The Department for Employment and Learning’s ‘Skillsafe’ scheme was created to assist Apprentices who have been placed on short-tme working as a result of the current economic downturn. The scheme was initially rolled out in the manufacturing engineering sector and has now been extended to include tradable services.

The purpose of the scheme is to fill the Apprentice’s downtime with accredited training that will contribute towards their Apprenticeship. In addition to this, they wll receive a training allowance to help offset the reduction in their pay, brought about as a result of them being placed on short-time working.

The ‘Skillsafe’ scheme commenced on the 8 June 2009.

To find out more visit the Skillsafe NI website.

Chris, Web Designer at Input Youth

Hi all,

The site wide search box at the top of the page is powereed by Google and applies equally to this blog and the main website. So no matter what you search for, you will get a result that includes the whole Input Youth site.

Chris, Web Designer at Input Youth

A survey of 16 to 24 year olds has found that 75% of them feel they “couldn’t live” without the internet.

The report, published by online charity YouthNet, also found that four out of five young people used the web to look for advice.

About one third added that they felt no need to talk to a person face to face about their problems because of the resources available online.

The findings will be unveiled at the Houses of Parliament on Wednesday.

Despite high-profile examples of internet security breaches, such as the recent incident of phishing email scams, 76% of the survey group thought the internet was a safe place “as long as you know what you’re doing”.

Chris, Web Designer at Input Youth

The move to a new web hosting company was to accomplish three main objectives.

These were:

• To lower the yearly hosting cost by at least £30.
• To swap from a Windows to a Linux server.
• And to find 1st class customer and technical support by reading independent reviews.

After much deliberation I finally decided to try one of the hosts recommended by PC Pro in their Reliability & Service Awards of 2009 – Fast2host.com.

Fast2Host is a British company focused on providing web hosting with top support. And it shows in its results, with 95.8% of its customers happy to recommend Fast2Host to friends and colleagues.

The Input Youth account with Fast2Host was set up on Friday 2 October 2009. I selected the Linux Enterprise package which has 100 sub domains, 50 email accounts and a LAMP configuration (Linux, Apache,MySql and PHP). The whole set up can be managed using CPanel V11.

Changing the TAG

The TAG change from the old host to Fast2Host was completed on Saturday evening and the whole site was uploaded and working by Sunday 4th October. A pretty stella performance! There were no hitches along the way even though the Input Youth site has a WordPress blog and several film shows to slightly complicate matters.

My Final Thoughts

This superb hosting company have been trading since 1999 and seem to go over and above what other hosting companies typically do for their clients. Their service and support are exceptional, which is borne out by the many positive reviews that litter the Internet.

So far we I am extremely happy with Fast2Host. The Input Youth website has experienced no downtime and even loads a bit faster than it used to.

Fast2host are a superb web hosting company who offer loads of useful features as standard. Other hosting companies may well charge extra for these goodies.
So, if you are looking for a good quality hosting solution providing the latest technology at the best possible price, look no further than Fast2hosts.