What’s an ‘email’ box?

We often get asked this question.

It’s a mail box on your server where all email is delivered.

You can then have the mail delivered to your computer/phone in two different ways:

1. Pop3 - which takes the email from the box and deletes the email from the
box
or
2. Imap - which takes a copy of the emails in your box and doesn’t delete the
email.

So which to choose?

Depends on factors such as whether you check your email from one computer - in that case Pop3 would be appropriate but if you use Webmail and access your email at home and at work, it’s better to opt for Imap.

According to a survey by web testing firm Gomez, people don’t like web pages that load slowly.  Hardly a stunning revelation but it seems that we’ve all become used to top level performance from the likes of Google and Facebook and if you don’t match up, you’re toast.

If I had a £10 note for every time someone’s told me that they can get hosting for a lot less than we charge, I’d be laughing all the way to our dedicated servers at Rackspace. Unfortunately the hosting market has educated its customers to buy on price - hosting is seen as a commodity until something goes wrong. So people think they can spend £50 a year and get all the webspace and bandwidth they need - perhaps some can but we’re talking successful e-commerce websites.

If your business website needs fast loading pages, regular data back-ups, 99.9% uptime and high levels of security, yes it costs a little bit more but in terms of value, it delivers a better customer experience and a stable business platform.

Alternatively, if you’re happy to risk your business on an offshore server that’s as secure as a Greek bank, be my guest and pass the Ouzo.

In case you’ve missed our press release, we’re campaigning to persuade Google to stop penalising UK website that are hosted on servers powered 100% by green energy because the servers are outside the UK. This is the gist of the release but you can read the whole story here.

To join our campaign, please sign here.

Google uses many criteria in ranking web pages, one of which is the geographic location of the web page’s “IP” address. This is the address of the location where the website is hosted. The UK’s alternative energy sources are still too unreliable to provide a consistent service so the best way for UK businesses to have their websites hosted on servers using 100% green energy is to choose a hosting service based outside the country. If they do this, their rankings in Google’s UK search results are likely to fall because Google infers that a site hosted in the US is less ‘relevant’ to a UK search.
Given that Google’s share of UK searches is now in the region of two thirds, this could have potentially disastrous effects on any UK business that decides to cut its carbon emissions.