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 - 67.215.238.29 - 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.

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

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!

All products and services are now available on servers within Australia, or within the U.S.

oh yeah and ‘all quiet on the western front’!

All shared hosting has been doubled! Double the space and double the bandwidth! The special? No price change! Existing customers should also see their limits doubling automataically within the next couple of days, if not already.

But wait, there’s more! Signup before the end of January for any VPS or Semi-Dedicated hosting account, and receive the first six months FREE!

So what are you waiting for? Enjoy the New Years Specials here at RoyceSoftware - End to End Internet Solutions.

On a separate note. Through our continuing efforts to improve our services, customers and clients alike will see RoyceSoftware become a new company with a new name and face. This will also include new localised servers and the final removal of U.S. based bandwidth providers. While the particulars are still being deliberated upon, existing clients can rest assured that they will continue to receive the same great service, with no change in monthly or yearly dues.

If you are considering purchasing services from RoyceSoftware, it might just be worth your while to wait until January 1st 2009 for some new years opening specials! You might be pleasantly surprised!

RoyceSoftware will no longer be developing websites and custom web applications. These tasks will be passed on to a partner company with a dedicated team for such development.

As you may or may not have noticed recently, communication with us via email has not been too good. We moved from a Linux to a Microsoft Exchange system (in order to separate our corporate systems from our commercials systems), and we have since been fighting a battle against SPAM. To make sure that you, our loyal clients, are not caught up in this trouble, we would like to ask you all to please, use the Support Ticket system to contact us. The support ticket interface and the contact page, by pass the “in testing” email filtering system, so that your message does not go un-actioned. You tickets will be passed on to your assigned account manager, to continue our personalised support system.

We apologize for the inconvenience this may cause some of you. Suffice to say, we were not prepared for the volume of SPAM that we have been receiving. To keep a quality level of support, it is important that Everyone uses the Support Ticket Interface, access in your account login. You can also submit a Support Ticket via your cPanel interface.

RoyceSoftware staff members will be unavailable to process support tickets and new registrations starting 12:00am Friday 21st March through until 8:00am Tuesday 25th March. Clients with extended support agreements will continue to receive support as usual during this period.

19th March 2008 - Reseller Accounts

If you would be interested in a Reseller cPanel/WHM account, please use our contact page to register your expression of interest. Please include the following in your submission:

* Name
* Email Address
* Subject: Reseller Account EOI
* Estimated amount of Space Required
* Estimated amount of Bandwidth Required/Month
* Brief description of what you would use your reseller account for (you don’t have to use a reseller account to resell hosting)
* Estimated month or yearly amount you would be willing to pay (please, serious amounts only or don’t include any amount)

You may have noticed that you can not access your website, check your email, or even login to cPanel. What happening?

One of our primary domain name servers is currently reloading all DNS records. Some corruption in the domain name database has been occurring, and ongoing attempts to stabilize the situation is no longer working. To this end, we have had to wipe the name server database clean, reload as many records as possible from a backup and sync the remaining domains from our secondary servers. This process will take some time. We don’t have any ETA, suffice to say all domains should be resolving again within a few hours.

We apologise for any inconvenience this has caused and thank you for your patience.

It should be noted that clients not using our name servers, are not affected.

19th February 2008 - Secondary Name Servers

In light of yesterdays name server problems, we have reacted (where we should have pro acted) by setting up secondary name servers in a geographically different location. If you are hosting your domains with us (that is, you are using our name servers), you will notice that you now have four name servers attached to your domain name, where previously you only had two. You can check this by performing a whois lookup of your domain name.

The four name servers are now as follows:

ns1.roycesoftware.com - 38.102.33.100
ns2.roycesoftware.com - 38.102.33.101
ns3.roycesoftware.com - 69.73.149.29
ns4.roycesoftware.com - 69.73.135.165

This was an unexpected outage, our provider thinking we wanted to complete this task on a Saturday. This outage lasted three hours and allowed us to implement a new wireless GPA service, removing the need for our current satellite service. Connections speeds are still the same, however the service will be cheaper and more reliable in the future. The outage affected clients on the following servers:

orion.roycesoftware.net
aurora.roycesoftware.net
prometheus.roycesoftware.net
daedalus.roycesoftware.net

We apologise for any inconvenience this outage caused.

22nd January 2008 - Network Maintenance, Rollback

The new wireless GPA service proved itself unreliable in the worst of weather conditions, and resulted in another unexpected outage. We promptly rolled back to the satellite implementation, although we did lose several hours of service. The following servers were affected:

orion.roycesoftware.net
aurora.roycesoftware.net
prometheus.roycesoftware.net
daedalus.roycesoftware.net

We apologise for any inconvenience this outage caused.

NB: Please remember that in the new year, RoyceSoftware will be ceasing the sending out of news updates and notifications (except for notifications to individual users, which will continue as normal) via email and other means. You will need to subscribe to our RSS Feed and check your user account “FYI News” in order to stay up to date with any important updates.

The implementation of our new system, including servers, billing and support has now been completely finished and is in full use. Our next step is to migrate all users on old hosting plans to our new plans (and servers). You will find that our new (and final) plans are far more value for money then the current deals. In fact, some users will find that upon migrating to a new plan, you may (or may not) pay anywhere up to half as much as you originally were!

This migration process will be as automated as possible. You will not get to pick your new plan, not straight away. By default, clients on old plans will be swapped over (and physically moved over) to the lowest plan in either the Individual or Business package set. For example:

You are currently on the server called manticore.nocdirect.com and you are using the RoyceSoftware Website Hosting Standard Package. Your account will be physically moved to the server known as prometheus.roycesoftware.net and your new hosting plan will be either the Individual Basic Package, or the Business Basic Package.

This migration process will happen two weeks prior to your next account renewal. You will be notified about the downtime and when you can expect to be up and running again, before the migration process will actually begin. The migration of your account will be completed before your account will need to be renewed. During this time (roughly 1 week or more) you will need to make a decision. Either stay on the new plan you have been placed on by default, and pay the new amount upon renewal, or upgrade (not downgrade) to a different plan and pay the new amount upon renewal. There will be no extra fees involved during this process, including set up.

How do I know if I am on an old or new plan? Easy. If you can see your plan on our website, then you are on a new plan, and can rest easy knowing there is nothing you need to worry about. If you CAN NOT see your current plan on our website, then you are on an old plan, and will be contacted in regards to the migration process two weeks prior to your next account renewal.

The Benefits and Advantages!

What does all this mean for you as a client?

* Faster access times to your cPanel account, and your websites
* Premium High Speed Bandwidth
* Storage Space Limits never before seen in hosting packages at these prices
* A streamlined process for accessing and paying invoices
* Easy to use Support Ticket interface
o An additional Support Ticket feature now built right into cPanel)
* Full Weekly Backups
* High Quality Server Uptime and Availability
* Less users Per Server

It should be be noted however, that access via SSH will also cease. We have encountered a number of issues (some turning into large security risks) due to the availability of SSH. To this end we have decided to remove SSH access from all accounts under the new hosting plans. Client on old plans will continue to have SSH access until your accounts are migrated to new packages.

In closing of this update, we would like to say a big thank you to all our existing and new clients for your business with us. It’s been a fantastic and successful year for RoyceSoftware and we hope to continue to provide and improve our services at our current high level!

We wish all of you a lovely christmas and happy new year!

P.S. Website Developers, this is where you take a break! Don’t make us disable FTP Access…

With the launch of our new website, is our brand new stack of available services and pricing! It’s possible you have never seen hosting as good as ours, for such low prices, anywhere on the internet! What’s the catch?! No catch! Just high quality hosting and domains, at value for money rates.

This new website also provides an RSS feed. Following the implementation of this feed, is the extinction of email notification. If you wish to stay up to date with everything that is happening at RoyceSoftware, it is suggested that you subscribe to the News Updates feed from now on.

If you discover any problems or issues with our new website, please don’t hesitate to let us know, so that we can correct them as soon as possible.

Kind Regards,

The Team @ RoyceSoftware