Virtual Private Server services; this is one of the major new areas we are moving into. We have been using a supplier that has not worked as we planned, so the directors agreed 2 months ago to invest in our own servers to released VPS’s on. This means instant setup, more control and most importantly better support. We plan to offer every customer who is currently use VPS or MineCraft services from our old supplier to move to these new servers. We plan on increasing the number of servers in our racks as we use up the current setup. We have made sure no overselling will happen on these servers, this has always been our promise not to oversell.

A new range of managed dedicated servers will also be released replacing our current list. This will feature some of the most powerful servers available.

All our updates are based on the release of our new website, so one you get word from us or just visit our site and see the new site, you will know you can now order the new range of services.

If you have any questions do drop us an email or even mention (@) us on twitter and one of the team will be happy to answer your questions.

Thank you from everyone at Host Media UK!

Again we are the proud winners of 3 fantastic awards for being one of the most popular UK hosting providers.

As always we hope to win more awards for our work. Thank you to all of those who voted for us and checked out our profile.

We are here 24/7 if you need anything!

Running a ColdFusion or Railo event or user group? Host Media UK has started offering sponsorship deals to the CFML community events & user groups to help projects further.

Examples of sponsorship support:

• CFML based hosting for life of the project.
• Funding, we are already sponsoring such events as 2011 MuraCon, 2012 Scotch On The Rocks and looking to invest in more projects.
• Hardware & software investment to bring into your event to help take the costs out of services.
• Design & development services, our design agency offers the complete package and will create and developer the needs of your project.
• and much more…

If you are interested in speaking with us about your CFML event or user group do contact us at: info[at]hostmediauk.com or use the contact form: http://www.hostmediauk.com/contact/

Thank you!

Over the past year we have been aiming to improve our support service level, we recently increased the team to allow faster response times around the clock. We also added 24/7 live chat support to handle all your Level (Tier) 1 needs. Now we are looking at 24/7 telephone support for sales, pre-sales, billing and Level (Tier) 1 support needs, this will greatly increase the way you can get answers to your questions.

We are still planning this service but we have things in motion and looking to our customers to tell us what they think. Check out our online survey (NO registering required) to help us find out your needs for the telephone service.

Take our survey

On Saturday 16th of July 2011, at 14:39 PM UK/London time our server management team started to see some unusual activity within the ssh commands list that had been ran. With a number of clients opening support tickets regarding unknown files and settings within their accounts appearing we quickly put the server into its highest level of security blocking any commands from outside the company.

We investigated the depth of the security breach which showed a number of insecure scripts had been running on a few accounts allowing access to come commands. This gave access to delete files on certain accounts which the script had access too.

With this level of security breach we needed to move all data and place on a new mirrored server setup, this required a full server migration which is not as easy when their are security issues on accounts which could effect the new server.

The move has gone well for the most part with 90% off accounts being moved without issues and no reported problems with sites. The last 10% were based on reseller accounts and our team are in the final testing stages to make sure everything is working as it should.

What’s being done to prevent this again?
Our Media1 server was one of our biggest media servers which was also classed as one of the most secure, this was not enough and we have planned for an external company to check all our servers for weaknesses and help prevent any future attacks in this way. We do our best to keep our servers as secure as possible, and use the very latest in server security software. We are making sure everything is up to date and to the strongest level.

What’s left to be done?
All media services are back online as they were before the issue. We are waiting for the final checks to be performed before installing FFMpeg and the media services to ensure permissions are correct and not weaknesses have been found on accounts where the FFMpeg service may have been used to access key server commands. Apart from this everything is working as it should including the LiteSpeed service.

Hosting Tips!
We have a number of tips we do recommend to anyone hosting a website online, no matter who the provider is. This event just shows if we did not have our own backups & mirrored systems in place we would have lost important data. So here are some useful tips when hosting your website:

• Backups!
  Running your own backups these days are very important on every device, mobile/cell phone, laptops & desktop PC’s and the same goes for your web hosting. It is always important to keep your own backups of your website incase you need them in any number of events from hosting provider going out of business or the simple case that your current provider does not have a backup solution in place. Most control panels such as cPanel / Kloxo / Plesk all offer an inbuilt backup system which allows you to download part/full backup of your website. Doing this once every couple weeks or even once a week will make sure you know your website data is safe and able to be restored at any point.
• Know who to contact
  Knowing who to contact at your hosting provider is very important, we have a number of ways to get in contact with us but the standard practice is support tickets. Most providers split the support tickets into departments so make sure you know what hosting package/service you are on to get the right support. Best sample we have a department for each service so if you have ‘Media Hosting’ then you will want the ‘Media Department’.
• Keep up to date
  Keeping up to date with whats going with your current hosting provider can save you a lot of time getting the basic questions you want to know about what maybe going on with a current/future server issue. The best ways these days is RSS Feeds & Twitter, we have both at Host Media UK and you can follow us on twitter at: http://twitter.com/hostmediauk

Have questions or comments?
If you would like to speak with one of the management team please open a ticket directly to us at:  https://www.hostmediauk.com/client/submitticket.php?step=2&deptid=14

Thank you to all our customers for your time and patience, and of course we are here 24/7 if you need us. We really appreciate you baring with us during these issues.
Host Media UK Team

Sometime ago we took over VZHost a US based company offering the very best in custom or packaged VPS & dedicated servers at fantastic prices. We are happy to announce VZHost has been completely merged into Host Media UK. All VZHost customers can now login to the billing portal (URL: http://www.hostmediauk.com/client/)

All VZHost customers now benefit from 24/7 Live Chat & Dedicated support teams helping with any problems they may have.

We look forward to offering more VPS & Dedicated services to our customers.

Thank you,
Host Media UK Team

We have now been offering Minecraft services for 3 months now with a £10 a month discount in our introduction period. This period has now ended but you can still order our great Minecraft services from only £17.50 a month. Make sure to check out our Minecraft service page for more details: http://www.hostmediauk.com/minecraft-hosting/

*Price change applies to new orders only, all current Minecraft services will be at current prices before the discount period.

MuraCon 2011 Sponsor

Being a part of the CFML (ColdFusion, Railo, OBD etc) community in anyway is very important to us and something we love to get involved with when we can. One major element of the community that gets a lot of great press if the award winning CFML application; Mura CMS. The team begin this content management system have organised a great event called MuraCon. The 2011 event will be held in Sacramento, California at the Drexel University campus – located in downtown Sacramento.

MuraCon will feature sessions by top developers from the Mura CMS world, showing off the latest developments and features in Mura CMS. Connect with the Mura CMS community and learn how you can harness the power of the world’s top CFML content management system.

Registration

You can register for the event on the MuraCon website, for a low cost of $99 USD/attendee, which covers the cost for both days, including lunch and snacks. To register for this great event please visit: http://www.muracon.com/registration/

Being a Sponsor

You can see all the companies sponsoring MuraCon this year on their website; http://www.muracon.com/sponsors/

Featured Speakers:

• Greg Moser
• Sean Corfield
• Ronnie Duke

Follow MuraCMS

If you do not already follow the MuraCMS on twitter we highly recommend it, you can find them at: @MuraCMS

Today we found out we were awarded 2 awards for May by the Web Hosting Directory, the first was our 5th time in a row winner being the #3 most popular UK web hosting provider and the second was a new award which is great to see; UK most popular cloud hosting award. If you would like to see all our awards we have been presented with make sure to check out our company information page.

You may have noticed we have a lovely “Live Chat” icon on the top right of our website now, we are now providing 24/7 online support staff and part time sales staff who will be online to help you with any enquires you may have. Our friendly team will do their best to answer any questions you may have and work with the help desk support team to resolve any issues quickly and professionally.

We have also improved our over night staff so when the UK goes to sleep our team is awake when the US wakes up. We hope to provide faster response times throughout the day and make sure you get the very best help.

Remember! The best and fastest way to get the best support is by opening a support ticket (make sure your logged in to your client area account & select the correct department) so our team has your information to hand and we can provide the very best support to you.

If you have any questions or comments please feel free to contact us as we love hearing from our visitors & customers.