Everall, original founder of Valcato in 2002, left the company in 2005 to work in the hospitality industry. As Valcato’s new managing director, Everall is responsible for the development and implementation of strategic marketing goals and infrastructure upgrades. He will also streamline customer support and lead research into new services and emerging technologies.

As an organized Limited Company in the United Kingdom, Valcato is required to meet a greater number of government regulations. The restructuring assures customers that Valcato is a legitimate business entity and is recognized by the government. It has operated previously as a sole proprietorship, since 2002.

“By incorporating we aim to reassure our clients and send out the message that Valcato is a brand to trust,” said Everall. “As the original founder of Valcato, this is almost like coming home for me. My piece in the puzzle is to promote our service and build on our brand to attract new business, which will allow us to push Valcato to the next level.”

Although Valcato’s clientele comprises primarily of SMEs, the company is adding new features to appeal to the individual users. New features include one-click installations of blogging or photo album software. Valcato Hosting now also offers a WYSIWYG SiteBuilder add-on, allowing novice designers to create fully-featured Web sites without any HTML knowledge.

The company also plans to roll-out a UK-specific hosting division in the coming months. It currently serves clients on six continents through its flagship brand, Valcato Hosting.

Started in early 2002, Valcato Hosting serves a variety of clients, including small and medium sized businesses and individuals. Valcato Hosting offers a variety of Linux shared Web hosting plans and dedicated servers.

As the most popular suggestion in this year’s customer survey we have developed a program with great rewards and a whopping 8.5% commission:

We’ll be running our first affiliate-only promotion soon, so be sure to sign up now and get in on a great deal.

There’s no approval process; anyone can join and start earning instantly. Visit the Affiliate Program page for more information.

All of our servers are fully managed, meaning that no technical knowledge is required for customers to use them — we take care of all the hard stuff! Our prices start at just $139 per month, and if none of our standard configurations meet your needs, let us know and we’ll happily put together a custom box for you.

Also as a result of the recent server migration, we are now able to provide daily remote backups for shared hosting accounts instead of weekly backups. Previously only premium accounts were backed up on a daily basis.

We’re always interested in hearing what our customers have to say about our services, so if you have any comments or suggestions about our new plans, or about our services in general, please feel free to email feedback@valcatohosting.com.

Most customers will not have to do anything, but customer web sites will be unavailable while their data is being moved. Customers who do not use our name servers, or who have their domain names registered with a third party, may also need to manually update their DNS information. See below for more detailed information.

Migration Schedule

The migration will happen according to the following schedule (work will begin at 14:00 BST on each day):

Customers wishing to find out on which server their sites are hosted can do so by logging into the Account Control Panel and clicking “My Sites” followed by “My Plans”, and then “View Details” next to the relevant hosting plan.

Services Which Will Be Unavailable

Some services will be unavailable while data is being transferred:

We can’t provide an accurate estimate of how long these services will be unavailable, as this will vary per customer, but this is likely to take a minimum of three hours.

Customers Who Don’t Use Our Name Servers

Customers who do not use our name servers will need to update their DNS records on the relevant date with the IP addresses of our new servers. (If you don’t know if this applies to you or not, then you almost certainly don’t need to do anything.)

The new IP addresses are as follows:

If you have a dedicated IP address and do not use our name servers, then please contact us to find out which IP address you will be assigned.

We recommend that customers who manage their own DNS servers lower their record’s TTL a day or two before the scheduled data transfer, so that your site will be unavailable for as short a time as possible.

Customers Who Registered Their Domain Elsewhere

If you use our name servers, but chose not to register your domain with us, then you may need to update your name server settings with your domain registrar. This only applies if your registrar requires you to enter the IP address as well as the host name of the name servers. The host names are not changing, but the IP addresses will change to the following:

You will need to update this information on or after July 21.

We’ve pre-installed a few Python modules which we think people will need, but there are bound to be customers who need more. If you find we’re missing a module that you need, head over to our support web site and open a ticket, and we’ll get it installed right away.

We will also be adding Ruby on Rails support shortly, so watch this space.

To access webmail, you can use the URL http://webmail.example.com/ where example.com is your domain name; or, to access the Control Panel the URL is http://cpanel.example.com/.

Yes that’s right, over the course of the past month we have been grilling our customers in our annual customer survey to gather their honest opinions on our service, support and plans for the future. The results are in and we are pleased to announce that they are overwhelmingly positive, we are very proud of the 100% customer recommendation statistic and it proves that we’re doing things right.

You can find some of the comments received on our customer comments page and a selection of the results below:

The speed your website loads

1 meaning slowly, 5 meaning extremely quickly

The reliability of your website

1 meaning unreliable, 5 meaning extremely reliable

Valcato staff worked on my issue until it was resolved

1 meaning strongly disagree, 5 meaning strongly agree

Valcato staff listened to me and gave a personal response

1 meaning strongly disagree, 5 meaning strongly agree

The speed of support response

1 meaning slow, 5 meaning fast

As you can see there is a dominance of dark orange, which means the vast majority of our customers rated us 5/5 in these key areas. We welcome feedback at any time of the year and have a special address set up for your comments: feedback@valcatohosting.com.

Note: This offer has now ended.

Introducing the biggest promotion we’ve ever run; double up your dedicated server.

Place a new dedicated server ordered between now and the 31st of May and you’ll have the opportunity to double the amount of RAM, Monthly Transfer or size of the Hard Drive completely free!

Need extra RAM for your applications, or got some big files? Well you can choose one of three components and we will double it, at no cost. Or you can double all three for a mere $47, a saving of over $160 on our regular pricing!

To take advantage of this offer just place an order for one of our fully managed dedicated servers and on the customise page you can choose which component to double.

This extension is designed for mobile internet devices and with a predicted 1.8 billion mobile internet users by the end of the year, there has never been a better time to register.

Register now!

Aimed at webmasters who have outgrown their shared hosting or need more control over their hosting environment but lack the technical knowledge to do it themselves, we take care of absolutely everything leaving you to continue running your website as normal.

All our servers come as standard with the industry leading control panel cPanel/WHM and include Fantastico script installer, alongside great value added features like 5 minute server monitoring, a 100% network uptime guarantee and a 48 hour setup average.

We offer two server configurations; one at the entry level and the second provides all the processing power you could need. This truly is a premium service, but with a Valcato price tag! Prices start at just $175/month.

What’s more, our current shared hosting customers are entitled to half price setup if you decide to upgrade and we’ll move your website across for you.

Stock is limited, so be sure to order soon.

.Asia covers the world’s largest internet community with over 400 million users, so it is predicted to become a very popular domain. Get in early to secure your name now, over 300,000 domains were snapped up in the first day of pre-registration!

We are offering .asia domain names for a great price of $23/year

Register your .asia or Transfer to us

.EU Transfers

The registry in charge of .eu domain names has recently enabled their transfer. This means we are now able to accept your transfer requests at a great rate of just $12 which includes an extra year’s registration.

Click the transfer link above for more information.

We have knocked a dollar off the price of the big 3 (.com, .net, .org) and many others, but the biggest cuts are .eu, .mobi and .ws; reduced by up to $13!

And if that wasn’t good enough, all new domains and transfers can now benefit from free ID protect to hide your name and address from the public WHOIS database.

These are our new permanent prices, and our customers will be able to take advantage when they renew their existing domains.

But until the end of the month you can register a .info for only $5! That’s more than half price, there’s never been a better time to get some action from the internet’s 6th biggest domain.

For the full lowdown on this special offer, and to check out our new pricing, refer to the domain name registration page.

Along with general improvements there are some great new features, a few of them include:

If you have any questions about the upgrade, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Rest assured we will be available throughout the holiday period should you have any questions or problems.

Note: This offer has now ended.

In the spirit of Halloween, we’re offering a little treat to everyone who creates a new account with us on October 30^th and 31^st! One free domain registration or transfer with each new web hosting account, for all customers — new and existing alike!

To take advantage of this offer, just head over to our Hosting Plans page and choose the plan that’s right for you. When asked, choose to register a new domain or transfer an existing domain to us and it’ll be added to your order at no charge.

Offer Terms and Conditions

This offer is subject to the following terms and conditions in addition to our normal Terms and Conditions of Use:

1. Free domain registrations and transfers are available only with new web hosting accounts.
2. Domain registrations are free of charge for one year from the date of registration or transfer, with the exception of .co.uk and .org.uk domains which are registered for two years. Normal prices apply for subsequent renewals.
3. Offer applies only to registrations and transfers of .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, .name, .co.uk, .org.uk and .us domains. Other top-level domains will be charged at normal prices.
4. Our 30-day money-back guarantee still applies to accounts created under this offer, however the normal cost of domain registration will be deducted from any refunds issued.
5. Offer runs from midnight October 30 GMT to midnight November 1 PDT (7am GMT).
6. Monthly payments are not available for the first year of service for accounts created under this offer.

Copyright Information

The promotional images for this offer make use of graphics from the Wikimedia Commons, a repository for freely licensed media. Littleghost.svg is in the public domain, and Jack-o-lantern.svg is available under the GFDL and Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike licenses.

In line with MasterCard’s requirements we have now removed the Switch logo from our website and all correspondence. SecureCode, MasterCard’s online fraud protection system is already in place for credit cards and will be introduced for Maestro cards in the third quarter of 2007. More information on SecureCode can be found on this website.

Customers who currently pay with a Switch branded card do not need to take any action, we will continue to process payments from your card as usual. When entering card details you will need to select the Maestro option where previously you selected Switch.

The Solo brand will continue as a brand in its own right and although Solo transactions can use MasterCard SecureCode, MasterCard have not made this mandatory. We will also be introducing support for this at a later date.

If you have questions please create a ticket to the billing department by clicking “Get Support” in the Account Control Panel.

We encourage all existing customers to subscribe either by email or to the RSS feed, and also welcome prospective customers and anyone else who is interested to make use of the system.

Not only do you receive a bigger discount than many of our new customer promotions, but this is not a limited time offer, the discount is for life and is available on our entire range!

For more information, and instructions on taking advantage of this ground breaking reward click here.

All existing customers have already been upgraded to the new plans, free of charge.

Remote Backup

In addition to our new shared hosting plans, we are pleased to announce that we are now operating an automated daily remote backup system for all customers at no additional cost. This will aid any future recovery efforts should the worst happen.

Watch this space for more service announcements in the coming weeks!

This upgrade should not cause any disruption, however some older scripts may be incompatible and will need to be upgraded. Any customers requiring assistance with this should contact us via the Support page.

The account migration process will be taking place over the coming months; customers who use Paypal to pay will be migrated first, followed by those using Worldpay and 2CO. All customers who signed up before the 12th of April 2006 will be migrated, but as this is a gradual process you will be contacted individually with the relevant instructions. To ensure you receive these instructions when they are sent please login to the Client Area and check that your email address is up-to-date.

For more information please visit the Account Migration page.

We encourage all our customers to submit their websites, there are categories for every type of site including E-commerce, Portfolio/Design, and Computers/Internet. It’s a great advertising opportunity and it will help boost search engine rankings, but the best bit of all is that it doesn’t cost a penny.

The directory can be found at http://hosted.valcatohosting.com

The idea for such a directory was originally suggested by one of our customers on the Community Forums and we’re always on the look-out for ways to improve our service. If you have any suggestions we would love to hear; either drop by our Community Forums or email feedback@valcatohosting.com.

This new design features a few things that were noticeably absent from our previous one, such as a News section complete with RSS feed, a clear and simple navigation structure to make it easy to find what you’re looking for, and valid XHTML and CSS for maximal accessibility.

Unified Look

One of the main goals of this redesign was to create a unified layout across the various sections of our web site. Customers will notice that our Community Forums now fit within the layout of our main site. We have also launched a new Account Control Panel to replace our old Client Area, sporting more powerful features in addition to the unified look. (See below for more information about both of these.) In the near future the Website Control Panel (cPanel) will also be redesigned with this new look.

New Account Control Panel

Our new Account Control Panel replaces our old Client Area. This control panel is powered by ModernBill, which sports many advanced features which our old system lacked, in addition to tighter integration with our payment processors.

The result of this is that our customers will be able to manage their account information more easily, making it easier to keep your billing and contact information up-to-date so there are no problems if we need to contact you.

All customers signing up from today will enjoy the use of this system. Our existing customers will be individually contacted in the near future when it is time to be migrated to the new system.

Redesigned Community Forums

Our Community Forums have been migrated to the excellent open source forum system, PunBB. This has allowed us greater flexibility in customising it to suit our needs. This applies not only to tailoring the design, but also will allow us to customise the functioning of the forums and implement new features as we need them.

Existing forum users will need to use the password recovery feature in order to login for the first time.

Domain Registration

From today we are accepting domain name registrations without the need to have a web hosting account with us. Customers choosing to register their domain with us and host their site elsewhere will still enjoy the benefits of our excellent technical support - so if you have trouble setting up or running your site we’ll do everything we can to help you, even if we’re not the ones hosting it!

Feedback

We are very interested in getting feedback on the new design. We encourage everyone to share their comments on our Community Forum. Or, if you’d rather leave your comments in private you can send them via email.

Please let us know what you think!

Jerome wished me to pass on the following message:

As you may have noticed I have not taken an active role in the management of ValcatoHosting.com recently, this is mainly due to changes in my personal life that have made me unable to devote the time I would have liked to driving the business forward.

I have known Adam for a long time and know that he is the right person to lead the company into the future. I will still be around while Adam gets settled, and will obviously still be here for those of you who chat to me on MSN or on our forum, I will simply no longer be taking an active role in managing the company.

I would like to wish Adam, his team, and all of our clients the very best for the future, and please do keep in touch!

Our customers will not notice any immediate change with this announcement, but there are improvements planned for the coming months. An improved company web site will be launched in early 2006, followed by a range of service improvements as the year progresses.

This is an exciting time for Valcato, both for our staff and for our customers. We are only just beginning what I hope will be a long and successful period of improvement, which will allow us to exceed the already excellent standards we have set for ourselves.

If you have any questions or comments regarding this announcement, please feel free to email me directly.

Adam McMaster
Valcato Hosting

http://helpdesk.valcatosupport.com/cgi-bin/kb.cgi?do=read&id=49

Virus Scan

Our server is now equipped with a virus scanner, enabling you to scan the contents of your site from cPanel to ensure that your visitors are safe. In addition to that we routinely scan the entire server and will notify you if we find a virus in your account. All email passing through the server is also scanned and will not be delivered if it contains a virus, meaning your inbox is safe from known viruses.

Phone Number Verification

To help prevent credit card fraud we now have an automated system in place to verify that the telephone number given with new orders is owned by the person placing the order. Customers are called during the signup process and must give spoken authorisation for the transaction. This not only helps protect the victims of identity theft (since their details cannot be used without their authorisation), but also helps protect the integrity of our service by helping to ensure we do not accept orders which use stolen credit card details.

Spam Filtering With Blacklists

To help cut down on the amount of spam which reaches your inbox, we now make use of several blacklists which allow us to block messages coming from severs known to send spam. We also block messages containing links to known spam web sites, including many of those used in the types of scam which attempt to steal login details for sites such as PayPal.

Customer Links Database

A database of web sites hosted by us is available, so that those who are interested can publish details of their site for others to see. This database is available at http://hosted.valcatohosting.com - to add your site, simply click “Add Site” at the bottom of the page.