There are lots of different hosting solutions out there from ‘cheap as chips’ overseas servers with little or no support through to more expensive local servers and some of those have little or no support. These are just hosting providers. We provide a total ‘managed hosting’ solution. To see the difference, consult the FAQ below this. We believe our hosting solution is better.

We made a decision some time ago to only build and host on our own server for these additional reasons:

• Our servers are optimised for hosting the websites we build. Others aren’t.
• We have wasted a lot of time in the past having to navigate our way through other hosting company’s back ends to get our websites installed and functioning. Some have had to have additional functionality added and going back and forward sorting this out with the hosting company’s support and explaining it to our client just takes up more time.
• Often when something goes wrong we are involved in a ‘he said/she said’ situation and more time is wasted explaining to you what has gone wrong and getting changes made.

In short, it is best for you for us to manage the website and the local hosting solution and make it a fully ‘managed’ hosting solution.

Normal hosting is providing a space in a server environment. Our Managed Hosting includes that server space plus running code base, plugin and security updates on your website to keep it healthy and less at risk of being hacked. Every month we log into the backend of each of our websites, run any updates that are required and then have a quick check to see that the site is still displaying. You would be surprised how many and how frequently updates are required. All the updates are important as they are normally part of the constant battle to stay ahead of hackers attempts to gain access to your website. Sometimes when a plugin or WordPress update is run they conflict with each other as the plugin developer has yet to update his code to adjust for the new WordPress version. This can affect site functionality or even break the site. We try to stop this happening.

Three reasons:

• Speed
• Google
• Access

There are some very cheap hosting services out there. Often not very well supported and normally on overseas servers. Part of Google’s rating of your website includes noting if your website is hosted within the same country as your business/domain name is registered. Opening websites from overseas is slower than local sites purely because of distance and international data link capacity. Also often our clients come to us because of frustration trying to get access to support for their hosting environment. When it comes to hosting you tend to get what you pay for.

Yes they would! Very few hacks are targeted at a particular site. Most are done by ‘hacker bots’. These are little applications (apps) that hackers create to exploit a weakness they have discovered in website code bases. Imagine that a weakness is discovered by a hacker or group of hackers in a version of a website code base, a plugin or even something in the basic html. A hacker may then write a hacker bot that will visit any website links it can find on websites it visits and simply searches for a website using that version of software, dives in and either exploits the weakness or reports back to the hacker bot’s creator that it has found a target. Annoying? Yes. Worth protecting against? Definitely!

Good question! You can register your own domain name for less than $40+GST and you are most welcome to do so. We charge the extra to cover the initial registration and admin work around monitoring renewal, invoicing and the actual registration and renewal process….and a little bit of peace of mind.

As well as collecting your information and inputting that with the domain name registration (plus separate technical and billing contact details) we also set up the DNS (Domain Name System) records to point the A Record to the server IP address. There is also some admin on the server side to prepare for the future incoming website ‘requests/calls’ (fancy term for what happens when someone types in your website address and hits return). Your domain is entered into our database for monitoring (bit of time here) and then details are entered into our accounts system (bit more time). We only use a reliable registrar. Not all registrars are user friendly and many put barriers in the way of redirecting your DNS A-Record away because they make their money from their hosting service. Getting through those barriers can take up to a couple of hours of calls and follow up over a period of time to get sorted.

A couple of months before your domain name is set for renewal we tag it and send an invoice to you. When we receive payment for the domain name we renew it. Confirming payment and then renewal also takes a bit of time. We have to invoice early and confirm payment because once a domain name is renewed we cannot get a refund should someone decide they no longer want the domain and not pay the account.

You are most welcome to register your own domain name. Once you have purchased it we will give you a server IP address (e.g. 192.168.0.72) and you can configure the A-Record within the DNS settings.

Some clients will find a cheaper register of domain names and that is fine as long as you can sort out the DNS Records on your own. We have also had some clients contact us, annoyed that their site is down, only to discover that they haven’t renewed their domain name and it has lapsed.

If you can configure the DNS record yourself and want to manage renewal yourself we are happy to supply you with a UDAI and you can migrate your domain name to another registrar.

We do. What you pay us for is for our time, creativity and experience to create an end product for you whether that is a pdf, a jpeg, actual printed booklet, flyer, banner, etc. The files that we use to create those products with remain ours.

In almost all cases, the client owns the “final artwork”, but the designer retains ownership of the working design files and all non-final design drafts. And as any client who has requested to own all these “working files” knows, designers don’t easily give these rights up. Here’s why.

Most clients believe that the primary reason for wanting to retain design files is so that the client will have to keep going back to the designer for future work – in other words, money. This is certainly a factor, but not the primary reason. When a designer creates something it becomes their baby, they grow attached to it and want to see it grow up strong and healthy. So their urge to manage your brand’s future is because they now know it better than most and feel they can best produce future designs ‘on brand’. That’s a big factor, but there are legal reasons too.

There are licensing issues for the individual elements used in the document. Design files often contain illustrations, photos, fonts, and other design elements that the designer has either created or purchased the rights to use. The client may own the final artwork that was made with these pieces, but this does not entitle them to outright ownership of each element that went into that final artwork.

While this may seem questionable it’s actually quite helpful to the client. For example, when we design logotype using a $400 font family, our client doesn’t have to purchase said font in order to have the right to use that logo. But if we gave them working files, the client would then have to purchase a license to use that font family– adding higher costs to their project. The same goes for image based assets.

Beyond that, design files hold a designer’s trade secrets. Giving another designer working files is much the same as a food company giving Kraft the recipe for their delicious new cracker. And like a designer, you’ve probably spent years in your profession, testing methods and learning tricks to make that recipe a-maz-ing!

Maybe Kraft won’t steal your cracker recipe, but why would you want to risk it?

It’s uneconomical, too hard to administer, and at times, hard to estimate the time it will take to effect changes. Sometimes we spend 10 minutes of the team’s time just looking into what you have requested, briefing a developer and then the developer looking through the site to estimate how long the changes will take. By the time it is communicated back to you, your time may be nearly up and no changes have been done.

No, unfortunately the 15 minutes must be used within the calendar month. They do not roll over or accumulate.

To view our full list of Terms & Conditions, please click here.