For some businesses, a website can be a useful adjunct, bringing in additional revenue and providing a means of informing and supporting customers. For others, the website is their business, and down time or problems can mean the difference between profitability and disaster. When considering a dedicated server or complex hosting solution for your enterprise, it is wise to look at the support offered by your managed hosting suppliers.
Call centres provide economies of scale, but do not necessarily provide for the speedy resolution of customer problems. Time spent hanging on the telephone is money wasted, and you would be better off with office based staff with an intimate knowledge of your particular technical requirements. Response to emergency situations should be immediate and staff should be trained to deal with a variety of problems quickly and expediently. Take a good, long, look at the support offered on the managed host website. Is it in-depth enough to be able to answer and solve your minor problems? Has a member of staff been assigned to manage your account and help you out?
CWCS managed hosting includes 24/7 telephone and e-mail support constantly monitored by dedicated staff. We have no call centres, just friendly and supportive office -based teams with the right level of technical expertise to solve your problems quickly. You will be dealing with real, live people, not making selections from a machine. We pride ourselves on the level of support offered to our customers, and the testimonials available on our website show that keeping your business online and productive is our paramount concern.

A virtual dedicated server, to all intents and purposes, is a separate machine. It can run a variety of operating systems and support software that gives you access to the latest web technologies – ASP, ASP.net, PHP5, MySQL, ColdFusion and Java. If this is the case, you may be wondering what benefits there are to upgrade to a dedicated server.
CWCS offers both dedicated servers and dedicated virtual servers, in a variety of configurations, operating systems, processing power, storage and RAM to suit a multitude of needs. The difference lies in having sole use of the hardware. Virtual servers exist on a single machine, and processing power is now so powerful that one machine is capable of supporting several virtual machines. These virtual machines share the processor and memory – and are thus an affordable way of spreading the cost. The downside is that there is sometimes a performance hit, and if you have a demanding website offering streaming video and large downloads, you may find your site slowing down to unacceptable levels at peak demand times.
A dedicated server is a separate machine, under your sole control and with no other drain on performance. CWCS offers dedicated servers comprising of brand new hardware in a variety of specifications. All you need to do is to pick the processing power and storage capacity appropriate to your needs. With all the servers on offer, virtual or dedicated, you get full root access, the ability to install the software you need and unlimited data transfer. If you would like advice on an appropriate package, please give us a call.

“From little acorns, mighty oak trees grow.” So goes the old saying, and it would be nice if our businesses also grew into larger, more profitable enterprises. As you expand, so should your online presence, and the opportunities to increase your virtual presence should match your physical, real world expansion.
CWCS offers three dedicated web hosting plans – which offer a clear upgrade path should your needs change. As you take on more staff, they will need to be supported with company e-mail addresses. While the starter plan gives you 85 e-mail addresses, more than enough for most small businesses, the professional and business plans upgrade that to 400 and a stunning 6500 respectively.
Bigger websites require more storage space. 1GB of storage space may seem adequate for your needs when you start out, but as you grow you may want to upgrade this capacity. Your websites may well become more complex, and certainly more demanding as your organisation grows, so you will need to be able to run the latest web technologies. This means that your websites can have all the bells and whistles required to add kudos to your corporate image and offer your customers the tools they need to access your goods and services.
Upgrading is simple, need not cost you the earth, and can provide you with real benefits. Call us – we will migrate your site and you will see the new features instantly available. With new features, new opportunities to increase productivity and profitability become a real possibility.

The internet runs largely on open-source software. Most of the web servers are powered by Linux machines running the Apache server system, and include PHP5 and MySQL for the creation and maintenance of dynamically served web pages.
CWCS dedicated servers and virtual dedicated servers come with the choice of a range of open-source and proprietary operating systems and the latest in web technologies. If you have a spare machine at work or at home and would like to get to grips with the benefits of open-source software, it is a lot easier than you might think.
The Linux operating system is freely downloadable and these days, installs easily without any huge amount of technical knowledge. While there are several popular Linux distributions available for free download, one of the easiest for newcomers to Linux is Ubuntu. The operating system fits onto a single CD and can be even be run from the CD disk so that you can try out the operating system and make sure that all your hardware is working without making any changes to your computer.
Likewise, the Apache web server and PHP5 and MySQL can be easily and quickly installed on a Ubuntu system, giving you a powerful set of tools to develop your website off-line. The best thing about open-source software is that it is free, and there is a host of help available on the internet to get you up-and-running in the shortest possible time. Having your very own local web server capable of running PHP and MySQL means that you can experiment with getting your web site working just as you would like before uploading it to the world at large.

Plans and packages are great. They can give you instant information about the benefits included and allow you to rapidly make comparisons about what is on offer, choosing the right deal to suit you and your present circumstances. Unluckily, life isn’t always that simple, and you may find yourself in a situation that isn’t covered by an existing dedicated server plan. Off-the-peg plans and packages are a bit like off-the-peg suits: no matter what contortions you get up to, sometimes you simply can’t fit yourself inside them.
The market in the provision of dedicated servers has changed dramatically over recent years. Companies offering these services have been able to drop prices while adding to the range of features and benefits available to new and existing customers. Economies of scale have dictated that many service providers have concentrated on plans and packages, because the vast majority of businesses will find one that suits their needs. Those of us with individual needs, or those requiring the intervention of a real-life person rather than a machine, have been a little neglected.
Luckily the market has now woken up to the opportunities that individually tailored plans and packages can provide, and it is possible now to tailor-make a dedicated server package that is exactly right for you and caters for all your requirements. CWCS dedicated servers can be tailor-made to your specifications, and with all dedicated servers you also get a real, live, human being to look after your needs and ensure that your server remains productive.

You will probably have noticed that the Professional web hosting Plan we offer here at CWCS includes the use of PHP5 and MySQL. If you’ve only recently moved into exploring the possibilities of a website for your business, you may be wondering what these tools are and how you might use them to your advantage.
Many websites are designed using just HTML. This is sometimes all a small business will need to advertise goods or services, display contact information or offer support. As your business grows however, the range of products and services may expand, and the amount of information you may need to update could become unmanageable using standard HTML. PHP and MySQL can make tasks like updating product information, prices and availability from a central database very simple.
More good news – both PHP and MySQL are free, and versions can be downloaded and installed on Windows, Macintosh and Linux machines. There is also a wealth of knowledge and help available online for using these powerful tools. A word of caution: if you are new to web design, the learning curve may seem steep. The benefits are however, immense. A good place to begin to learn to use PHP in conjunction with MySQL is the many free online tutorials that you can find using a good search engine like Google.
If you already have an in-house web designer, or employ a design team, then they will already be aware of the benefits. Selecting an appropriate web hosting plan from CWCS could be all you need to give them access to these tools, and the benefits for your business will soon become apparent.

Having a successful website says a lot about your corporate image – and once it has been up-and-running for a while it can cause a massive increase in traffic to and from your online business. Of course, this is good news for the sale of goods and services, the provision of customer information and support and can have a huge impact on your turnover and concomitant profitability.
However, the increase in traffic can start to cause problems if your current site is unable to cope with the demand: pages become slow to load, transactions take a while to process. This can have a negative impact on your customer’s perceptions of the usability of your site and this perception may feed back into a negative appraisal of your business as a whole.
A dedicated server makes things a lot easier. It can dramatically increase the speed at which your website operates and allow for the rapid processing of pages offering information and financial transactions. You may be thinking that having your own server is both expensive and complicated: think again. Prices for dedicated servers have dropped dramatically in recent years, and web-based control panels have simplified the process of day-to-day management considerably. Make sure that any dedicated server you consider comprises of brand new hardware and comes with appropriate processor power, RAM and hard disk storage for your needs.
At CWCS, our Linux and Windows dedicated servers come with unlimited data transfer and a guaranteed 99.9% uptime. There are a variety of affordable packages which include a dedicated account manager to help keep your business online and profitable.

Here’s a common scenario: you’ve got three new members of staff starting work this morning. You’ve sourced them office space, desks and computers, but in order to help them to be productive, you also need to provide them with a company email address and make sure that existing staff and customers can contact them immediately.
In the old days, this might have required frequent telephone calls to your network provider and a visit from technical support to configure the email clients. Sometimes you could wait for a whole day or more before everyone got set up. This was because configuring a server to do these things required a level of technical expertise that may have been out of reach of all but very large businesses.
All CWCS Web Hosting Plans include a control panel, accessed from a standard web browser like Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari. This control panel allows those of us with little experience of server configuration to perform the day-to-day tasks required to keep staff working productively. Email accounts can be set up and configured with a few clicks of a mouse. Email forwarding and automatic email responses are easily handled – as are the complexities of allowing FTP access to authorised personnel, setting up a Blog on your website, and examining site statistics.
Web-based control panels will save you both time and money, minimise the need for convoluted technical telephone conversations, and ensure that your staff remain productive. They also allow you to have quick and easy control over many of the aspects of your online business.

Liquid cooling works as an alternative to the fan that usually cools the processor. Cold plates that conduct the heat from the processors to the liquid replace the fan.

Keeping a data centres temperature to a minimum is an absolute essential procedure for known hosting providers that own and manage their own data centres.

CWCS Managed Hosting are partners directly with HP who provide dedicated server hardware for managed hosting clients. HP has announced they are expanding the use of liquid cooling across their hardware, which will ensure all hardware remains ice cool. Not only does this solve the issue with heat, moving to liquid cooling tackles another known problem…. fan noise.

One way to compare the level of noise is to think of a normal household refrigerator, which generates around 40 decibels. Some fan-cooled hardware generates up to 38 decibels under a heavy CPU load. When idle the hardware generates around 27 decibels and you can imagine the noise this produces in a working data centre environment.

CWCS Managed Hosting always goes that bit further to improve its services and always offers the most reliable and effective hosting solution available today. This is why we choose a top brand like HP as a supplier. Working with a proactive supplier allows us to implement new hardware and technologies as soon as it’s available on the market.

Find out about what we can offer to improve your hosting solution:
http://www.cwcs.co.uk

The internet never sleeps. We are truly living in a global village, and the obvious implication is that our customer base is global as well. Gone are the days when we sold local goods and services to local customers: now we may be selling to Beijing and New York, provide support to Burkina Faso, deal with queries from Brazil and develop new markets in Sierra Leone.
While we may work physically from 9 to 5, time zones dictate that our online business has to run 24/7. This means that any problems affecting our web presence must be dealt with quickly. CWCS offers 24/7 support, with a range of professionals equipped to deal with problems rapidly and effectively. This means that your downtime is minimised, your profitability maximised and your problems are expediently solved. Unlike many other hosting services, there is no extra charge for our support – it comes as part of the package.
While good support is paramount, CWCS also strives for excellence in one other regard: minimising downtime for all our customers. We guarantee that your server will be up and running 99 percent of the time even when routine maintenance is taken into account. We do this because we realise the importance our customers place on participating in a growing and thriving global market in goods, services and information. When you choose a web hosting package, it is important to compare like with like. Your package should be affordable, but should also offer everything you need to stay online 24/7.