Special release notes:
Big PayPal patch in this build. PayPal is changing their standards on the 29th of this month, and this version includes the updated code. If you are currently using PayPal to process payments through the shopping cart feature then you must upgrade to this version to prevent the PayPal functionality from breaking on your website.
v4.9.3 r9
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*Shopping Cart > Paypal Payflow Link > Updated the Paypal payflow link to post to new url. Note that if PayPal payments will stop working on the 29th of this month (August 2008) unless you upgrade to this version.
(h)Several new hook locations (for plugin developers) added throughout website-side shopping cart files. Especially: pgm-add_cart.php and pgm-more_information.php
DrakNet has grown so outrageously that we now have satellite offices in London and Sydney!
OK, we don’t really.
That would be really cool, though.
We do now have local numbers in London and Sydney for our UK and AU clients.
You can call us at the following numbers:
United States: 512 377 6138
United Kingdom: 020 7558 8517
Australia: 02 8011 4876
Our business in the UK and Austrailia is expanding quite a bit, and after the United States and Canada they are the two countries that we tend to do a significant amount of business with.
While Canadians tend to have the ability to call us pretty cheaply, both groups of our clients across the ponds in either direction tend to have it a bit more pricey if they need to speak to us.
Does this mean that we’re shifting more to telephone technical support?
No!
The ticket system and chat system is still going to be your best bet to get a hold of us, as there are still more staff members covering those systems than will likely ever cover the phones here, and it’s open and manned for a far greater portion of the day.
If you have a technical issue or need support, your mantra should still be “open a ticket”.
Occasionally, issues may arise where you feel you have no choice but to call, and for the most part you guys do use the phones sparingly and only when really necessary and important. We have no doubt that the Aussies and the Brits will do the same.
DrakNet is proud to announce the formation of the DrakNet Client Forums. The client forums are a public community for our clients to exchange technical knowledge as well as business strategy and other information relevant to the operation of your business and web site.
While the forums are not an official channel of technical support, they can be of great assistance when dealing with issues which would not normally be supported by our technical staff. They are also a great venue for the discussion of product offering suggestions and needs you may have which we do not currently meet.
We are also announcing the closing of the DrakNet Chat List on Yahoo in August. The chat list was set up in an emergency years and years ago. Since so many folks showed up there we simply left the discussion list at Yahoo because of the large number of users that had already joined, and due to its offsite ability to facilitate communication in the unlikely event of a crisis.
DrakNet has grown enormously since then (now considered a “mid-sized” web host as opposed to small), and we find that the Yahoo list simply doesn’t enable people looking into hosting here to get a true sense of our community, nor does it seem as professional to us as we would like it to be. The list form there and its horrid search interface also makes it very difficult to find older information, or for new clients to view the community in any way.
To encourage peer to peer communications on the forum, we will hold a drawing on August 15, 2008, to give away 3 $100 credits for current clients that sign up and participate on the forums. We’ve looked at the numbers for the chat list and hope that they will translate to the forums as well - but we want to give a bit more incentive as we do know we’ll lose some folks in transition.
For access to the Client Areas, which are private, please apply to join the Clients Group, and we will approve you when we can confirm your account.
One of the benefits of being a small company is that we can try new things with relatively little planning (i.e. meetings and committees and focus groups and…) and one of the further benefits is that when we find out things don’t work, we can nix it just as fast.
Five years ago, we changed from accepting orders and then seeking payment in any way you could get it here to only accepting orders with credit cards and requiring that you keep them on file. A small but vocal contingent really hated that, and some people just flat out refused to replace their credit cards and more or less kind of dared us to try and enforce the rule, so we didn’t - we instigated a “penalty” of sorts of $1.50 to cover the fact that folks were essentially thumbing their nose at us.
Some of them further thumbed their nose by paying every part of the invoice other than the fee.
OK, we get it.
DrakNet has completely done away with the manual payment fees, and we don’t require you to have a credit card on file, and we don’t require you to have a subscription for PayPal on file. You need to pay us by the deadline and if you don’t, we suspend your account, and 7 days later, we’ll delete it.
DrakNet accepts the following payments, and none incur any kind of fees:
Credit Cards on File - place a Visa, Mastercard, American Express or Discover Card on file and we will charge the card when your invoice is generated on the 25th of the month for monthly accounts, or 3 months before the day your package renews for annual and biennual accounts.
Manual PayPal Payments - you can email your payment to billing@drak.net and we will post it manually, or you can make a one time payment within your billing area after logging in that will post and credit immediately.
PayPal subscriptions - you can set up subscriptions for your packages within your billing area so that PayPal will auto-pay it, and it will automatically post.
Electronic Checks - Fill out the electronic check form as long as you are paying from a United States bank. (Please note that if you have insufficient funds, the payment will not be retried and the bounce will incur a $25 fee.)
Paper Checks - mail us a check as long as its drawn on a US Bank to our address and we’ll credit it. If you’re running late and don’t want to be suspended you can send an overnight to the same address with any shipping service as there is someone to accept the delivery and sign for it. Report it to us so we know it’s coming.
International Money Order - An international money order is very similar in many aspects to a regular money order except that it can be used to make payments abroad. With it, a buyer can easily pay a seller for goods or services if he or she resides in another country. International money orders are often issued by a buyer’s bank and bought in the currency that the seller accepts. Mail it the same way you would a paper check.
Wire Transfer - we only accept domestic and international wire transfers for amounts over $500. Contact us for information on sending a wire.
We have taken off all the alternative fees manually, and if we missed one, let us know.
DrakNet is announcing a new shared hosting package targeted to small businesses that need high availability and redundancy on a smaller budget.
The new DrakNet Shared Failover Package is an insurance package for sites that cannot afford down time, or what we affectionately like to call “poor man’s redundancy”. In most situations, when you want to guaranty high availability the amount that you pay is going to go up exponentially in relation to the amount of redundancy you wish to have. These solutions have always been available, but only DrakNet has brought it together in one single package under the banner of one company that takes care of at all for less than $100 a month.
The Shared Failover Package includes two Bells and Whistles accounts, one located at our primary data center with Liquid Web in Lansing Michigan, and a secondary backup Bells and Whistles account at one of our secondary data centers at Wired Tree in Chicago, Illinois.
Instead of using DrakNet’s standard nameservers, we provide you with 5 enterprise name servers with integrated monitoring and automatic failover from outside both data centers from geographically dispersed locations - if, for any reason, your site’s availability stops on our primary servers, the integrated failover system will launch into action and make an immediate change to your DNS sending your clients, customers or readers to the backup installation on the Wired Tree Server.
With the $60 a month package, you are given the logins and access to both. You can choose to mirror the site completely by setting up your own software to sync the installations, or if you have a static site you can set it up once and forget about it, knowing that it’s ready to take over should there be any issues whatsoever with our main data center or the server you are on. Once the crisis passes, your site will be moved back to the main server.
With the $90 a month package, we will mirror the data on the backup site once a week for you. If you have a dynamic site that constantly changes, we can mirror the data at any frequency that you specify. Contact us with your needs and we’ll be happy to provide you with a quote.
1-866-DRAKNET is no longer DrakNet’s phone number. Well, ok, it may currently still be, but it won’t be for long - I know, it was really, really cool to have our name in a toll free number and all. I’m a little bummed, too. But unfortunately, it’s time to retire it.
Now that we’ve taken on more staff, we’re moving over to Skype completely for voice communications which, honestly, there shouldn’t be much of.
Our new number, 1.512.377.6138, is our Skype-In line, enabling you to call us directly even if the concept of Skype freaks you out a little bit. Our toll-free line was nifty because it was exceedingly vain and had our name in the number and all that, but it was also limited to the United States alone and significantly limited our International clients and how they could contact us since we didn’t have a local number whatsoever.
As a small company, costs are always a factor and we’ve found that the lower accounts that call pretty much just ignore those invoices for calls, meaning an Intro Account on a ten minute phone call has become a loss leader that, frankly, were we anyone else, we would have nuked the account for the repeated phone calls. We also found that those of you that have been with us long term picked up the phone if you wanted to pick up the phone, and that was the end of it.
Phone support does cost a significant amount considering that doing support live while typing and looking into things takes longer - many, many hosting companies have cut out telephone technical support altogether due to the cost. We’ve sought different solutions to that cost/benefit ratio, and our first attempt was charging for support on the phone to balance out the costs of having it at all.
That didn’t go over too well.
Skype is not 100% as reliable as “regular phone service” yet, however, the costs are phenomenally lower than telephone service. It enables us to give cheaper and more widely accessible access that’s easily expandable as we add more staff while not utilizing hardly any extra power to do so (which we also find a really neat green solution) and without having to buy anything (which we find a cool anti-consumerism solution).
And oh, yeah - we’re not charging for the lower account levels anymore. If you’re an Intro account, you can call - you’d have to talk an awful lot for Skype to make your account upside down. (This does not change the fact that Skype goes to 1 person, and the ticket goes to an actual department of multiple people, so remember you’re not going to get serviced as quickly calling unless you get really lucky.)
We also find that a toll free number considering prevalence of cell phone free minutes anywhere simply isn’t necessary - and if you really don’t want to pay and have no other option, Skype us at drak.net - anyone utilizing us is almost sure to have a computer and setting us Skype was much easier than we thought it would be.
We’re also going to begin integrating Skype’s features to connect you to each other, and to us - we’re going to schedule Skypecasts on different topics of interest. If you have a topic you’d like to see, let us know and we’ll try to cover it. We even have some guests scheduled.
So, don’t think of it as losing the cool toll free number. Think of it as gaining wider access to the DrakNet community and staff! And if you’re trying to call us, remember to call 1.512.377.6138 or skype us at “drak.net“.
DrakNet has added an additional way to contact us - you can now call DrakNet free on Skype!
For those who don’t know, Skype is is a software program that allows users to make telephone calls over the Internet. Calls to other users of the service are free of charge, while calls to landlines and cell phones can be made for a fee. Additional features include instant messaging, file transfer and video conferencing - though, sorry, I am not doing the video thing. Ya’ll don’t want to see me in my pajamas reconfiguring Apache.
Currently, only Jen (that would be me) is on Skype, and you can connect with me by calling “drak.net“. Since Skype is free for us, calling me via Skype is free for you and you will not be charged the 50 cents per minute for any direct support that you feel you need via … um, speech. Because this isn’t really a phone.
We still wholly recommend submitting a ticket instead of calling, and we absolutely recommend submitting a ticket before calling - we’re still fairly adament that telephone technical support is not the most effective means of technical support and actually causes your issue to take longer to work out than it would via ticket. We do, though, understand sometimes you just want to talk to a human being.
If you have a microphone and speakers, you can download Skype and sign up for an account and call us from your computer at no charge. You won’t need to pay anything to sign up at all, and Skype to Skype calls are absolutely free.
Yesterday, we “upgraded” the four older servers to remove PHP 4.X track from your available options. As it’s getting close to the PHP4 End of Life moment (2008-08-08 is D-Day for PHP4) we wanted to go ahead and make the jump now as both versions have been running for almost a full year. We also took the time to upgrade PHP to 5.2.6, as well as compile mysqli as an option. Everything went well and it appears most of you have made the jump to PHP5.X, as there was no mad rush to the ticket desk.
We also wanted to let you know that there are two new staff members covering the tickets, and if you’ve submitted one within the past few weeks you may have met them. Thomas Williams, and Brian Hochstein have joined the team - they both have some familiarity with hosting, and while Thomas is familiar with hosting in general Brian’s pretty familiar with DrakNet as a whole, so give them some time to get up to speed and if you feel you need to have your ticket upped, please don’t hesitate to ask politely. As always, abuse of our staff is just not tolerated here - we’re geeky tech hippies and too laid back to smile while people call us names, so give them some slack while they’re learning about ya’lls quirks.
You’ve got a few weeks left to get yourself on the MySQL 5 server with some leeway time, as in mid-July we’re upgrading all servers to MySQL 5. We’ve had very few requests for this, so we’ll warn you now we’re not going to have an immense amount of sympathy if your stuff is not compatible with the current recommended version of MySQL. We can get you moved over in a few minutes while maintaining your old installation so if you need to take advantage, do so, and soon.
We should get back to our snarky banter posts soon.
This morning when you go into your cPanel, you’ll see a new button under Software/Services called Old Script Finder. Old Script Finder searches your web site for old, out of date scripts by searching for signatures on some of the most popular, and most security issue-laden if not updated, scripts being used today.
After installing, we ran a report on all five servers. There’s only eight sites on the new server and half of the scripts (3 of 6) were out of date. Half of them. Before you take a deep breathe in shock at that news (considering the server hasn’t even been up a week), let’s get to all of you other folks on the older four servers… I’m sorry to say wasn’t a single one that didn’t have 80% of the scripts out of date - ranging from just a few steps behind to woefully, woefully so far behind that the message was “script obsolete”. Even we were a bit surprised at the statistics.
Currently, we have only the most basic options on this script enabled - every Saturday, it will search all the servers and it will take stock of who’s scripts are out of date. That report will appear in your cPanel. It will tell you what script is out of date, where that script is located, what version you have and what the current released version of the script is. There is also a button for you to run the script on your own to take a look in your own directory if you install something - please use it sparingly as this is a fairly resource intensive endeavor.
The catch is you need to look at it, and you need to take action.
Hopefully, this handy tool will help you get a handle on updates and give you information you didn’t have before. It should also help folks that have installed scripts and forgotten about them - I took a look at some of the things that were found and I get the feeling that a few of you are going to be shocked at what’s hanging out in your web site.
If the statistics don’t get significantly better, we’ll take the next step and have the server email you regarding your out of date scripts. If that doesn’t get a response, at some point, we may start locking them down after repeatedly warnings are ignored.
For a list of scripts that are looked at, click the more information button below.
Alakazam is now up and running, and houses several folks that moved as well as several new sign ups. Since this are running smoothly there it’s time to address the rest of you antiquated folks.
We’re going to step each thing up slowly so that we can narrow down what upgrade is causing what problem, should you have any problems.
June 16, 2008
On June 16th, we’re going to cease offering PHP4 across all 4 remaining servers and move exclusively to PHP5 only. This is for security reasons, both for the server and because any php scripts that aren’t compatible with PHP yet aren’t really going to be scripts we want on the servers. You have had many, many months with both to prepare for the move over where you had both available to you and we feel it’s now time.
July 7, 2008
We’ll upgrade to MySQL 5 from MySQL 4. Again, we have a box with 5 now - if you have any question or concern that your site will not work with MySQL 5 or that you’ll need to do work on it to make it compatible, you need to speak up now. After July 7th, everyone will have 5 and if you need 4, you won’t be able to find it here.
August 4, 2008
Finally, we’ll be upgrading Apache. The only real issue will be that your password protection will need to be redone after the upgrade. If you have password protected directories, you may want to submit them to us so we can make sure they are re-secured.
Please note that the following programs have no need to be tested and are compatible with standard installations:
DrakNet has grown so outrageously that we now have satellite offices in London and Sydney!
