As we approach the end of the year, there are a number of announcements to make. This message is being mailed to all CityScape customers, as well as posted on cityscp.announce and made available through our WWW pages.
The CityScape offices will be open on all normal working days, and support hours will be as normal, except that we will be closing at 13:00 on Friday 22rd December. In addition, Support will be open on Saturday 30th December.
Please note that some of our staff are taking time off over the holiday period, and so we may not be able to handle calls and email as fast as normal.
The service will, of course, continue to operate throughout the holidays, and our 24-hour emergency pager service (0941 116836) will be active.
Customers will be pleased to know that we have made major improvements to our WWW server. The new system involves several machines running in parallel, and is completely scalable - new machines can be added at very short notice if load increases. In the three weeks that the system has been running, we have seen access to the server almost double while performance has actually improved.
Because of these changes, we have had to tighten up on access controls.
Users' web space should only be accessed via URLs of the form:
<http://www.cityscape.co.uk/...>
<http://www.gold.net/...>
or registered aliases and domain names;
other URLs which have worked in the past may fail
without warning. Similarly, when uploading new pages, you must FTP to
ftp.cityscape.co.uk and nowhere else.
The new server involves an element of caching. Therefore changes to pages may take up to an hour to become visible, though they will normally be much quicker. New pages will still appear instantly.
Thanks to our new web servers, we are now able to offer all users more free space. From 1st January, all new and existing CityScape customers will have 1 Mb of free WWW/FTP space included as part of the standard service.
This is another stage in the improved service that CityScape Internet Services aims to provide all its customers.
We are pleased to announce a reduction in the price of WWW/FTP space for customers purchasing 5 Mb or more. For further details, see our catalogue.
If you want to appear to have your own web site, CityScape now offer a Web Forwarding service. With this service, all accesses to "your" web server, say <http://www.mycompany.com>, are redirected to your web space at CityScape. For further details, see our catalogue.
We would also like announce the new CityScape Home Page. While the GoldSite server continues to be Europe's most popular WWW site, CityScape now has its own page. Take a look and see what you think.
CityScape will be withdrawing all use of the Pipex PoPs on 1st January 1996. From that date onwards, you must use Demon Internet PoPs to connect to the Internet.
Windows software to automatically configure your system can now be downloaded from our website. Please ensure that you have read the instructions on this page before doing anything. We apologise for the delay in production of this software.
If you are using another system, you will have to configure your setup manually. Full information on how to do this can also be downloaded.
If you have already reconfigured your system, please re-read this page to ensure that you have made all the changes it describes; this page last changed today (Thursday 14th December).
Some of our customers wish to have more than one POP-3 mailbox, but do not need a second IP-GOLD account. We are now able to offer additional mailboxes at £5 per month, with no minimum period. Each mailbox gets the facility of a free alias, just as with the primary mailbox on an account.
This service is available to IP-GOLD customers only, and not stand-alone.
Customers are reminded that they should read the newsgroup cityscp.announce. This is the official channel for CityScape announcements; it is not practical to email every customer personally every time.
For those who do not normally read news, we will be setting up a mailing list in the new year which will be sent copies of all announcements. You should read the newsgroup until this is available.
A very happy Christmas and a successful 1996 to all our customers.
Clive D.W. Feather