Welcome to the new site! We hope you like it, I’ll be blogging about how it was made over the following weeks. Let us know what you think. The blog will be reskinned shortly too.

Moving in started early on Monday morning with us all arriving at least half an hour before start time as there were early deliveries which needed signing for and things to move around.

The photo below shows part of our reception area. When we first arrived the office was bare, as we just had stuff from storage such as spare cabling, server parts, random boxes and soon-to-be rolled out servers.

The first arrivals were the some of the computer parts we would be putting together, and our chairs.  First up, chair building!

Strangely enough for the most part the chair building proved challenging due to difficult instructions with 4 poor images telling us what to do. Myself and Toby decided to disregard the instructions and do it our own Jedi way, which kind of worked, eventually. Tim actually followed the instructions (what sort of techie does he think he is???) then spent 20 minutes waiting for us to finish (well he spent 20 minutes smoking outside actually!).

The chairs turned out to be incredibly comfortable, of course - the only reason we got them was that we were told that they were featured in the Base HQ in the (poor) movie Armageddon.

These were quickly coined the uber chairs as they have many buttons and levers to do all sorts of crazy chair-like things. The photo doesn’t do them justice, we’d have to send you one so you can experience the uberness.

We then had the phone call that Tim was dreading. “Sorry, your desks won’t be arriving today!” ARRGH! WTF? Nevertheless, we carried on unavaded.

The remaining computer components arrived very soon after the chairs were completed so we rapidly got stuck into building some PCs. The building for the most part was fairly simple, except I struggled with a few parts given that this was my first build but I was given help when needed. The only part which caused major issues was the ‘Ninja’ heat-sink, which clipped in incredibly awkwardly, even the pro’s of the office spent a fair amount of time fiddling with it and making sure the little metal rods wouldn’t fall onto the motherboard causing much smoke. Once they were all running and installs were completed (Vista setup was so long we had a lunch break in the middle) everything came together perfectly.

With our 22mbit Internet provided by Be* (we’re 150metres from the exchange) all the necessary drivers and software updates were done in lightning fast times, we spent the remainder of the day with our monitors sitting on our computers, the curvy keyboards on our laps and struggling to use the wireless mice on our arm rests. Difficult but comfortable and workable.

We spent half of Tuesday in a  similar predicament but the desks finally arrived in the afternoon and were set up by the people delivering them, which allowed us to concentrate on work future promos and tickets.

Once that was all completed we got together and made a list of things that need addressing.

The rest of the week went very smoothly, well apart from this - which wasn’t too much fun! So finally, after 4 years of crazy 24/7 non-stop working, our little start-up company (with no outside funding, shareholders or general evil) finally has an office in Maidenhead town centre.

Because we’re all in the same location now we can get a lot more done, our ticket responses during office hours should on average be 5 - 15 minutes, we’ll be blogging every day, we’ll be working on new services, a new site and much more.

Thanks to all our customers that have made this possible, we will always go out of our way to stay in contact both when things go wrong and when things are going well - customer satisfaction and uptime are our two main priorities, with no exception. These are the two core principles that have built Evohosting and we’ll stay true to them.

And guess what, my digital camera just ran out of batteries - so I’ll post the rest of the pictures later on!

 …

Well, I don’t know about you but when I’m at the PC I am connected to  6 IM networks minimum. Running 6 IM programs has been a real pain, Trillian hasn’t been updated for a while, I can’t stand Pidgin although other staff quite like it; so I went on a hunt a couple of weeks ago and found Digsby!

Digsby lets you connect to AIM, Gtalk, Yahoo, MSN, Jabber, ICQ and last but not least, Facebook!

You can customise your contact list to a very high level and move everything around very nicely, you can also group your contacts - like for example if your friends have accounts on multiple networks you can group all of their ID’s into one main contact.

Digsby stores all your IM network passwords, contact lists and settings on their servers - this means you can login to Digsby on any computer with it installed, it will then pick up your IM network settings, skin settings, contact list/group options and automatically apply them on whichever Windows, Mac or Linux box you run on.

Integration with Facebook means you can see which contacts are online, talk to them using Facebook chat, you’ll be notified of new events etc - all in all, a very nice addon for Facebook.

Digsby has many other neat features, one being if someone messages you, the message will appear on a pop-up that fades in/out, but the great thing is you can also reply to them on that pop-up, which means (for me at least) no more hunting through about 50 IM windows to find that specific person’s conversation.

All in all I am finding Digsby to be the best IM program I’ve used so far, however I would like to see what will happen with Trillian Astra - hopefully it won’t be bloatware.

You can get Digsby from here: http://www.digsby.com/

My friend from Console Realms has also released a shiny little icon pack for Digsby, it is available right here.

11.00: Pete & myself are working on the support and billing systems today. I imagine we’ll be working into the evening, we’ll continue to answer tickets though.

19.04: Update! Kayako & WHMCS are both upgraded to latest, I’ll skin WHMCS tomorrow. Ive fully tested WHMCS, all functions are working - there are some shiny new ones too, log-in and have a look

Update: We’re finished with both systems, they’re working great. We won’t be reskinning WHMCS as a new version comes out soon and we’ll have to reskin it from scratch again.

Hello!

This is for people who have a Teamspeak server with us. As you may know from when we started out in 2004 up until mid 2007 we were giving away free Teamspeak servers with our plans, we were also selling extra slots at cost price price too. Unfortunately these day this takes up too much of our resources.

Due to this we’re going to close all Teamspeak servers on 29th May 2008 and revoke our Teamspeak ATHP status too.

Why? As we host Teamspeak, we also have to support it. A lot of people’s Teamspeak servers get hacked and things like that, supporting it takes up valuable time that we could be spending improving our hosting services.

I want Evohosting to concentrate solely on what we do best, website hosting. Nothing can be perfect, however no matter how good you are at something, you can always become better, especially if you have your company’s full resources dedicated to it.

If you are a Teamspeak customer who pays us monthly/annually you might be due a partial refund, if this is the case you’re more than welcome to open a ticket in the Sales ticket queue where we can arrange this. Please visit https://clients.evohosting.co.uk/ if you need to discuss.

Also, you won’t need to cancel your Teamspeak server, we’ve already gone through billing and cancelled them all.

If you have an automated Paypal subscription for Teamspeak you will be required to log-in to Paypal and cancel that yourself, we have no control over Paypal subscriptions.

We may provide Teamspeak 3 hosting in the future, but we’ll have to see how things turn out. The amount of account hackings on Teamspeak 2 were frustratingly high though, this puts me off.

If you’d like to purchase a Teamspeak server, our good friends at www.fatgames.eu will be happy to help out.

So, from me and the team….

Goodbye Teamspeak! (For now at least).

The UK Team are having a well deserved break over Easter. We will not be available via the helpdesk on the following dates:

Friday 21st March
Saturday 22nd March
Sunday 23rd March
Monday 24th March

This means all departments will be closed on those dates with the exception of ‘Web Hosting Support’ which remains open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

This doesn’t mean we’re not montoring services during this period, Toby, Jan-Erik and myself will be on-call alongside our offshore team to continue to monitor the stability of all services 24hrs a day during the Easter period.

I hope you have a good Easter and enjoy your easter eggs, I just sent out 40 of them and quite frankly I don’t want to see another one this year - they haunt me in my sleep.

Best regards,

Tim.

We have a new shared hosting server, a Dell PowerEdge 2950 with 8GB RAM, Dual CPU Quad Core, Dual PSU, Dual LAN and 2TB of storage on RAID5. It’s name is Firestar and from today all new web hosting accounts will be installed onto it.

Firestar is located in our fully monitored and managed rack at Bluesquare Datacenter in Maidenhead, Berkshire.

Here are our christmas open hours.

Web Hosting Support Department = 24/7/365 During Christmas & New Year.

All other departments

Christmas Eve = CLOSED

Christmas Day = CLOSED

Boxing Day = CLOSED

New Years Eve = CLOSED

New Years Day = CLOSED

All other days = Open 0800 - 22:00 (London time).

What does this mean? If you are looking for web hosting support over christmas we’ll be here 24/7 as ever, if you have domain transfer requests, sales/billing requests we won’t be available on the days marked as closed.

It amazes me sometimes as to how much we’ve grown over the last few years and how diverse our customer base is, it really is interesting to work with such creative people. From hosting regular web designers, business and home users to bloggers, forum owners, car modders, self proclaimed Linux geeks, radio stations, record labels, musicians/bands and even other hosting companies, the list is pretty much endless - I thought it’d be pretty neat to take a snapshot of 60 (about 2%) of the websites we host.

The new v3 plans have been tweaked to include more as standard, also the business plan now comes with unlimited email addresses, databases etc as standard. To upgrade the home plans to have unlimited email addresses and databases is now just £1.00 extra on top of the original plan prices.