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…

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!

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!

We receive so many sales tickets requesting to price match or beat quotes for Railo & ColdFusion hosting, and we are happy to say we always do.

With this great interest we thought we would make a public announcement that we will beat any valid Railo or ColdFusion (shared/reseller only) quote you provide and have your account setup straight away.

We will provide a free, no obligation quote for you and match or beat the features of your current or found hosting provider. You have nothing to lose by asking for one of our quotes.

Contact our team by submitting a sales ticket: http://www.hostmediauk.com/client/submitticket.php
(Make sure to provide a link or scan of your quote as proof of quotation is required.)

Look forward to hearing from you.

After so many customers asking for MsSQL to be added as a service we are very happy to announce we now offer Microsoft SQL 2008 database hosting with RAID5 hard drives for the best performance, located in Scranton, PA (USA) which gives a great connection to our US based Railo 3 & ColdFusion 9 servers. Our CFManager already handles connections for MsSQL in your datasource names (DSN) for ColdFusion.

Price Plan

1GB MsSQL 2008 = £7.50/mo (£5 one time setup fee)

You can order this as an addon to your current hosting or order with a new order. If you are interested in just database hosting with us and not part of any of our other services please contact our sales team who will process this for you.

Order your MsSQL 2008 database hosting

If you require more than 1GB of database storage please contact our team as we have plans available up to 1TB (1000GB).

We have been offering CFML services for a long time now on Linux servers but our team have been working on our very new services ColdFusion 8 on Windows Server 2008 with Plesk.

Features

• ColdFusion 8
• ASP.NET 2 & 3.5
• PHP 5
• MySQL 5
• Plesk
• Windows Server 2008 Edition
• UK Servers

Packages

• Free hosting available
  Just like our other hosting services we will be releasing a free hosting package which is for a one time setup fee of £1 GBP with instant setup.
• Low costs for more than any other provider
  Priced packages will start from £3 per month or £15 per year, this will be one of the cheapest CF windows based hosting anyone provides.
• MsSQL Addon
  We are introducing 100MB MsSQL databases for £7.50 per month so you can start using MsSQL for your applications.

We are not planning to offer reseller hosting for Windows as we would like to make sure we have a stable shared environment to make sure we don’t get issues. This is future planned though.

Why ColdFusion 8 not 9?
We are hoping to upgrade to 9 on these servers but the reason for CF8 instead of 9 is that the current stable version of Plesk control panel currently only supports CF8 fully.

Release due: End of March 2011

This is a simple but effective way of getting rid of HTML tags and make the HTML string into plain text to output:

#REReplace(htmlStr,”<[^>]*>”,”",”All”)#

Example HTML: <h1>Title</h1><p>My content<p>
Example Output after: Title My content

We thought after our last major update on the plans of the ColdFusion 9 on cPanel services it might be a good idea to update everyone, as we keep getting a lot of people asking when this service will be released.

We are currently at the stage of final testing and have planned to make sure this service is released as soon as our new website is released so take advantage of a faster way to order and a site that will provide more information.

Company Update

To start the little update off we will be releasing our brand new website within a couple weeks time, the design has been approved and we think it will show the best of us really well. Being a CFML hosting company we thought we better build the website in ColdFusion, so we are happy to say most of our website will be built with CFML.

Now some business information for you; as you might have read last year was a very good year we met our targets and kept going above the targets. It has not even been half way through January but we have already beaten January 2010 records by a massive 30%.

We have a number of different areas we have been investing time into such as our WebHostDir page which now have an interview with our company director Jonathon Lucas which can be found at: http://uk.webhostdir.com/search/profile.aspx?spid=15533

We also have a Facebook page which we are currently building an application to be integrated into this. You can check us out at: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Host-Media-UK/102710030037

For all of those ColdFusion lovers out there you will be able to find one or two of us at Scotch on the Rocks next year (SOTR2012). We are hoping to be one of the proud sponsors and be giving away some great software, books, free hosting and Host Media UK merchandise. We hope to be speaking with the SOTR team shortly after the 2011 conference.

Make sure to follow us on Twitter for the very latest news, offers and features from Host Media UK. You can find us at: http://twitter.com/hostmediauk so join the over 240 users already following us.

Hope everyone has a great rest of January 2011. As always we are here 24/7 so feel free to contact us.

Something we have been wanting to offer for some time after so many people have been asking for it has finally started the testing stage; ColdFusion 9 Enterprise with cPanel/WHM 11 hosting. We will be offering both shared & reseller packages with all the great features of cPanel with ColdFusion 9.

cPanel + ColdFusion 9 Hosting

What needs to be done
After our successful Kloxo with CF9 we know a lot of the areas we need to work on to make sure our service is fully stable! Here are some of the key elements we will need to work on:

• Fix the ColdFusion Apache permission issue for CFFile uploads to the temp directory by changing the directory to a friendly server home directory.
• Test the latest MuraCMS, BlogCFC and Mango Blog to work with the newer 64Bit server.
• Enable CFManager to work with this second server for ColdFusion which will enable instant DSN setups.

Package Prices
We will be offering the same price & feature plans as our current Kloxo CP based ColdFusion hosting including the free hosting for only £1 setup fee. You will be able to decide which is best for you Kloxo or cPanel.

More ColdFusion Coming
We love ColdFusion so much we are also looking into offering ColdFusion in the UK with a provider who will be able to offer CF8 on Windows (Plesk CP) and support the server requirements better than any other provider in the UK. Another option is to use our current Co-Location providers and have our team run the servers fully with ColdFusion 9 on Windows with Plesk. We will update everyone once we know more on this matter.

General Updates on the ColdFusion side
As always we are always looking to update CFManager with new features and tools, one we have had to put back time and time again due to a heavy increase on work load is CFTracker integration. We are hoping after the release of the CFManager with the added server compatibility we will focus our work load onto adding this invaluable tool to our CFManager. Dave at CFTracker has helped so much and look forward to showing off his work in CFManager.

New Years

Hope everyone had a great Christmas and a happy new year! London sure did have a colourful one with a great display of fireworks.

< Photo shows London Eye fireworks from New Years Eve 2011 taken on the London Thames river bank. A great display that lasted a long time!

2010 is almost over and 2011 is just around the corner. We have now been hosting under the Host Media UK brand name for over 2 years now and having a great first year we had a high bar to beat… But each month we have beaten our previous years records and the company has increased by 150% which is great success.

Next year we are aiming to beat 2010′s records and looking to grow by a minimum of 25% (of course another 150% increase would be great!).

We have planned new services including the exciting ColdFusion 9 Enterprise on cPanel to enable cPanel Reseller accounts which we have had so many requests for.

We are also planning on a re-design of our website, talks are being held with the design team at AeonCube Networks (our owners) for what will be the best style to go forward into 2011 and onwards. The new design will also hold a lot of new integrated features and powerful tools for free.

We have released our online forum community area which you can login using your client area details so please do say hi on there and any questions we will sure respond to help for PHP, MySQL, ColdFusion, Railo and anything else. Visit the forum at: http://www.hostmediauk.com/client/forum.php

We are always looking for new ideas for new services to offer and look into so if you have an idea you would like us to explore why not give us a shout at: info{AT}hostmediauk.com

We wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, we will be here 24/7 so please feel free to contact us.

Thank you!

Host Media UK Team

To celebrate our successful first month of offering stunning ColdFusion 9 Enterprise hosting, costing for the cheapest anyone has ever offered before. We wanted to give away what we think is one of the most important ColdFusion books that should be in your collection, A signed copy of Matt Gifford’s new book ‘Object-Oriented Programming in ColdFusion’.

How to enter the prize raffle draw

To enter it couldn’t be more simple, place an order for any of our ColdFusion hosting (Including our FREE ColdFusion hosting – only one time £1 GBP setup fee required). All customers will be automatically entered into the give away. Signup only takes 2min and you could be walking away with this great book signed by Matt Gifford. Already have a ColdFusion hosting account with us, then you are already entered into the draw.

View our ColdFusion hosting…

Entries close on December the 10st 2010 midnight (London, UK Time) with the winner being announced on the following day.

The Prize

We are giving away a signed copy of Matt Gifford’s new book ‘Object-Oriented Programming in ColdFusion’ to one lucky winner who will be announced on December the 1st. This book is a must have for any ColdFusion developer looking to get into Object-Oriented Programming with ColdFusion.

This book is a fast-paced tutorial to developing ColdFusion applications using an object-oriented programming approach. Complete with code examples that can be altered and applied to your application and careful explanations, this book will guide you through your first interaction with object-oriented programming within your ColdFusion applications.

If you are a web developer wanting to implement object-oriented programming with ColdFusion, then this book is for you. If your goal is to get a good grounding in the basics of object-oriented programming concepts, this book is perfect for you. No prior knowledge of object-oriented programming is expected, but basic knowledge of ColdFusion development skills is assumed.

You can find more out about Matt Gifford at his website: http://www.mattgifford.co.uk/

View our ColdFusion hosting…

Good luck! and remember to share! Thank you!

Over the past week we have been working closely with David Boyer from the CFTracker team to work on the new features for our CFManager to give our ColdFusion customers application data which would include information such as sessions, memory usage and so on. With CFTracker enabled within our CFManager we will be able to provide a powerful tool for free.

The next version of CFManager will hopefully be released within the next couple of weeks and ready for the release of our CF9 with cPanel servers.

We are very proud to be working with CFTracker and we are also running monthly donations for the project to support CFTracker which our director has now setup. If you would like to donate to keep this fantastic project going please visit the donations page. (Make a donation) Check out how we support CFTracker. (Host Media UK helping CFTracker)

CFTracker can be used on your local machines & live servers for both Railo and ColdFusion. If you are unsure what CFTracker is and how it can be used then the best place to start learning can be found below:

Introduction

CfTracker is a ColdFusion based web application for viewing the current status of your ColdFusion server. It’ll show you active applications and sessions, let you peak inside the query cache, provide very detailed memory usage information, view all the threads on the system and expose various other statistics.

History

CfTracker started life as a single ColdFusion component that contained code to access all active sessions on an Adobe ColdFusion instance (CF7+). Gradually, sometimes with the help of others, I managed to undercover further ways to access metadata about the sessions (time alive, expired?, last accessed etc…) and similar methods for application instances. Once it got to a certain point of functionality, things went quiet as I didn’t have a need for the component.

After I attended the “Scotch on the Rocks” 2010 conference, I was inspired by Claude Englebert’s presentation on “Intro to CF 9 Server Manager Cluster and Manage CF”. He had to rewrite part of his presentation due to issues with Internet access and ended up talking about Adobe CFIDE Admin extensions. This was something I hadn’t encountered before and, as always with SOTR, I came away with a desire to use it for something.

Hence, CfTracker as an Adobe CFIDE Admin extension was born. I quickly put together various templates to display active applications, sessions plus some memory and performance information. Adding to that I provided methods for stopping / refreshing any session selected. A couple of people took an interest in this new version of the project and everything picked up from that point.

Today

CfTracker is turning into quite a flexible application, it has more options for installation:

• Standalone.
• Adobe CFIDE Admin Extension.
• Railo Server Admin plugin (currently in the beta release).
• Set of core components that provide all the functionality (this is what CFManager is using).

It also provides a lot more information and actions you can take:

• Applications (all active application instances)
  • Metadata (date created, expiration date, sessions, initialised)
  • Scope dump.
  • Dump of the application.cfc instance.
  • Can stop, restart (runs onApplicationStart, but maintains application scope) or refresh any application.
• Sessions (all active sessions on the server)
  • Metadata (date created, expiration date, client IP, last accessed time).
  • Scope dump.
  • Can stop or refresh (update last accessed time) any session.
• Query Cache
  • View cached queries.
  • SQL, result sets, creation date.
  • Purge all or individual items.
• Memory
  • Heap and Non-heap memory usage.
  • Heap and Non-heap memory pools usage.
  • JVM Garbage collection activity.
  • Server OS memory usage (physical and swap).
  • Request Garbage collection takes place.
• Statistics
  • Time spent compiling code.
  • CPU Usage.
  • Various performance counters.
• Threads
  • See all threads on the JVM.

What can you use it for?

Development

CfTracker can be a great tool when used for development purposes. You can easily see what applications and sessions are being created and peak inside them without having to use CfDump / WriteDump in your code. See what items are making it into the query cache and investigate how much memory usage is taking place.

If you’ve made a mistake in your application scope, you no longer have to wait for expiration, restart the server or try and write some code to correct it. You can use CfTracker to simply stop the application instance and the same goes for sessions.

Production

Can be very useful to see what’s going on. If a user reports a problem, you could check the application and session scopes to see if there is anything that looks odd. Make sure that your memory usage isn’t getting out of hand and that search engines haven’t created a load of extra sessions.

Future

2.2

This is the next version in development and currently available as a beta (can contain bugs). Most of the work is complete and only the Railo Server Admin plugin is left to complete.

• Historical Graphs (survive crashes or restarts).
  • CPU Usage, Compilation effort, Classes loaded, Class loading/unloading activity.
  • Heap, non-heap memory usage.
  • Garbage Collection activity.
  • Physical and Swap memory usage for the OS.
• Improved Thread information.
  • CPU time spent.
  • Template trace of any CFML threads.
• Railo Server Admin plugin support
  • Allows CfTracker to operate within the Railo admin itself.
  • Negates the need to request the server admin password.
  • If installed to a web admin, restricts applications / sessions to that web context only.

2.3+

Here is an idea of what else is in the pipeline for versions down the line.

• Alerts.
  • Receive email alerts when user configurable limits are hit.
  • Examples:
    • Memory usage hits 80%.
    • Too many garbage collections over a certain time period.
    • Unexpected rise in compilation effort (lots of new code being compiled).
    • Query Cache full.
    • CPU usage above 80% for ColdFusion over a certain period of time.
  • Each alert has an alert and reset level, plus a non-alert period, so constant emails aren’t fired.
  • For example, alert when memory is over 80%, unset the alert when it returns to 50%, don’t alert again for 10 minutes.
• Stack Traces
  • Enable stack traces for all threads on the system.
  • Useful for tracking down long running threads.
• Request monitoring
  • Still on the drawing board but should be able to monitor the CPU usage of each request, time taken to process and returned status code etc…
• Remote monitoring
  • CfTracker running in a dedicated ColdFusion instance, monitoring multiple remote instances.
  • Easily see what’s happening across your servers / instances.

So what now?

Go and try it out. The installation is straight forward (standalone), you just drop it on your server, open a web browser and surf to it. See if it’s useful and if it is, let others know about it.

Links

• CFTracker Website
• Google discussion group
• Twitter @cftracker

For some time we wanted to start up a new blog area for our guys to write code, reviews and general techie bits. After a couple weeks off and on testing and writing posts we now have a fully working blog for this. This release notice is a bit late as it has been a couple months now that it has been up and live. So check out: http://code.hostmediauk.com/

Any comments, requests and if you would be interested in becoming a blogger for the blog free feel to contact us or write comments on the posts of your interest.

After almost a month of testing we have publicly released ColdFusion Hosting today as well as our CFManager application which allows users to manage their data source names (DSN’s) instantly without the need to contact us.

Features include: CF9, FFMpeg, PHP with PHP Ming enabled, MySQL and Kloxo control panel.

Tested Applications: Mura CMS & BlogCFC (More being tested.)

Learn about the CF9 packages: http://www.hostmediauk.com/coldfusion-hosting/

CFManager 0.1.0: http://cfmanager.hostmediauk.com/

After having so many people interested in using the ColdFusion 9 BETA hosting since we released this phase we thought we better write up a little updates on everything and what’s happening. Don’t worry all is good and going well for the full release date!

1. Issue: We had some issues with the security of ColdFusion usinf cfdirectory / cffile but we have now fixed this and all is ok
2. System Required: We wanted to allow a user to be able to create DSN without needing to wait around for our team to add it in or even the edit it with the details. Even if we added it within a minute we know as developers ourselves we want it added now so we can get on with coding live. Thats why we are in the middle of building this system, its around 60% done and should be finished in the next couple of days.
3. The two major ColdFusion blog/cms systems we really wanted to make sure worked works fine both Mura CMS & BlogCFC works great and thank you to our Beta testers for testing them out.
4. Beta Tester Suggestion: A suggestion that was made about the control panel was some user guides to help with Kloxo. We have had plans to release online videos for both cPanel & kloxo as our 2 main control panels used and after this greater interest we will be releasing our videos in the next day or so.

Thank you again to our beta testers for their great jobs and we are looking forward to releasing the news that ColdFusion 9 Hosting is officially released.

After many days of testing, installing the latest systems we can confirm the features and server software on our ColdFusion services:

• CentOS 5 32Bit
• LxAdmin/Kloxo Control Panel (Same as our Railo hosting)
• ColdFusion 9 Enterprise
• MySQL 5
• PHP 5
• PHP Ming Enabled
• FFmpeg

Why 32Bit operating system, the main reason is due to the control panel we want to use. LxAdmin/Kloxo is supported mainly for 32bit and as we want to provide the most stable solutions possible.

Once we have tested each area is working fine and we are happy with these systems we will release the beta stage of our services to a select group of users to test and play. This will be done this week hopefully, if you would like to register your interest for the beta testing please contact us.

Please note some tags will be restricted such as “cfexecute”, “cfregister”, “cfobject” etc for security reasons.

UPDATE: 31/August/2010 : 13:58 UK TIME

We have had a few questions about ColdFusion datasource names (DSN) and how the process will be in creating them, as unlike Railo users will not able to have access to the Admin area of ColdFusion. Well the answer from our tech team is nice and simple, we will be creating an online form which all users that have ordered ColdFusion hosting will be able to access to create DSN’s within the client area of Host Media UK. We will later look into developing a Kloxo control panel addon to manage datasource names.

This will be released soon after the public release of the hosting and for the mean time anyone who requires a DSN created will be able to open a support ticket with the database details so our team can manually create one for you.

After our successful survey for ColdFusion 9 services on Linux we have now decided to go ahead with ColdFusion and have placed a new server in our racks to start offering this services within 2 weeks time.

Our timeline:

1. Install best OS for ColdFusion
2. Install ColdFusion 9 Enterprise with the latest patches for the new security fixes
3. Install Control Panel (LxAdmin / Kloxo)
4. Test connections and server resource usage
5. Install media features such as PHP Ming and FFmpeg
6. Run dedicated tests on the service from our internal team
7. Meet to discuss results and server usage and if required upgrade servers features
8. Start our beta tests for a select group of users with free accounts to use ColdFusion 9 hosting
9. If all is well in 2 weeks time we will release the service to the public. If any issues and requires more time a notice will be made to everyone.

Thank you to those who gave us their feedback on the ColdFusion on Linux survey, we are still happy to hear peoples comments & views on this and you can still access the survey here: http://smurl.be/?0e12d

If you would like to see the ColdFusion packages and prices that are set at the moment (may change) please visit: http://www.hostmediauk.com/coldfusion-hosting/

Thank you from all of the Host Media UK team!

Today the Sport Datum service is launched to provide XML based data feeds to be used on desktop, mobile and of course web based applications. XML can be read by a huge number of coding languages including: ColdFusion, Railo, PHP, ASP.NET, X-Code and many more.

You can sign for FREE to the services and get the English Premier League Top 3 and Formula One Standings Top 3 results for free and you can upgrade at any time or just keep using the free service.

The data feeds are located in the US and the UK which allows you to pick which will fit with your users requirements best, or use both!

Why not try out the service and start showing sports data on your website!

Register a free account: http://www.sportdatum.com/register/

Visit the website: http://www.sportdatum.com/

Have your say!

We wanted to put the question regarding ColdFusion’s future on Host Media UK to the public to try and help us see the demand for the service. We know ColdFusion is in demand and people love using ColdFusion, we have seen this in Railo which has been more than successful.

Q: Would you like to see ColdFusion 9 Enterprise on Linux hosting?

Check out the online survey with a simple 1 question to answer at: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/33W9BPY