Cookie Policy
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users of our website. This helps us to provide you with a good experience when you browse our website and also allows us to improve and monitor the use of our site. You can change your cookie preferences at any time by clicking on the settings icon on the bottom right corner of this page.
Understanding how and why we use cookies
We use cookies on our site to distinguish you from other users of our website. This helps us to provide you with a good experience when you browse our website and also allows us to improve and monitor use of our site. This Cookie Policy explains what cookies are, how we use them and what benefits they bring.
What are cookies?
A Cookie is a small file of letters and numbers that are sent to and stored on your computer, smart phone or other device if you agree whenever you visit a website. Cookies contain information that is transferred to your computer’s hard drive. Cookies are useful because they allow a website to recognise a user’s device. More information about cookies can be found on http://www.allaboutcookies.org.
Our cookies
We use or may use the following cookies:
- Strictly Necessary Cookies: These are cookies that are required for the operation of our website. They include, for example, cookies that enable you to log into secure areas of our website, such as on our Careers Page or on our Gas Enquiry Service.
- Analytical/Performance Cookies: These allow us to recognise and count the number of visitors, see how visitors move around our website when they are using it and estimate and report our total audience size and traffic. This helps us to improve the way our website works by ensuring that users are finding what they are looking for easily. All information about how you used our website is collected anonymously. The service we use is Google Analytics, a web analytics tool provided by Google. For more details please visit the Google Privacy Centre. You can also watch a video about Google Analytics Cookies.
- Functionality Cookies: These are used to recognise you when you return to our website, when completing online forms and logging in to the site. This would enable us to personalise our content for you and remember your search preferences.
- Session Cookies: These are used when you log in to an application and it remembers that you are logged in as you navigate the website, e.g. where you apply online for jobs with Xoserve. When you close the browser the cookie is deleted, as a result when visiting the website again you would need to log in.
- Persistent Cookies: These are used if you were prompted to take part in a website survey and you completed the survey. A persistent cookie would be stored on your computer to record that you have completed that survey. This would prevent you being prompted with the survey each time you visited the website.
- Statistical Cookies: These cookies help us to understand how users interact with our site and provide statistical analysis of our site. In order to keep our site easy to use, working properly and up-to-date, we use web analytics services to help us understand how people use our site. For example we see which areas are most popular, identify when errors occur and can test different features to see which works best.
See the table below to find out what specific cookies we use on the website:
| Cookie Name | Provider | Purpose |
| nmstat | SiteImprove | This cookie name is associated with the website analytics service provided by SiteImprove. It enables site owners to gather usage statistics about their websites. |
| _unam | ShareThis | This cookie is associated with the ShareThis social sharing widget placed in a site to enable sharing of content across various social networks. It counts clicks and shares of a page. |
| _ga | Google Analytics | This cookie is associated with Google Universal Analytics. It is used to distinguish unique users by assigning a randomly generated number as a client identifier. It is included in each page request in a site and used to calculate visitor, session and campaign data for the site’s analytics reports. By default it is set to expire after two years. |
| _gid | Google Analytics | This cookie is used to collect information about how visitors use our website. We use the information to compile reports and to help us improve the website. The cookies collect information in an anonymous form, including the number of visitors to the website, where visitors have come to the website from and the pages they visited. |
| _gat_gtag_UA_46273215_1 _gat_UA-46273215-1 |
Google Analytics | Google uses this cookie to distinguish users. This is a pattern type cookie set by Google Analytics, where the pattern element on the name contains the unique identity number of the account or website it relates to. It is used to limit the amount of data recorded by Google on high traffic volume websites. |
| catAccCookies | Cookie cat | Cookie set by the UK cookie consent plugin to record that you accept the fact that the site uses cookies. |
| AWSELB | Amazon Web Services | This cookie is associated with Amazon Web Services and is used for managing sticky sessions across production servers. |
| PHP session cookie | Session Cookie | Cookie generated by applications based on the PHP language. This is a general purpose identifier used to maintain user session variables. It is normally a random generated number, how it is used can be specific to the site but a good example is maintaining a logged-in status for a user between pages. |
| UMB-XSRF-TOKEN UMB-XSRF-V UMB_UCONTEXT UMB_UCONTEXT_C UMB_UPDCHK _cfduid |
Umbraco | Umbraco (the host content management system for Xoserve.com) does not create cookies unless there is a login. If there is a login, either on the front end or back office, the icons listed will be used. |
| ARRAffinity | Azure | This cookie is set by websites that run on Windows Azure cloud platform. The cookie is used to affinitize a client to an instance of an Azure Web App. Azure will create affinity cookies for requests on their load balancer. This cookie is called ARRAffinity. This cookie will ensure that you get the best user experience, and does not track your usage. |
| Hotjar | Hotjar | We use Hotjar in order to better understand our users’ needs and to optimize this service and experience. Hotjar is a technology service that helps us better understand our users’ experience (e.g. how much time they spend on which pages, which links they choose to click, what users do and don’t like, etc.) and this enables us to build and maintain our service with user feedback. Hotjar uses cookies and other technologies to collect data on our users’ behavior and their devices. This includes a device's IP address (processed during your session and stored in a de-identified form), device screen size, device type (unique device identifiers), browser information, geographic location (country only), and the preferred language used to display our website. Hotjar stores this information on our behalf in a pseudonymized user profile. Hotjar is contractually forbidden to sell any of the data collected on our behalf. For further details, please see the ‘about Hotjar’ section of Hotjar’s support site. |
Xoserve does not use cookies to target advertising, share information with social networking sites or other services.
Third parties
Please note that third parties (including, for example, providers of external services like web traffic analysis services) may also use cookies, over which we have no control. These cookies are likely to be analytical/performance cookies or targeting cookies.
When we include links to other websites, please bear in mind they will have their own privacy and cookie policies that will govern the use of any information you submit. We recommend you read their policies as Xoserve is not responsible or liable for their privacy practices.
User agreement
You can choose to Accept’ or Not Accept our cookies. If you choose not to receive our cookies, we cannot guarantee that your experience will be as fulfilling as it would otherwise be.
How to manage your cookies
You can change your cookie preferences at any time by clicking on the ‘SETTINGS’ icon on the bottom right corner. You can then choose either ‘I Accept’ or ‘I Do Not Accept’ cookies. You can also adjust the available slider for analytical cookies to ‘On’ or ‘Off’, then click ‘Save and close’. You may need to refresh your page for your settings to take effect.
The browsers of most computers, smart phones and other web-enabled devices are typically set up to accept cookies. If you wish to amend your cookie preferences and block cookies for this website or any other websites, you can do this through your browser settings. Your browser’s ‘help’ function will tell you how to do this.
However, please remember that if you choose to switch certain cookies off, it is likely to affect how our website works. For example, if you reject all cookies, you will not be able to use Xoserve services that require you to ‘log in’ and you may not be able to take full advantage of all offerings. For more information about how to disable cookies, visit: http://www.allaboutcookies.org.
More about your privacy
To find out more about how Xoserve protects your privacy when using our website, see our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy.