This week the decision has been taken for us to merge Inspired Services back into Inspire Hosting. Once we have merged back in our managed services division we will be shifting our focus more towards managed services once again and away from shared hosting.

The reasoning behind this decision is that VMware, our software supplier for all our VPS solutions has made their top enterprise Virtualization product, ESXi 3.5, freely available, this makes our potential to offer low priced high quality Virtual servers very high, an opportunity that we couldn’t allow to pass us by.

We aim to have all of our systems merged back together from the end of the month. From an as yet undecided time we will do a minor redesign on our website and re-brand to “Inspire Hosting - The Managed Virtual Server People” Once this is complete we will move all current VPS clients to new ESX based servers and offer VMware solutions to all current dedicated server clients, which should represent a large cost saving and many other benefits such as total system backups as standard.

If you have questions or are interested in the new services that will be launched as part of this new project Click Here to ask us.

Things move fast around here these days, especially with our website design. As you can see we have changed some of the pages over to our new design, there are a few dead links about and we haven’t changed all of the pages over yet, but by Monday morning we will have the new site fully rolled out across the site, perhaps with the exception of the blog as that takes a little while to integrate into the site design.

Let us know what you think of the new site on the forum!

Dear Customers,

At approximately 3PM BST a segment of our data center experienced a power outage, this caused power loss to the switch providing the frontend internet connection to our equipment running our Virtual Server hosting and our SH1 shared hosting server.

It was not immediately obvious that this had happened as power was restored near instantly and the majority of systems on attached to the same switch recovered normally, but our equipment remained offline.

Time was spent checking over our servers for issues before looking back at the networking hardware, we then found that the configuration on the switch had been reset to defaults. This resulted in our IP range being down and so no traffic could get to or from any of the affected servers, this took some time to correct as we had to restore the setting of the switch then test that this was working correctly before hooking it back up to our servers.

Full connectivity was restored at 17:50 BST but work continued until 2am to resolve all issues with our VPS services.

We apologize for any inconvienence caused and our working closely with the datacenter to make sure this cannot happen again.

@19:50: We are currently seeing loss of packets from our servers at BlueSquare when attempting to connect to our US servers. We are investigating currently but it appears there has been a routing failure in New York, this should not affect the uptime of any websites although some traffic coming from or going to the US may be lost.

@20:34: It has become clear that this is a failure on the network of one of our upstream providers, the issue should be resolved shortly as we are now seeing 50-60% of traffic getting through with no problem.

@21:07: Normal service has been fully restored, one of our upstream providers had a failure in their New York location which resulted in us seeing issues with connecting to servers in the US. We have now failed over to a different provider and everything is now functioning normally.

We will update this post when the issue if there is any change of status.

Dear Customers,

All of our clients hosted on BlueSquare 3 based hardware will have seen an outage of about 2 and a half hours this afternoon following a switch failure at the datacenter leading to a total loss of conectivity for all our hardware. We are now fully back up and running.

We apologise for this outage and are working with the datacenter to prevent a reoccurance in future.

Our summer ‘08 promotion is now up and running, if you order between now and August you can get 15% off your first payment period (be that a month, quarter, half year or even a full year) to take advantage of this offer make sure you use the Promotional Code ’summer08′ when signing up!

It is now time for the first of many competitions that we will be running over the next few months!

This one is dead simple for you, we’ve just opened our shiny new forum, Inspire Community, right now it is rather quiet so we have come up with a competition to get more people talking and more fun stuff happening.

The Challenge
You must get as many new sign ups to the forum as you can before our deadline of Monday 9th June. These people must post actively for you to be in with a chance of winning. We will announce the winner a week later on the 16th of June once everyone has had a chance to make a good few posts!

The Rules

• Any person can only sign up once, anyone found to be cheating will be disqualified
• When you get someone to join you must get them to post a new thread in this forum stating your username as the person who invited them to join
• The winner will be able to pick their prize from the list posted here

Enjoy!

We have now opened our community forums, feel free to jump over to http://www.inspire-community.co.uk to have a look around and join up. Our aim is to build a big and successful forum for the benefit of all our customers and potential customers.

On the forums over the coming months you will find competitions, special promotion codes, tutorials and much much more to help you make the most of your hosting experience.

Well, this is our first post, we’ve got rather a lot to say so I’ll get to the point…

Currently we are putting the finishing touches to the Billing System so we can get our order system back up and running, as soon as that is up we will finish off the forum and sort out a few template issues that are currently causing this blog to look a little weird in places.

As you may have guessed from the big banner on the front of the site and at the top of this post, we’re running a summer promotion, if you order before the end of june you will get 25% off your first payment term, meaning if you pay monthly you’ll get 25% off your first month, or if you pay annually, you will get 25% off your first year, on top of the two free months you get for paying annually!

As you may have noticed we currently do not have the tutorials section up and running, don’t worry, we will start wrtting some tutorials for you all once we have all the bugs ironed out with the site.