Well, it’s April 2011 and fortunately there’s not much to report. I say fortunately because as it happens most of the time at the this* camp, everything is working as it should! We’re still developing things behind the scenes to make our hosting more fluid and automated, saving time for both you and us, so I wanted to take a little time to talk about some of the latest changes we’ve made.

Automated and Automatic Affiliate Payouts
I’m pretty sure we’re the only one, if not one of the very very few hosting providers out there who have any kind of automated affiliate payout system in production – and we’re proud of that. This means that without needing to get in touch with us, you can view your affiliate account balance and either send the money directly to your PayPal or add it to your balance with us. All in a few seconds and a few mouse clicks.

Redesigned Ticket System
We’ve redesigned our ticket system slightly so that whilst submitting your ticket and before it is sent to us, you are prompted with possible suggestions and solutions to your questions or issues you may be facing – with information pulled directly from our knowledgebase. This is primarily to reduce the number of what we refer to as “obvious tickets” containing very common questions which are already covered within our knowledgebase. We’re really trying to push our knowledgebase as the first port of call for any questions clients have, and we’re always adding to it. Many companies have knowledgebases and Wikis detailing how to complete common tasks, and the intent is to reduce support time.

I’m very happy to say this is working well, and our support times are lower than ever

Automated Domain Name Changes
Previously a feature we’d charge for (due to the Administration involved), we’ve now developed a system where you can modify the domain name of your account from within the client area. This is to assist those who may “flip” their websites regularly, or want to let their domain expire and utilise their hosting account on another domain instead. You can find this by selecting ‘My Hosting Accounts’ and then clicking the ‘Manage’ button next to the hosting account in question. At the bottom there will be a new button allowing you to change the domain name.

Promotions Page
Many people ask or want to know if we’re currently running any promotions. To aid those and to boost the use of our promotional codes, we’ve created a page on our website that pulls currently active promotional codes out of our system and displays it on the website, along with the value of the code and the expiry date(s). Never miss a promotion again! Don’t forget, there’s currently 50% off all hosting accounts throughout April.

As always, we’d love to hear from you if you have any comments or suggestions. Thanks for being a part of this*.

Today we’ve made some substantial behind-the-scenes changes to our “Account Resource Usage” script inner-workings. As a result of these changes and the debugging before deployment, we’ve had to reset the CPU usage history data, so currently you will see nothing within the “Account Resource Usage” page in the client area. Statistics update once a day and will show once updated, with the same 7 day history and overview as before. New data will be shown within the next 12 hours.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause those currently trying to reduce their CPU usage and are relying on this information, but the changes we’ve made have fixed a few inconsistencies and make future deployment of this information far easier.

Today we successfully deployed our 5th shared hosting server. To celebrate, we’re offering 75% off any shared or reseller hosting order for the first 50 accounts to settle on her!

Simply use the coupon: THISJULIE to get your discount today.

We have now completed the development of account upgrades, allow customers to upgrade or downgrade from our “old” packages to the new ones. Previously you were only able to upgrade from the “old” packages to one of the higher or lower “old” packages.

Please be advised that downgrading from a reseller package to a shared package will result in any accounts you’ve created within WHM to be terminated. This is of course because reseller permissions do not exist on shared packages, therefore accounts via WHM need to be removed as a result.

The upgrade pages themselves are currently being reworked and redesigned, as the default templates are… rather ugly. Please bear with us whilst we complete this over the next few days.

In other news, we’re looking at launching “semi-dedicated” packages for those who currently have higher CPU usage than our AUP allows. Semi-dedicated packages are essentially the same as normal packages, except that there are far less accounts per server, resulting in those accounts being allowed to consume more resources than on a typical shared account. Currently you are allowed to consume up to 120 CPU minutes (2 hours) per day. With semi-dedicated accounts, we expect to allow significantly higher margins of usage. Before offering this, we’d like to know if this is something that customers may see a use for. Naturally these semi-dedicated packages will be provided with the same this* quality you expect from us. If there’s an interest in this, we’ll spec up some approximate details and pricing and let you all know.

After looking at our new packages, we came to the realization that the bandwidth offering was perhaps a little on the low side. We’ve now added 50% more bandwidth to all new shared and reseller packages – at no extra cost. As usual, existing customers on the new packages will receive these upgrades automatically.

We’re still working on the upgrades/downgrades from the old packages to the new packages, so stay tuned.