the JRA hamster expired

Regular visitors to the site might have spotted more than just a few glitches over the last week, in fact the whole lot disappeared for a couple of days. Something drastic broke on our server and as luck would have it, it co-incided with our website hosting company going bust.

We’d had inklings that all might not be well the the hosting company (Burton Hosting) as service levels gradually deteriorated from instantaneous response  to not answering phone calls, emails or support tickets over the course of a year, and luckily we had sorted out a new host and taken backups. It still caused a load of trouble but I think we’re back to normal now. If anyone reading this knows what actually happened to Burton Hosting I’d be interested to hear about it.

In other unrelated website destruction news, Singletrackworld.com were hacked by some unscrupulous 6th form students who then posted their entire user database on a hacking website. This is a bit of an unpleasant thing to happen at the best of times but they could have probably done without working hard all through Christmas so we wish them all the best getting it back up and running again.

EDIT: It seems Singletrack were on Burton Hosting too so it’s not entirely unrelated that both our sites went down for longer than they should have done.

And here’s a link about them: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=742458

Singletrack magazine

Tubeless stuff is obviously very close to our hearts and so it was good to see a load of tubeless products featured in the latest issue of Singletrack. While they made a lot of good points and said some nice things about products we sell, and they actually tested the products for a good length of time unlike some other “reviews” we’ve seen recently, there are a couple of points where they went off the tracks a bit. So we don’t have to spend the next week answering questions on the phone “but in Singletrack they said this…”  here are some comments.

1. Stan’s kits aren’t available in just ‘narrow’ and ‘wide’ versions. In fact there are 9 different rimstrips available if you count the road version, all varying in either material thickness or strip length to get just the right fit on virtually any rim.

2. “There is no grippy mid-weight tyre on the market so I’m sticking with thick-walled tyres and inner tubes for now”, well OK but why not use that thick-walled tyre tubeless? The conversion kits open up virtually the whole world of 26″ rubber for use as tubeless tyres so if there’s nothing there to suit then you’re being too fussy. Here are some examples of what we use at JRA, all tubeless: Maxxis High Roller LUST 2.35, Maxxis Ardent 2.4 dual ply, Maxxis ADvantage 2.25 and 2.4 single plys, Maxxis Minion, Maxxis Swamp thing (2.35 SPC to 2.5 DPC).

3. We’d like a definition of “All Mountain” please…

We could go on; but won’t. If you want to purchase your own copy of Singletrack don’t forget we sell it in the shop!