Talk about technology

How valuable is your domain name?

Posted: November 6th, 2009 | Author: Simon Shaw | Filed under: Intelligenta | Tags: , , | No Comments »

It never ceases to surprise me that we still get clients who suffer from domain name scams. I registered my first domain in 1994, they were costly at the time and back then the choice of provider was limited to reputable registrars and a few partners. With the increase in resellers we have seen the creation of just about every hoax you can imagine which is devised to transfer, steal domains or simply to take money for nothing. Anyone can sell domains but really what good can come of it?

My advice is to do your research well, choose a trusted partner and don’t try to save money. A domain is extremely important to your brand and therefore trying to pay the lowest price is as silly as buying a cheap lock for your front door.

We look after many domains for our clients, we don’t host millions and therefore we are not the cheapest. What we do offer though is security, through experience, maintaining standards and following recommended guidelines, to protect what is one of the most valuable assets in the world. It is simply not enough to pay the low-cost of a domain and hope for the best, the consideration should be how much are you willing to spend to look after it. In 1994 it was about £175 a year and in reality considering the online real-estate value for any organisation that would still be pretty cheap.

Concerned about your domains? Drop us a line and we will gladly give you some sound advice.

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Google Wave, initial thoughts

Posted: November 3rd, 2009 | Author: Simon Shaw | Filed under: Hype, Intelligenta, Stuff We Like | Tags: , , , | No Comments »

So our team has been playing around with Google Wave over the last week since being invited to the preview. Technology wise it is quite remarkable, the Google developers have created a life-like conversation application that goes way beyond the standard messenger or email format. However through lack of documentation things can get confusing fast and also I am not convinced (yet) that the system is anywhere near ready. The writers of lifehacker.com have made the first attempt at clarity however with their excellent book completewaveguide.com and I recommend reading that before you start.

Time will tell if this is a workable solution, it may just be that Google has over-complicated something that didn’t need fixing. Replacing email is a big task and I am not sure in it’s current form Google Wave offers an alternative. It is entirely possible that the conversation style will make it hard to follow which will make the tool unproductive and a non-starter. They also have to convince everyone to have a Wave account to communicate and this is something that could seriously damage the rate of adoption. You can’t, after all, teach old dogs new tricks!

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Google Chrome OS – Should we believe the hype?

Posted: July 10th, 2009 | Author: Simon Shaw | Filed under: Hype | Tags: , , , , | No Comments »

‘They even had it on the news
Don’t believe the hype…’ Public Enemy

Hang on a minute, everyone seems to be talking like Google Chrome OS is going to change the world. Surely it would be better to wait until more than a handful of people have seen or indeed used it before we label it a major player? Although I anticipate many people will be early adopters of a suspected very long beta program there will be limitations and in reality it could take years for this product to mature.

In short, Google don’t walk on water, I’d prefer to see and experience Google Chrome OS in action before the hype. However if they make it Open Source that should be applauded.

Let’s see what happens….

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Instant Applications with TurnKey Linux and VPS.NET Cloud

Posted: July 6th, 2009 | Author: Simon Shaw | Filed under: Stuff We Like | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

We’ve been using VPS.NET for a short time now and mid-june they introduced appliance images from TurnKey Linux. This makes deploying Drupal, WordPress, Rails and Apache servers amongst others quick and easy. Take a look at the following video from the guys at TurnKey Linux demonstrating how quickly VPS.NET can be used to launch Open Soruce appliances into the cloud.

Appliance features:

  • Auto-updated daily with latest security patches.
  • Webmin easy to use configuration console and web management interface
  • Minimal footprint (typically around 150MB) – each software appliance is carefully built from the ground up with the minimum components needed to serve its role with maximum efficiency and security.

Appliance list:

  • Core
  • Google App Engine SDK
  • Tomcat
  • phpBB
  • Wordpress
  • LAMP
  • LAPP
  • Ruby Rails
  • Joomla
  • MediaWiki
  • Drupal 5
  • Drupal 6
  • Django
  • MySQL
  • PostgreSQL

Overall we think this is a simple way to get applications running fast. When you are looking for something out of the box you can’t fail.

VPS.NET has data centres in the US and UK with billing in both currencies.

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