RoyceSoftware

Please take a few moments of your time to read the following news update from RoyceSoftware.

Christmas Holiday Business Hours.

Telephone support will be unavailable from the 21st of December through to the 24th of January. Email and ticket support will continue to be answered through the christmas holiday period as usual. Please use the ticketing system for responses from our engineers. Telephone messages can be left, but may go unanswered in busy times. As per the usual agreement, dedicated server and VPS customers can use their allocated telephone support numbers as required. Sales will be closed on the 24th, 25th and 26th of December, 31st December and 1st January 2010. Due to the holiday season, sales responses and order times may be a little delayed.

Are we there yet?

All required server  migrations, account migrations, dedicated and clustered server migrations have been completed. We would like to specially thank all the customers who assisted us with the necessary migrations and most of all, every single one of our customers for your patience and cooperation during any down time you experienced.

So what’s new?

Shared hosting and Reseller hosting customers can now enjoy the reliability and flexibility of having their accounts located on a cluster of servers. This allows us to allocate CPU and Memory resources to each individual reseller account, which is then spread amongst your customers, load balancing as required (so your not locked in or refused additional resources if you need it). Shared hosting customers can also enjoy the same flexibility and reliability. Think of your account as being a slice of a pie that no other accounts can encroach upon. No matter how busy or intensive another website on the same cluster is, there will always be CPU and Memory resources available for you. Isn’t that awesome!

Shared hosting starts at $10 a month for 500MB of space and 5GB of bandwidth. Signup for a year and receive a discount!

Reseller hosting starts at $30 a month for 30GB of space and 300GB of bandwidth. Signup for a year and receive a discount!

We have totally revamped our VPS infrastructure built upon Virtuozzo and OpenVZ. This allows us to provide a competitive VPS model that is value for money and resources. We now have three variations of VPS each with three plan types. You can start a brand new standard VPS with 384MB of RAM (burstable to 1024MB), CentOS OS (or any other linux), 20GB of HDD space, 50GB of bandwidth and FREE setup for only $57 a month. Discounted when signing up for a year

We have finally completed and finalised our new dedicated server provisioning model. This new model allows you to customise a server to your needs, rather than settling with a preset server configuration and requesting modifications. Go ahead and try it out! You can now pick up an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.6 Ghz (the horse power of 5.2 Ghz), 50GB of Bandwidth, 1GB of RAM, 160GB HDD and $99 setup for just $162 a month! Discounted when signing up for a year.

All customers (Dedicated, VPS, Reseller and Shared) can now enjoy the flexibility and reliability of a globally dispersed DNS cluster. Many of you are already using this new cluster (shared hosting customers have had this enabled automatically), that keeps your domain names alive in the event the server or connection to the server where your website is located, becomes unavailable. If you are unsure if you have this enabled or not, or require assistance with this, please submit a support ticket.

New signups for services located in the U.S. and U.K are currently NOT available. Look forward to these in 2010!

Stay up to Date

We can’t always notify by email or telephone call, the affected customers when a server or ISP goes offline or becomes unavailable. Please follow us on twitter or use the twitter RSS feed to stay apprised of server and network outages. From time to time we may also use this method to announce discounts, bonuses and specials! You can also keep track of our News and Updates page in a similar fashion.

http://www.twitter.com/RoyceSoftware

Twitter RSS Feed

News and Updates Feed

News and Updates Page

Business Hours Availability

Our sales and support availability times for 2010.

Monday to Friday, 9am to 9pm. Sales and Support available via Telephone and Support Ticket Interface.

Saturday and Sunday. Support available via Support Ticket Interface only. Telephone messages won’t be answered until Monday (or the next business day).

Christmas and New Year Wishes

Thank you to all our customers, existing and new for your patience, cooperation and support this year. We wish every single one of you and your families a safe and cheery christmas and a fantastic new year!

All quiet on the western front…

Migrations, Migrations, Migrations!

All quiet on the western front…

Changse ahead! Stay Tuned!

All quiet on the western front.

All quiet on the western front.

VPS and Dedicated Servers are being revamped. Stay tuned for great deals!

All quiet on the western front.

A Reminder about Name Servers

All shared hosting customers with domain names hosted and managed by us, will now see four (instead of two) name servers listed.

• NS1.RoyceSoftware.Net – 202.125.47.194 – Located in Brisbane, Australia
• NS2.RoyceSoftware.Net – 220.233.235.231 – Located in Sydney, Australia
• NS3.RoyceSoftware.Net – 98.143.155.196 – Located in Dallas/Texas, United States
• NS4.RoyceSoftware.Net – 58.96.27.174 – Located in Sydney, Australia.

Resellers are welcome to rebrand any of the above IP Addresses. If your domain name is not managed by RoyceSoftware, but your website is hosted by RoyceSoftware, than you will have to make the name server changes yourself. This is not absolutely necessary. If you simply have NS1 and NS2, that will suffice. However having the additional NS3 and NS4, will ensure your domain remains live in the event one of the other Name Servers go down.

If you require support with rebranding or adding the additional name servers to your domain name, please feel free to contact us for assistance.

Dedicated Servers

We are in the final stages of deliberation over our new dedicated server hardware line. We expect to be able to take orders in the early weeks of June, in time for the end of the financial year.

Stay up To Date!

Use RSS? We do! Keep apprised of news updates like this by subscribing to our RSS feeds:

• http://www.roycesoftware.com/feed/
• https://www.roycesoftware.com/clients/rssAnnouncements.php

Use Twitter? We Do! Follows us on Twitter:

• http://twitter.com/RoyceSoftware

Business Hours Availability

Just a reminder of our sales and support availability times.

Monday to Friday, 9am to 9pm

Sales and Support available via Telephone and Support Ticket Interface.

Saturday and Sunday

Support available via Support Ticket Interface

All quiet on the western front.

Additional Name Servers

Remember last month we informed you of an additional name server you can use to keep your hosted domains live, should any of our servers or connections to our primary data centre go down? Well, just so you all know, it’s not an automated service! In other words, if you want to take advantage of the additional reliability provided by using additional name servers in your domain name, than you either need to do this yourself, or submit a support ticket and request assistance to get this setup! We’ve queried the domain names pointing to our servers and network, and only a small percentage of you (especially resellers) are taking advantage of this! There is no extra cost involved and you get to have peace of mind knowing that in the event the server or network connection to your server goes down, your domain names(s) will remain active and be immediately accessible again, the second the network connection or server is back up and running.

VPS Hosting

VPS Hosting has been totally revamped and you can now enjoy any or all of four different variants of VPS including, cPanel VPS, DirectAdmin VPS, Webmin VPS or Just VPS. For more information about our VPS variants and available plans, please visit: http://www.roycesoftware.com/hosting-plans/vps-hosting/
We can’t ‘convert’ existing VPS customers, however, if you are interested, we can offer a discounted upgrade and bring all your data from your existing VPS to your new VPS. Discounts will be individual to each customer, depending on the current account length and type, so please submit a support ticket for more information.

Dedicated Servers

Our current stock of dedicated hardware is officially empty. If you are interested in purchasing a dedicated server, please bare with us while we acquire a new line of hardware. These things take time, and contain a lot of variables that we need to confirm before we go ahead. Details of new dedicated server combinations available for purchase will be available next month.

Business Hours Availability

Just a reminder of our sales and support availability times.

Monday to Friday, 9am to 9pm. Sales and Support available via Telephone and Support Ticket Interface.

Saturday and Sunday. Support available via Support Ticket Interface

Don’t forget, you can follow us on Twitter! (http://twitter.com/RoyceSoftware). Stay up to date and be informed of discounts, special deals, server and network outages and more!

All quiet on the western front

Stay up to date with RoyceSoftware

Want to stay up to date with RoyceSoftware news? As well as our RSS feed, you can now follow us on Twitter! Visit the sidebar link on our website. You’ll also find the link to subscribe to our RSS feed there as well. We are aiming to avoid adding to the amount of email, junk or not, sent around the internet, so as of this news update, you will no longer receive email news updates of any kind, so please, especially those of you who like to be aprised of service outages the second they happen, subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter to receive our updates straight away.

Changes to Backup Schemes

There has been a growing trend in the backup system being used as a time machine. In other words, most clients are only after data they may have lost or deleted very recently. With this in mind, Shared Hosting, Reseller Hosting and VPS customers should be aware that only DAILY backups are now being kept. We are using a 3 day retention system, so you if you are lucky, you may be able to get lost or shadow copies of your data that is up to 3 days old. You WILL however be able to get data lost or changed within the last 24 hours of the last backup. Backups begin at 1am Australian Eastern Standard Time EVERY night. While it is not against the terms and conditions to store large amounts of data and files (if your quota allows it), it is pointless keeping weekly and even monthly backups of downloadable content (podcasters for example) that never changes.

The backup schemes in place for dedicated server customers remains unchanged.  

Secure Your Passwords!

We have been quite relaxed on the low complexity of passwords you are allowed to have. As such, the growing trends seems to be something like this:

1. Account gets hacked
2. Password gets changed
3. Damage and suspicious activity occurs
4. Account gets Auto-Suspended
5. Angry client calls (or emails) asking why their account has been suspended when it was up and functioning fine the night before.

If this trend continues, we may have to charge a password and account rescue fee, to discourage the use of simple passwords (like your dog’s name, your last name, dictionary words etc). Our suggestion? Either use the complex password generated for you when you began your account, or pick your favourite 8 letter word (or more) and replace some of the letters with similiar looking numbers, and alternate the remaining letters with upper and lower case type. The security and reliability of your data is ultimately your responsbility, NOT OURS!

New Business Hours

RoyceSoftware business operating hours have changed and are now as follows:

Monday to Friday, 9am to 9pm. Sales and Techsupport Available via Telephone and Support Ticket Interface.

Monday to Friday, 9pm to 9am. Techsupport Available via Support Ticket Interface.

Saturday and Sunday. Techsupport Available via Support Ticket Interface

This new scheme applies to Shared, Reseller and VPS hosting customers. Dedicated Server customers will continue to receive the same around the clock support as required from data center technicians. Please be patient with us. We do receive a lot of tickets and telephone calls. If you don’t get a response within seconds of submitting your issue or placing your call, please wait a few minutes, we are not ignoring you!

Additional Name Server

Reseller and Shared hosting customers can now take advantage of an additional name server external to our primary data centre. Shared hosting customers will automatically have NS3.RoyceSoftware.Net added to their accounts. If you manage your name servers at your domain name registrar, than you will need to add NS3.RoyceSoftware.Net as either your secondary (2) or tertiary (3) Name Server to take advantage of the additional functionality. Please submit a support ticket if you are unsure of how of what or how to do this. Resellers are also welcome to rebrand the Name Server IP Address as one of their own if you wish. All our Reseller servers have already had NS3.RoyceSoftware.Net clustered with them. If you are a VPS or Dedicated Server customer, and would like your server or VPS to be clustered with NS3.RoyceSoftware.Net please login and submit a support ticket so that we can set this up for you.

This additional name server will allow you some redundancy, should your website or server become unailable or ‘offline’ for long periods of time. Your domain name and subdomains etc, will remain live and active, and will also be accessible the moment any sort of outage has been resolved. We have begun a project to add further redundancy measures for all our clients at no additional cost. We will keep you aprised of these changes here on this website, and what you can do to take advanatge of them, so be sure to subscribe and stay up to date!

All quiet on the western front!