After 3 months of development first staging of the Polar CMS script has been released to our testers / designers to start playing with.

Process of our testing

• Running the install program to setup the databases and user accounts
• Use the basic functions of the CMS:
  - Add pages
  - Add page elements to change
  - Use the WYSIWYG editor
  - Apply code to front end site to test speeds
• Consult with development team to see how things can be improved

Next steps

• Design second simple admin template / style sheet for simple viewing (Less images / design factor)
• Develop modules system ready for alpha testing as this is still in development as one of the main features of the systems
• Speed & load testing to make sure the script uses the smallest amount of CPU

We will be updating the Polar CMS website soon with some of this information. Also a new website will be released soon.

Visit polarcms.com

Hosting Companies Unite to Provide Relief for Haiti.

And You Can Help.

On January 12th, a series of earthquakes measuring 6.5 to 7.3 on the Richter scale devastated Haiti. There is now a critical shortage of essential supplies and support personnel to assist the people of Haiti through this crisis.

“Although normally fiercely competitive, as members of the hosting community we know that the power we wield as a group is much more than we can wield individually. And so we’ve come together to help assist those affected by this disaster. With the generosity of all our combined customers, we hope to make a difference. And you can too. One dollar helps. One hundred dollars helps one hundred times more.” Taken from HostingForHaiti.com

Hosting for Haiti has partnered with the American Red Cross to provide support, which may include mobilizing relief workers, sending relief supplies, and providing financial resources for recovery.

Want to donate to the British Red Cross for Haiti click here.

Here’s what you can do:

Donate to the American Response Fund or donate to the British Response Fund 100% of the funds will go to the American / British Red Cross Haiti Relief and Development fund.

Copy this URL (http://www.hostingforhaiti.com) and place it on your blog or anywhere else you think it will be viewed.

Tweet about this! Use the hash-tag #hostingforhaiti and spread the word! Show you heard it from us using the hash tag #hostmediauk

If you would like to learn more about our supported charities / events or have any questions about the Haiti support program please feel free to contact us.

Before we were talking about hosting the Mura CMS but now we are happy to inform you we have installed Mango Blog with Railo which was one of the easiest systems to install. There was only one thing that needs to be added to a web.xml file to work with Railo and thats something our team are happy to do for our clients. The rest is the normal Mango Blog install.

Check out the link below to see Mango Blog in action:

http://railo.hostmediauk.com/mangoblog/

Due to the increasing amount of visitors and requests on one of our companies services Bold Mailer which has experienced some downtime due to the servers having to work alot more than normal.

The mail services of Bold Mailer were not effected in any way and all services inclduing the frontend of the shows as green. We look forward to expanding these services over the next few months.

If you do not know about Bold Mailer here is some helpful information:

Prices are based on two things, the first is the prices of the email which is 1p per email and the second is a fee for the campaign as a whole which is £3. We are rated one of the cheapest emailing companies on the web today.

Check out the website at: http://www.boldmailer.com/

As we now offer Railo hosting services we wanted to start demonstrating the power of Railo, our first release / showcase is the popular Mura CMS which is a great free open source content management system.

Instead of giving screenshot we have setup our own labs just for Railo which we will continue to release more showcases for.

Check out the link below to see Mura in action:

http://railo.hostmediauk.com/mura/

We are very happy to annouce we are one of the first to be listed as an official Railo hosting provider. Check out the Railo website for more information:

http://www.getrailo.org/
http://www.getrailo.org/index.cfm/community/hosting-providers/

We look forward to doing more work with the Railo team as well as Railo development.

Well the first month of 2010 comes to an end and with many companies including us doing final TAX/VAT returns we took some time to look how we have done compared to last year and to also share this with our customers.

Some figures for you: (January 2009 compared to January 2010)

Sales: ∧ 10% Increase
Traffic: ∧ 22% Increase

As our basic figures show above suggest we have done very well compared to last years January, but this is not a reason for us to keep as we are but more of an incentive to push on further so next year we can double our popularity on the net.

We have made some new friends over the past couple of months, one of them we are very proud to have become apart of is Railo. Our development team has been following Railo with great interest and has shown their support by joining the official Railo group hosted on Google Groups. We have also been speaking with a couple of their team with regards to having Host Media UK listed on their website as a Railo hosting provider which we are very much looking forward too.

What’s coming next month:

February will be another important month for us, one of them will be a move to new offices for our team in London (located in W1) to meet with clients as well as setting up a Colchester based office. With this new move our studio will be able to offer more services to our design clients and we will be able to help offer more future hosting support services.

A large part of our improvement plan is to increase the performance of the client support side of hosting as we have been increasing the support to the servers with new contracts to our data centers all over the world but our in house support team are looking to grow. One plan is to bring a dedicated team for each area of our services, we have already start by splitting up the way you open a support ticket so your ticket goes to the right department. The first area to have its dedicated support team will be the shared hosting services as this has become one of our largest services provided.

As we are looking to help promote Railo as a service on the net we will be publishing some simple to use scripts for both Railo and ColdFusion with installers so our customers can start playing with our Railo services and see how much easier is to develop using ColdFusion / Railo.

Thank you to all our customers / clients for using our services and hope we can make 2010 a great year for hosting.

A new part of ColdFusion our development team has been looking into more is the custom tags (cf_). Soon to be used with the Polar CMS (Visit official site), custom tags allow you to have scripts and coding within a tag that can be called from a cfm page as shown below:

<!— CFM Page (cfcustomtag_caller.cfm)—>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″ />
<title>Call Tag</title>
</head>

<body>
<cf_cfcustomtag customVar=”test”>
<p>SOME HTML</p>
<cf_cfcustomtag form=”testFormCode”>
</body>
</html>

As you can see we are using a new tag <cf_cfcustomtag> with custom variables (customVar=”test”). These variables can be picked up within our custom tag cfm file we are about to create.

<!— CFM Page (cfcustomtag.cfm)—>
<cfoutput>
<cfif isDefined(“ATTRIBUTES.customVar”)>
<h1>#Now()#</h1>
<p>#ATTRIBUTES.customVar#</p>
</cfif>
<cfif isDefined(“ATTRIBUTES.form”)>
<p>#ATTRIBUTES.form#</p>
</cfif>
</cfoutput>

The above is a simple CFM file which has HTML and ColdFusion code. As you will notice we have named the file ‘cfcustomtag.cfm’ which is the same name as the tag: <cf_cfcustomtag> just without the cf_ at the start. Coldfusion will look for any files with the same naming tag.

You may ask why not use a <cfinclude> tag, but with cfincludes they can be slower and you are not able to reuse the cfinclude as easy as a cf_ custom tag. With custom tags you can lower the amount of code you need by using the extra variables (ATTRIBUTES).

Hope you enjoy using custom cf_ tags. Feel free to comment and add your code to show better ways of using cf_ tags. You may also want to research <cfmodule> tags.

Hello Everyone!

A new year, a new start for some but for us we aim to improve al our services over 2010. As from our last blog posts you will see Railo is now fully up and running with people already starting to use the services without any reported issues.

The new year will bring the following improvements:

• Design and usability changes to our website
• Integrated design of the Host Issues forum
• Better server status system to help track any issues on the servers
  - We have already begun this by adding every server we have on the server status page. Check the server stats (Opens in new window).

New services coming in the new year:

• Free Wordpress blog hosting on a subdomain so if you dont want to pay for your blog then we can offer a great free service
• VPS servers with options of FFmpeg / Railo

We hope you have a great new year from everyone at Host Media UK and AeonCube Networks

We have now launched our Railo services to allow ColdFusion CFM / CFC scripts to run without the costs of ColdFusion. Railo 3.1 allows the use of most of the ColdFusion 8 tags.

Check out our Railo services:

• Railo Hosting Package
• Using LxAdmin (Kloxo)
• On CentOS Linux Servers

If you have any questions feel free to contact our sales team.