We will shortly be starting a major consolidation of our shared hosting servers and control panels.  Currently shared hosting customers are supported by one of our HSphere clusters, we intend to migrate all customers away from these servers and on to a new set of HELM powered high speed servers which is the same control panel software used by our Resellers customers.

We will also be doubling the disk space and traffic on all shared hosting plans once migrated as part of this consolidation exercise.

We hope to have all Windows customers migrated to the new servers over the next 6 months and will be contacting customers in groups to arrange to assist with the migration of their website content, databases, email  etc.

However if you wish to move your website yourself immediately and take advantage of the new control panel, faster servers, new features such as .NET 3.5 SP1, ISAPI Rewrite PHP5.x etc then we are also offering an incentive to make the transition easier.  Any customer who chooses to migrate their site content themselves without our assistance, and migrates all content within 1 month of requesting your new HELM account will be entitled to a credit of up to 6 months hosting fees !  For every additional month past the first month that the old shared hosting account remains open the credit will be reduced by a month.

If you wish to take advantage of this offer please send an email to our support team including your account name or number and we will set up your new account for you ASAP.

We are now supporting Microsoft .NET 3.5 SP1 on our Reseller Servers.

We have now completed our Reseller Server upgrades. All servers in the cluster are now Intel Xeon 3210 Quad Core Kentsfields with a minimum 2GB RAM and high speed SAS drives.  All servers are cross connected via a high speed Gigabit interface.

Next on our list of upgrades will be a migration of our mailserver software, then we will look at implementing new servers for hosting MySQL 5 and SQL Server 2008 and lastly either an upgrade to our HELM control panel to version 4, or an entirely new control panel system.

Our Reseller Plans have all recently been upgraded, all plans have had their included diskspace and/or traffic increased, several plans have also been reduced in price.

The following discounts will apply to customers choosing to pay for their Reseller plan in advance:

• 1% Discount for each month paid in advance. e.g pay 3 months in advance receive a 3% discount.
• Maximum period that can be paid in advance is 12 months.
• Discount of 15% for customers electing to pay Annually (12 months paid in advance).

We have started to upgrade PHP on all Unix servers to version 5.2.1. Each server will need to be rebooted during the upgrade.

Unix27 is the first server to be upgraded, and this has already been done. Once this server has had some time with the new PHP we'll put together a schedule for the remaining Unix Servers.

To make the transition to PHP5 easier, we have enabling the zend.ze1_compatibility_mode directive by default. For true PHP5 functionality, you can disable this directive by putting the following line in an htaccess file in your web root:

php_flag zend.ze1_compatibility_mode Off

Instructions for enabling PGP4 CGI Support an be located on our support forums.

We do not have any timeline for PHP5 on Windows at this stage, .NET2 is the main current focus for our Windows servers.