DrakNet Site Changes, New Programs, and stuff…
This past week we’ve made a few changes on the DrakNet site, as well as launched a few new programs that we wanted to let you know about.
The first thing we want to announce probably isn’t of great interest to our current customers, but our potential customers may be fairly interested in it. We’ve gotten a lot of inquiries from people about moving here who have prepaid somewhere else and wish to be “bought out” of their contract for a variety of reasons, and to be quite honest with you we’ve never been all that impressed with the concept. I mean, let’s be honest - if your current hosting company sucks, it’s not a great idea to ask your future hosting company (who you presumably think doesn’t suck) to take financial responsibility for your old hosting company, and your choice to pre-pay before knowing whether or not they suck. So even when asked, our answer has always been no.
We’ve found that we have a little bit of a different attitude when it comes to Soholaunch folks. Years ago, we were a pretty techno-geek focused company. One day, Soholaunch popped up in Fantastico, someone installed it and complained that it needed a license, we checked into it, and decided to give it a go. In the intervening years, Soholaunch has grown to become a large chunk of our hosting company - 7.4% of all the sites on DrakNet now run on Soholaunch Pro, and that number is definitely growing. We have a good and familiar relationship with Soholaunch themselves, and are extremely active in the Soholaunch forums as well. We like the software, and we like when people are happy running it.
Recently, we’ve noticed other hosting companies advertising the software even though they don’t, in fact, “have it” - at least not in the way we do. The fact is any host that has Fantastico can offer Soholaunch, however, if they don’t pay to license their servers, and their client doesn’t pay $149 to license the software, they’ll see their site go from lovely and cool to covered with ads in 15 days with limited functionality. Sometimes, they don’t expect it to happen - in some cases, they simply license the software for $149 and are happy with that. In other cases, they are infuriated, and they feel duped, and they simply don’t have $149 to spend.
It’s the “other cases” that we wanted to address with our new Soholaunch Rescue Program. It’s difficult to watch people create something that they really love, and watch some of them feel as if they are being manipulated into a fee by extortion. There is something of a lack of clarity in Fantastico’s installation message, and there is something of a lack of either knowledge or deliberate misrepresentation on the part of some hosts regarding whether they actually offer Soholaunch Pro with all abilities, and no advertisements. We can understand how people can be mislead, and we wanted to create an option for people to be able to maintain their site and, should they not be able to afford to purchase the software, to move here and have it included even if (and especially if) they committed to a hosting company that represented that they offered it only to find out it was the trial and ad-enabled version.
Details of the Soholaunch Rescue Program are available here.
We’ve also discontinued Lifetime Hosting. Obviously, those who have already purchased their Lifetime Accounts are still going to be maintained the same as they ever were, and we have left the page up so that everyone can still look up the terms. With the software that we’re adding that does cost monthly recurring licensing fees for us (like Soholaunch) we’ve just found that Lifetime accounts are not longer terribly practical - as if they ever were.
We’ve moved the DrakNet News Blog to it’s new location, and have also changed the Network Status Page so that it, also, has an RSS Feed. You can now comment on both pages if you have something to say about anything we have to say. We’ve also created a new, simplified order form for current clients so that you don’t have to submit your address and telephone number and card information to get a domain on a current account, as well as added fields on the form for cPanel transfers so that you don’t have to fill out two forms.
We hope you like the changes - as always, we’re sure you’ll let us know if you don’t!
Tags: billing, soholaunch, support
