We have been doing the reward for reviews for some time now to help us get more information from our customers for things they like or dislike about our services. We thought we would share some of our customers views on our hosting services:

“Having used several hosting companies, I found Host Media and gave them a try. Fantastic prices, quick responses to any questions, consistent uptime, I now use Host Media for all my hosting and would recommend them without hesitation. Thank you Host Media.”
by Steve Callcut of www.re-move-all.co.uk

“With one sense.’Just what I was looking for a long time.’ Great ColdFusion hosting services with constantly improvement. I recommend it to any Cf web developer.
Thank you”
by I Ramljak of www.iwebo.nl

“I’ve been with Host Media for about 6 months and I love it.
It is full of services, reliable, always available to help and I never had a problem with them. The Railo 3.1 service rocks…”
by Nelson Batista of www.energianatural.pt

“First I using Host Media UK service for my blog (obilog.info), Host Media give me best solutions for web hosting with lower price but high services and quality like good uptime server, excellent technical support and good customer service.
And now host media give a lot solution for location choice of hosting server, you can select location on UK, USA, and for Asia. I’m very happy, because I’m from Asia and Host Media UK give Asia location on hosting package.”
by Robbi Hendriyanto of www.obilog.info

Thank you to all of those who have reviewed our services! Sorry we couldn’t list them all as there was a good few reviews but thank you for your support.

From our post (read here) about making our Railo service even faster we found some issues with our Railo memory usage which you may have seen by short periods where Railo failed and required a restart. After a couple of days of testing we found the Java behind Railo required a lot more Ram than we thought so we can increased the amount by double and increase the amount that Java can use to handle the Railo service.

After our major increase we have found Railo to be working well and the server appears to be handling websites much better. With this we have also learned a bit more about Railo, we can now see when Railo requires more from the server and can easily upgrade when its time to. At the moment the server is running great and everything seems to be fine. We will keep an eye on the server logs to see any further issues that may appear.

If you have any questions or comments please contact us via a support ticket.

After some small slow down in the Railo services on our servers we thought we would upgrade our Railo servers RAM. You maybe thinking this is not a big deal, wont change anything and as long as everything is working then nothing to think about… Well with this upgrade you might be interested to know the Railo services are now working 25% faster than before and from our tests running sites like smurl.be will give all users better performance on their accounts.

This just shows another reason why we love Railo, we have a great processor on our server but with Railo RAM is the key to make everything run fast so as RAM is easily upgradable we will keep upgrading the RAM when ever any slow down on the server happens.

Hope everyone on our Railo packages are enjoying the faster speeds.

As today is the first of the month we thought it would be nice to offer something for free so we are now offering a Railo hosting plan which includes 100MB of space & 1GB of bandwidth for free! Only a one off setup fee payment is required of £1 GBP and you will never have to pay a penny more. You can also upgrade your account later on to a paid plan instantly through the client area if you wish.

View Hosting Packages / Signup

Hosting Features:

• Railo 3.1
• Web Administrator
• Unlimited Datasources
• Mapping
• CF8 Tag Compatibility
• Custom Tags
• CFImport
• CFObject
• LxAdmin Control Panel
• MySQL
• FFmpeg
• PHP Ming

You can order online and have your account setup instantly and Railo enabled within 24 hours after your order. We already have 100′s of happy Railo hosted websites being hosted on our servers and continuing to improve our systems.

View Railo Hosting Plans including the free package : http://www.hostmediauk.com/railo-hosting/

Earn £0.25 per signup! Share this offer through an affiliate link to friends and family and if they signup you get 0.25p! Signup and get your link: https://www.hostmediauk.com/client/affiliates.php

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:

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.

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.

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.

Today we received information back from our new data centre in the US regarding our new Railo servers which we are happy to say they are now in the final stage of development. The servers have been tested with all basic systems such as CentOS, LxAdmin (Kloxo), Railo 3.1 Final and PHP with MySQL.

The final step is the important part, to make the DNS systems assign to IP’s and the server load is monitored for a minimum of 6 hours to make sure no upgrades to the hardware is required which we are sure they are not as the servers are the latest from our suppliers in the US.

We hope to have the servers up in the next 48 hours, it is not as we expected date we had planned but with this delay we have been able to do extra testing and prep time. Our development team is looking forward to using Railo and we hope to have a range of websites to show off the power of Railo.

NOTE A: Railo 3.1 Final uses the tags of ColdFusion 8 and ColdFusion 9 is currently in the next phase of development.

NOTE B: If you are after adult hosting for Railo we are sorry to say our contract we have agreed with our new US data centre means we will be unable to hosting adult material on the Railo servers.

NOTE C: As our data centre is working on a connector for LxAdmin => Railo our team will need 48 hours on all new domains/accounts that are setup to enable Railo on the account. This is an easy process for us to do and wont be a problem. This is just due to the host files in apache not being read by Railo. We hope to have a connector in the near future no manual work on these XML files will need to be done.

After long talks with the Vivio Data Centre in Walla Walla, Washington we have now agreed a contract to have new servers placed within the fantastic facility. With this new data centre comes new services which include Linux based Railo hosting which allows you to host .cfm files without the expense of ColdFusion.

Railo comes with many great features that allow you to use the power of ColdFusion without spending out for the hosting. Railo is also more stable and faster than the ColdFusion engine.

Features

• Use most of the ColdFusion tags and custom tags from the Railo team.
• Your own cfadmin to add mappings / datasources / etc
• Open source built so we can work on adding new connectors and system addons
• Works with the following ColdFusion frameworks:
  1. Coldbox
  2. Transfer ORM
  3. CFWheels
  4. Fusebox
  5. Mach II
  6. Reactor – ORM
  7. Model Glue
• Supports most database types including MySQL, MsSQL, PostgreSQL, Access, etc

Our view of Railo

As ColdFusion based developers finding a easy to use and powerful scripting language that can handle our clients requirements is a huge plus. This is why ColdFusion was picked as the main development language for us, when we heard about Railo we were very excited about the idea of a server side software that will use almost everything that ColdFusion does but open source and free. As you may know ColdFusion Standard has a price tag of over £800 (Ext VAT) for 1 server licence which for many is alot to invest in.

We are now moving our scripting plans to be able to handle both ColdFusion and Railo so if you use our scripting services you dont need to worry about expense of ColdFusion and use Railo.

Railo on ordering

As we will be offering railo services to all LxAdmin hosting package apart from the basic package you will have Railo Activiated on your account within 48 hours after ordering as our team does need to add your account to a XML file that handles the paths for your hosting. All other features of your hosting will be enabled straight away which will include PHP, MySQL etc.

LxAdmin (Kloxo)

Kloxo (Previously Lxadmin) is trivially the most advanced and flexible hosting platform on this planet. From Kloxo HostinABox that can run a full featured hosting on 15MB RAM to Kloxo Enterprise, which is only truly distributed hosting platform in the industry, Kloxo is a single software that can power all areas of your hosting business, whether it is powering your entire shared hosting or simple control panel that you can sell with your VPS offering.

Why LxAdmin

We have picked LxAdmin for this new server and service due to its low preformance requirements and its easy to use interface. Similar to cPanel in many ways, this control panel allows you to manage every part of your website hosting.

DNS Information

dns5.hostmediauk.com
dns6.hostmediauk.com

Packages / Ordering / Pricing

At the current time we are working on the websites detail page for Railo / LxAdmin hosting and our team is deciding on the best pricing structure for this. We think basic LxAdmin hosting without Railo will start at £5 per year and will be listed with the hosting packages under ‘Shared Hosting’. Railo Hosting will be a dedicated section on our website with all information regarding its features and what you will be able to use on the hosting package.

We will post more information here on our blog in the next day or so.