followus updates

Hi readers,

Firstly, let me begin by apologising for any inconvience caused by our extended outage yesterday; this was caused by an issue with our hosting provider (Amazon), and affected many sites globally.

Yesterday, at around 1am Pacific Time, Amazon began having major problems with some of their hosting infrastructure:  specifically with their EC2, EBS, and RDS offerings.  The issues are ongoing, and many of your favorite internet sites or services are probably still down or at reduced functionality because of it.

For a very partial list of some affected sites see: http://ec2disabled.com/

Some estimates are placing the outages experienced today as having affected upwards of 30% of popular web-sites.

I’m sad to say, us being hosted with Amazon; we were certainly affected. We’ve been hosted through Amazon Web Services for the main part of the last year or so – in all we have been both extremely satisfied and out-rightly astounded by Amazons hosting platform, for reasons of stability and a vast feature set allowing rapid development, as well as the multiple levels of redundancy offered.

However, whilst much of our services are hosted across multiple “availability zones” or in laymen terms different physical locations, some of our core database functionality was affected causing our main services to be disrupted. The situation slowly worsened as other parts of Amazon Web Services developed issues. This caused functionality to be disrupted through-out the day stopping us from being able to rapidly redeploy from our to-the-minute backups.

Going forward, we will take steps to ensure our affected database cluster is available in multiple locations; which should prevent a rare event such as this affecting our service.

For statistics on our uptime last year, see:
site24x7 – last year statistics

To see how this has affected this years statistics so far, see:
site24x7 – year so far

As you can see, we are still maintaining upwards of 99.47% uptime; and it’s my belief by the end of the year we will be on 99.7%+ uptime on this year with the steps we will take to ensure this doesn’t re-occur.

I will continue to update here for any future news on this matter.

AWS is currently a treading topic on the popular microblogging site twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/search?q=%23AWS

FollowUs would like to give a warm congratulation to Mark Pick of Hastings who won our Christmas GPS Tracker competition this weekend.  Mark was also won 100 mobile phone tracking credits.  For those of you who did not hear about our mobile phone tracking competition, it was for the chance to win one of our GPS Box trackers worth over 340 pounds and 100 mobile phone tracking credits.  We thank all of you who participated and wish to you Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

FollowUs is comitted to provide the very best solutions to enable to its customers to track a mobile, or for those requring more details movement report analysis, our GPS tracker products, such as the GPS Fleet.

Please note that whilst our support lines will be closed between Christmas and the New year, we will conftinue to provide 24 hour email support during the festive period.

Kind regards,

the FollowUs team

A common question we are asked is whether you need a GPS mobile phone to be able to track it.  The answer is No.

With the FollowUs mobile phone tracking service, we are tracking the sim card within you mobile phone and understanding which mast your mobile is connected to on the Network.  This means that we do not use any GPS technologies on our standard mobile phone tracking service.

This does mean that its accuracy will not be as high as with a GPS product, but it does mean that mobile phone tracking via FollowUs will work with ANY MOBILE PHONE and on ANY MAJOR UK NETWORK (except for 3).

So to summarise:

You do not need a GPS mobile phone to be able to use the FollowUs Mobile Phone Tracking service in the UK.  Any other questions, then feel free to blog.

Kind regards

The FollowUs Team

For all of you with 3G mobile phone ‘s on the Voda, Orange, T-Mobile and O2 network, then you can continue to track mobile phone ‘s as you did before.

Changing over to a 3G sim card does not affect our service and you will still be able to track mobile phone ‘s.

For further questions, please feel free to contact the FollowUs team.

Mobile Phone Tracking in Ireland

A common question we are asked is whether mobile phone tracking will work in Ireland. The answer is yes and no!

The www.followus.co.uk mobile phone tracking system will track a UK sim card (mobile phone) in the UK – which of course includes Northern Ireland.  However, if that mobile phone is taken into the Republic of Ireland, then mobile phone tracking will not be possible.

If you live in Northern Ireland and plan to use our mobile phone tracking service, please note that our mapping is currently in transition and the maps for Northern Ireland are not very detailed.  They will be improved by the end of August 2010 and this is just a temporary matter.  However, we still provide the same descriptive location, so you know where the mobile phone is located.  Maps for the rest of the UK are unaffected and we provide full street level detail.

We hope that’s helpful.

the Followus team…

At FollowUs we don’t just offer our tracking mobiles solution to home users – we also can track mobile phones for businesses, and in fact, businesses make up a good proportion of our revenue.

You may not know that the FollowUs mobile phone tracking service is used by Reliance PLC, who won the contract last year to provide lone working solutions to NHS employees in the community. This enables Reliance to track a NHS lone worker if a panic alarm to triggered, and the solution is planned to be distributed to over 30,000 NHS employees over the coming years.

Furthermore, did you know that the FollowUs mobile phone tracking system is not just used to track mobiles?  FollowUs also tracks the SIM cards in GSM modems for customers, and we are tracking items as varied as WiFi hotspots, mobile MRI Scanners, assets such as boats and cars, but to name a few.  We also track GPS mobile phones and were featured in the National Geographic television program ‘How do they do that’.

So, if you have an application where you need a tracking solution, then feel free to call us on 01582 460960 to discuss your requirement and we will see if we can help.

the FollowUs team…..

Another common question dealt with in our FAQ is whether you can track a mobile phone if it’s lost? The answer is YES, but you need to set up your phone for mobile tracking before its lost.

There are strict rules in the UK which ensure that you must get consent before you can track a mobile phone. This is done simply by sending back an SMS code for your mobile to the www.followus.co.uk servers. This does make sense and helps ensure, in particular, that vulnerable people are protected.  Consent to track a mobile phone need only be given once.

If you need to carry out covert tracking (perhaps you thefts at your work place), then we ask that you please visit our GPS solutions at www.gpswholesale.co.uk.  There are a variety of products there which should satisfy your requirements. Please call us on 01582 460960 if you need further guidance.

the FollowUs team….

Another common question dealt with in our FAQ is whether you can track mobile phone ’s secretly?  The answer is NO, and there are various places on the FollowUs website where we explain this to our users.

There are strict rules in the UK which ensure that you must get consent before you can track mobile phone’s. This does make sense and helps ensure, in particluar, that vunerable people are protected.

Consent is given by sms’ing a unique pin code back from mobile phone to be tracked. Once the consent is received back by FollowUs, then it is possible to track this mobile phone. Consent to track a mobile need only be given once.

If you need to carry out covert tracking (perhaps you thefts at your work place), then we ask that you please visit our GPS solutions at www.gpswholesale.co.uk.  There are a variety of products there which should satisfy your requirements. Please call us on 01582 460960 if you need further guidance.

the FollowUs team….

We are commonly asked by our customers if they can track mobile phones on the ‘3’ network?

Well we are sorry to say that the answer is no one can track a 3 mobile in the UK, except for the police.  The 3 network have not made the mobile phone tracking data available to commercial service providers such as www.followus.co.uk in the UK.

Tracking mobiles is possible on the Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile and 02 networks.  It is also possible to track mobiles for virtual service providers such as Virgin, Asda and Tesco.

So to summarise, it is possible to track mobiles on the 4 largest networks in the UK and also other services that operate off the back of them, but it is not possible to track mobiles on the 3 network. 

the FollowUs team…

We are often asked if it is possible to track a UK mobile phone abroad, or an overseas mobile phone in the UK.  The answer is yes and no!

It is of course possible for the police to be able to request to track mobile phones in another country if they have sufficient justification.

However, with commercial services such as FollowUs it is not possible to track a UK mobile phone abroad.  It is also not possible to track mobile phones from overseas in the UK using www.followus.co.uk.

So in summary tracking mobiles can only be possible with a UK mobile and Sim card whilst in the UK.

To track mobile phones abroad may be possible in the future, but requires agreement at a network operator level and this has not been possible to date. Until then for international tracking we need to rely on GPS tracker devices.  We do offer GPS tracking devices that will work abroad and these can be viewed at our sister GPS Tracking site www.gpswholesale.co.uk.

the FollowUs team…