Improved Emergency Access addon for Hosted customers

4 minute read time · Updated February 11, 2025

Emergency Access AddonUnlike the vast majority of our competitors, we offer two editions of our MIDAS web based room booking and resource scheduling software.

Some customers prefer to download, install, and run MIDAS from their own server/infrastructure, so that they have complete control over their MIDAS system – we call this our “self hosted” edition.

Other customers prefer a completely managed system hosted in the “cloud” so they don’t have to worry about installation and updates – we call this our “cloud hosted” edition.

You can compare the difference between these two editions here.

Access is key

We know that for our “cloud hosted” customers, maintaining 24/7/365 access to their booking information is crucial to the smooth running of their business operations. We therefore strive to make every reasonable effort within our control to ensure 100% uptime of our cloud servers and infrastructure.

However, as with any IT infrastructure, in the unlikely event that unforeseen circumstances arise which are beyond our control, 100% uptime can never be guaranteed. We are, for instance, reliant on external data centers and ISPs to provide us with infrastructure and services to then allow us to provide hosted MIDAS services to our customer. Our ISPs guarantee us 99.9% uptime of their infrastructure and services.

Active Monitoring

We actively monitor this to ensure that these high standards are met, and over the course of last year (2014) the combined total downtime for our hosted customers for the entire year was less than 10 hours.

That’s not a lot, and exceeds the 99.9% uptime guarantee we’re given. However, we fully appreciate that if any downtime were to occur at a crucial time of the day for our hosted customers, however brief, that this can cause implications for the day-to-day running of their operations.

That’s why, ever since we first launched MIDAS back in 2006, we’ve also offered all our hosted customers an optional “Emergency Access” addon.

Secondary Emergency Access URL With this optional addon, our hosted customers are provided with a secondary “Emergency URL” in addition to the primary URL used to access their hosted MIDAS system. At this secondary “Emergency URL”, a completely separate MIDAS system runs on a separate server, in a different data center, though a different ISP. Each day, the customer’s “live” system is automatically backed up to their “Emergency URL” to ensure that data in their backup system is never more than 24 hours behind their live system.

This means that should there ever be any issues affecting our customer’s ability to access to their primary scheduling system, with this addon, they’ll still be able to access all their booking and scheduling information via their secondary “Emergency URL”.

Emergency Access Improvements

Over the weekend, we’ve now improved our Emergency Access addon in the following ways:

  1. Data is now backed up in “real-time” from customer’s “live” systems to their secondary Emergency Access URL (with their global MIDAS settings backed up every hour). Previously, data and settings were only backed up once per day.
  2. We’ve invested heavily in new infrastructure for our hosted customer’s Emergency Access backup systems. This means significantly faster server performance, should customers ever need to access their Emergency Access systems.

The price for this Emergency Access addon is only £89/year GBP ($139/year USD, $179/year AUD, $169/year CAD, €129/year EUR*) and certainly worth it for the piece of mind it provides knowing you’ll still be able to access your data in the event of any issues affecting our primary servers/infrastructure.

What’s more, for a limited time**, we’re offering 10% off our Emergency Access addon to all existing customers with remotely hosted MIDAS system who don’t already have it! To take advantage of this limited time offer, please upgrade your MIDAS system today!

If maintaining 24/7/365 access to your room booking and resource scheduling information is paramount to your operations, you should certainly consider this optional add-on for your remotely hosted MIDAS system!

New customers can add the Emergency Access addon to their “remotely hosted” MIDAS system at time of purchase, or at a later date.


* Prices correct at time of writing, but may vary slightly day-to-day due to fluctuations in global currency exchange rates. Current pricing may be viewed here for existing customers, or here for new customers

** Offer ends 23:59 UTC on Sunday 5th April 2015 – EXTENDED UNTIL 30th APRIL!!

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Earth Hour 2015 – We’re doing it again!

3 minute read time · Updated August 17, 2024
Earth Hour 2015

For the past couple of years, we’ve been proud to be part of “Earth Hour“. Each year, millions of people across the world switch off lights for a whole 60 minutes to raise awareness of climate change.

This annual event first began in 2007. It is now a global event marked in more than 162 countries and territories worldwide. Organized by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), its purpose is to encourage individuals, communities, households and businesses to turn off their non-essential lights for one hour. This is to demonstrate their commitment to our planet through a symbolic reduction in their energy consumption.

We are once again very happy to be supporting this year’s effort which takes place on Saturday 28th March between 8.30pm-9.30pm in whatever timezone you’re in!

Now, as you can probably appreciate, running a global web-based business like MIDAS consumes a fair amount of energy to keep our infrastructure up and running year-on-year.

At the same time, we take our environmental responsibilities very seriously! We’ve already invested in servers with extremely low power consumption. In fact, some of our administrative servers draw as little as 18w of power! We have also now replaced traditional mechanical hard drives in virtually all of our public-facing servers with newer, faster, yet more energy efficient Solid State Drives (SSDs). Within the next few months ALL our public-facing servers will be running with SSDs in them!

We also work hard in the development of our MIDAS software itself to optimize its disk, memory, and CPU usage. Factors which all in turn help to reduce the amount of power consumption on servers running MIDAS. Whether that’s on our cloud servers for our “hosted” customers, or on our “self hosted” customer’s own servers.

We believe that everyone, not just individuals but other web & cloud based businesses like ours, can reduce their energy footprint and show they care about our planet. That’s why at 8.30pm (UTC, as we’re based in the UK) on Saturday, we’ll once again be joining in with “Earth Hour”. We’ll be switching off non-essential systems – not just our lights – for 1 hour.

Note: This will not affect access to our main website, or prevent our “hosted” customers from accessing their MIDAS booking systems during this period. However our non-essential administrative systems will be shut down for 60 minutes. This may lead to a slight delay in responses to emails received during this period, etc.

So go on, make a difference with us and support Earth Hour at 8.30pm on Saturday wherever you are in the world!

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We’re 9 years old today!

2 minute read time · Updated February 8, 2025

Happy 9th Birthday, MIDAS!We’re celebrating a birthday today – ours! Yes, it’s been 9 years to the day since the very first version of MIDAS was publicly released back on 11th March 2006. Since then our software has grown and developed to become a leading world-class web based booking and scheduling system which is trusted by organizations of all sizes and types around the globe!

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank all our customers – whether you’ve been with us just a short time, or been with us since the beginning! We love seeing the joy our software brings to customers and how it helps makes their lives and facilities administration easier!

Some of the important factors customers carefully consider when looking for a potential new room booking system for their venue is how long has it been around? ..and how often is it updated?

Whilst there are a handful of other room booking systems that have been around longer than ours, the majority of these are no longer maintained/updated. We’ve been around now for nine years, and our software remains in active development today!

So, if you’re not yet a customer, but are looking for a new room booking system for your venue, one that’s regularly updated with new features, and one backed by a proven track record of outstanding customer service for the past 9 years – then look no further than MIDAS!

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Do you #loveMIDAS?

2 minute read time · Updated January 25, 2021

MIDAS Web Based Room and Resource Booking Software

It’s nearly that time of year again, folks – Valentine’s Day! #loveMIDAS …and just like last year we’re feeling all loved up, and want to share the love with you again!

So, whether you’ve been considering MIDAS for your organization’s room and resource scheduling needs, or you’re an existing customer, to celebrate Valentine’s Day – February 14th – for a limited time we’re offering 14% off new purchases of MIDAS, and for our existing customers; 14% off your next Annual Support Subscription renewal!

To take advantage of this limited offer all you need to do is:

  1. First, make sure you’re following us on Twitter @mid_as
  2. Tweet the world and tell them why you love our MIDAS scheduling software using the hashtag #loveMIDAS and be sure to include a link to our website, //mid.as

We’ll then send you a Direct Message through Twitter containing a special code you can use to get 14% off your purchase, or if you’re an existing customer we’ll let you know that we’re deducting 14% off your next renewal cost!

Stuck for ideas of what to Tweet?

Here’s what a couple of our customers tweeted last year:

You can also check out some more of the love our existing customers have for MIDAS here

So, get tweeting and tell us, why do you #loveMIDAS this Valentine’s day?

Terms & Conditions:
1. This promotion ends Monday 16th February 2015 at Noon (UTC) any Tweets made after this time will not be eligible.
2. Discount codes are valid for new purchases of MIDAS made before the end of February 2015 only.
3. For existing customers, Annual Support Subscription discounts apply to their next renewal only and are “one time” (i.e. non-recurring).
4. Tweets originating from fake Twitter accounts or those deemed, at our sole discretion, to be engaging in “spam” will be disqualified from entry.
5. Tweets originating from private Twitter accounts (accounts where tweets are “protected” and not visible to non-followers) are not eligible to take part in this promotion.
6. Only one discount is available per organization and/or Twitter account. Multiple tweets from the same organization and/or Twitter account, whilst welcomed, will only be eligible for this promotion once.
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