Cloud hosting case study: King of Shaves
King of Shaves is the UK’s leading quality shaving and skincare challenger brand, founded in 1993 by Will King and offering a range of innovative products for both men and women.
Since Will King created the Original Shaving Oil in his kitchen back in 1993, King of Shaves now sells a product every three seconds worldwide and is regarded as one of the UK’s most innovative and successful challenger brands.
We spoke with Simon Watson, Head of Design at King of Shaves about how Layershift Managed Cloud Hosting responded to the King’s needs and did everything possible to help make their online Kingdom the greatest of them all.
Simon, who are you and what’s your background?
I formally trained as a Graphic Designer at Middlesex Polytechnic graduating with BA Hons degree in 1991 before starting work for a small corporate design consultancy, Ludden Taylor, in London for five years working with blue chip clients like The BOC Group, Rolls Royce Aerospace, Philip Morris and the EU – we were one of the first studios to produce every piece of work completely on computers (Apple Macs, naturally). I then worked for a design and advertising agency called Ambleglow based in Maidenhead, Berkshire doing a mixture of recruitment and consumer advertising mixed with corporate identity design.
An old school friend was working for a small male toiletries business, KMI – who owned the King of Shaves brand, and asked us to work on a few small projects for them. We started off doing a couple of leaflets and I ended up doing so much work for them that I was head hunted and ended up joining them full-time in 2001. During my time at Ambleglow, in conjunction with a specialist HTML / PHP coder, I designed and built the first major version of the King of Shaves website and online store at www.shave.com – my first proper internet project.
SSL Certificates Explained
SSL is an acronym for Secure Sockets Layer, an encryption technology used to protect sensitive information passed between a web server and a web browser. An SSL certificate provides the encryption keys used during the communication – think of it like a secret password needed to decode the data transmitted between your computer and the specific server you’re talking to.
Even if other Internet users or servers “eavesdrop” on your conversation, they cannot understand what you’re saying because it’s all in a secret code only known to you and the server you’re speaking to.
“S” stands for secure
The ease of shopping and comparing products and prices online makes it an attractive option for many shoppers. But how can you make sure your transactions are safe and your credit card information is going only where you intend it to?
The first thing you should check when purchasing on the Internet (or entering any sensitive information – even login details) should be to look for the “S” in the website address bar. If the address starts with “https” you are on a secure site.
This “S” from “https” gives superpowers to a web page. It means that there’s an SSL certificate which will guarantee that the information you enter (e.g. your personal details or credit card information) is encrypted before transmission from your computer to the Internet. As a customer, that’s all that should interest you.
Secure your mailbox with powerful email antivirus protection!
Parallels Premium Antivirus by Dr. Web
If you’re one of our Cloud VPS customers and are looking to protect your hosted cloud email from viruses, you’ve probably heard about Parallels Premium Antivirus by Dr. Web already.
Dr. Web is what keeps your mailbox safe from all the naughty viruses out there. With more than two decades experience (Doctor Web started developing the anti-virus software in the early 1990’s) the developers have come up with a very effective heuristic engine, and comprehensive virus definitions database (over 120,000 definitions, and each individual definition can detect up to thousands of viruses!). Their sophisticated heuristic virus analysing engine with fly-code technology, origins tracing and structural entropy analysis can detect zero-day viruses and other malware before they are even added to the virus database.
Why do I need to use email antivirus?
Research from the UK’s Federation of Small Businesses estimates that the cost of cybercrime amongst its members in 2012 was £4,000 per member on average (around $6,500) of which virus infections were responsible for a staggering 20%!
According to a study in The Guardian, more than 9 million adults in Britain were hacked in the past year. Would you take this chance?
Another thing worth mentioning is spam generated from your computer becoming infected by viruses. It’s common for a virus to ‘hijack’ your computer to send outbound spam – and we all know everyone hates receiving spam! GroupIB, specialists in cyber security, made a recent report about the evolution of spam in the last two years and determined that profits gained worldwide from this activity reached $786 million in 2012. The main products targeted by these spamming campaigns were medicines, drugs or software. What would your customers say if they suddenly received slimming advice from your e-mail account? Not very professional, right? The only thing ‘slimmed’ would be your profits!
How it works
With Dr Web, you get a rapid protection time for all new viruses. You can be confident it’s up to date with hourly updates – critical during any outbreak! Dr. Web’s over 150 R&D staff work around the clock to keep a constant eye on new viruses and respond as soon as something looks questionable, keeping your inbox protected.
Secure webmail hosting with Roundcube and Horde
We have some great news for all of our webmail users! We’ve now introduced Roundcube webmail as the default webmail client for our Cloud VPS range (replacing Atmail open-source which is no longer supported by the developers). And for those of you who prefer to use Horde IMP we’re pleased to say that it was also upgraded to version 5!
These two secure webmail clients are both easy to use, very popular and have a great interface to make your life simpler.
Enhanced secure webmail with Roundcube
Roundcube webmail is very intuitive through its neat drag-and-drop interface.
One of Roundcube’s strongest points is the simplicity of the interface, which is comparable to using a good quality desktop client and brings powerful features usually only typically found in services like Gmail and Outlook.com.
Jelastic iPhone and iPad app released
We’re delighted to announce the immediate availability of the Jelastic mobile application for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices!
Now you can always be connected to our next-generation PaaS using this handy mobile app. It was developed to make your life easy by providing access to the most common operations on the move.
By 2014, it’s expected that mobile internet usage will overtake desktop as people are spending more and more time on their mobile phones than ever before. Extending the Jelastic dashboard onto your iDevice makes sure that you always have everything right at your fingertips – even when walking your dog, or other strange outdoor activities like that where you might face the scary prospect of being away from your keyboard for a while.
Available now
Get the Jelastic Mobile App now from the Apple App Store – it’s completely FREE.
The application is compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch and is optimised for iPhone 5. Available for iPhone 4, 4S, 5 and iPad 2, 3, 4G, its interface is intuitive and user-friendly, so you can easily figure out how to use it within seconds.