Jambour Blog

With regards to our hosting, it is, and always has been, of paramount importance that we offer the best service we can. As a side effect of this, we charge higher than many shared hosts for our monthly fee but we feel it's a justified price based on what we offer.

When I started to develop my own plans to move from the bog standard shared hosting packages I had used in past, I thought much about running my own server and how it would prevent my site from being down so often.

Our business is all about providing reliability for our customers as well as an excellent customer service and final product. However, I want to mention in this post our business model. We've mentioned in our blog before that we also can reduce costs for our clients by gaining more clients - we're prepared to help them as much they help us. We work on a system of the more clients the less we need to charge.

So if you want a business that puts clients at the centre of it's business model, look no further than Jambour Digital.

It's also not often I talk about server upgrades because they are often just done in the background. Today I rebuilt the server from the ground up in a new virtual machine and running on Ubuntu 18.04.

As a result, we also now use PHP 7.2. I have also increased maximum file upload sizes to 50MB for all users.

I know PHP gets a lot of criticism (particularly from people who like other languages) but I still strongly believe in PHP as I have done since I began to learn it, even though several websites I work on are moving to other languages such as RoR. I didn't choose to stand by PHP because it was what I was learning or it was forced on me, I chose it because I genuinely believe PHP fits the specification for a backend language.

At 11.30 we will be running some maintenance. Websites will go down for about 20 minutes. This maintenance involves adding more security to the server to protect it further after recent events and the server needs to be taken down and snapshotted before we initiate this.

The last week is the first week we have achieved exactly 100% uptime since beginning Jambour Digital. We normally achieve around 99.8% uptime because of things like server maintenance and such, but we're happy to announce 100% uptime this week!

Once again BT has messed up with our Internet connection! This means nothing for the websites we host but it does mean that our phone line is currently down. It will affect how much work we can get done in the same timeframe as we are working from smartphone data which is a bit more pricey and is making it difficult to work at present.

We can advise you at present to use email to get in touch with us but do not expect us to reply as promptly as if you were to phone us.

Our phones are back up again as of Sunday 28th of January.

At Jambour we aim to offer the best service possible. As part of this, one of the services we offer and include in all of our packages is automatic backups.

This means if, say, a webpage's content is changed and you wish to revert it, we can carry this out. Backups are carried out every day automatically by the system and are stored for two days on the server then moved to another computer system for another 5 days.

On top of this, we absolutely must make images of the system to minimize downtime on the occasion that some goes wrong. Unfortunately, this type of backup requires the websites on the server to go down for about 20 minutes. This is why this backup method is only performed once a month. 

As mentioned, the monthly backup is more crucial than the content backups because that allows us to restore the system within about 10 minutes if something were to go wrong. However, there will downtime on your website as a result of powering the system down whilst this is done. 

Keeping your own content to the minimum possible size will help keep backups speedy and efficient.

You may have noticed that Jambour has its own phone number. That's because we recently decided to install our own PBX (personal branch exchange).

A PBX is used to transfer phone calls from a VoIP system such as a SIP trunk to the appropriate phones within a business, and yes, you guessed it, Jambour Development uses it's own SIP trunk, which means we don't use the old-fashioned simple copper-wire based telephone line (PSTN) for our personal number. 

We've got tonnes of new features on our phones, including conference calling, putting users on hold and a synchronised phonebook system. We use Grandstream phones, who are an amazing brand of phones. We've also got a fantastic deal on this, costing us next to nothing to own! We will soon be taking on business and the preparation for this is coming along smoothly. 

As we are an Edinburgh company, we also opted for the 0131 extension which fits perfectly with our business.