Firstly I’d like to say thank you to everyone for their huge participation in our Halloween “Trick or Treat” 2010 giveaway. A few lucky people won a free hosting account for a year, and many many people won discount coupons – which we hope came in handy!

Recently we’ve made some changes to things here at this* which I’d just like to touch base on briefly.

Account CPU Usage
As some of you may have seen from the client area, there’s a small link on the right hand side that lets you view your account resource usage. This is, effectively, the number of CPU “minutes” per day that your site consumes. Resource usage is something we’ve been tracking for some time, but over the last few weeks we’ve opened it up so that clients can view their own usage. I’ll admit, it’s currently in early stages and isn’t very “pretty”, but it gives you a good idea on your resource consumption for particular accounts.

In line with this, we’ve also developed an automated system that will advise anyone who exceeds 120 CPU minutes per day for multiple consecutive days that their account resource usage is too excessive. After long discussions and calculations, we’ve decided to shy away from asking customers to pay more for increased usage beyond this amount and have instead opted to advise clients that they either need to optimize their website(s) or look at an alternative hosting option.

Currently there is no dedicated upgrade path for our shared hosting users, but… very soon we shall be providing the option to purchase dedicated servers on our new website.

Domain Transfers
Presently, within WHMCS, domain transfers are a semi-automated process. The domain transfer initiation process is automated, however if a transfer completes or fails, we were required to inform users manually – which we’ve presently been doing by opening a ticket. As you can imagine, this can be a rather tedious and busy process… which is why we’ve now automated it!

Domain transfers will now be tracked by our system and you will be notified via e-mail on the status, and advised what steps to take if the process has failed.

Live Sales Chat
Please be advised that our Live Sales Chat is, as the name suggests, for sales information or discussion only. Regrettably we cannot provide technical or account support via this medium. If you require technical support or help with your account, please open a ticket within the client area or search our extensive knowledgebase for possible assistance.

New Website
Our new website is very near completion and is something we hope to roll out before the end of the year. To give you some idea on the changes;

As always, thanks for being a part of this*. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions for improvements – please let us know!

Halloween isn’t for around 3 weeks now, but we decided to launch our October 2010 promotion(s) slightly early to give you plenty of time (and chances) to get some great offers. You may remember this from last year, and since so many people enjoyed it, we bring it to you again this year

Trick or Treat ThisWebHost 2010

How does it work? Once a day (that’s every 24 hours) you may “trick or treat” us by pressing the button. You then have a 50/50 chance of hitting “TRICK” or “TREAT”. “TREAT” will provide you with one of the following;

TREATS are provided in the form of unique discount codes, which you may either use yourself or give to others if you wish. Don’t forget to include your affiliate link if you’d like to earn some commission! Very lucky users will receive a golden TREAT that will provide them an entire years free hosting with us!

Coupons generated will expire 1st November 2010. This service is limited to a single use, per user, every 24 hours. There is no limit to the number of coupon codes a single user may win. Users may distribute the coupon codes if they wish. To use the coupon codes, simply enter them into the promotional code section of our order system, located at http://www.thiswebhost.com/order.html

Please note that coupons can only be used for new orders, and cannot be applied to invoices or existing orders with us.

It seems that with our last post and mail out, some customers are still confused regarding the situation. We apologize for this, and hope to clear up this confusion with this blog post. I’ll try to summarize the situation as simply as possible;

If you have any questions or comments about this change, please let us know.

Due to internal structure changes, ThisWebHost is now a UK registered limited company. Because of this, we are now in the process of changing our internal payment gateways to accept payment in GBP (British Pounds). We expect this process to be completed within the next 7 days. If you’re alarmed by reading this, please don’t be.

What’s going on? Have you been bought out or purchased by another company? Is my hosting service going to change?
The answer to all of these questions is a very clear “no”. The reason for the change to a UK limited company is simply one of convenience. The director and majority shareholders of ThisWebHost are UK citizens, so it seemed only appropriate to register the company in the UK. The internal structure (staff, servers, support) remain exactly the same with no change(s) at all so there will be no difference to the service that we provide.

Again, these are merely internal changes.

What happens to the pricing?
Due to fluctuations with exchange rates, we are going to effectively have 2 different pricing options. Our current pricing in USD will remain, but we will also add prices in GBP for those within the UK. If you are purchasing from the UK, you will notice a ‘GBP’ currency option within the shopping cart area and may pay in GBP if you wish. We will try our best to keep the pricing as close as possible but you may notice a small increase.

If you are outside the UK and pay in USD, depending on the payment method that you use you may or may not notice any changes. If paying by Google Checkout, you will notice that the USD value is converted to GBP during the checkout process. Please note that whilst the conversion occurs, you are still paying the same price, just in a different currency. If you pay by PayPal or PayPal subscription, you will notice no changes at all. The payments will remain in USD and no conversion is performed.

What happens to my currently active PayPal subscription?
Before we migrate gateways, we will be canceling all recurring payments from our previous PayPal account. If you had a current PayPal subscription setup, you will need to create a new one to our new PayPal account. You can do this by viewing a due invoice on or before the due date, and selecting the ‘PayPal Subscribe’ option.

When will these changes occur?
We will implement these changes on August 1st 2010.

I am a UK customer/live in the UK. Does this mean I can now get my hosting in the UK?
We are looking at colocation providers, and our aim is to be able to offer UK hosting solutions in the near future.

I’m a customer in the USA – are you moving my site/servers to the UK?
Absolutely not. These changes are internal only, and no changes are being made to our network or customer websites.

Should you wish to discuss this change, or have any questions, comments or concerns; please either create a ticket within your client area, or respond to this blog post.

As you may be aware, we’re currently in the process of developing our new website. It’s a process that has taken far longer than anticipated, due to the many changes we’ve decided to make along the way, but we now have a clear vision of things that we’d like to complete before launch. David (who is the co-founder of this*, and also a web designer) has spent a great deal of time on the new website, but has decided to take on other design duties full time. I wish him the best of luck in his new endeavours. Since we have a reasonably decent number of designers and developers as our client base, we thought we’d open the doors and see if anyone has any interest in helping us complete the new site!

What we Need

We’re looking for someone to help design and develop the new client area with us. The key goal of the new client area is dramatically improved user interface and accessibility. The client area currently runs off WHMCS using the Smarty templating engine, but familiarity with this isn’t required – just the ability to code valid xHTML and CSS. The current client area feels very confusing and doesn’t ‘flow’ very well at all. We’d like to change that and redesign it completely from the ground up, so we can present the correct information where it’s needed and in a manner that’s easy to understand. Essentially we want a clean and accessible user interface.

Ideally we’d prefer someone who isn’t in school or college, to prevent the distraction from important curriculum work. Experience with jQuery or general Javascript would be hugely advantageous, as is PHP/MySQL. These extras are very helpful, but not required – so if you’re a competent designer who can also output their work into xHTML and CSS for the web, we’d still like to hear from you!

So, to recap; are you familiar with designing user interfaces? Can you design clean, easily accessible control panels/backends? Can you also code valid xHTML/CSS?

If you’re interested in applying, or have any questions, please e-mail jules@thiswebhost.com. Please be sure to include examples of your work.

UPDATE: This is not a request for a full or part time position, merely a request for work. You will be required to work remotely, so you are not needed in-house.