Smartcall, Virgin Media Cloud and Webspace closure

[JPAC]

Well I have my website elsewhere but I think in about a years time a few people will get caught out thinking it's still free. So long as it's not a minimum two year contract or more, it'd be worth a punt, remembering to cancel before the free year is up.

[horseman]

Originally Posted by BenMcr

All sites on virginmedia.com, ntlworld.com, blueyonder.co.uk and virgin.net webspace will be taken down at the end of April

You can't be serious? I've had "ggrider.ntlworld.com" since March 2002 and carefully preserved all it's historical website untouched for posterity and now VM are deleting it! Have they no sense of nostalgia?

[Kushan]

Originally Posted by JPAC

Well I have my website elsewhere but I think in about a years time a few people will get caught out thinking it's still free. So long as it's not a minimum two year contract or more, it'd be worth a punt, remembering to cancel before the free year is up.

I would say if you're planning to run your site for more than 12 months, bite the bullet now and buy yourself the domain and hosting space from someone else. I've been very happy with Namecheap and their prices are reasonable.

I dont even know what Smartcall is (or was).

[Kushan]

Originally Posted by Paul M

I dont even know what Smartcall is (or was).

App for your phone that would let you call over Wifi using your Virgin Home Phone plan, i.e. if you had talk unlimited it would let you make use of that from your phone, regardless of what minutes you had on your mobile contract.

[v0id]

I can see email going away soon too

[Kymmy]

Had my own hosted domains since 1999, even the VM account address forwards to them.

[Taf]

I was asked to check VMs Newsgroups for a neighbour. I could hardly remember how to access it, but found what he was complaining about: several of the bigger groups have been removed. So I wonder now if Newsgroups will be the next to go?

[Kushan]

Originally Posted by v0id

I can see email going away soon too

I'd be surprised if they did this, but not that surprised. I think most people on this forum will agree that having an ISP email is utterly useless in this day and age. The free alternatives from Google, Microsoft, etc. are far superior and won't tie you into your ISP.

Originally Posted by Taf

I was asked to check VMs Newsgroups for a neighbour. I could hardly remember how to access it, but found what he was complaining about: several of the bigger groups have been removed. So I wonder now if Newsgroups will be the next to go?

Virgin's newsgroups have limited retention (I think it's 30 days, it used to be just 7) and their reseller gets hit hard with takedown requests, so you have to be fast. It's worth paying the $10 a month for a better service.

[progers]

Following a recommendation on here, I moved my domains to HostPresto! It's only about £20 for domain and hosting and the service has been excellent, two domains can be hosted and email accounts are unlimited.

[savvychels]

Originally Posted by Kushan

... I have no issue with the closing of these services.

I wouldn't recommend their use to anyone, as it's yet another thing tying you to your ISP that you can get better elsewhere. It's a shame they're not partnering with Dropbox like they are with GoDaddy, a few extra GB's on my Dropbox account wouldn't go amiss.

SmartCall was useful back when we had to pay for 0800 calls on mobiles, but now they're free there's little use for it. Instead of paying for XL phone or whatever, just throw the same money at your mobile provider for unlimited minutes, so you can not use them as well.

None of those offerings were particularly groundbreaking, none of them were reasons to move to Virgin or stay with them.

Smartcall is extremely useful in calling back home to landlines when out of the country. We use it quite a lot, so it definitely will be missed by us and others who use it the same way .

I gave up my web space years ago, and I could never get all of my computer to back up to their cloud, so I personally won't miss those, but I'm sure other users who rely on them will. It's really much notice for backing up and finding new alternatives and the potential time involved for people on the slower end of the technology scale like me. So I'm grateful I'm not using those two things

[vincerooney]

i threw the letter out....i didnt even know there was a code. and ive got no email...how do i get a new one?

[heero_yuy]

I only kept a few car based pictures in the web space for the convenience of linking to them on another forum where I post under my real name. (The web space URL gives your name and default e-mail addy away) The threads are quite old so the absence of the pictures is unlikely to be a problem. Attaches work as well for this anyway.

[horseman]

Originally Posted by vincerooney

i threw the letter out....i didnt even know there was a code. and ive got no email...how do i get a new one?

FWIW I'll see if any SU on VM forum is going to use mine, if not I'll PM you in a week with it.

I can't actually use it as BenMcr forget's that originally NTLWORLD domain users could have (and guess what) 15 email ID's and the max is now 10 !!! So unfortunately there's no way for me to move a webspace id to virginmedia domain without losing 6 email ID's!

....and before Ben predictably asks me to escalate to VM Support to do it for me then: do I really look/sound/write that stupid? (OK no need to answer that! ).

That said I predicted VM would terminate Webspace back in 2009, 2 yrs after their re-branding but even LG in 2013 gave them another two years grace.
Despite their re-assurances then VM email ID's will not be continued when the current OSA contract runs out as that is also not in LG's mission roadmap, So I give that another 2-5 yrs before that goes the same way!
OK as my previous prediction was at least 2yrs out then say 3-6yrs.

Our speedtest code (in the navbar) is actually hosted on my VM webspace.
This was done at the time (10+ years ago) so that it ran internally on the VM network.

I guess I could move it, but actually, there are so many proper speedtests around these days, its probably a good excuse to retire them.