Rapid Hosting

To our valued customers,

Due to the current value of our Australian Dollar in the US markets, we have been forced to review our all our domain prices.

Please take the time to view the new pricing scheme that is effective immediately at our Domains page.

And remember with all our domains sales, you still get the same great support and service for all your domain needs.

Kind Regards,
Darren Nolan

A new update is available for WHMCS, so if you are using 3.7.1 please ensure you update as soon as possible.  There is a range of new bug fixes, for full details, see WHMCS.com.

Cheers!
Darren Nolan

7:30pm QLD - Electrical Failure

At approximately 7:30pm we suffered a UPS failure that cut power to the rack powering our Rapid Servers.  Rest assured that our new data centre is working quickly to resolve the issue which caused this outage.

During the power outage, our services were not down for more than 5 minutes.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused with tonight’s outage.

Kind Regards,
Darren Nolan

Update: 10:44pm - Power Outage

We’ve been advised that at 10:44pm there was an interruption to our power supply at the datacenter, which caused our server to power down again.  We’ve been advised by our datacenter that the problem has now been resolved.  I will continue to provide updates were possible in relation to this matter if we expect another outage.

Again I apologise for any inconvenience caused with tonight’s outages.

Kind Regards,
Darren Nolan

Update: 10th of October RE: Power Outage on 8th of October.

I’ve been in communication with out data center about recent power outages that happened on the 8th of October.  There was two short outages of system power for roughtly 5 minutes at 7:30pm and 9:30pm.  At 10:30pm the staff were alerted to a fire in the UPS room.  The fire brigade were called and attended in under 10 minutes.  Standard policy thereafter dectated that power must be shut off to the entire center.

The damaged UPS components were removed.  Full functionality was fully restored at roughly 4am.

I’ve been advised that there will be an upcoming maintenance window to commission a replacement external UPS bypass switch to replace the faulty unit.  At this stage I will email all clients to notify of the expected time frame.

Again, I wish to sincerely appologise for any inconvenience caused by this outage.

Kind Regards,
Darren Nolan

“WHMCS just got even better…”

The new version of WHMCS was realsed on the 10/09/2008 and has new conditional email template control, ability to customise and resend email messages, new client control options, 3 new configurable option field types, more flexible promotional offerings, furthur affiliate control and a consolidation of the two order systems. It also introduces some new features including support for 2 levels of taxation, ticket management usability improvements, a new income forecast report, two new registrar modules (WebNIC & Nominets new EPP protocol) and much more.

It’s now available to download via the Accounts Download Page for all registered clients. Please note, in order to use this software you do require a valid license key which can still be purchased from Rapid Hosting at only $15.50 per month AUD (including GST).

Please be advised that on this upcoming Monday, 15th of September we will be moving all shared and reseller accounts from the server Gravity located in the Sydney Datacenter Equinix, will be transferred to the new server, nicknamed Blue, located at our new Brisbane Datacenter.

The transfer will take place at approximately 1am and we expect the transfers to be complete close to 4am.  During this time your site will not go down.

Blue has been up and running the past week serving our three largest Resellers as a trial run, and the Blue server has operated flawlessly.  We’re happy to announce that users have reported a speed increase in page loads by up to 10%, which is absolutely fantastic news!

If you are using a dedicated IP address or custom nameservers, you will receive an additional follow-up email letting you know what your new IP and instructions on how to change your nameserver IPs.

If you have any concerns or queries, please do not hesitate to contact support@rapidhosting.com.au

Cheers
Darren

Since October 2007 we’ve have been using the Equinix data centre and it has been a fantastic ten months.

However in the best interests of all our clients we will be moving to a new data centre in Brisbane, at this stage close to or around the 20th of September.  We will release another update closer to the date with full details on the move.

At this stage, we are estimating that your service will not be interrupted for more than approximately 5 hours. This time is of course, massively over-exaggerated.  We hope we’ll ensure the smallest amount of downtime and interruption possible during the move of your account.  The transfers will commence around 2am that evening.

Some of the benefits will include server specifications roughly double that which we have now (from Dual Core to Quad Core) and 2GB of Ram to a huge 4GB of Ram.  This means even FASTER speeds than we’re getting now.

We’re also getting an upgrade in data connectivity - roughly ten times the bandwidth pipe we have at the moment, connecting to AAPT, Optus and UECOMM (UECOMM then connect to a range of local providers including Telstra), even though at this stage we’ve never had connectivity problems. “Touch Wood”

And the best part is - we’re keeping our prices fixed at their current rate!  (Good news right? You bet!)

If you have any concerns or questions, please do not hesitate to contact me personally.

Cheers,
Darren Nolan

A little while ago I activated WHMCS’s “affilate” program.  Anyone may register to refer our business in the form of a small link on your website or select from a few of a banner images (designed by the fantastic Karl Short who makes a lot of my images - THANK YOU KARL!)

Just a quick note, I am calling this the “Referral Program“, not an “Affilate Program” although WHMCS refers to it as such.  Personally, I think any affiliate program requires much attention, large email lists and time on your behalf.  This is not a get rich quick scheme (sorry!).

The Referral Program allows you and myself to track any visitors from your site coming to Rapid Hosting.  If they are interested in our services Rapid Hosting will pay you a Referral bonus, equal to the amount for their first month worth of hosting.

I would much rather keep money circulating locally (yes New Zealand, you are considered local to me ) than continue to pay overseas companies to advertise Rapid Hosting.

Please ensure you read the details in relation to our Referral Program in our Terms of Service.

If you missed the link above, you can sign up here - please ensure you use your unique URL to copy and paste on your website so the tracking feature works!

Thank you all again for your continued support!
Darren Nolan

Continue reading “Referral Program”

On the 13th of July 2007, php.net announced that PHP 4 will no longer receive feature updates after the 31/12/2007.  Up until this point, the only releases coming from php.net have been security fixes.

On the 08/08/2008 PHP4 will no longer receive security updates.  It is strongly urged that you review your scripts immediately and ensure they will run on PHP 5 (see here for details - Use PHP5 as the default).

The best thing to remember is to not panic.  Many PHP4 applications work perfectly using PHP5.

At this stage, on the 08/09/2008 Rapid Hosting will switch the default version of PHP on the server to version 5, and leave PHP version 4 as the secondary version for compatibility reasons,  Unless there is a security notice stating that PHP4 is no longer safe.  Security is our top priority on all our servers.

When cPanel release PHP6 into their updates and after the 31/12/2008 - we will replace PHP version 4 with PHP version 6, leaving PHP version 5 as the default version.

Please note all of the above dates may change if a security notice is released about PHP4 on or after the end of life.

Closer to the date, I will remind everyone about this change.

Cheers,
Darren Nolan

I am extremely proud to announce Rapid Hosting is now an official WHMCS Licensed Reseller.  Already we’ve helped move several customers to this simply fantastic billing software.

WHMCS is a PHP script written and maintained by Matt and his team from WHMCS Ltd.  The billing software helps automate domain registrations and hosting creation packages for people using Reseller, VPS or Dedicated Server solutions.

Rapid Hosting has been using WHMCS since we officially began business back in October in 2007, and I’ve personally never found anything to compare with the continual stream of useful features and ease of use.  Personally I believe it’s a great alternative to ClientExec and far easier to use than ModernBill, although both these systems will of course work with our servers.

In order to order your WHMCS license from us, you must be a registered customer utilising our hosting services.  At time of writing, keys are $15.50 AUD including GST.

To order your key today, please log into your client area, view your hosting package details and click the link for “addon products”.

And the best part of this reseller program is that all your techinical enquires are fully support by WHMCS!

Happy WHMCSing!
Darren Nolan