As part of Global Gold’s continual growth in the highly competitive Web Hosting sector, this Essex based web hosting and domains operator has recently acquired Tag4.com for an undisclosed sum. 

The acquisition of Tag4 is a clear statement of Global Gold’s intention to strengthen its web hosting capabilities. Since its inception the customer has placed great emphasis on the delivery of excellent customer service which is why it boasts an exceptional retention rate for its customers. 

Global Gold offers their clients highly reliable and sophisticated hosting solutions and the newly acquired customer base from Tag4 will have complete access to all of Global Gold’s services including its renowned:

-  TechSupport team

-  Linux and Windows-based Hosting

-  Virtual Private Servers (VPS) 

-  Citrix and Zen based Virtual Machines

In addition to this it also offers email services such as Barracuda Anti Spam and Email Marketing applications. 

The company continues to look for other interesting companies to work with.

Web hosting is a core component in the definition of an organisation’s “green” strategy and therefore must work to support the strategy of that business. In order to achieve this, IT and web departments alike, must be aware of the real issues facing their organisations at multiple levels, and must come up with measures that make sound business sense. 

Global Gold’s, Management Team have started the process of examining the risks facing it’s business and it’s customers because web hosting is at the forefront of rapidly rising energy costs, global warming and potential new regulations. Rather than rushing headlong into short term, poorly conceived solutions, the company is actively exploring how to develop and implement “green” strategies in web hosting in the coming weeks and months ahead.
This evaluation will cover greener web hosting packages and reducing our reliance on energy intensive servers, implementing advanced technologies which address the issues and so on. Expect to hear more from us on this matter.

“The Optimized Hosting Platform - Meeting the Changing Needs of Hosting Providers,” conference is being held on July 28, 2008. Mr Beloussov, CEO of parallels.com, will be discussing the need to automate, virtualise, and standardise in order to deliver optimized computing for hosted services providers that can significantly help service providers to profit from and adapt to an ever changing web hosting market.

Tim Dunton, Technical Sales Director at Global Gold said “HostingCon 2008 will be a great place for the industry to learn how to optimise and apply hosted services through virtualisation, automation and standardisation,” “It will also be a great time to meet find out how our competitors are thinking about these new technologies in their business.”

Parallels has already been adopted by UK based web hosting company, Global Gold Network: www.globalgold.co.uk for its Plesk based VPS solution and Managing Director for Global Gold, Debra Hastings-Henry, said “We’re actively looking to extend and strengthen our relationship with Parallels, they are significantly advanced in several technologies and we’re currently looking at several of their other hosted solutions in their range.”

Global Gold Network Limited was founded in 1999 and has its headquarters in Essex.  The company specialises in delivering cost-effective web hosting solutions for SMEs.  Since its inception it has built a wealth of experience, expertise and know-how in the following key areas:

• web hosting
• virtual private server hosting
• VM hosting
• managed hosting and dedicated servers.

Global Gold remains one of the few a profitable and independent web hosting businesses in the UK. Spokesperson, Debra Hastings-Henry, was recently quoted as saying:

“Our growth has been largely organic and based on the fact that we treat our customers the way we would like to be treated ourselves. As such “word of mouth recommendations” from thousands of satisfied customers has helped us to remain in our enviable position in an industry that likes to claim it is customer focused when in reality most web hosts are product focused.”

To date, Global Gold has a portfolio of over 8,500 customer accounts in the UK alone. 

Global Gold Network houses all of its web hosting servers within the TeleCity Group of data centres. Telecity is Europe’s leading data centre provider and has over 15 years of specialist expertise in the area of data centre management.
TelecityRedbus is going to pay £33 million for Globix UK and its associated pan-European network. Last November, Telecity bought Redbus Interhouse. Since then, the combined company has been aggressively building its service portfolio and pursuing new markets in the European area.
“We have a leadership position, not only in terms of market share and everything else, but more importantly in the way we drive the industry,” says Mike Tobin, TelecityRedbus CEO. “We are aggressive in terms of where we think the pricing position should be, and what people should be receiving in terms of service levels.”

Through the deal, TelecityRedbus will gain two high-specification data centers, with 40,000 square feet, in central London, as well as:

1. - an expanded Internet network infrastructure,
2. - a comprehensive portfolio of managed services
3. - Globix’s technical and management specialist team.

Global Gold’s Technical Director, Tim Dunton said that “For us this move makes sense, we’re located near these datacentres to ensure we can support our customer base. We’ve also recognised that Telecity is in the business for the long haul and we’ve watched them invest in state of art technology and companies over time, improving the services they deliver. There is no data centre that can match them in the UK especially when you consider on-site ISP and bandwidth availability.”

This acquistion will consolidate Telecity’s position as one of Europe’s most advanced web hosting and managed data center service providers and the Global Gold web hosting network will benefit enormously from it.

For customers using our Barracuda Anti-Spam service, it is important to let the system know what you think is and isn’t spam so that you can gain the most benefit from the system.

Once your domain is setup the initial scanning process will take about 24 hours to start working fully while it learns which email addresses on the domain are legitimate.  You should start noticing a significant reduction of spam messages your receive after 1-3 days.

Spam messages will normally get blocked completely or added to your personal quarantine. If you have a spam message in your quarantine then you just need to tick it and mark it as spam. This will help the system learn what it must look out for. It takes about 200 emails to be marked as spam by yourself to fully learn and catch these emails out.

You can download a plugin for your email program here - http://barracuda2.globalgold.co.uk/cgi-bin/index.cgi (click the link “Get Mail Client Plugins Here”).  This plugin will show up on the tool bar in your email program and will help you to easily mark messages as spam.

Spam comes in many different forms and inevitably some emails do get through the system, but the Barracuda system is constantly learning and receives regular updates to ensure these are few and far between.

Apple’s iPhone 3G is not the only big story of the week, there is also the release of Global Gold’s virtual hosting offer, VM Hosting.  Many companies still do not realise how cost-effective and efficient virtual web solutions can be. There deliver the obvious pricing benefits compared to dedicated server but in performance terms they are hard to beat providing not only a natural upgrade path from a Virtual Private Server but also a means of enabling those companies who have dedicated servers which are clearly excessive to requirements. it is. To find out more simply visit this link to VM Hosting . Alternatively call 0845 313 0906 for an objective assessment of your actual needs and a solution that is appropriate for it.

For some companies, a Dedicated Server appears too much of a leap from their existing Virtual Private Server (VPS). The need to increase reliability and performance is often outweighed by the rising cost of moving to a Dedicated Server. A Virtual Machine (VM) therefore, is a very effective alternative. VM Hosting is a very reliable and cost effective solution, that has the added benefit of being more environmentally friendly. A Virtual Machine would be an ideal solution for companies looking to update their old, out of date Dedicated Server equipment, as well as growing companies who want to expand their business without encompassing spiralling costs. With the same configuration and flexibility as a Dedicated Server, a VM is able to run just as smoothly on a Windows 2003 operating system as it is Redhat Linux, Redhat Fedora or Debian operating system.

It’s critical to let your readers know exactly what they can expect from you before they agree to opt in to your newsletter or email marketing program. You must meet and/or exceed those expectations throughout your relationship with them. By doing this, you effectively engage your readers who will look forward to your messages and act on them.

If you fail to meet expectations at crucial points during the relationship, your subscribers may become inactive/non readers or opt-out altogether.  The following are some key touch points to prevent them becoming inactive:

• Be clear what they are getting before and during opt-in. 
• Advise them of your privacy policy. 
• Ensure they get a confirmation email/thank-you page. 
• Send a “Welcome” communication 
• Standardise your email design/email format
• Advise them of your unsubscribe procedure.

Key Principles in Managing Expectations
The following basic principles apply in managing reader relationship: 

• Be transparent. Tell readers exactly what will happen when, what they have to do to meet their own objectives (subscribing, changing preferences, unsubscribing), what you will do with their data and what you will not do.
• Be clear, concise and simple.  Copy, instructions and policies should be written in plain language, and every action should be intuitive and easy. Give your brand or company a prominent place in the inbox so readers recognize it immediately.
• Give options and alternatives. Your readers are different. They expect you to provide them content and value in ways that meet their individual needs. Offer multiple communication channels, differentiate between them and learn to talk to them about what interests them and in their preferred format e.g. HTML, text or mobile-friendly. Then, stick to their choices.
• Under-promise, over-deliver. If you promote “Special Email-Only Offers,” be sure to deliver on that promise. 
• Only request what you need. Don’t ask for data that you don’t plan to use or doesn’t add value to you building a relationship with them.
• Monitor and solicit feedback. You can’t please everyone no matter how good your email marketing. Get feedback and find out why the inactive are not responding early in the email relationship. Track and monitor opt-in form conversion rates, unsubscribe rates and other areas to any uncover potential problems.

There will be a third service pack for SQL Server 2005 released by Microsoft, just before the next software version of the server is due for release.

The release of SQL Server 2008 is scheduled to happen in the third quarter of this year - service pack 3 for SQL server 2005 is expected to come out after that.

What the service pack would include is uncertain as Microsoft did not disclose this information, but they did say in a Tuesday blog post that it will have cumulative updates to the software included in it plus some additional fixes to bugs.

The Incremental Servicing Model that Microsoft introduced last year, in July, will not be changed by the release of service pack 3. The model introduced a regular update process for SQL Server 2005. It works by Microsoft issuing a cumulative update for SQL Server 2005 every two months that includes all critical fixes that had been discovered during that time.

Microsoft will continue using the model since customers enjoy its predictability, said Francois Ajenstat, the director of marketing for SQL Server at Microsoft. Many users say there’s a need for a third service pack, he said.