Mailman is getting rather long in the tooth. It’s hard to use, and because it was designed for email-based discussion forums it has never worked very well for email marketing.

Besides, I’d rather not have bulk email sent from our servers, even if it’s not spam. Once Mailman is decommissioned we’ll tighten our terms and conditions regarding bulk email.

I strongly recommend that people use a modern email marketing system. We use Campaign Monitor and recommend it highly.

It’s a time of great change in the internet industry and, as it happens, for me personally. Over the coming month or so I’ll be working with you to ensure that our hosting services are right for your business needs or, if they’re not, make sure that you’re steered in the right direction.

The technical infrastructure for internet hosting is now a commodity. It’s now possible to get “free” hosting, provided you give away some of your privacy to marketers, or accept advertising, or do without technical support. Conversely, providing quality support can be more expensive, because the technical environment is more complex.

I wrote about this last year in two articles, Internet hosting: the cost of support and Internet hosting: the cost of reliability.

NEW PRICING STRUCTURE will offer two levels of support.

To make things clearer, I’m splitting our internet hosting services into two pricing streams. The deals on offer will be the same technically. Indeed they’ll run on the same servers. But they’ll differ in the level of support.

1. UNMANAGED HOSTING includes technical support via email and the web. The new pricing will be a little cheaper than you pay now, or provide more capacity for the same price. This is for clients who are comfortable dealing with the technology, either personally or via their web designer, developer or other consultant.


2. MANAGED HOSTING includes additional support, advice and planning. It’s for clients who want someone to take care of all this technical stuff and get on with their business. The pricing will depend on your exact needs, including hours of coverage, target response times, and what additional services you require.

NEW RATES WILL BE PUBLISHED ON 7 JULY 2011, along with an article explaining the difference between unmanaged and managed hosting.

There’s no need to rush. You’ll have three months to decide whether you want to choose managed or unmanaged hosting — that’s until 30 September 2011. You’ll continue to be billed at your “old” rate until you make the choice. And if you’ve paid in advance, we’ll adjust things appropriately.

New billing processes

1. New billing cycle. Starting on 14 June, we’ll email our invoices for internet hosting on the 14th of the month rather than the 15th, and they’ll be payable on the 28th. They’ll cover the following calendar month—or quarter or year, if you pay quarterly or annually. You will probably see an adjustment on your next invoice to bring things into line with the new cycle.


2. Automatic credit card or direct debit payment will be required, at least for unmanaged internet hosting accounts. We’ll email you separately about setting that up, but in brief we’ll charge you automatically on the 28th of the month. Again, you’ll have until 30 September 2011 to get that organised.


3. New late payment procedures. Our escalation process for late payments will be updated to reflect the automated payment process.

If you have any questions, please do ask. Email admin@prussia.net and it will automatically open a job ticket in our system. I’ll get back to you within two working days.

Kind regards, and Good Fortune for the new financial year.

Please check out contacts page for the best way to get in touch. It’s usually better to use email rather than phone.

If you’re having a particular problem with email, read on… and follow our Twitter feed for real-time updates.

If you still have email problems for more than an hour after the scheduled move time—you’d have been emailed about that on Saturday—here’s what to do. Unless you run your own mail server, in which case you’re on your own.

• Check to see if your website is online. If it isn’t, it means we hit an unexpected problem with your account and you’ll just need to wait a little longer. Sorry.


• If the website is online, check your email server settings. If your primary domain is example.com.au, then both the incoming server (POP3 or IMAP) and the outgoing server (SMTP) should be mail.example.com.au — that is, your domain without the www, but with mail instead. Some clients may have this set to mail.prussia.net, which would have been done for testing. If that’s what you’ve got, that’s the problem.


• If changing server settings doesn’t fix it, open a job ticket. Since your email is broken, you’ll have to use a different email account to email support@prussia.net, or go to the website at prussia.net/support and open a ticket in the “internet hosting” queue.


• ... OR YOU CAN JUST WAIT IT OUT. The problem will eventually go away of its own accord, even if your server is set to mail.prussia.net. But that might take up to 24 hours after we finish the migration. Up to you.

That said, there’s only a small chance this will affect you.

And you may get some more spam this weekend.

Our UK-based security consultant won’t be fine-tuning the spam filters until Monday evening our time. Sorry, but you’ll probably see more spam than usual until he’s finished.

Just a reminder that Prussia.Net’s service status information is now being posted on our Twitter feed.

This Twitter feed is for status announcements only. If you’re after technical support for your internet hosting account then the process remains the same: email support@prussia.net or go to prussia.net/support and open a job ticket in the “Internet Hosting” category.

Feel free to get in touch if you’d like to know more about using Twitter and other social media tools in your business.

The first step in this review will be an email next Tuesday 16 March asking about your preferences for internet hosting and how it’s supported, and explaining the implications. Further details then.

+61 2 8569 2006

I know it’s tempting to leave updating your address book until “later”, especially as faxing is so rare these days, but it’s probably a good idea to get it out of the way sooner rather than later. Human nature, eh?

That said, the old fax number will remain active for at least one month.

We’re now using the online service mBox rather than an actual fax machine. Highly recommended.

mBox provides virtual fax and voicemail services. Incoming faxes are emailed to you as PDF files, and voicemails are emailed to you as MP3 audio files. Very handy.

Their pricing is good too.

Their entry-level MessageIn 200 plan, which is what we’re using, is good for 200 minutes per month of inbound calls. If you only use it for faxes, that’s around 400 pages per month—more than we’ll ever use. That’s $9.95 per month—cheaper than even just the phone rental on a fax line, let alone the other costs of a fax machine.

mBox has other services too — inbound and outbound SMS and outbound faxing, including bulk fax and SMS—but we haven’t explored them yet. They even have an iPhone application for checking your voicemail and faxes.

And no, we’re not getting paid to recommend them, we just thought we’d share the information.

For the details, please check the full announcement.

Thanks for your support through 2009. May you and your families have a safe Holiday Season and a prosperous New Year.

Prussia.Net is now on Twitter! Follow our Twitter feed for server status information and announcements for clients.

We’ll also occasionally post links to useful information for small business Internet users.

And feel free to get in touch if you’d like to know more about using Twitter and other social media tools in your business.

This is a 3-hour period, but the actual downtime will almost certainly be much shorter: a few bursts of a few minutes each. We’re just giving our installation team ample time to deal with any unexpected problems.

During the downtime, your websites hosted with Prussia.Net will not be visible.

Email will continue to flow normally, however, and this work won’t affect our project system at prussia.projectpath.com nor the email marketing system at prussia.createsend.com.

What we’re doing:

• Updating your hosting account’s control panel “cPanel” at prussia.net/securecontrolpanel to add new features, including video tutorials.


• Upgrading the PHP programming language to provide PHP5 as well as PHP4—a move which is long overdue. This will be of interest to your web developer, so make sure you pass along this information.


• Upgrading our support system’s SupportSuite software at prussia.net/support to the latest version.

IMPORTANT NOTE:
Please make sure you tell your web developer that we are upgrading to PHP5.

There is a very small chance that custom website scripts written in PHP may encounter problems, especially if they were written some time ago, and you will need to stay with PHP4.

Since we’re upgrading our Support Centre website prussia.net/support, we will take longer than usual to respond to support requests on Sunday.

If you or your web developer have any concerns, please let us know immediately by emailing support@prussia.net to open a new job ticket.

If we haven’t dealt directly with your web developer before, you must email us their full name and email address and authorise them to speak to us about your account, otherwise we will not do so. This is a standard security measure.

If you do need to stay with PHP4, it is very simple to revert.

Once the new cPanel goes live, there will be a button in the “Software/Services” section labelled “PHP Configuration”. This allows you to switch between PHP5 and PHP4.

If Prussia.Net developed your website, we will email you individually this afternoon to explain how this change affects you.

We will email you again on Sunday morning to confirm that everything went according to plan, and to explain the new features.

This is the first in a series of upgrades which will eventually result in a more powerful server to host your websites, better anti-spam and anti-virus defences, and more flexible and responsive technical support. We’ll be telling you more about all that over the coming weeks.

[UPDATE Monday 19 January 2009, 9.20pm Sydney time: This problem has now been resolved.]

[UPDATE Tuesday 24 February 2009, 2.30pm Sydney time: The problem has returned with this month’s license key not arriving. We expect the problem to be resolved by 2pm Wednesday.]

Email sent to the support addresses (support@prussia.net, itsupport@prussia.net, webdev@prussia.net and admin@prussia.net) is arriving, but is not being transferred into the support system database. Also, if you visit the support website you will see the error message: “License Error: Key file has expired” and won’t be able to log in.

It may take 24 to 36 hours to resolve the problem. Meanwhile, we will be checking the support emails manually and acting upon them outside the system.

Please continue to email your support requests to the appropriate email address.

If your issue is particularly urgent, i.e. it must be processed before 9am Monday (Sydney time), please call +61 2 9557 5545 and leave voicemail. Please leave your name, phone number, email address and full details of the problem.

This problem does not affect any other hosted system.

The following systems are all working normally: the Internet Hosting control panel at prussia.net/securecontrolpanel, webmail at prussia.net/webmail, the project management system (Basecamp) at prussia.projectpath.com, the mailing list manager at prussia.createsend.com and all websites and email.

The problem was caused by a damaged license key for the Kayako SupportSuite software which powers our support system. We have requested a replacement key, but it may take 24 to 36 hours to arrive.

I say “interim” because, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m selecting a business to handle this stuff long-term — a company rather than an individual because one person simply can’t be available 24/7.

I haven’t finished that yet, so I can’t give you full details. However, the hourly rate will be cheaper if the work is done as part of a pre-paid plan, rather than responding as tasks pop up randomly.

Meanwhile, from today I’ll be charging new rates for work I do personally. It’s the first change in two years.

So what are the rates?

The full rate card is on the website (82kB PDF). The key changes:

• The base “standard rate” rises from $140 to $150 per hour, in line with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) increase since 1 September 2006.


• Call-out fees rise by $5, again in line with CPI.


• There is no longer a discounted “SOHO Rate”. When we first introduced this discount for very small businesses, I envisaged being able to use junior staff to deal with “simple” set-ups. However these days even very small businesses have more sophisticated IT needs, and I discovered the hard way that “cheap” staff don’t have the professionalism and range of skills which our clients are used to. A tiny business with only basic IT knowledge actually needs more knowledgeable support because their computer users often can’t describe a problem accurately.


• Discounts for pre-payment only. At this stage, the only discounts offered off the list rate will be for pre-paid work. I will contact you individually if this applies.


• There is no “emergency call-out fee”. This concept assumed, in effect, that we’d drop another client’s work if you paid us more money. That strikes me as unfair. Instead, we’ll work through our jobs like a nurse does triage on emergency patients: critical tasks first, then in the order they came in.

The rate card is also simpler to understand:

• The base rate is $150 per hour, unless we have to hire a specialist.


• There’s a call-out fee if we come to you, which varies according to distance.


• If we come to you, it’s a 30-minute minimum, then we charge in 15-minute blocks.


• Otherwise it’s a 10-minute minimum, then we charge in 5-minute blocks.

The new rates apply to all IT Support job tickets opened after 0800 Sydney time today, and our General Terms of Trade apply. Unless arranged in advance, all work is done on 7-day terms, and late fees apply.

What about existing work?

Any work on existing projects, or on job tickets opened before 0800, will still be charged at the rate you’d been quoted, or the usual rate you’ve been paying until now.

What about Web Development and Internet Hosting?

These rates apply only to IT Support — that is, work done on your computer systems, or for web hosting support beyond the email- and web-based support provided as part of your monthly or quarterly fee.

If you use our Web Development services, I’ll be talking to you about new (and much simpler to understand!) rates shortly. I’m also reviewing Internet Hosting charges as part of a regular server upgrade at the end of September.

And what about that questionnaire?

Well, yes. August was very busy, and there have been personal disruptions as well, mostly health-related. However I do want to get a “spring clean-up” campaign under way for regular clients, and I’ll be in touch about that as soon as I can.

Regards,

Stilgherrian

From Monday 1 September 2008, except in a very few cases, I won’t be doing any IT Support work personally. This article explains how things will work after that.

For two years now, I’ve been intending to operate in line with Prussia.Net’s slogan, Managing Information for Small Business. As I explained in Prussia.Net evolves, this is all really about your business information, not “just” computers. And it’s about a managed approach, not just fixing things when they break.

My personal role will be to do that planning and management. I’ll help you figure out what tools will most effectively support your business, and then select and manage the suppliers who’ll make it happen. I’ll also be working more on web development, and especially the new “Web 2.0” and “social media” tools.

All this is much better use of my experience and skills than crawling under desks or running software installers!

(I’ll also spend more time on my media work, but that’s another story.)

Some of our clients have been “managing” their computer systems with nothing more sophisticated than “call Stilgherrian when something goes wrong”. That will have to change, because I won’t be available! And since computers are essential business tools these days, it’s also unprofessional.

As I’ve said on my personal website, There ain’t no shortcuts to professionally-managed IT.

Over the coming weeks I’ll be selecting an IT installation and support firm to take care of those services — a firm rather than an individual because individuals need to take holidays and so on.

To help you make the transition to proper IT management, I’ve put together a 3-step process:

1. Later this week I’ll send you a questionnaire to help you identify the key IT issues in your business. Please have someone complete the questionnaire before Friday 15 August.


2. Based on your answers, I’ll provide you with a quote for developing an IT Plan for your business. Should you choose to go ahead, I’ll work with you to develop that plan.


3. We can then implement that IT Plan for you, and review it regularly.

How much will it cost?

Filling in the questionnaire and getting that initial quote costs nothing but your time, and there’s no obligation to proceed any further.

The cost of developing an IT Plan will depend on the size and complexity of your business, and on the number of “gaps” between how you’re currently operating and “best practice”.

New rates for IT Support services will be introduced on 1 September, and I hope to announce them a week beforehand. The exact rate will depend on the deal we negotiate with the external supplier. However I’m looking for a professional but cost-effective IT services company, not someone who does things “on the cheap”, and it has been two years since the last change.

What about existing work?

Any work on existing projects or job tickets will still be charged at the rate you’d been quoted, or the usual rate you’ve been paying until now.

However, between now and 1 September I will be giving priority to projects which have already started or where a deposit has already been paid, and to urgent faults.

What about Web Development and Internet Hosting?

I will eventually simplify the other two “branches” of Prussia.Net’s business too: creating and maintaining websites, and the “Internet Hosting” of your web and email. For the time being there are no changes here.

Any questions?

I’ll provide more details as we go, and if we have any open job tickets I’ll be in touch tomorrow to schedule those tasks. If you do have any questions or concerns in the meantime, please let me know.

Regards,

Stilgherrian

By creating a separate website at gretschcustomshop.com.au, they’re able to showcase the unique, top-shelf qualities of these instruments and give visitors the impression they’re seeing experiencing special.

The website is built “by hand”. A designer has to adjust the home page photos every time a new model is released. In the long run it would be cheaper to build this site in a content management system (CMS). However sometimes a quality, hand-made product does require a quality, hand-made website.