Layer Seven Hosting

If you’re a freelancer or starting up a small business and need to find the relevant building blocks to create success you should consider how Layer Seven Hosting can help you. We offer load balanced website hosting providing 100% uptime making sure your website will never fall victim to a webserver failure.

With 24/7 support available for your every need, we can give you the platform you need for your business, promising reliability and transparency with our service. To find out how we can create a tailor made package specifically for you and your business, give us a bell today.

We’ve all been there, you look at the screen, look at the window, look at the screen, look at the window, next thing your day dreaming about flinging your malfunctioning your laptop or PC out the window in a desperate attempt to make yourself feel better. Well apparently you’re not alone; according to recent studies destruction is the most popular method of choice when an upgrade is wanted.

“Shockingly, over a quarter of the office workers surveyed feel that the quickest and most efficient method of replacing outdated technology, such as laptops and mobile phones, is to deliberately destroy or irreparably damage them,” reveals the study which surveyed 600 IT managers and 3,000 employees in the UK, France, and Germany.

Luckily for you, if you’re looking to avoid throwing your computer out the window in response to your unreliable web hosting, we can help you. With Layer 7 you can get Load Balanced hosting so if one of your webserver fails your website wont. (And your computer will be safe for another day!)

Police are hoping to shut down websites that are thought to be engaged in criminal activity, it was heard today.

The Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) have made a call to Nominet (the internet registry for .uk domains) to let authorities have domain closing power, a movement they are considering in order to help police work.

Nominet currently do not have any terms and conditions that disallow the use of domains for criminal activity, however following this inquest it will look to add conditions that ban any sites if there are ‘reasonable grounds to believe they are being used to commit a crime.’

This comes in connection with a site police closed down recently after it was seen to be offering advice to those who were photographed taking part in the violent student protests at Millbank Tower.

Over the last year, Nominet have been very responsive in these calls to action and have previously shut down over 1,200 that were breaking UK laws.

Today is the first day of National Anti-Bullying Week and Facebook has joined campaigners in tackling the global issue of cyber bullying.

Recent months have seen social media gain criticism after the suicide of several gay youths in September this year due to online abuse and physical bullying.

In line with the theme of cyber bullying, Facebook have launched a series of tips to help victims avoid and prevent being targeted.

1.       Only accept friends you know

2.       Stop abusive behaviour

3.       Report trouble directly to Facebook

4.       Keep your information private

5.       Don’t react to bullies – block, report or delete them

In a study released by the Anti-Bullying Alliance (ABA) the organisation that runs National Anti-Bullying Week, figures show that half of pupils ignore bullying if they see it first hand, choosing not to report what they saw. Around 43% asked said they witness bullying on the school run however 47% of those admitted to turning a blind eye. As part of National Anti-Bullying Week, Beatbullying, an anti-bully charity will launch ‘The Big March’ which will see 750, 000 people march across websites as their avatar, carrying anti-bullying banners.

This December thousands of short domain names, consisting of just each letter of the alphabet or each single digit will be released for registration by Nominet, the UKs registry.

Names including aa.co.uk, ba.co.uk, be.co.uk, ip.co.uk, no.co.uk, or.co.uk and others will be available to registered rights holders on 1st December, Nominet said. That phase will close on 17th January 2011 and the unregistered rights phase will happen after that, then the open ‘landrush’ period.

International governments have been given the burden of reviewing a new .xxx internet domain.  The controversial domain was deferred voting by ICANN until December. If the new domain is given the thumbs up, then the adults-only top-level internet domain will be set to run the gauntlet of objections from angry pornographers, and appalled Christians for the sixth time.

According to ICM, the .xxx will give members of the adult industry the opportunity to self-identify and allow for easier filtering, aiming to promote responsibility.  However, the domain is set for public scrutiny.  ICANN comment period attracted an unprecedented 13,000 letters and emails by outraged American religious groups.  They argued the XXX internet domain will capitalise on $$$ from the exploitation of people, disruption of nuclear families, and inviting evil into a household.  Bringing to mind the famous seven deadly sins…lust, sloth, avarice…

The newly published ICM-ICANN contract contains a few amendments that highlight how controversial the .xxx domain application has become.

These baseline policies include bans on spam and phishing, and a prohibition on child porn, as defined by UN convention. The ban extends to marketing practices that suggest the presence of child porn, such as HTML meta-tags.

ICANN hopes it can wash its hands of the claims by shifting responsibility for policy-making to IFFOR before the contract is signed.

Along with most things in life there are good sides and bad, and the internet is no exception. Domains are a great example of this and when considering safety, Hong Kong was reported as the most spammed and dangerous in the world back in 2006.

Now following a more recent study carried out by MacAfee, it was reported  that the extension .vn had been ranked one of the most unsafe due to an astounding 59 per cent of the countries domains been marked as dangerous.

On the flip side, Japan has yet again been named the country with the safest domain. In a comment from Paula Greve the director of security web research at McAfee Labs she stated “Last year Vietnam’s .VN was a relatively safe domain, and this year it jumped to the third most dangerous domain. Cybercriminals target regions where registering sites is cheap and convenient and pose the least risk of being caught. A domain that’s safe one year can be dangerous the next.”

Over 1,000 marijuana-related internet domain names have been snapped up as California, US, gets set for potentially legalising the narcotic.

California could be the first US state to allow the legal possession and sale of marijuana (although 14 States in the US have already legalised the drug for medicinal purposes).

Names such as icecreammariuana.com and marijuanapastry.com have been snapped up in expectation of a positive outcome.

According to the New York Times, the ‘landgrabbers’ are utilising slang names such as ‘bud’, ‘weed’ and ‘reefer’ in their domain name titles to attract customers and expect that a more lenient approach to the narcotic might send people online for their purchases in future.

Wednesday saw the German internet suffer problems for over an hour and many business users were unable to access the internet or their websites. DENIC, the German internet authority, attributed this problem to the uploading of empty zonefiles.

According to reports, the problem affected the German .de domain names. .de domain names account for 13.6 million German domains, so many sites were affected. Some claimed that all .de domains were down and others claimed that only some of them were down. One thing’s for sure – it wasn’t too good for business!

Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has made internationalised domain names (IDNs) available, which is the first time this has happened. Because of Icann’s fast track process, the three first country-code-top-level domains (ccTLDs) were placed into the DNS root zone a couple of days ago for Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt.

This means that countries can now apply to Icann for IDN ccTLDs in scripts other than Latin and so far the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has received twenty one requests for this in eleven different languages.