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Last Updated: 14 November 2016

Website Support Update

Some changes to our website and hosting support services, and clarification of some issues that have arisen over recent months.

We'd like to remind all clients that all out-of-warranty support is chargeable, either as part of a support contract or at our hourly rate. Any requests along the lines of 'Can you just...' will be treated as support requests and charged accordingly!

To request support, help, or site amendments, please send your request to - this will automatically raise a support ticket which helps avoid support requests disappearing into the quagmire of general correspondence.

Points to note:

• Priority is given to support requests where an annual support agreement is in place
• Other support requests are prioritised by OUR interpretation of order of urgency or criticality, and scheduled to fit in around any other work already in progress.
• If it is a relatively small task - i.e. less than 2 hours of likely duration, we will carry out the work if practical/possible, and invoice you accordingly, without requesting further approval, unless you clearly state you only want an estimate.
• If the task is likely to take longer than 2 hours, we'll give you an estimate first.
• The minimum chargeable period is half an hour
• We are not an IT consultancy or IT support provider. We cannot help you with your in-house network or email services other than how they relate to any hosting provided by us. We will help where we can, but we cannot advise on configuration of email clients, debugging connection problems, or the vagaries of your network or ISP. For assistance in these areas you will need to engage an IT support company.

CMS Lifetimes

The fact that we built a website for you one, two or several years ago does not mean a lifetime's free support! You wouldn't drive a car around for years on end without getting it serviced, and the same applies to websites - they do need some maintenance and upgrading from time to time.

Software has a lifespan, and it's relatively short. The older a piece of software is, the greater the likelihood of security and compatibility issues. It is unreasonable to expect that a piece of software developed several years ago will remain compatible with the latest server software, or remain secure. As with nearly all software developed anywhere by anyone, security flaws have been exposed in older versions of Joomla and Wordpress (and their additional plugins), particularly as in many cases they necessarily have to be run on older versions of PHP and Apache, which have also been found to have security vulnerabilities. Joomla versions 1.0, 1.5 and 2.5 are now long past 'end-of-life' and are no longer supported by the developers.

Over the last few months we have seen a proliferation of attacks on sites running some of these older versions, particularly Joomla 1.5 and Wordpress <4.5, some successful, resulting in significant downtimes (and cost) while sites are recovered.

The bottom line is that if your site is running an old version of Joomla or Wordpress, it is vulnerable to attack, and it should be upgraded, sooner rather than later, as should your site be hacked:

a) we may not be able to recover it or continue hosting it, leading to significant downtime while it is replaced or upgraded, and

b) the cost of recovering it is chargeable, and there is no guarantee that recovery will be anything other than a short term solution. Prevention is better than cure, and now is the time to upgrade or you run the risk of significant downtime.

If your site is running one of these older CMS systems, we will be in touch with your upgrade options if we haven't already - for 'standard' sites the cost of upgrading to the latest CMS version is not prohibitive, and should you choose not to upgrade the eventual cost and harm to your business could be considerably higher, and we may not be able to provide ongoing support for your site.

Terms and conditions

All work undertaken by us is subject to our current terms and conditions : See Terms and Conditions

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Last Updated: 23 September 2016

Google Penguin 4 Officially Launches Today

The latest iteration of Google's war on webspam kicked off officially today.

As with previous Penguin updates, the target is to attack sites engaging in illicit linking strategies. Key features are 'Real Time' processing, where penalties are applied (and hopefully removed) following each crawl and re-indexation, and 'Granularity' penalising sites at page rather than domain level.

Better get ready for some movements in SERPS over the coming weeks!

Click here for Google's official release post. 

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Last Updated: 06 April 2016

Bing still chipping away at Google

Last June Bing announced that it had signed a 10 year advertising deal with long-time Google partner AOL, which came to fruition from the 1st January 2016 when Bing results and ads replaced Google on AOL search.

AOL might not be the power they used to be, but this is still a significant coup for Microsoft who have slowly but steadily been gaining market share in the search marketplace, recently passing the 20% mark in the US.

Read more: Bing still chipping away at Google

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Last Updated: 22 September 2021

Should you use your website host for hosting your email?

This is a question we've asked ourselves frequently over the last year. And the conclusion we've come to is 'quite possibly not'.

The hosting and email hosting market has changed radically over the last few years with the proliferation of devices used to keep people in touch.

In the 'good old days', up to about 5 years ago :-) most people collected their email via POP3 from a single device - PC or laptop, and downloaded their mail to their email program - Outlook, Thunderbird or whatever.  Mail was just passing through, only temporarily stored on the server before being downloaded; and most hosting companies geared their infrastructures around that sort of usage.

Read more: Should you use your website host for hosting email