Today it is with great pleasure that we announce the opening of our telephone system! The new system will allow you to speak to operators for both sales and support when available. The number is:

(+44) 020 3322 2270

The system will not be manned 24-7 as our primary support method is through the ticketing system which is a more secure way for us to operate. To use the support system you will need to confirm a security question that you have set under your account; if you do not have a security question then you must set one to be able to use telephone support.

Option 3 on the call menu will allow you to flag your ticket as an emergency matter. You will be asked to state your ticket number and full name. Abuse of the emergency flagging system will result in your account being overlooked under the call bumping system.

The number is a local rate number in the United Kingdom (London). Calls will be charged at your carriers rate to the number. Many telecom operators in the United Kingdom allow free calling to local rate numbers, which this is. We do not charge or make any money from calls made to the number.

A full list of menu options can be found on our contact page.

Today is our Second Birthday!

Unfortunately, we have to share our birthday with April Fools Day which, we can assure, is in no way affiliated with our Birthday.

The last two years have been exciting and have seen our product range and subscriber base increase drastically.

As part of our ongoing efforts to providing powerful web solutions we have an exciting new product we are planning on launching next week.

As the image above explains, we will be launching an email service next week.

“But email is included in your services already, bundled with web hosting” I hear you say.

Well, not quite, this is a dedicated email product, and, it is free!

From next week we will be providing email services with push/IMAP connectivity for free. The service will be powered by our UK network and will include 20 megabytes of space. We’re just finalising a few things to fine-tune the service and we are planning to roll the service out at some point next week.

Once again, thank you for being a valued reader and heres to the years ahead of us!

Cheers.

Today Inter-Webs.net has become a part of the Electrotoad family. All Inter-Webs customers can expect the same level of care and quality as Electrotoad subscribers. We’ve updated all Inter-Webs subscribers prior to the news and news about the takeover is in there.

We’re happy to welcome all Inter-Webs customers to Electrotoad and hope you enjoy our services.

You are aware that in the last week we had issues with the stream in Manchester. As a result of this we opened a temporary stream platform using our USA Network. The service was sold boasting its connectivity across Europe when it was running in Manchester and to maintain the consistency we have now moved what was the temporary stream to a permanent platform in France.

We are aware that many subscribers preferred the Manchester platform and once our upstream providers resolved issues at their end we were able to bring this back up. If you would rather stay on the Manchester stream then that is not a problem and Electrotoad have been reassured that incidents like what our platform experienced as a result of the providers is rare.

If you are a subscriber using the Manchester platform then you need not worry about this email. If you are using or going to be using our France platform then below we have some details for you concerning the France platform.

Because the server has been transferred to our France location, we have a new IP address for stream, management and FTP.

The new IP address has been emailed to affected subscribers, alternatively you can check this in your client area.

You will need to reflect these changes in any API’s you are using, A-Name records, and client streams you have running and code-snippets used.

We have found the server in France to be our most reliable Shoutcast server and we are very happy with its performance.

Your streams and client streams using the USA platform will remain active on the old server for the next 24 hours to allow you to make necessary changes to your broadcasts. We have disabled logins for the USA Shoutcast platform to prevent any data being uploaded. Your user credentials have not changed.

We are sorry for the inconvenience this may cause and assure you there will be no more changes to your service.

Electrotoad would like to thank you once again for the trust that you put in to our company and our services. We continually strive to provide efficient and secure services.

In a word – yes.

Our previous post (about Shoutcast being offline) has perhaps dazzled you. Yes, we do offer Shoutcast services but we have done so only on request. Think of it as a closed beta that you have to discover.

We have been running Shoutcast DNAS services for about four months now and media streaming is something new to us. It’s because of this that we haven’t released the service to the wide public and we wasn’t sure about the demand we could expect from the service.

A few months back we got requests from some existing clients asking if we provided the services and we did not offer them at the time but instead helped them to install a stream on their VPS they had with us. We realised how powerful and effective Shoutcast can be, but in most cases when you’re running the DNAS by yourself and don’t have much money, licensing for management panels like WHMSonic and Centovacast can be costly.

We thought we would take it on as a bit of a hobby service as none of our technicians were experienced in the DNAS (Distributed Network Audio Software) and so we got ourselves a new machine, a Centovacast license and a microphone. We liked it, Centovacast is incredibly powerful and above all, exciting.

So, we do not offer this in our product line up yet until we are so pro with DNAS and confident we can provide such a great service.

I hope this almost off topic post explains how we work and maybe, just maybe one day you will be streaming yourself over Electrotoad’s network cables.

RE: Network Issue | UK | Shoutcast & Centovacast

Shoutcast services and Centovacast management services have been offline for the past few days as our uplink providers ended their service without warning and this has left lots of companies affected. Electrotoad used these suppliers to provide the servers we were running Shoutcast and Centovacast on. We have not been able to communicate with the suppliers and over the last few days we have treated this as a matter of urgency.

This behaviour from our suppliers is totally unacceptable. It is because of this that we have ended business with them and have taken our business elsewhere.

The new Shoutcast and Centovacast streams have been temporarily homed on our signature Dallas network where we provide the bulk of our services.

We do realise that this service was sold as being hosted in Europe and whilst we provision new servers for Shoutcast and Centovacast in France, the services will be running from Dallas, USA.

As per our SLA the service has had two days downtime because of the incidents with the upstream providers we are giving all subscribers their next month of ShoutCast service free of charge or if you are not satisfied with that you are of course entitled to a refund for the ShoutCast service.

We once again apologise for inconveniences caused on the network and we realise the importance of having your stream always connected. We did not foresee this issue occuring and in the future we will ensure that we choose our upstream providers carefully.

All clients will have to reconnect their stream to the server and must reflect account changes shown in the email sent out in their output machines.

This issue was resolved by 19:37 GMT 16 Feb 2012.

Today, 28th January 2012, is Data Privacy Day. Data Privacy Day is an annual event and focuses on educating internet users on the importance that privacy can be when using the internet.

The way we use the Internet has been a very hot topic this month, see our post and standing on SOPA for more on this.

We use the Internet a lot, for many people it is a vital part of their lives. As we use more and more digital services and the more we use the Internet one should appreciate how we’re creating data. Signing up to that email list, registering to a new forum, completing a survey, all of this is data which will affect your online identity. When in most cases data is protected with and secure, in bad situations data could get leaked and data you have entered online can get in to the hands of the wrong people.

It’s important to use secure passwords and to use different passwords on different systems; perhaps you could consider using a password manager for ultimate privacy.

Some tips to keeping your privacy safe online:

• Always read the privacy policy whenever signing up to anything online.
• Don’t tell anyone your passwords!
• Be cautious and think who is at the receiving end of the data you are entering.
• Use secure and different passwords on all your online profiles.
• Make a serious effort to not release any personally identifiable information, especially publicly.

There’s an excellent guide in Microsoft’s Safety and Security Centre about your online reputation.

We also recommend you check out the Data Protection Day website for lots of useful advise on data privacy.

So there’s been lots of talks on SOPA the last few weeks, a law which will impact how the Global DNS system works in the USA and the laws associated with the use of the web. Whilst Electrotoad operates in the United Kingdom, we operate servers in the USA and to be honest, SOPA has angered us.

On the 18th of January our connection blog will be censored to protest the impact that SOPA will have on free speech.

Our connection blog is on strike today against #SOPA electrotoad.com/connection/

— Electrotoad (@Electrotoad) January 18, 2012

To make it clear, Electrotoad do not support SOPA.

In case SOPA were to get passed, let us enjoy these meme’s whilst we can…

With the new year, we’ve updated our pricing structures. We feel that the new structure provides the public with a more realistic offering. Whilst our base price has increased we feel that our value for money has increased as we add more products and services to our offering.

We’ve been providing services since April 2010 and in this time Electrotoad have noticed the changes in how subscribers use the service and how they see the quotas being offered.

The new pricing structure does not affect existing subscribers, the plan you signed up with is the plan you remain on until you wish to change the service.

Plan Changes:

We have introduced new basic plans on our shared offers to accomodate users who do not need lots of resources. We have introduced free IP addresses on Ultra packages and on Ultra US a free SSL certificate too.

On Standard & Ultra Reseller we have included 1 free Basic UK Shared account used for off-network accessibility for the primary domain used at signup for the reseller account.

On Ultra Reseller accounts we now also offer 1 free IP Address and SSL Certificate.

If you have any questions on the plan changes, you may contact Sales or leave your question in comments of this post and we will answer and questions you may have.

After a month of our UK system being in exclusive testing for existing subscribers, we’re now accepting subscribers current, old and new!

In the testing we found the current DNS services we had in place for the UK platform to not be so strong as we had this set to uk.electrotoad.com. We have set up a stronger DNS system for this and is on the domain electrotoad.co.uk.

We have also launched a new pricing structure for all of our shared and reseller offerings across US and UK platforms, this will be revealed in a new post shortly. We are mentioning this in this post because our reseller standard and ultra packages includes a free basic shared hosting account on the UK platform. This has been requested a lot and because this is off network, in the unlikely event of the US platform going down (although all websites have downtime) resellers still have a way of communicating with clients. We’ve seen resellers doing this to bring news about network issues and to host their client portals.