FREE faster broadband with BT
Aug.05.2009 
BT has started handing out Broadband Accelerators to customers prepared topay the £1.20 in postage, and promises an average speed increase of half a megabit.
BT customers interested in a free boost to their broadband can apply on-line for a free Broadband Accelerator, assuming they have the right kind of BT socket, and aren’t already getting the promised bandwidth from BT.
The device is actually BT’s I-Plate, and it has been around since last year, retailing for under a tenner. It blocks the bell wire that’s prone to picking up in-home interference, as well as providing some filtering on other lines. Anyone with extensions around the house should get one, as the improvement to ADSL connections can be dramatic. This is why BT is handing them out with such enthusiasm.
The bell wire is supposed to provide a signal to make extensions ring, but modern phones don’t use it – it doesn’t even pass through the ADSL microfilters that should be fitted to every socket. So it just acts as one big antenna picking up rogue signals from around the house – such as those generated by florescent lighting – and channelling them into the ADSL line to interfere with the data connection. Simply cutting the bell wire also works, as well explained by Jarviser, though the filters in the I-Plate may improve things even more.
Recognise this socket: then you could benefit from a free I-PlateThe I-Plate won’t help those of us who’ve been pushing our speed by any means available (currently topping 288Kb/sec, thanks for asking), but if you’ve got any extensions and the right kind of BT socket, then it seems worth a try for less than the cost of a half.
Web Server Upgrades
As many of you will know, we have been working hard here at INSTA Host for the last few months on a programme to upgrade all our webservers. We took the decision to do this because some of the early webservers were now four years old. Although they had all been excellent servers and not given us any significant problems, we decided that at that age we could start seeing problems.
We also took the opportunity to upgrade many of the storage servers we use, these actually hold the web site data and the webservers connect to them. In all we moved over 40 Terabytes of data to new servers and all customer websites are now on servers that are less than six months old.
Although this process was expensive we do believe that keeping hardware up to date is an important part of being a web host and is something that you would want us to do.
Upgraded servers
Web Servers
PHP4 has been upgraded to 4.4.7 and PHP5 to 5.2.3 on all web servers. (you can choose!)
SOAP support has been added to PHP5 allowing PHP programmers to interact with SOAP based web services.
Ruby has been upgraded to 1.8.5 on all web servers.
Imagemagick and Ghostscript enabled and updated on all web servers.
