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!

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).

VZHost

We are proud to welcome to our group VZHost a US based Virtual Private Server company which was a startup company that took out interest straight away. With its fantastic virtual environment to provide powerful VPS’s starting from only $6.95 per month which is one of the cheapest providers in the world, we can now offer network customers a great solution in the VPS market.

Our plans for the company!

We have a number of plans for this great up coming company, we are currently working on the new site and new branding which will showcase the great value VPS’s much better.

As we like to improve everything we can to allow for a better service we are planning to release Railo installation packages so you can have a low cost VPS to use for your CFML applications.

Check out this great package (see below):

VPS #1 – ONLY $6.95/mo

• 1GHz CPU
• 20GB Hard Disk
• 1000GB (1TB) Bandwidth on 100Mbps Port
• 512MB RAM
• 2 Usable IPs
• OpenVZ + vePortal
• DDOS Protection
• Self Managed
• Available locations: Scranton, PA / Los Angeles, CA

You can order your Self Managed VPS now at: http://my.vzhost.net/cart.php?gid=5

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

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/

Last night we had our Railo services upgraded to the latest stable release: Railo 3.1.2.001 final

With a huge amount of new features and fixes for both security & current features. To see what’s planned for the new major released of Railo please visit the Railo Roadmap on getrailo.org URL: http://www.getrailo.org/index.cfm/documentation/railo-roadmap/

Hope you all enjoy the new features.

We have been getting many emails saying what’s the best way to preview their website before changing the main sites DNS / A:Records over… Well we have found a simple but easy way to preview websites, its as simple as creating a sub domain. Just like a full domain name a sub domain can be pointed to our Railo servers in the US and we can then add it to the service. (Example below)

What we see:

<Host name=”#domain.com#” appBase=”webapps”

unpackWARs=”true” autoDeploy=”true”

xmlValidation=”false” xmlNamespaceAware=”false”>

<Context path=”" docBase=”/home/#username#/#domain.com#/” />

<Alias>#www.domain.com#</Alias>

<Alias>#subdomain.com#</Alias>

</Host>

Key:
Grey: Standard host text we add when we get a new order
Black: What we add for your sub domain to work on the main domain

So in conclusion with your current domain owner or hosting provider you will need to create a sub domain name, anything you would like (Example: railo.yourdomain.com) and point it to own Railo IP which is in your ‘Welcome Account Information’.

If you have any questions or would like to get more information please contact our support team via the support ticket.

With our new server up & running today we have finished the main install of Railo 3 onto the server with Resin which we are happy to inform everything on that it is working just fine on our cPanel based server.

We are currently looking to see how Railo can integrate with the servers hosts XML file so no adding host entries into the Resin file.

The techie part:

<host regexp=”(.+)”>

<host-name>${host.regexp[1]}</host-name>

<root-directory>/home/${host.regexp[1]}/public_html</root-directory>

<web-app id=”/” document-directory=”.”/>

</host>

<host id=”DOMAIN.COM” root-directory=”/home”>

<web-app id=”/” root-directory=”USERNAME/public_html” />

</host>

Today our team is working on a new way to host Railo which could allow better interface between the control panel and the Railo service. We have brought a new server (US based) to install the latest cPanel and the latest Railo to work together with high performance.

The features we would like to start offering on this service is:

• Add domain names to the Railo service to work from midnight onwards

  OR

  Add domain names to work instantly with Railo without the midnight Railo service restarts we currently do

• Allow data sources (DSN) to be setup / managed within cPanel so no need to access the Web Administrator
• Also to allow mappings to be managed within cPanel
• WHM reseller permissions to enable or disable Railo for an account as a feature

This service will be released as stable while we start adding new features over time as listed above. We hope to have the Railo & cPanel service testing finished by the end of the week (9th / July / 2010).

Keep an eye on our blog for updates.

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

Over the past few days we have been testing our new upgrades to our Railo servers in Washington and preparing for even more upgrades to the servers within the next 2 months.

The main update to the servers have been the CPU power to allow for better handling of Railo, with this increase in performance power more powerful ColdFusion & Railo scripts can be run without decrease in server speed.

Many of our customers have already notices an increase in script speeds and with the future upgrades planned we hope to have the very best Railo hosting servers out today.

One of the main things all developers come to in applications is pagination and the best way we found to do this is by Raymond Camden which covers how to create next and previous buttons for your content using the URL variable.

As we have extended what Raymond Camden has done we will go through all the code again to make sure you get the full picture.

First part is to get our data, which most of the time will be a database or as the second data example shows a queryNew which is a way of creating data in a query format without the need of a database query.

<cfquery name=”data” datasource=”data_dsn”>

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SELECT *

FROM data

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</cfquery>

OR

<cfset data = queryNew(“id,name,age,active”,”integer,varchar,integer,bit”)>

<cfloop index=”x” from=”1″ to=”22″>
<cfset queryAddRow(data)>

<cfset querySetCell(data,”id”,x)>
<cfset querySetCell(data,”name”,”User #x#”)>
<cfset querySetCell(data,”age”,randRange(20,90))>

<cfset querySetCell(data,”active”,false)>

</cfloop>

Next we want to set the number of records per page we would like to show, for this example code we are using 10:

<cfset perpage = 10>

Now we create the code for the URL variables which counts the records in the data we have got from our database / query. We also set the default of the variable URL.start to 1 as we want to start from the first record and not 0.

<cfparam name=”url.start” default=”1″>

<cfif not isNumeric(url.start) or url.start lt 1 or url.start gt data.recordCount or round(url.start) neq url.start>
<cfset url.start = 1>
</cfif>

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The output of the data, you will notice on our <cfoutput> tag we have startrow & maxrows which sets what records are displayed.

<cfoutput query=”data” startrow=”#url.start#” maxrows=”#perpage#”>
#currentrow#) #name#<br />
</cfoutput>

And now this is when the code that Raymond Camden created changes a little to add in a new feature, page numbering. We first have a previous link which has an if statement around it to see if its a link or not and enable the <a> tag or have no link on it. This can be done different ways but to keep with Raymond Camden’s code we will leave it as it is. Now the new part you can see within the commented area (<!— Start Page Number —> CODE <!— End Page Number —>) we set 2 variables one for a page count as we need to have a number of pages that will be listed. The next one is page link, this is to fit in with the rest of the code and add the number that will need to be added within the link to view the numbered page. Next is a loop to go through the number of pages with the link and a small bit of VERY simple maths to add up the next page through the loop.

<p align=”center”>

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[

<cfif url.start gt 1>

<cfset link = cgi.script_name & "?start=" & (url.start - perpage)>

<cfoutput><a href="#link#">Previous Page</a></cfoutput>

<cfelse>

Previous Page

</cfif>

/

<!--- Start Page Number --->

<cfset pageCount = 1>
<cfset pageLink = 1>

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<cfset totalPages = Ceiling(rs_getReports.recordCount / perpage)>

<cfloop index="c" from="1" to="#totalPages#">

<cfoutput>

<a href="?start=#pageLink#">#pageCount#</a>

</cfoutput>

<cfset pageCount = pageCount + 1>

<cfset pageLink = pageLink + perpage>

</cfloop>

<!--- End Page Number --->

/

<cfif (url.start + perpage - 1) lt rs_getReports.recordCount>

<cfset link = cgi.script_name & "?start=" & (url.start + perpage)>

<cfoutput><a href="#link#">Next Page</a></cfoutput>

<cfelse>

Next Page

</cfif>

]

</p>

Thats it, you will now have something that looks like this:

Base code taken from Raymond Camden’s coldfusionjedi.com :

http://www.coldfusionjedi.com/index.cfm/2006/4/24/ColdFusion-and-Pagination

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

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  - Use the WYSIWYG editor
  - Apply code to front end site to test speeds

• Consult with development team to see how things can be improved

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)—>

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<!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”)>

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<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

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  ).

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

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.