Blogs

As we mentioned in our blog post about reliability, we have moved all of our services into the Amazon Cloud and this post is a brief overview of how this helps our customers.

Imagine this scenario; you are looking to get a website designed for your new company, you've found a website design company that you like the look of and have decided to go with them. Your new site looks great, it's all paid for and it's officially live. You have started marketing your site and telling potential clients about it and convincing them to use your business. This is a good time for any new startup but what would the impact be if there was a problem with the hosting company's server and your website went down? How would that look to your potential clients and what would it do to your reputation?

Around 4 years ago, we started up a blog for MDS Solutions and came up with quite a few posts on website design and SEO. We had a few issues with the installation and for one reason or another it fell to the back of the queue in terms of importance. We also had lots of new client projects and our own website and blog had to sit on the back burner for a while and it didn't really get the attention is deserved.

Google have announced a new infrastructure for their search engine codenamed "Caffeine". They are inviting developers and power users to help test out the new infrastructure which will allow them to "push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions".

Twitter have released a "search widget" that you can customise and place on your website to show all of the latest "tweets" that have been made on a particular subject. What is the Twitter Search Widget? The Twitter Search Widget is essentially a piece of javascript that you can place on your website. The javascript will create a kind of "news ticker" type section that will display all of the latest "tweets" that are made on a particular subject. How do I get the Twitter Search Widget? You'll need to first visit the Twitter Search Widget page where, if you are logged in, you will be presented with a few required details on what you want your search widget to contain: You'll need to enter what it is you are actually searching for (notice that in the example above we've decided to show all entries that match Web Design OR SEO so that we get results from two different terms). You can also customise the Twitter Search Widget so that it displays a title and a caption that suits your intended use. If you want to change the colour and size of the widget, you can also do this by going to the "Appearance" and "Dimensions" tabs on the left hand side, however you won't notice these changes on the above preview page: If you click the "Finish & Grab code" button at the bottom of the page you should also be presented with a textarea containing the javascript that is necessary to put the widget onto your site. Assuming you have done all of this correctly, you should hopefully see something like this:

As we've just gone through the process of expiring and renewing some of our domain names, here's a quick guide to the domain renewal process that we've gone through to both expire and renew our existing domain names. Why do I have to renew my domain name? Simply put, you don't actually own a domain name, you only ever lease or rent it. For a ".co.uk" domain name, the lease is just two years but some other domain names (such as a ".com" or a ".net") can be leased for up to ten years. Personally, I think it's better to use the smaller amount as it means if you no longer want the domain name then you are not paying for it for x number of years after you have actually finished with it. It also gives the opportunity for someone else to use the domain name if they have a new purpose for it. Usually what will happen is that once you start approaching the date that the domain name renewal is due, your domain registrar (we use 123-reg.co.uk) will contact you to notify you that your domain name will be expiring soon and that you should renew it as soon as possible if you want to keep it. I think I received renewal emails with 45, 30, 15 and 7 days to go until that notice was due but this may vary depending on your registrar. What happens when I reach the renewal date? Well, you won't actually lose your domain name, however within 30 days of this expiry date your website will actually stop responding to that particular name so anyone visiting your URL won't actually see your website. Your domain name will then go into a state known as "domain suspension" which will last for another 60 days. During this time, your domain name still won't respond to any requests but you are still recognised as the "owner" so you can still renew it at any time and it won't be released back to the public. How do I renew or expire my domain? This really depends on the domain registrar that you use, however both of these tasks should be relatively simple. For the renewal process, our domain registrar simply allows us to go through the initial payment process and we just enter our details to automatically renew for another two years. If we want to expire the domain we have a couple of options: