TerraNetwork

Starting this week (19th July 2010) TerraNetwork have begun sponsoring the Daily Quiz on Radio Caroline. This old “North Sea Pirate” is still broadcasting today, both on Sky Digital Radio (Channel 0199) and online at radiocaroline.co.uk. [...]

Sage Pay have announced that they have scheduled a major system upgrade beginning Saturday 17th April 2010 at 22.00 hrs UK time. As far as we can tell the main part of this upgrade will involve changing the ip addresses which their name servers work on.

Sage Pay are anticipating minimal disruption (calculated in minutes) while the ip address changes take place – but we have been here before with Sage Pay system upgrades and their track record is not great.

As Internet Service Providers lock onto the ip addresses which name servers use and not the actual names they use we hope that Sage Pay will put in place forwarding from the old ip addresses to the new. If they fail to do this, or fail to do it correctly, or their systems get overloaded with the redirects then you should expect disruption for much longer than a few minutes.

Our advice – if you have alternative payment modules installed but not currently in use, such as Pay Pal, then you should activate them ready for the 17th of April, thus guaranteeing that your customers are able to make payments to you.

Hopefully you won’t need this – but it’s just as well to be prepared!

Link to the Sage Pay email below:
Original Sage Pay Email

You may soon be approached, if you haven’t already been, by companies trying to sell you the new .co type of domains. This new domain type has nothing to do with existing .co.uk domains. This type of domain, whilst it isn’t even available yet, is being marketed as “recognised worldwide as standing for company”. How it can be recognised world-wide as standing for “company” when it isn’t even available yet beats me.

The fact is that .co stands for Colombia, the South American country this domain type belongs to – just as .tv stands for TuValu and not for TeleVision.

Registering one of the .co domains at this point in time, the pre-launch “Sunrise” stage, will costs hundreds whether you calculate in Dollars, Pounds or Euros.

If you think it is essential for your business that you grab one of these domains then you will need to do so at this stage and absorb the cost.

There are new types of domains coming out all the time, some make it and some don’t. For instance, you’ll see .tv domains being used by some companies who advertise on television, but mainly it has been a flop.

My own, purely personal, view is that at this point in time it is too early to tell if the .co type of domain will take off in a meaningful way.

At TerraNetwork we’ve been specialising in providing eCommerce websites and hosting since 2002. Quite a number of our customers have been with us since their early days and our early days.

However, we know that in this difficult economic climate there are many who are thinking about starting a Online Ecommerce Business, but are perhaps deterred by the cost and commitment required. That’s why we’ve decided to lower the entry bar for Start-Up businesses. [...]

One of the things that attracts people to Magento is the ability to run multiple websites from one control panel, with one database and just one set of files. However, there is a lot of debate about whether the Magento multi-site capability can be used successfuly on Shared Hosting. The answer to that question is both “Yes” and “No”, depending upon how you wish to run the different websites. [...]

For those waiting for a new Zen Cart module which implements 3D Secure with Pay Pal Website Payments Pro UK (Cardinal) TerraNetwork can announce that we have our own module now available. [...]

There are certain things which give away the fact that your Zen Cart website may have been the victim of a hack. Some of the tell-tale signs are given below: [...]

Now that we have two new cPanel servers online and will switch earlier servers (using Ensim Pro control panels) over to cPanel it gives us the opportunity to offer own-branded name servers to Resellers. [...]

“What cart do you recommend?” is the number one query we get. An easy enough question, but the answer depends on your business and your requirements. To make your choice simpler, we’ve compared the features of our two most popular carts, Zen Cart and Magento, plus our in-house ReadyCart.

Read below for comparison or if you have have experience with either cart, leave a comment about the good and bad bits.

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For the past week our new Enterprise server has been online.  During that time we have been moving some of the more high-usage sites that were on our Stargate server over to Enterprise.  These, and other actions we have taken, have restored Stargate to its previous stable state. [...]