Press Releases

Sep 6 2006 6:41PM - Scheduled Maintenance - Server Moves

On Friday 15th September at 11pm all hosting services will be shutdown in order to accomodate a move to a new Data Centre. The new Data Centre is only 20 miles away from the current one and hence the downtime should only be around 1 and a half hours, although we have allocated a 3 hour window up to 2am on Saturday the 16th just incase of any small issues.

The company that operates the current and new Data Centres HopOne are closing the current Washington DC data centre later next year due to rising telco and fibre costs in Washington DC. We are therefore taking this opportunity to move to their new state of the art data centre in Virginia. No changes with regard IP addresses and configuration is being made to the servers, all of our Class C addresses are being moved in their entirity to the new data centre and therefore no reconfiguration is required, just the physical move.

Everything has already been planned, new racks and new cables measured to the correct sizes are already in place. The move has been tested many times and should go very smoothly. This move will allow us to continue to improve and offer new services at the new data centre.

If you have any questions, please contact Customer Support at support@databasepower.net.

Jul 20 2006 3:05PM - Support for Microsoft SQLServer 2005 Workgroup Edition

We have today announced support for the popular Microsoft SQLServer 2005 Workgroup Edition. Database Power will offer support up to a database size of 1Gb on our shared Workgroup servers. After this you will need to migrate over to SQLServer standard edition which will support up to 2Gb on our shared SQL servers. Please note however we are not announcing support for SQLServer 2005 Standard edition. This will follow in a few weeks time.

Apr 13 2006 8:16AM - Professional Plans - Disk space increase

As from today, all Professional hosting plans will include extra web space. The increases are as follows:

• Starter increased from 150Mb to 250Mb
• Lite increased from 300Mb to 500Mb
• Smallbiz increased from 600Mb to 750Mb
• SME increased from 1Gb to 1.5Gb

We hope this extra space will help with your extra storage requirements.

Mar 15 2006 3:24PM - PHP5 now available on Professional plans

PHP 5 is now available for Professional plan customers. The exact version of PHP is 5.1.2. This is only available on a newer set of windows 2003 servers that have recently been built. PHP4 will stay available on the current servers so that customers who are not ready to upgrade can remain on V4. For the time being we will support both versions of PHP by maintaining the 2 sets of servers all based on Windows 2003. There is obviously no cost involved in this.

Any customer wishing to take advantage of PHP5, please contact support via email to discuss the move of your site to one of these later servers.

PHP5 will be coming shortly for Corporate and Budget customers.

Feb 18 2006 6:56PM - mySQL Upgrade

The MySQL database server will tonight be upgraded from 4.0.18 to 4.1.18. This is only a minor upgrade and as such should produce no issues. We have already done a test upgrade on another system to check our procedure. This will be performed tonight on the 18th Feb at 23:00 GMT. The procedure should take about 10 - 15 minutes during which mySQL databases will be unavailable.

Please note, this is NOT Microsoft SQLserver, this is the mySQL server.

Oct 8 2005 3:13AM - Livestats Upgrade to V8.0

We are pleased to announce that Livestats has been updated to the latest release v8.0 from Deepmetrix. This new version contains a better user interface together with many admin features to help us manage thousands of sites.

Sep 6 2005 2:05PM - New EMail System

Over the past year or so we have become aware our mailserver system called Imail from Ipswitch has undergone little development and has fallen behind in terms of reliability and functionality. For several months we have been looking and testing and found a replacement product. The product is called Merak Mail server from a company IceWarp software. The software is already used by millions of customers worldwide and has proven to be a great value for money and a reliable product.

It has many new features, far too many to list, but some key ones are:

• Ability to turn off anti-virus on a per account basis
• Ability to turn off anti-spam on a per account basis
• Space pool. This allows you to share your space among your accounts in a much more usable way. No longer are your account sizes fixed. For example, if you have a Professional Starter plan, you now get 20 email accounts and a max of 400Mb of email space. How you split that up between your email accounts is up to you. You could have 2 email accounts at 200Mb each or 20 at 20Mb each. Using an email control panel you set the values.
• The anti-spam can be configured to move spam into a spam folder to separate it.
• The anti-virus seems more reliable in picking up virus and less reporting of false positives.

There are many other features, many to help us from an administration point of view.

Aug 8 2005 1:00PM - Forwarding becomes more search engine friendly - Part 2

Over the last few months we have had many requests to alter our forwarding service to be 301 search engine friendly. A 301 redirect is similar to normal redirection but it leaves a 301 status for search engines to inform them of a permanent move. In many cases this stops you getting a double penalty within Google and other search engines.

Our standard URL redirection has now been altered so that either a 301 or 302 status can be left. In addition to this, a new forwarding feature called Like4Like forwarding has been included. This is ideal if you have several domain names all wanting to redirect to the same site retaining parameters and queries. Also it is ideal if you change your website domain and want to retain all those great search engine links you have spent so long generating.

For example

http://www.adomain.com/page?parameters

will redirect to

http://www.anotherdomain.com/samepage?sameparameters

All these features are totally free on all domains registered through us and for domains which have been transferred in full to us. We believe our forwarding features are probably the most search engine friendly out there, certainly for free anyway.

However we are not stopping there. In our next round of Infrastructure builds we are including ISAPI Rewrite on all Professional and Corporate range servers. This will allow you to redirect pages for websites and to handle those last few scenarios left which our forwarding service doesn't cater for.

Aug 8 2005 12:47PM - ASPMail from ServerObjects

Over the last nearly 10 years, the COM component ASPMail from a company called ServerObjects has been used in probably hundreds of thousands of websites. Unfortunately the company is no longer actively developing their products and for last few years havent released any new versions for any of their products. Although they have released no statement we strongly suspect that their products are now effectively frozen.

Jul 8 2005 11:53AM - Forwarding becomes more search engine friendly - Part 1

Over the last few months we have had many requests to alter the default A record for websites and parked domains so that instead of it being alias, it is a 301 redirect instead. A 301 redirect is similar to normal redirection but it leaves a 301 status for search engines to inform them of a permanent move. In many cases this stops you getting a double penalty within Google and other search engines.

All parked and hosted domains will therefore be changed so that http://domain.com will 301 redirect to http://www.domain.com

The new redirection is the same but search engine friendly so we cant see why anyone would want to keep it as an alias. However if you do please contact us and we will leave it as is.

May 17 2005 5:55PM - SQLServer 7 End of Support Notification

This notification only applies to customers who have a SQLServer database provided as part of their shared hosting plan.

SQLServer 2005 is due for release in the next quarter. We have therefore decided to cease support for Microsoft SQLServer V7 by the 31st August 2005. From the 1st of September 2005, only SQLServer 2000 and SQLServer 2005 will be supported. This will allow us to concentrate our support efforts and resources on the current SQL release and the previous release.

Although many customers have already migrated to SQL2000, some customers are still on V7. Customers on V7 will be contacted shortly with regard a migration over to SQL2000.

If you have any queries or questions with regard SQLServer please contact support@databasepower.net.

May 4 2005 1:01PM - More for the same

The following changes are being made to our hosting plans from the 1st May 2005. The hosting plans are not changing in price, we are just including more for the money.

EMail Accounts

• Budget range POP accounts increased from 5Mb to 10Mb per POP account.
• Professional range POP accounts increased from 10Mb to 20Mb per POP account.
• Corporate range POP accounts increased from 25Mb to 30Mb per POP account.

Additional Web Space

• Professional Starter increased from 100Mb to 150Mb.
• Professional Lite increased from 250Mb to 300Mb.
• Professional Smallbiz increased from 500Mb to 600Mb.

Additional Monthly Data Transfer Allowances

• Professional Starter increased from 2Gb/mth to 3Gb/mth.
• Professional Lite increased from 5Gb/mth to 6Gb/mth.
• Professional Smallbiz increased from 10Gb/mth to 12Gb/mth.
• Professional SME increased from 15Gb/mth to 20Gb/mth.

All changes will be made automatically to all plans in the next few days. Customers who are currently still on the older mail system (Rockliffe Mailsite) will need to migrate to the later IPSwitch system in order to receive the larger email quotas.

Sep 29 2004 4:51AM - Support for Microsoft SQLServer 2000 coming soon

As many customers are aware, we currently only support SQLServer V7. Due to the reasonably small number of requests for SQL2000 we had originally decided to skip SQLServer 2000 and head straight for the next version to be released called SQLServer Yukon. Unfortunately the release timelines for SQLServer Yukon keep slipping and we have therefore decided to offer SQLServer 2000 in the meantime.

The hardware has been ordered and will be installed in the next few days. We are anticipating having SQLServer on offer in approximately 10 days time and obviously we will announce his to all customers when launched. As always with our upgrades we never upgrade in place. New SQLServer systems are being commissioned so that customers can be migrated over from V7 at their convenience after any relevant testing has been complete.

Sep 28 2004 7:28PM - Database Power now includes support for IP*Works! 6 ASP and .net Editions

We are now pleased to announce the IP*Works 6 component suite from NSoftware is installed on all Corporate range servers. We have listened to customer feedback and now provide these free of charge on our Semi-Shared range. It is hoped that we will be able to offer these on our Professional range of plans too in the near future, but this has not yet been agreed.

Aug 25 2004 5:16PM - WebHostDir vote Database Power #1 UK Windows host

Jul 7 2004 8:41AM - SAFileUp V5 now available for Professional and Corporate plans

The COM object SAFileUP from Software Artisans has now been upgraded from V4 to V5. V5 has been altered to function correctly with IIS6. The exact version installed is 5.03 and has been installed on all Professional and Corporate webservers.

Jul 7 2004 8:30AM - Additional EMail accounts reduced in price by 20%

Jun 15 2004 5:53AM - HSBC Secure ePayments COM objects now available

The HSBC Secure ePayments COM objects have now been included in our latest round of builds for all windows 2003 servers. The COM object cccpicom.dll is now present on each Windows 2003 server and is available for use for HSBC banking customers in the UK.

May 20 2004 8:22AM - Livestats V7 for Professional and Corporate customers

Great news, Livestats Version 7 is now here for Professional and Corporate range customers. Over the past year Deepmetrix the company who manufactures Livestats have come on leaps and bounds with the features in LiveStats 6, but unfortunately it did suffer some reliability issues due to the technology they chose at the time. A new V7 has now been released, which uses SQLserver technology behind the scenes and is very reliable. We have the new version up and running and are migrating customers over the next few weeks. You will receive a migration email in the next few weeks when it is your turn. You will of course be able to visit your stats from within the Control Panel and of course a direct url is available to take you straight in, although the format of the url has changed.

Mar 22 2004 3:23PM - PHP4 now available on Budget plans

Great news, PHP is now available on ALL plans. We have started commisioning Budget plans on the latest Windows 2003 servers, which has allowed us to increase our feature set. This means PHP4 is now included in all plans free of charge.

If you need PHP4, please contact support@databasepower.net and asked to be moved to our latest platform.

Mar 13 2004 1:13PM - SQLServer databases, free upgrade from 25Mb to 35Mb

All SQLBasic SQLserver databases have now been increased in size from 25Mb to 35Mb free of charge. 35Mb is the new standard size for all SQLBasic databases on hosting plans.

Feb 18 2004 3:08AM - Improved features for Corporate customers

Due to economies of scale we are now able to offer more disk space and cheaper bandwidth on our Corporate plans.

Diskspace - We now offer 1Gb, 2Gb and 3Gb of disk space for each of our Corporate Bronze, Silver and Gold plans respectively.

Bandwidth - In an effort to simplify the many contracts and different scenarios which were available on our Corporate plans, we have now altered the plans to a simple 3 2 1 principle. The bandwidth overusage charges are now £3, £2 and £1 per Gb on the Bronze, Silver and Gold plans respectively. Please note: Bandwidth overusage charges only apply when you have used your monthly bandwidth allocation in your hosting plan.

Best regards,
Database Power team