Even more premium mailbox capacity now available

EnvelopeThese days an increasing number of people are accessing their e-mail via IMAP rather than POP3. The advantage is that the mail stays on the server, so you can access it via any device.

Of course, this means you need more capacity on the server. Our mailboxes come by default with a capacity of 400Mb, but you can choose an add-on to give you a Premium Mailbox of 2Gb at an additional cost of only £10 per year, per mailbox.

Not only this, but we are pleased to announce you can now have even more capacity: you can now upgrade a Premium Mailbox further by 2Gb increments right up until it is 20Gb in size! The cost is £10 per year, per 2Gb.

So if you find you’re running low on space, just contact us with your request and we’ll do the rest.

Speeding up search with Google Chrome

There are lots of reasons why you might like to use Google Chrome as your primary web browser:

  • It’s fast and lightweight (not too big to install)
  • It’s W3C-compliant (it’ll show web pages properly)
  • Based on the WebKit layout engine, it supports HTML 5
  • There are numerous extensions available for it
  • It’s highly compatible with Google’s other offerings, such as GMail and Google Calendar

Editing Chrome’s search engines

One very good feature of Chrome is that you can search fast by simply typing your search terms into the URL bar at the top of the browser. However, it isn’t always Google that you want to search. You might want to run a search on Wikipedia, Amazon, or another site. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to search the site of your choice – any site – very fast, and very easily, from that URL bar? You’d never need to visit the sites again to search them.

Chrome enables this. The first step is to left-click on the URL so that it is selected, and then right-click on it and select “Edit Search Engines…”:

Chrome - Edit Search Engines

Google Chrome - Edit Search Engines

This brings up a screen like the following, in a new tab:

Chrome Search Engines

Google Chrome - Search Engines (Click to enlarge)

Here you can either customise current search engines, or add new ones using the form at the bottom of the page.
To acquire the correct URL to use, simply run a search on the site in question and examine the resulting URL on the search results page. Copy this and use it when defining the new search engine, substituting %s for the search terms.

Note you can name the search engine fully, but most usefully of all, you can give it a short reference. In the screenshot, amazon.co.uk has been assigned short reference “a”. To search Amazon, then, you would simply click in your URL bar and type the letter “a”, then a space. The shortcode is recognised and the URL bar changes to look like this:

Chrome Short Search

Chrome Short Reference Search

You now simply proceed to type in your search terms. When you hit Enter, Amazon will be searched and the results page at Amazon will be displayed.

Remember, this kind of short reference searching can be defined for any site you like.

Assigning a default search engine

On the Edit Search Engines page, you can set a particular search engine as your default (this is the search engine that will be used if you don’t prefix your search terms with any short reference). For this you will likely want either Google standard, which will display the usual Google results page, or Google “I Feel Lucky”. When this flag is used on a search, Google bypasses the results page and just takes you to the top ranked result. If you searched for yourself, and asked us to do your Search Engine Optimisation, then this could be you!

To make Google use “I Feel Lucky”, the following parameter needs to be added to the standard search string: btnI=3564. So, the string (the text) for this in the Edit Search Engines page would be as follows:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?btnI=3564&q=%s

In conclusion

If you haven’t yet set your custom search engines, go for it! This is one thing that will make your use of the web much faster.

Hesketh Press moves to us for web hosting

Hesketh PressWe’re proud to announce that Lancashire printer Hesketh Press has recently smoothly migrated all of its web hosting and e-mail requirements over to us.

Based in Fleetwood, Hesketh Press is a highly professional company offering comprehensive printing services. They have chosen our Bronze package, which will be sufficient for their requirements and cost them only £24 per year!

Along with this they have add-on IMAP Premium Mailboxes with a massive 2Gb capacity each. This means all their mail can be stored on the server and accessed using any capable device, computer or phone.

If you’re interested in making savings while only experiencing an improvement in service, you may like to consider moving your site to us too…

One click installs updated

Just a note to say we have updated the following one click install products for our web hosting customers (roll over to see version numbers):

WordPress Version 3.2.1Joomla! Version 1.7.1Drupal Version 7.8PrestaShop Version 1.4.4.1Open Web Analytics Version 1.4.1AWStats Version 7.0phpBB Version 3.0.9OpenCart Version 1.5.1.3Concrete Version 5.4.2.1

We hope you enjoy using them!

Universal Name Finder added

Domain searchFor true consistency it’s best if you can choose a domain name that is also available across social media sites. Ideally you want consistency – the same memorable name used in each case. But do you really want to be running multiple searches on each domain suffix and visiting each and every social media site to see if your preferred name is available? Probably not. That’s why we have just introduced the Universal Name Finder to our hosting site.

Simply enter the name you’d like to use, and its availability will be displayed for multiple domain types and multiple social networking sites including Facebook, Twitter and Linked In. Give it a try now and see if you can snap up the name for your organisation before others do…