New Data Centre

We have moved into a brand new data centre in Sheffield UK.
Much investment in new cabinets so we can now offer co-located servers from £40 per month with 400Gb per month.

New VMWare Hosts installed

We have a brand new data based in Sheffield, UK and started out with a fleet of VMWare ESX 4.0 vSphere servers.
These servers are committed to running customers dedicated servers, we have also installed iSCSI SAN's for redundancy and extra storage.
In an attempt to get these servers earning their keep we have listed them on eBay in our new eBay shop: http://stores.shop.ebay.co.uk/Dedicated-Servers-2010 at a very good value.

.tel domain names released

.tel domain names have been released (March 2009)
Mantis Computing are doing the best deal you will find on these new domains, have a look here for best pricing http://mantiscomputing.com/domain-names.html.

Why can't I be found on Google?

That is the number one question we get asked here at mantiscomputing.com.

Even in 2008/9, people are still having websites designed and then wondering why the Mighty Google hasn't heard of them.

The simple fact is that Google WON'T put you to the top for the key phrases of your choice just because you've decided to have a website designed. And it really doesn't matter whether you've spent £100 or £10,000 on the site - if it isn't optimised for good listings, it won't get good listings.

At mantiscomputing.com we can get you onto Google.

One of the best ways to get your site more traffic is with our Higher Google Listings packages - ideal for every business website, whether business to business or business to consumer, and with our fantastic pricing, there's a package to suit everyone!
Our Higher Google Listings service does exactly what it says on the tin - helps you to achieve higher listings within the Google search engine.

Pricing includes:

all initial and ongoing optimisation
submission to ODP and Google
XML sitemap generation
submission to the Google Webmaster Tools service
other work needed to ensure higher listings for your website.
You will also receive a weekly report detailing your positions, and regular recommendations, hints and tips that will help you even further.

IE 8 due to be released to manufacture RTM soon

Microsoft's new Internet Web Browser IE 8, is soon to be released from its chains.. or so Microsoft would like us to think, the true fact with IE8 is, instead of becoming more compatible with Internet standards, it has distanced its-self even more, with over 2,000 major website (not to mention the millions of 'non major' web sites, who decides what is a major website anyway?) not compatible - DONT PANIC - there is a 'button' - yes a 'button', what would we do without buttons.... (get cold!), Ok, with IE8 Microsoft have added a 'compatible' button, so when you visit a website and it looks really bad, or totally blank - you can hit this button and the world is normal again!
So why bother? we don't know either, but what we do know is - the likes of FireFox (or Firefix as we like to call it as it makes everything ok again) and Googles Chrome will increase their market footprint on the peoples fav browser list, and IE8 will slide down the scale.

There is an upside to IE8, like Chrome, each tab runs in it's own process, this means that if a website causes IE to crash, or IE just crashes all by itself you do not loose all of your open tabs, just the one that has caused the problem, IE7 will completely disappear if it crashes and you have to start all over again and try to remember which website you had open when it crashed.
Of course there is loads of other new stuff, but to the avegare internet user, these will be unused features.
You have to remember that Microsoft's browsers have 2 roles:
1: To surf the internet,
2: Corporate usage, IE is a very powerful tool in the work enviroment, it can be seamlessly used with very powerful applications such as Sharepoint, CRM, Exchange Outlook Web Access (OWA) plus many more, none of which work at all, or only 'just' with other browsers like Firefox.

So before writing off IE completely, remember that it is a multi role application, but Firefox, Chrome, Safari etc are just built to surf the web - and nothing else.

Protect your information with Domain Privacy

Did you know that when you register a domain name, the contact details you supply are made publicly available using a service called ‘whois‘?
This information is held by the domain registrar companies and is perfectly legal in all countries.As this information is easily accessed by the public it can be a source of SPAM, email marketing and even could be used to try and steal your domain name.
Don’t Panic, help is at hand and it is very easy, all you need to do is login to your Mantis Computing Client Area and from here you can tick the box that says ‘Opt out of whois’ - this is free for .co.uk domains, .com and others do have a small charge of approx £10.
If you want to find out more about this service then please get in touch.

cPanel added to our shared hosting servers.

We are pleased to announce the addition of cPanel to our web hosting control panel systems.
cPanel is now being used as our control panel of choice for all of our Linux based web hosting packages.Q: Why have we chosen cPanel?A: It is very secure with an intelligent firewall built in preventing password and dictionary attacks, it is also very fast compared to other major control panel offerings.You do not need to be a expert to use it as there are online videos showing how to setup an email account for example, more info here http://www.cpanel.net/.It is much cheaper than other similar systems which means our hosting costs stay low, which we can pass onto our clients.
We are still using Parallels Plesk on all of our Windows IIS based servers as over the years this control panel has proved itself to be very powerful.