Stop the presses!

Published 2021/10/04 by David in News

WordPress Toolkit Deluxe now free with all cPanel servers

From October 2021, all cPanel servers that are managed and/or licensed through us will have WordPress Toolkit Deluxe available at no extra cost!

WordPress Toolkit appears as an icon in the cPanel interface, and allows the end user to perform simple and quick tasks on their WordPress site. Key features include website cloning, backup and restore, password-protecting websites, adding/removing/updating plugins, and much more.

Previously, only the WordPress Toolkit Lite was included in a cPanel license, however this restriction is being removed and all licensed cPanel servers can benefit from the unrestricted functionality of WordPress Toolkit Deluxe.

If you’re a managed hosting customer and you do not see the WordPress Toolkit icon inside your cPanel interface, please open a support ticket and we’ll install the software or alter your package featureset as appropriate.

Published 2021/06/23 by Anthony in News

Changes to streaming media services

As we continually strive to improve and expand our products, we are announcing changes to our lineup of streaming media offerings. On September 1st 2021, we will be retiring our existing streaming products in favour of a new, improved and unified platform.

1. We are disaggregating all streaming media primary servers, relays and AutoDJ storage to just two locations. Customers can choose from Coventry UK, or South Bend USA, according to their geographical location.
2. Existing streaming plans based on listener count and fixed bandwidth streams will be discontinued. These are replaced by a new, single plan that flexes to accommodate multiple bitrates and listeners automatically, and will invoice based on usage.
    
3. AutoDJ and primary streams are relayed around the world to our 50+ CDN PoPs at 256Kbit AAC, and listeners are automatically served by their closest location for fast streaming and minimal buffering.
4. Listeners can select from three streams according to their bandwidth availability; 48Kbit/s AAC+ HE, 128Kbit AAC, 128Kbit MP3, or 256Kbit AAC.
5. Streams are transcoded directly at our CDN PoP edges from 256Kbit AAC to the listener’s selected bitrate. This ensures minimal bandwidth waste and maximal quality.
6. A playlist file is generated per AutoDJ or primary stream that cycles between the quality automatically, highest to lowest. Or, you can offer a fixed link to the stream quality (or multiple qualities) of your choice.
    
7. The base plan costs $10 per month per AutoDJ or primary stream.
8. The base plan includes 10GB AutoDJ storage, with additional storage at $0.25 per GB.
9. The base plan includes 500 points. Once exceeded, each additional 500 point block is invoiced at $5.
    
10. Bandwidth charges in Europe and North America are 1 point per MB. ($10/TB)
11. Bandwidth charges in Africa are 3 points per MB. ($30/TB)
12. Bandwidth charges in South America and Asia Pacific are 5 points per MB. ($50/TB)
13. To help you work out bandwidth charges, 1 listener x 1 hour x 128Kbit stream uses approximately 60MB.

Why are we making these changes?

We’ve been paying close attention to the feedback from our streaming media customer base. They want to offer higher quality streams cost-effectively and without inflicting buffering. Additionally, as their listener base grows, they no longer want to be tied in to fixed maximum listener counts to accommodate huge bursts in listeners. Our new unified solution is the answer to all of these problems and ensures fair pricing for all.

What will happen to my existing stream?

Our experts will contact all customers to help onboard them to the new unified platform. The inbound primary stream links, internal AutoDJ control panel, and listener-facing stream links will require a change as part of the transition. We will assist you with making changes to ensure minimal interruption to your stream.

Published 2020/10/06 by Olly in News

Cloud Unboxed completes fourth network expansion phase

We’re pleased to announce that our network expansion project, in conjunction with ISP Backbone, has today completed its fourth expansion phase. We began our long-term network project in Q1 2019 with a not-so-small PoP count of 24 locations, however our fourth phase has brought our total count to 48 unique locations around the world! We’ve faced many challenges during this phase, with COVID-19 restricting data centre access and hands-on work, however we’re back on track and the network is humming away sweetly. But what does this network expansion mean to you and what benefits does it bring?

What is a PoP?

A network Point of Presence, or PoP for short, is a location within a data centre (or “carrier hotel”) in which we’ve installed our equipment, and then connected to both the wider Internet and our own network. A PoP therefore allows a closer, shorter network path into our network – and back out to the ISPs that make up the rest of the Internet.

Each of our PoPs contains at least one edge router, a local nameserver (DNS) cache, a CDN endpoint, a WAF endpoint, a streaming relay, and a DDoS mitigation service/appliance. Some larger PoPs also contain general compute servers as well as hosted equipment for our sponsored services, such as software mirrors, NTP servers and third-party network monitoring probes.

How do PoPs help?

We announce the IP addresses on our native network using Anycast technology, which means each one of our PoP locations accepts traffic destined for any server or website on our network.

Let’s say you live in New York, and you’re accessing a server hosted in London. Your ISP will connect using our New York City PoP, allowing us to route your traffic privately over our own network until it reaches the destination in London. This setup avoids any congested network routes to maximise speed, ensures the shortest and most optimal path for the best latency, and allows us to automagically reroute traffic if a major service outage occurs on the wider Internet.

What’s more, all of our PoPs have a DNS cache, so when you type in the www’s to get to your website, your ISP is automatically served from a close and fast nameserver rather than one potentially at the other side of the world. Plus, if you use our CDN, your static assets will also be served from our local PoP, making your website feel super-fast and responsive.

The upgraded service status page

With the number of our PoPs ever-increasing, we’ve given our status page an overhaul to make it easier to use. Our Network Edge PoPs are now grouped into continents, while our Network Core & Compute sites sit within their own group. We also have individual groups covering each unique service in granular detail, so tracking problems is super simple.

Our status page is fully white-labelled, so you can link it from your website and send it your customers. Furthermore, you can subscribe to receive email status notifications to be proactively notified when there are problems. Simply head over to the status page, click the subscribe button in the footer and fill in your email. Note, you’ll receive an email confirmation link that you need to follow to activate the subscription.

Published 2020/03/13 by Olly in News

Coronavirus (COVID-19) Update

We’re making adjustments to the way we operate due to the impact of Coronavirus (COVID-19). Our priority is to protect all staff and clients, whilst ensuring continuity of service to the fullest extent.
We’ve made investments and improvements to our internal technology infrastructure so that we can operate most systems and processes remotely with minimal interruption to service levels. Effective immediately, we are implementing a Work From Home policy for all staff.

Customer/technical support commitment

• Telephone support will be limited during this time. Most calls will be handled by our answering service, however technical support will be transferred to email, live chat and Portal only.
• Online support via email, live chat and Portal will continue as normal. All staff have remote access to internal systems to continue supporting customers.
• On-site support and meetings have been cancelled and will be rescheduled for a future date.
• Billing operations will be limited during this time. There may be delays processing payments due to physical access limitations to banks and advisors.

Network availability and uptime guarantee

Like other ISPs, we are seeing an increase in network utilisation during the day and early evening periods, and we expect this to further increase as more people work from home. Our network is designed with ample headroom to facilitate spikes in traffic, however we are increasing network capacity at core and edge locations wherever possible to mitigate any potential bottlenecks.

Our business continuity planning allows our uptime guarantee to continue unaffected by today’s challenges and changes. We are confident in our ability to achieve and exceed response time targets to all incidents and outages throughout this time.

Cybersecurity

We urge customers to remain vigilant against security incidents. We have witnessed an uptick in phishing attempts using the Coronavirus as a lure, and expect this trend to rise as the virus reaches its peak. We have not seen any notable increase in network/DDoS attack traffic, however our security experts will continue to monitor and protect the network.

Free VPN access to private networks

We have observed many of our customers implementing a Work From Home policy. We are providing free VPN access to enterprise customers with private networks, so that their staff may securely access internal systems while working from home. The VPN endpoints are designed to maintain up to 100 active sessions and will be provided free of charge with unmetered bandwidth until the Coronavirus outbreak is under control. Please raise a support ticket for further information and help implementing this.

Stay safe

We appreciate your understanding during these challenging times, and above all wish that you stay safe and well.

Previous Next

Published 2019/10/11 by Olly in News

Cloud Unboxed showcase new branding and identity

With 2020 fast approaching and a number of exciting projects coming to fruition, we had a growing disconnect between our services and brand aesthetic or identity. We enlisted the top team at TribeOf6.com to give our branding and web presence an overhaul that fits with our company's exciting brands and services, and is relative to our future journey. We hope you love the changes as much as we do!

Published 2019/03/04 by David in News

Cloud Unboxed Limited partners with cPanel Inc. and CloudLinux Inc.

We are pleased to unveil our official NOC Partner status with cPanel Inc., the world's leading web hosting control panel software. We have relied upon cPanel for many years to deliver a solid, simple hosting solution to our customers and partners. Our transition from a reseller to NOC Partner status brings expedited technical support, direct access to the complete suite of cPanel products, and cost savings that we're passing to our customers.

We've also partnered with CloudLinux, who provide us with great security software for our hosting environment. This partnership again brings us expedited technical support along with some price reductions which we're able to pass to customers.

Published 2018/07/23 by David in News

Cloud Unboxed Limited and ISP Backbone Ltd partner for network success

Cloud Unboxed Limited have today signed a contract with ISP Backbone Ltd, a worldwide connectivity services provider, to strengthen our network and inter-connect all 24 of our data centre locations together. The long-term project, expected to begin Q1 2019 and take several years to complete, will give our customers a competitive edge compared to standard network designs. Our head of Network Operations provides technical details.

"The Internet is a gigantic complexity of over 500,000 unique networks mashed into one. All these unique networks rely on transit providers, internet exchange points and peering locations to speak to one another. The problem is that tens, hundreds or sometimes thousands of routes can exist between networks, and it's up to transit providers to choose which route they take. Typically, transit providers take the least-cost route because they are running for profit, but the least-cost route is usually the slowest. Our long-term goal is to alleviate these slowest routes by building our own transit network between data centres -- but the expense is eye-watering. We reached out to ISP-Backbone, who have already built this type of network, and with their help we can achieve network nirvana for a fraction of the cost. This huge project will put us in full control from source to destination, and give our customers a competitive edge with lower latency and faster speeds compared to standard network designs. We look forward to working with ISP-Backbone in the months and years ahead."

- Steve C., Network Operations

Published 2018/01/12 by Olly in News

Cloud Unboxed reaches 24-PoP network milestone

I'm delighted to announce we have brought online our 24th data centre presence! The continued growth from our new and existing customers is celebrated with our 24th location - South Bend, Indiana - launching with immediate effect. Such a vast presence allows us to deliver closer and localised services to our customers and their audience, further strangthening their success along with our network infrastructure. This incredible milestone sees our self-owned, self-operated hardware hosted in over three continents, including:

• Europe:
  • London, Maidenhead, Coventry, Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Bucharest
• USA:
  • New York, Piscataway, South Bend, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Atlanta, Miami, Los Angeles, San Jose, Seattle
• Asia-Pacific:
  • Singapore, Melbourne, Sydney, Hong Kong, Tokyo

Published 2017/07/19 by Anthony in News

Cloud Unboxed to launch hosted WAF powered by Comodo

In line with our ambitious AceCDN project, we're partnering with Comodo to launch a fast, secure WAF project powered by our CDN. We realise that a CDN is often the weakest link in the security chain of a website, allowing malicious hackers and bots easy access to otherwise sensitive information. With the help of our trusted partner Comodo, we're adding their PCI-DSS verified Web Application Firewall (WAF) in front of CDN requests to help secure and protect customer websites. Unlike our competitors who "add-on" security, we're building it right in to the core product stack to ensure safety as standard. We anticipate the full launch in Q2 2018.

Published 2017/02/27 by Olly in News

Cloud Unboxed plans expansion into CDN marketplace

Following the huge success of its DeployVM brand and accompanied network footprint expansion, Cloud Unboxed has today expressed plans to launch its own CDN service to increase the speed of hosted websites and infrastructure.

"We're seeing an ever-increasing trend of bigger data, from feaure-heavy websites, higher quality images, larger resolution and longer video files, higher quality streaming, and more. The internet is getting bigger and better as our devices and connections get faster. While we always recommend our customers use a high quality CDN to speed up the delivery of websites and large files, we're yet to find an exceptionally fast and stable CDN that delivers to expectations. As our own network reach and size grows, we're sure we can do better than the mainstream CDN offerings -- so today, I'm happy to announce a bold and brave embarkment towards building our own, purpose-built, high performance Content Delivery Network we're calling the 'ACECDN project'. We'll soon be offering free trials to managed hosting customers and if you'd like to be a part of this amazing new project, please let us know!"

- Olorin Henderson, Operations Director

Published 2016/12/05 by Olly in News

DeployVM brand success leads to footprint expansion

Our recently launched brand DeployVM has proven to be a great success for both new and existing customers. Thanks to the overwhelming support and location demands of our customers, we are pleased to announce a global network footprint expansion from 7 to 10 data centres! We anticipate the completion of this expansion project by Q2 2017.

Published 2016/11/21 by David in News

Cloud Unboxed Limited showcase new website design

We're today proud to unveil our brand new site relaunch, fulfilled by our very own design and development brand TribeOf6.com. Our new design perfectly reflects our current company status and brand offerings, whilst representing the next chapter in our journey toward achieving hosting perfection.

Published 2016/03/24 by Anthony in News

Cloud Unboxed announces official Comodo partnership

I'm pleased and proud to announce that we have today secured our official Partner status with Comodo, an industry-leading security company. We have been providing Comodo security services to our customers for many years, however our Approved Web Host status brings us even greater benefits, product selection, and pricing schedules which we are passing directly over to our customers. Many thanks to all customers for allowing us to achieve this milestone and I look forward to your continued business in the future.

Published 2015/10/26 by David in News

Cloud Unboxed Limited secures investment to launch two new brands

Cloud Unboxed has today secured a new round of funding which will aid the development of its products and services, and subsequently launch two new brands in the coming year. The six-figure private investment will be used to improve and expand upon the company's cloud server product portfolio, and bring to life a new web design and development brand in 2016.

"2015 has been such an amazing year so far, and this investment brings a new wave of excitement to our entire team. We're looking forward to building on the great service we've delivered across our brands so far, but also the launch of these two new and exciting brands that will both see us shine and pioneer in our industry."

- Olorin Henderson, Operations Director

Published 2015/05/19 by Anthony in News

Cloud Unboxed Limited acquires local IT firm ioHub Computing Ltd

Cloud Unboxed is pleased to announce it has today finalised an agreement that will see the acquisition of independent IT firm ioHub Computing, based in Chester-le-Street, County Durham.

"ioHub Computing has been our go-to source of all cloud server node and component needs for a number of years now. The expertise and advice we receive from the ioHub team is always second to none, and blows the market leaders out of the water. I couldn't be happier to welcome the whole ioHub Comptuting team aboard our company and hope for some great success together as we both continue to grow."

- Anthony Somerset, Chief Technical Officer

Published 2015/01/03 by Marie in News

Changes to EU VAT rules

On January 1st 2015 new VAT rules were applied to companies selling digital services within the European Union. As such:

- Customers based in the UK are charged 20% VAT
- Customers from EU Member States are charged the VAT rate of their respective country of origin
- Customers in EU Member States who can produce a valid VAT ID, will receive their invoice according to the Reverse-Charge procedure, without UK VAT

You can read more about this on the GOV.UK website here.

Published 2014/05/16 by Olly in News

Cloud Unboxed Limited acquires assets of Somerset Technical Solutions Ltd

Cloud Unboxed is pleased to announce it has today finalised an agreement that will see the acquisition and merger of Somerset Technical Solutions' assets and managed hosting customers in to the Cloud Unboxed brand.

Published 2014/01/01 by Olly in News

Cloud Unboxed Limited acquires assets of ello group limited

Cloud Unboxed is pleased to announce it has today finalised an agreement that will see the acquisition and merger of ello group's assets and hosting customers in to the Cloud Unboxed brand.

"Effective 1st January 2014, the acquisition brings greater and enhanced support to existing customers, and a strong investment toward new technology developments which will increase the quality and diversity of products offered to both new and existing customers."

- Olorin Henderson, Operations Director