News, New Products and Special Offers

Find out about new products, special offers, updates and changes at Cymru 1 by visiting our News page regularly.
2008 promises to be an exciting year for us with several important new products being launched.

27/04/08: Cymru 1 Launches New Website

Our original website was designed in early 2000 in preparation for the launch of our company in 2001, and has not changed significantly since then. An update was therefore long overdue, especially since website design ethos and accessibility guidelines have changed in the intervening years.

We hope you like the new design, which uses the same basic layout as the old site but on a technical level is completely different and has allowed us to introduce a number of new innovations and to comply with modern accessibility guidelines.

The new design is only part of the overhaul that is in progress, however. Some of the pages on the new site contain content that has been copied directly from the old site and are therefore still in need of updating to properly match the new style, design ethos and accessibility compliance of the rest of the site. Over the next few months we'll be working hard to update the content in these pages.

The most significant change from a visitor's point of view in the use of a fixed width of just under 1000 pixels for the main content of the site. This change reflects the feedback of a recent customer survey and the fact that the vast majority of visitors to our site have screens set to a resolution of 1024x768 pixels or higher, compared to 2001 when most had screens only capable of 800x600 pixels and only a few were capable of 1024x768.

We have also implemented a system to allow visitors to increase the size of the text on the site using the icons you'll see at the top right of each page. The small "A" represents the normal text size, while clicking on the medium and larger "A"s will increase the text size and remember your setting on subsequent visits. Although the same effect can be achieved in Internet Explorer and Firefox by clicking on the View menu and selecting Text Size, feedback from our survey found that few Internet users, even those who found it hard to view the text on most websites, knew that this feature existed.

Also as a result of customer feedback we have implemented a Printer icon, , again at the top right of each page. Clicking on this allows you to print the content of a page without the logo, advert, main menu and left hand side menu, which are all unnecessary when printing and indeed would waste space and ink.

One thing has not changed: we are still avoiding the use of too much in the way of pictures and graphics on our pages. Although a picture really can be worth a thousand words or even more, this rule falls down when it comes to explaining the advantages, specifications and limitations of a technical product such as Internet access, hosting, or virtual private servers. Feedback on the old website suggested more images and fewer words were what many visitors wanted, however - we were overloading people with too much information. These comments have been taken on board and will be acted upon as we continue to update the content of the site.

27/04/2008 - New Product - Linux VPS options

A Virtual Private Server (or VPS) is, to all intents and purposed, a fully fledged Internet server, the same type of server used to host this website, our customer's websites and indeed all the websites on the Internet, not to mention certain storage servers, e-commerce servers and so on. The only difference is that rather than having its own dedicated physical hardware, a Virtual Private Server shares physical hardware with a number of other Virtual Private Servers. In effect, one physical server is subdivided using special software into a number of Virtual Private Servers which each share its processor, disk and memory resources.

In the old days this would not have been a sensible option, but the sheer power and capacity of modern servers, coupled with the necessary virtualisation software, makes renting a Virtual Private Server a very attractive alternative to renting or buying your own physical server. In particular, they are far less expensive.

Virtual Private Servers are ideal for website designers and budding hosting companies as it allows you to effectively run you own hosting servers and be in complete control. If you want a particular version of an operating system, control panel, database or scripting language installed on it you can easily do so rather than having to make do with whatever your current hosting company has standardised on.

Best of all, a VPS can grow with you. You can start with a basic specification and then very easily upgrade as your needs and budget demand - without any downtime or reinstallation being required.

Virtual Private Servers are also great for novice system administrators who are just finding their feed when it comes to running their own servers. Quite apart from the fact that they cost a great deal less to rent than physical servers, with a VPS mistakes are easily reversible by restoring the entire server and all its files from an online backup or by re-imaging to start from scratch, with both options being possible in a matter of minutes and directly under your control - there's no need to involve the support department at all.

More information on Cymru 1's UK based Linux Virtual Private Servers