March 2009 Update
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:
- Account gets hacked
- Password gets changed
- Damage and suspicious activity occurs
- Account gets Auto-Suspended
- 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!
