Unless you have been living under a rock for the past decade, you will be very familiar with Google and their dominant position on the web. So powerful are Google within the search engine market, that it is more widely said that one is to ‘Google’ something rather than search for information online. Therefore it is no surprise that in order to remain at the top of a keyword related search online, you had best be keeping the Google indexing system happy with your site.

In August 2009 Google announced the launch of a new search and indexing architecture under the codename ‘Caffeine’. This is expected to hit the full public domain sometime within the next few months, although it is already active in a number of Google’s key datacentres. Caffine’s primary roll is to refresh Google’s overall indexing and search-return capabilities, switching focus more directly to speed. This means that search results are returned to users more quickly (some tests have shown results to be returned twice as quickly), and the Google index is better able to cope with rapidly changing information sources such as Facebook and Twitter. Of course this bodes well for businesses who consistently update and roll out new information, as there is no longer a need to wait for your site to be reindexed over a lengthy period of time. It also means that Facebook fan pages and Twitter updates (amongst other social media strategies) can now become a more active part of your sites overall page ranking.
Google will now be rewarding faster websites with higher page ranks, making speed not online a new priority for Google at their end of operations, but also for those businesses seeking to better their SEO and improve page rankings. This will have a direct positive impact on total site traffic, another key factor rewarded by Google’s new system architecture.

So how is this related to your dedicated servers and overall online services? Well for a start, with the new shift in focus towards site speed, the response times from your online location had better be very good. Unlimited bandwidth is also a must; as well as fast and reliable hardware to ensure internal data is processed quickly. This should then be coupled to a high-speed backbone directly onto the web, ensuring site visitors have the lowest possible latency times when interacting with your online location. Current research suggests that users are able to subconsciously discern speed differences from as little as one tenth of a second in loading times. This illustrates just how important speed has become to the modern world of web hosting.

The location of your dedicated server(s) is also highly important in gaining a respectable position within Google’s index. For a UK company, it is now more important than ever to keep your dedicated servers within the UK as well. In recent years many organisations have pushed their IT services abroad hoping for more solid financial returns without considering the quality and speed of the services received. Forgetting any SEO perks, it should be remembered that better site speed will also improve customer relations and the likely hood of customer visits to customer order conversions.

Netwise Hosting understand the needs of businesses in relation to Google’s new Caffeine architecture, and have been following the overall progress and all related details of the new functionality to ensure our services match the updated index. UK businesses can rest easy in the knowledge that the dedicated server packages from Netwise Hosting meet Google search guidelines, ensuring your hosted online presence is entirely optimised and ready for the best possible results on Google’s new architecture roll-out this year.

Modern business has seen a direct shift in focus in recent years. According to the transitional models of academics Dwyer, Payne and Kotler, traditional marketing and business model operation strategies are now long dead. The pivotal change came with the introduction of relationship marketing strategies in the late 90’s. Essentially, it is no longer acceptable to focus on growth from a business-centric position – the focus has been shifted to operating within a customer-centric model of operation, thus placing customers at the heart of all decisions made within the organisation. This reaps benefits on both ends of the table, with customers enjoying a better rounded personal level of service, and businesses better able to retain existing clients. With the state of the economy, it is the retention of existing business which is keeping many businesses afloat.

As I am sure most will expect, Netwise Hosting plan to innovate new strategies and so lead the internet services industry into this exciting area of operation. It takes a special group of dynamic thinkers to come up with ground-breaking new strategies in an otherwise clockwork marketplace, making Netwise Hosting the only real choice for taking control of such changes.

The well established mobile telecommunications industry is and ideal case study in identifying the key advantages behind implementing a customer-centric retention orientated business model. Relationship focus has played a major role in how the big players inside the mobile telecomm’s industry have found such dizzying heights of success. Looking at the contrasting successes of O2 and Vodafone illustrate this point very effectively, as well as taking into consideration the smaller companies such as Orange and T-Mobile.
Although Vodafone are the worlds largest mobile telecommunications provider, with 333 million customers worldwide, their focus on retaining UK customers has slipped considerably. This is due to a continuing focus on general growth, particularly focusing efforts on the emerging economies such as China and India. Vodafone hold this to be of key importance, and in terms of growing the value of their business they would be entirely correct. India alone have 52 million new mobile phone contracts taken out every month, making the market highly valuable. But of course this has a trade off, in the loss of UK business.
This means that the UK’s mobile contracts market has been taken over by O2, who are undoubtably the leaders in relationship marketing strategies. O2’s extensive customer service portfolio has secured their place as the UK’s favorite provider of mobile phone services, with the O2 Priority events and venues a key success in their overall strategy.

The What Mobile Awards show the progression of the smaller providers across the years, with Orange winning the top award in 2009, ahead of both O2 and Vodafone. This is thanks to their impressive customer-centric marketing deployment activities, such as Orange Wednesdays and other 2-4-1 offers –  a very good indication of how much the public appreciate being valued as a paying customer.

Bringing this over to the dedicated server market will not be an easy task, primarily because of our target market. However, Netwise Hosting are currently in the process of planning out a series of additional offers that we feel our customers will value. We hope this will aid in customer retention, and in boosting customer satisfaction as a whole.

As part of our move to the new facility, Netwise Hosting are now able to offer a series of added features and services which we feel will highly benefit both new and existing customers.

The first of these major overhauls is the addition of Personal Account Management and One-Point Contact. Any customer with Netwise Hosting – from single backup solution contract holders to full multi-rack colocation customers – will now have a singular point of contact within the organisation. This will mean your account with us is personally managed by a highly-competent member of the Netwise Hosting team, reducing query times and ensuring your services run as smoothly as possible. Direct phone and email addresses will be available for use during office hours, guaranteeing an immediate source of information regarding any personal account matters. New and existing customers will be notified of their own personal account manager, along with all the relevant contact details.

Netwise Hosting will also be rolling out a wider range of operating systems, both Linux and Windows solutions. This will improve server customisation options and give greater flexibility over end-solution suitability for many different applications. Netwise Hosting aim to constantly offer the industry leading operating systems, as well as the latest releases and innovations from both Microsoft and most leading Linux Distributions. Any key updates will also be catered for.

Our existing hardware range will also be expanding very soon. On top of offering customers Entry Level, Mid-Range and High-End dedicated servers, Netwise Hosting are launching the ‘Ultimate’ dedicated server solution. Ultimate servers will come with Dual Quad Core 2.0GHz Intel® Xeon™ Processors, 8GB RAM and 2 x 1TB Hard Disk Drives. These are our most powerful solutions to date, catering for the most resource-hungry applications. An Ultimate server solution will allow the needs of any large business to be condensed into small, easy to use machines – without the need for vast numbers of low end machines working at capacity – saving on both cost and environmental impact. For more information visit the Ultimate Server page.

We are also very pleased to annouce our full migration to Unlimited Bandwidth across all Netwise Hosting dedicated server solutions. Any server platform hosted within our facilities will now have completely unlimited bandwidth as standard at no extra cost. This further confirms our position as the most cost-effective provider of dedicated server platforms in the UK. As well as this addition to our base-level services, Remote Reboot functionality will also be included as standard on all dedicated server platforms with no added cost. Expect these changes to be in effect very soon, saving you and your business money.
To complement this added value further still, network connectivity has been improved with a greater choice of connection speeds and a better level of overall service. It is now possible to fully scale your connection along with your hardware.

Our work has also extended to the improvement of end-user software solutions. We uncovered a need for server control panels to come pre-installed on our dedicated servers for customers to use right away. Because of this emerging demand, we will soon be offering a choice of top control panels when purchasing and setting up any dedicated server solution. Panels will be provided for all operating systems wherever possible.
Whilst deciding to roll out a set of end-user control panels, we have also decided to begin redeploying our own purchasing and order handling control panels. Within the next few months, customer will be able to log into their own control panel, from which they will have the ability to undertake a wide selection of tasks, including but not limited to; checking their billing, adding upgrades, purchasing new services, advanced support, download library access, network and server status reports, maintainance timetables, FAQ’s and a new affiliates program.

Free setup will also be applicable to all services as we move into 2010, again reducing costs and increasing the overall value of the Netwise Hosting service range.

We hope you are as excited about the future as we are. These new features will ensure that both new and old customers continue to get the most for their money when it comes to owning an online service with Netwise Hosting. We look forward to adding to this growing list of additional features and services in the very near future. Keep checking back for more information.

As CEO of the Netwise Group, I thought it would be beneficial to give you all an insight into the development of our new data centre facility which is due for completion in the forthcoming New Year. I hope to write frequently to keep you up to date with our progress and to show you where your data will soon be stored.

To start with, you may or may not have been aware of the fact that we were planning on building a new facility for your data. This was decided just 6 months ago due to major inflexibility at our current premises; this almost forced the decision for us to move or for us to at least re-think the direction in which we wanted to head.

After several key meetings it was clear that a new facility was the most logical answer from both a service and financial point of view. From here we started to list in detail our requirements from which a specification could be produced. As always this is easier said than done. As I am sure you are aware, with technology constantly moving at such a quick pace it’s often difficult to try and specify accurately and to cater for both now and the future whilst keeping within strict financial budgets. During this process it was soon evident that we needed to keep our motto at the heart of our plans; speed, security, stability.

From this, several main areas arose from which solutions could be researched and discussed. This covered everything from the real estate side right through to the best method of air containment within the data centre; I hope to cover these in more detail in future posts.

The first major area was finding a suitable site/building. After much searching and number crunching we finally found a suitable area for locating our new facility. It ticks all the boxes; large amounts of available power, accessible redundant fibre connectivity, room for all the M&E equipment both internally and externally and plenty of room for both now and the future, but it is rather expensive! I will try to upload some photos in the near future for you all.

When completed we will have two state of the art server floors, each being able to accommodate over 1500 servers. As well as this, a new larger office space, meeting areas and a network operations centre will be built. Alongside this we are planning on providing designated server provisioning areas. This will give our both our internal technicians and our colocation customers a comfortable and practical area from which they can manage their servers and the associated hardware without being stuck in the middle of an uncomfortable server row. We want to encourage all types of client to visit our facility to show them firsthand what we do and how we do it, this should hopefully aid the building of long lasting and fruitful business relationships.

From here, we moved towards the major structural and provider services side of the build. Endless meetings with energy suppliers, specialist connectivity providers and data centre designers led us towards a final specification (if it is or interest to anyone then I can write up certain amounts of information in regards to this). We are now finalising our schedule of works and stage one should be under way within the next few weeks, fingers crossed!

And this is where we are up to. The build and kit out should progress very rapidly, we will have several teams working around the clock to meet our deadlines, I will try to provide photos whenever possible. I hope you have found this interesting and I look forward to updating you further in the near future. If you have any questions or comments then please don’t hesitate to get in contact, we would love to talk to you.