PigeonTech News

Each issue we bring you the latest news on what we have been up to and who we have been helping.

First the really big news...

At the end of May 2012 PigeonTech will be relocating to new offices in Matlock. We are very excited as this is a big step in the growth of the business giving us a more professional image and meaning we can work far more efficiently. Instead of operating the business from a cramped spare room in our home, we will finally have a dedicated office where we can bring clients and develop more of our ideas in a properly managed work environment.

Our sincere thanks go to Phil Munn from Midland Corrosion Services for making this happen for PigeonTech. Cheers Phil.

Price change

We've listened to your feedback and decided we needed to simplify our pricing structure for support packages. So we have introduced a sliding scale for our hourly rate whilst keeping the monthly cost fixed. This makes it easier for our customers to understand and means the price we charge is fair and competitive for the services we offer.

At the same time we took the opportunity to review all our prices and have introduced a small call out charge. This was a decision we pondered over for a long time, but it was clear the rising cost of fuel meant we needed to recover some of that cost. As our customer base widens the distances we travel are increasing too, so we are actively looking of ways to reduce this overhead and one idea for the near future is to invest in the use of Smart Cars which have very low running costs that we can pass onto our customers.

Welcoming new customers

Earlier this year we started work on the website for a brand new beauty salon which has recently opened in Wirksworth. The Studio Beauty Salon is owned and run by Shelley Hallows who is a fully qualfied beauty therapist with over 6 years experience in the industry.

Shelley is growing her business and already has a good number of clients, but she recognised the importance of having a web presence to market her business online and approached PigeonTech to see if we could help. We discussed with Shelley how she wanted the site to look. She already had a few design ideas which we were able to incorporate into the site along with some carefully selected graphics to compliment the business profile.

You can visit Shelley's new website at www.beautyinthedales.co.uk

Keeping our existing customers happy

In March we received a call from Simon Wilson at WilsonSherriff who offer a wide range of facilitation, virtual workshops, summits, conferences and consultations to businesses.

They had a major problem with their network file server which refused to start up. Simon had an important report to complete that weekend and couldn't access any of his data, so PigeonTech sent in their Technical Expert to resolve the problem.

A failed Raid Drive was preventing the server from booting and needed to be replaced before Simon could continue his work. PigeonTech quickly sourced a new drive and Simon was able to complete his work in time for his meeting.

This is a good example of why a disaster recovery plan is so important for any type of business. The raid drive on the WilsonSherriff file server helped to prevent major loss of data by creating a mirror copy of all the data on the hard drive. This meant the data was protected from loss and allowed them to continue to work whilst a replacement drive was sourced and installed. Look out for our techi tips on Raid Drives in the next edition to find out how this technology can help protect your important business data.

Techie Tips - Helping You Work Safer

We all know how important it is to stay safe on the Internet. There are plenty of hackers out there who have the means to break into webservers and online databases and steal our personal details. The best way to keep your computer secure is to use a really strong password. That is a password which contains different case letters and numbers which no one, not even your Mother could guess!.

You can follow some simple rules such as:

1. Never use a word or name, especially your own name in your password

2. Never use your date of birth or any other series of numbers which relate to you such as your mobile number or house number.

3. Try to remember to change your password as often as possible. About every 2-3 months is good practice.

4. Use different passwords for different accounts and never use the same password for different bank accounts or other sites where important financial details or information which could compromise your identity are stored.

5. Think about the site you are creating an account for. Is it asking for personal information like your date of birth and address. If yes you need a very secure password.

6. Also make a judgement about the site. Is it a well recognised website like Amazon which is liklely to have lots of security in place. Or is it a business you haven't heard of before which may not be so stringent with it's online security.

7. And if you ever logon to your account using a public computer such as in an Internet Cafe or at an airport never allow the computer to remember your password details and always be sure to logout after you have finished.

Here's a quick and easy way to create a really strong password and make it easy to remember.

Think of a phrase such as

‘the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’

Note - the strength of your password increases exponentially with the number of characters.A really strong password will have a minimum of 12 seemingly random letters, characters and digits.

Then take the first letter of each word

tqbfjotld

Then capitalise the first and last letters

TqbfjotlD

And change one of the letters to a digit. In this case the letter ‘o’ easily becomes the digit zero

Tqbfj0tlD

Add some other characters at the start middle and end

#Tqbf#j0tlD#

If you want to check how secure your new password is you can visit howsecureismypassword.net to see how long it would take a computer to hack your password.

You can read more on this topic at howsecureismypassword.org

Startup Deals

We've been focusing a lot on supporting new businesses recently and are currently offering some great deals to help startups get their business idea off the ground.

PigeonTech offer a wide range of services designed to fit the IT requirements of most business profiles and we can now offer some of those services for free for a fixed period to any business that has been operating for 12 months or less.

If you have a new business you could benefit from free website hosting for a whole year plus 1 month of full IT support.

To find out more about how this great offer could help your business give us a call today on 0843 289 1843 or click here to go to our online enquiry form.