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.

We wanted to let everyone know that there are more tutorials on the support page - we’ve newly added flash tutorials showing you how to do the most common functions in Drupal. Thanks to a comment on one of our blog posts, we’ve become aware that Drupal is somewhat of a bear in the “how the heck do I do this” department, and we thought we’d add them as we know we have a quite few people using it.

We have two announcements - one, “we can has a new server”. We’re going to be working out the specs and likely bringing it to roaring life at the end of this month or the beginning of next.

This will also coincide with our MySQL5 implementation plan. (everyone shiver and make appropriate groaning noises).

We’ll bring the new server online with MySQL5, and anyone that wishes to move to the new box at that time will be more than welcome to pick up and go over there - just submit a support ticket when you see the announcement (and which Pokemon its likely to be named after) and we’ll get you over there lickety split.

For the rest of you? Well, you have a choice - we’ll provide a mirror of your site without changing your DNS so that you can test at no charge on the new server. You’ll need to use that time to work out the kinks, make any upgrades, check out compatibilities and lack thereof during that one week. If you take advantage of it, that’s great, and you’ll be better prepared.

If you don’t, we’re upgrading the four “old” servers a month or two after that, and if you didn’t test and your stuff doesn’t work, we’ll have lots of comforting sympathy for you but we will not, under any circumstances, downgrade the servers because a few old programs have some issues. We may decide to leave one server at four, but that will depend entirely on how widespread the problem is, and we’re not promising anything - and the only way we will know is if you test. If you don’t test, we’ll upgrade ‘em all if there are very few people with issues.

Watch the blog feed for more information as it becomes available, and let us know if you have any questions.

This weekend, we’ve added almost 100 new tutorials to the support area. There are now visual demonstrations of how to change your DNS, how to transfer your domain registration, 47 Fantastico installation tutorials showing you how to install most of the programs offered there, as well as some basic Wordpress tutorials.

You can view the expanded support area located at http://www.drak.net/support/ .

DrakNet’s gotten a lot of compliments over the years on our support, and we have a lot of options for you to get support. We wanted to go over some of the ways, and some of the reasons behind the ways, that we recommend that you get support through us.

Live Chat

There is a live chat button on every single page of the site, as well as within your cPanel. For general questions, this is a great method to immediately get someone on the line to answer your questions, and have a record emailed to you of what took place in the chat so you have a reference for it later. If you access it from the main DrakNet site, there’s going to be some things we can do and some things we can’t - anyone could say they’re you, and while we can go through a bunch of things to qualify you as you, we find it much simpler to have you log in from the chat module in your cPanel so we can see instantly that you are who you say you are since we’re given your location automatically.

Ticketing System

The ticketing system is another great way to get support, as there is a record that can be associated with your account that you can pull up at any time to revisit old ticket issues. You can email the ticket, submit one from your billing area and your cPanel, and if no one is on chat, you can submit one from there, too.

Telephone Technical Support

And now we come to the ulterior motive for this message.

For several years, it has been posted that only Whistles accounts and above (which include Resellers) have access to telephone technical support. While many people have no problem working within the confines of those account specifications, there have been quite a number that ignore them completely. It puts us in a very difficult position when we have someone who has an Intro account repeatedly call the toll free number, so much so that by month 3, we’ve paid more in our phone bill than we made on their account all year - with no signs of stopping.

If your account doesn’t include telephone technical support, and you choose to call, we are now treating this as a consultation, charged at the rate of $30 an hour (charged at $.50 per minute - which is, frankly, $45 less an hour than we charge anyone else!). We have formalized this in the TOS, the support policies, and there is now a disclaimer on the telephone message when you call reminding you at the time, before it connects, just who’s covered by free support and who’s not.

Telephone technical support is, in our opinion, not as efficient. It’s very difficult to troubleshoot a problem while someone waits on the phone for us to get familiar with the issue. We are sprung into a situation that we are unfamiliar with, and it takes more time to look into things while carrying on a conversation with someone expecting an immediate answer than it would if we were able to fully focus on the problem with no distractions. There are many hosting companies that have moved away from telephone technical support as a method of support, and while we realize there are times that people want to have someone on the phone, some people seem to have some trouble discerning when it really is needed and appropriate.

If we call you because we determine that you’re not understanding us on a ticket (and we do often), you will not be charged regardless of your account level. If you call us and you have an Intro account because you want a password reset done over the phone, your account will now be charged $.50 per minute if you choose to do so.

We hope that by implementing this, it will have a two-fold effect. One, it will hopefully urge people to follow the support dictates of their account level so that we’re not put in a position of having to “turn people away” or lose money on their account because we don’t want to be rude. Two, it will compensate us for the lower level accounts that inevitable choose to repeatedly utilize phone support despite the fact that after 15 minutes, we’re now in the negative.

Again, if we call you because we feel you need it, we won’t charge you a dime. If you choose to use the tech support line when your account doesn’t cover it, you will need to pay the fees incurred to cover those costs.

Speaking of fees…

We also want to remind folks that if you don’t have a card on file, you are breaking the Terms of Your Service with us. We have required, since 2005, a credit card on file that is valid for charges. Some folks have found various ways to get around this, or have just flatly refused to follow it at all. Due to that, and due to the extra work that goes into servicing these accounts, we have instituted a fee of $1.50 per payment term per package for accounts that are in violation of this contractual provision.

Frankly, 2.5 years of asking hasn’t worked, and so we felt we needed to take the next step and try and enforce it. We wish we didn’t have to, but it’s quite frustrating to just mantra the rules and have them be ignored, and our choice was this or simply terminate the accounts. We have chosen this.

We do realize, and have sympathy for, the multitude of reasons that people have for not placing a card on file - however, we’re sure that almost anyone that breaks terms can find a reason for why they did it because, after all, no one does anything without a reason. The underlying fact is these are the terms of having service with us, and we need those terms to be followed.

We want to thank everyone for their understanding, and hope everyone has a good holiday weekend, whichever one of the March holidays you celebrate this year!

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!