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Hi All, Just thought I would drop a quick posting on here to firstly say hello, and secondly explain a little about Exa and why we chose to sponsor the *nix forum. So first things first, "Hello". my name is Mark Cowgill, I am the co-founder and director of Exa. Exa is an Internet Service Provider, that caters primarily to education, and we look after thousands of schools throughout the UK; and secondly to the business market. We do not have a home user division. As an ISP we have been providing our services in to schools for over a decade now, covering everything from connectivity, content filtering, email, hosting and security through to more bespoke solutions. If you are interested in any of the services we offer feel free to PM me any time, if you would like to speak to any of our schools for references or you just have a general question on Exa, again just PM me, or of course you could just ring the office too, we are nice people I promise, and we never hard sell. Okay, enough about that side, so why the *nix forum. For one someone else was already doing the Internet one but being more serious; as well as being an ISP we are a software development house; we develop and run our services primarily on *nix platforms. Our in house systems team and R&D teams have been working on *nix platforms for far longer than any of us care to remember, and we do consider ourselves to be somewhat experienced in this field, and we thought it would be good to share some of that experience and expertise with anyone else interested in developing on, or running *nix platforms. We also have a good track record of developing lots of opensource projects including software such as ExaProxy and ExaBGP. In fact some of the biggest companies in the world including Microsoft and Facebook use our opensource software. So if you have any questions on running *nix servers or developing for the platform(s) pm me or any of my colleagues that you will see on here from time to time and we will do our best to help. Please bear in mind if we don't come back to you immediately it is not that we are ignoring you, it's just we all have the full time job of running and developing for Exa and keeping all our customers happy too! Look forward to chatting with many of you over the years to come.

Hi Everyone, I’m planning on trying to put together a website for my residents committee (and all owners/tenants) in my block of flats. I’d like for it to provide a website forum and log-on’s for potentially up to 300-400 users. There are 183 flats in my development and most are rented so I’d like to have logon options for both the tenants and owners. Other than the forums I’d like to use the website for hosting minutes of meetings/factoring documents/letters. Some kind of bulk email (for newsletters/etc.) to all users’ would be useful as well. Problem is I really don’t have much of a clue when it comes to putting together a website from scratch. I’ve had a look at 1&1 for hosting which seems like it might do the trick. It offers the option of Linux hosting or MS hosting. I’d guess I’d be looking for Linux hosting and using something free like phpbb since I won’t actually be generating any income from the website. Their mid-range package for £8.99 month offers up to 10 MySQL databases and what looks (to me at least!) like a good range of supported options? Can anyone advise whether that will be sufficient for what I’m planning on doing and whether there’s anything else I should consider or look into before signing up? Any advice appreciated…! TIA

I am a school librarian and have created a number of sites in the past using Frontpage, then Dreamweaver. I have also done a lot with our VLE, Kaleidos, to make the library sections look interesting. Now, I am about to start a new job, the library is very old and will be re-furbished next year. In the meantime, I will have to run a web-based service and I really want to wow the students and staff with a really dynamic website. What I am asking is advice as to how I should best do this. I will be working alone, with no clerical support, so I will not have a lot of time. The Dreamweaver ftp idea takes up too much time. So, I have thought of using something like Wordpress. I have played around with it on a free version. If I go down this route, what would be the best hosting package? I have read a lot on this forum about your Joomla! package and it looks really great. But I am not sure that I have the technical ability to go with this idea. I would really appreciate some advice, Anne

I'm looking for a hosting company for a new site I'm working on. My current provider doesn't support PHP 7, which I need as the site is based on Drupal 8. I'd also like command-line access to my virtual host. Any recommendations? I was with Gradwell for a long time, but left after receiving what they admitted was terrible support. But that's the type of company I think I'm looking for.

I just wanted to introduce myself and Intelligence Hosting Services as one of the new forum sponsors. I personally was an IT manager and IT Director across various Yorkshire schools over a 12 year period before taking up my position here at IHS. I'd like to think I have a good feel for a lot of the day to day issues most of you are facing and hope that Intelligence Hosting Services can help with some of those. We offer a range of Hosting Services from our Tier 3 Data Centre, our very cost effective Cloud Backup and Tape Archiving solution is exceptionally popular with our education customers at the moment. If you would like to take a look at what we can offer you, our website has some very useful cost calculator that are totally transparent to help you cost up your solutions. There are times that we can offer certain discounts for projects so well worth contacting us to see if there is anything we can do. If you would like to try before you buy we do have the facility to offer a short term trial as well. You can find our website here: www.intelligencehs.co.uk any other questions feel free to DM me

Disclaimer: This is being posted with Dos Box's permission. My company are a North West (Blackburn based) software house who provide online (and offline) analytical solutions to the telecoms industry. As part of this we also host, and operate our solutions to some of the customers and the role is part of the team who install, run & maintain these hosted systems, as well as operating as part of the overall IT team. An External IT Engineer with strong knowledge of Internet WAN technologies (proxies, web caches, DNS, POP3/SMTP) and related network infrastructure (IP routing) is required. The candidate will join a technical support team responsible for implementation, maintenance and troubleshooting of mission-critical 24x7 Web & Analytics solutions. The candidate will provide day-to-day management and support for Internet related applications, server, firewall, web appliances (F5) and backup systems within a results oriented, mission-critical environment. You will help manage the design, implementation and commissioning of Internet related infrastructure as well as ongoing support and technical expertise. Required Skills - Strong Web Hosting skills (Apache / IIS) - Internet WAN technologies (proxies, web caches, DNS, POP3/SMTP) - Network infrastructure (IP routing, OSPF, BGP) - Windows / Linux Server installation & admin Additional Skills SQL based database admin (Oracle, MS SQL Server and MySQL) This is an ideal role for a Network Support Engineer or Internet Systems Engineer with excellent web hosting skills and knowledge of Windows and Linux environments. We are looking for a highly motivated individual, who can show a track record of deploying web based solutions, and who is capable of keeping abreast of new technology innovations, and who can work well autonomously, or as part of a close knit team. We are looking for someone with a thirst of learning new skills and technologies, with a broad interest in technology out of work as well. This is a client facing role, dealing with some of the largest telecoms organisations within Europe and globally. Salary is £29k-£33k, based on a 37.5hr week (Mon-Fri), with OT when needed. Out of hours, on call is part of the role (remote dial in), and this is paid in addition to the salary. Please PM me for further details, and NO agencies!!

Hi, Our website is currently hosted on Heart Internet's shared service but in the last few months their service has been absolutely rubbish. Every few days the website is down and I only know the times that I (or one of the teachers) noticed it. I foolishly only recently started monitoring with monitor.us and statuscake. The last couple of days in fact it has been more down than up and the upshot of an exchange of emails with support was that their shared hosting service doesn't have an SLA and suggested we get a VPS. However, apart from the fact that I wouldn't want to pay them any more money, I want to get a managed service which I don't think they provide. So, does anyone have any web host recommendations, either for a reliable shared hosting service or for a managed server. I was looking at this one: Hetzner Online AG: Managed Server MX90-SSD I use their vServer VX11 for personal projects and have been quite happy with it. Our website is a WordPress site and it is quite heavily used for blogging by all the staff and we also post a lot of news for the parents, etc. Thanks

my school is looking at doing some video pod casts and I need to find the best video podcast hosting services ideally free any suggestion?

What does everyone use to host their wordpress sites? - Self hosting won't be an option. I've some experience with using wordpress.com to create pretty basic sites and hosting it there. But a friends asked me to help him set up a website, so I'll probably be going down the wordpress.org route and hosting it elsewhere.

I'm currently looking at moving our website over to WordPress. I've setup a test site, but can't work out how to setup permalinks. I've found the setting in Wordpress admin, but every setting except /?p=N sends me to a 404 page. I'm guessing it's a IIS issue, but I can't see what option I need to change, either in WordPress or Plesk. Anyone found a way of getting this to work on EMBC? Thanks Neil www.wrenspinney.northants.sch.uk

I am so pleased to have found this site. I wish I'd stumbled across it a long time ago. I hope I might have something ready in the next couple of months that might interest those of you who are interested in creating web spaces for your students. I'm aware that there are some people offering hosting for schools (such as edutechhosting), but mine is based around a custom hosting management system rather than the free provision of a hosted domain. I am a FE ICT teacher (although my background is secondary) and I'm also studying for an MSc in Internet Apps Development. After recent issues related to web hosting for students at my college I have decided to create a free hosting service for schools for my major MSc project. The idea is to create a web-based service where teachers can sign up their school and add class lists (in a format like xls) and the system creates separate folders on the server for each class->student. Usernames and password would be created for each student on-the-fly that allow students to log in and upload folders/files in an ftp-like interface (without the need for a local ftp client). Then each student would have their own website address (the following links don't work) Note that no domain purchase is required: school.hostdomain.com/class/student eg. stjohns.achost.com/10C/debbie Teachers are able to administer students accounts, and certain security measures can be put in place to prevent access from outside the school (if required- by IP) and password protect sites from public view (if required- by htaccess) and also locking accounts to prevent late submission, modification and deletion of coursework (if required). Also the idea is to have a facility to allow teachers to download a local copy of the class' work to a CD for exams board/ moderator submission, etc (or the exam board could view the sites live). Essentially it will be a streamlined, highly manageable system for teachers, providing only basic hosting, but providing additional security/privacy and download options customised for schools. Incidentally, my intention is to provide only simple file hosting, so no databases or server side scripts- but I know there are people getting their students playing with Joomla et al, so if your students need php/mysql/etc then I could look into implementing these things later. It's an ambitious project but I'm already well underway with the development (I'll place a link when I have something ready to show off). At this stage I'd be interested in hearing from school staff who might be interested in such a service or those with concerns or suggestions. I have an arrangement to trial the system at my current college, but I'd be interested in hearing from people for the following things: General indications of interest, especially in trialling and providing feedback on its use. Anyone with security/privacy/DPA/technical concerns to such a thing (This is a biggy as far as I'm concerned, and your input would be valuable) As well as teachers, I'd love to hear from network managers, as it will take some effort to get such a system working consistently in the minefield that are LA/School firewalls. I want network managers to be happy with the integrity of the system. Also, exam board representatives about their requirements and initiatives as far as online coursework goes. As a teacher I think I can fulfill their criteria, but it'd be nice to have some dialog For absolutely any comments or more details please don't hesistate to reply to this post or email me on andy at websitesfast dot co dot uk I will be ready to release the beta to 3-5 schools for testing mid-October and if you'd be interested in trying it out I'd absolutely love to hear from you. Ultimately I'm after teachers/schools who would allow me to conduct an in-depth study of how the system is being used and its implications on teaching and learning.

Hello, Before the summer, we got Schoolwebsite.co.uk to design and host our new websites: http://www.coombegirlsschool.org, http://www.coombeboysschool.org, http://www.coombesixthform.org. The sites look nice and work quite well, but have always been pretty slow, sometimes taking over 60 seconds to load the homepage! The real problem, is that any time there has been snow, or the theat of snow anywhere in the country, the website has just been overloaded, even as I type this, I am getting an error 503 when I try to load it. What I want to ask, is does anyone else have websites hosted with Schoolwebsite, and are having the same problem? Do schools who have their website hosted with other commercial companies (particularly companies that specialise in school websites such as e4Education or CleverBox) have similar problems? Are there schools on Schoolwebsite who don't have this problem? We have raised it with our project manager a couple of times and had a bit of a mini rant at BETT, but this morning was the same story. The School Administrator and I are trying to get some data together to show them, so any responses are appreciated. Thanks, David

Evening All, For those whom know me they will already know about EduTech Hosting, It's a Service that I provide to Schools and Non-Profit Organisations. I just wanted to make a quick post on here to let everyone know, that any users of the service whom make donations via the website that every 6 months i will be donating all of the funds raised to a Charity. On 31st June 2011 I will be sending the collected funds to IT School Africa. On 31st December 2011 I will be sending all collected funds to Optimus Education Foundation If anyone wishes to use any of the services provided please contact me via the website. EduTech Hosting Services Many members of EduGeek already use the Services. Cheers, James. P.S. The Charities will be aimed at Education and IT so if anyone has any other charities in mind, please do let me know for future reference.

We are hoping to bring our website internally this year but we don't want to leave ourselves open to dropping off the face of the (internet) earth if we suffer and outage. I have a cunning plan that involves a scripted page on our external hosting that checks the connection & forwards the request if everything is ok, other wise it displays a basic page with a tech problem message. It may also have a system to read a text file so we can post updates if there is an ongoing problem or we need to push messages to parents. My only thought is that it will break if they bookmark the internal page rather than our root page, therefore bypassing the front script. I don't want to do address masking at all. So what do others do? Does this sound feasible?

Stupidly, I took up an email hosting plan with Fasthosts (hereafter known as 'Farcehosts') and because of a mix up with the IPS tag, 17 of my domains are in limbo. In a nutshell, I wanted to move away from 1&1, just for a change as much as anything as my account was due for renewal; I had no problem with them as hosts, so it is a move I now regret. So, I elected for Fasthosts. The domains were transferred in using the IPS tag that Farcehosts own downloadable support document gives, namely FASTHOSTS To cut a long story short, that document is out of date, and the tag should have been LIVEDOMAINS!! I had to contact Nominet to bulk transfer the domains from FASTHOSTS to LIVEDOMAINS as Farcehosts told me they couldn't (or wouldn't) do it. Nominet charged me £11.50 for the pleasure but told me that Farcehosts could have easily done it for free. However, because of some technical issue with Farcehosts control panel, my .co.uk domains are still sitting as pending. They have been like that for almost a week! OK, problems are problems, but Farcehosts are doing NOTHING, and my support tickets are going unanswered! The matter has supposedly been escalated, but that ticket has now sat there for 2 days. I am unable to use email on any of my domains and will have lost a lot of enquiries for private work that I do. To the point of my post then - I need some recommendations for a DECENT email hosting company that I can transfer my domains out to, who have a good list of features to boot. I would transfer back to 1&1, but I am now reluctant to again use a big company due to the lack of support, and would prefer to use a more specialised and personal service, with an ounce of reliability thrown in! I also need free transfer in, as I have 18 domains to move over. Also, if anybody knows someone within Farcehosts who can pull a few strings to get the technical support puppets to sort out my domains, I'd appreciate it! Thanks folks. DON'T USE FARCEHOSTS!

Ok I have decided to give the Edugeek Joomla package a try for a new site I've got to create for a nursery that a good friend of the family runs. I know the domain I want but who should I got to for hosting. Obviously it needs to have PHP and MySql on the box which is fine, but Easyspace who I normally use want to charge around £55 for that which is a bit steep as the site isn't going to be that larger really. So has anyone any suggestions of who they have found good, reliable and good value for money for a Joomla site? Cheers J