The Road Ahead

You may have noticed that we had a few a technical issues over the weekend (saturday) that affected our mail services. These issues are now fixed and we apologise for any inconvenience caused.

We suffered a bit of a domino affect. A hard disk error caused a database failure that in turn stopped our mail servers from processing and routing e-mail messages. We were still receiving messages, but they were just building up in a big queue awaiting sorting and delivery. Once the underlying issue had been resolved, all outstanding messages were processed and delivered as normal.

All web hosting and associated services (and their associated databases) were not affected by these issues and continued to operate as normal.

Our new Network & Service Status website is now live at status.calzadamedia.com. This new service presents live status information taken from the systems that continually monitor the availability of our websites and services.

Our Support Helpdesk">support helpdesk (Support Helpdesk (opens in new window)">helpdesk.calzadamedia.com) has also moved to a new server. Any existing tickets have been transferred across and the website and e-mail addresses remain unchanged.

With these changes, our key support and status systems are now independent of our web hosting infrastructure - they are even located in a different part of the country! This aim of these changes to impose a higher degree of resilience - in the event of a hosting issue our independent support systems will continue to operate allowing our customers to monitor our status and contact us.

You can now check the status of our services and websites using the new Service Status page. This displays realtime status information taken from our monitoring systems.

https://status.calzadamedia.com/

In addition to displaying the individual statuses, this page will also display the uptime for each service or website.

We do perform regular maintenance work, and this may involve some periods of downtime. Announcements of maintenance work and any ongoing issues may be found on our blog and Twitter feed.

Edited: 2nd October 2015 to fix broken links.

In the last few days we've upgraded our free URL shortening service LeafURL. As before, LeafURL is completely free to use, and if you register for an account, you are able to manage and monitor the performance of your shortened URLs.

In the next couple of months we will be enhancing LeafURL with improved and enhanced reporting and management capabilities for registered users. If you have any suggestion or ideas, get in touch.

Everything comes to an end, and after 12 years Microsoft will cease support for Windows XP on 8th April 2014. At first glance, this might not seem important. Computers running Windows XP will not magically cease to work on the 8th, but they will become progressively more vulnerable to attack and security breaches as Microsoft will no longer release security updates and patches.

If you are still using Windows XP, you now have less than a month to upgrade or replace your operating system.

Before purchasing the latest version of Windows, compare the system requirements of Windows 8.1 with that of your computer. Computer hardware has changed significantly in the past 12 years and upgrading to Windows 8.1 may not be possible with your current hardware.

If a Windows upgrade is not a viable proposition, then there are alternatives. One common route is switching from Windows to Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu is free to download and install and unless you absolutely require Windows or Microsoft Office, it is a reliable alternative that includes the LibreOffice Suite. A guide on how to migrate from Windows to Ubuntu may be found in this month's PcPro magazine.

After 8th April, we will only offer support for customers still using Windows XP on a case-by-case basis.