John McLaughlin, our Support Manager sent this email on September 20, 2011. We’ve included it below for reference.
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For those of you I haven’t yet communicated with, I’m the new Support Manager at Salsa. I look forward to working with you, and hope to talk to you all at some stage.
I’m writing to let you know that we’re simplifying the way we charge for hosting & support. Since Salsa started in 2003, we’ve bundled support & hosting together, providing a heavily discounted hour of support as part of the monthly hosting costs. This has caused some complications & ambiguity, which I’m looking to resolve.
In brief, the net outcome of the changes below for most customers is that you will save $30/month (for the month’s you don’t use support). For those customers that regularly use support, you’ll pay an additional $20/month on those months, however still gain access to a heavily discounted first hour of assistance from Salsa. We’re also reducing our hourly rate back from $170 to $155.
For more details on these changes, please read on.
*** CURRENT MODEL
Our current charging model is:
- Shared hosting – $100/month, including 1 hour of $170 support
- Dedicated hosting – $250/month, including 1 hour of $170 support
Other support we provide includes:
- 30 day warranty (support required to fix in-scope work within the first 30 days of site going live)
- Training (which can use the hour of free support)
*** CHALLENGES
- The included hour of support creates significant ambiguity between what is chargeable support, and what is not for both Salsa, and for customers
- Some clients don’t use all of their support, and so feel they don’t get value for money
- It is sometimes unclear what support is provided under warranty, and what is included within the free hour of support
*** NEW SOLUTION
To alleviate these challenges, we’re now offering hosting only for a lower monthly fee, and you only pay for support if you use it! (I hear your sighs of relief).
As of November 1, 2011 all customers will now be charged according to our simplified model:
- Shared hosting – $70/month, including NO free support
- Dedicated hosting – $220/month, including NO free support (still $50 for each additional site)
If you do need support:
- First hour is discounted to $50, charged in full if you require any support – you then have an hour to utilise as you please
- Subsequent hours are charged at the standard Salsa hourly rate of $155/hour, charged in 15 minute increments
** NOTE – we’ve also decreased our hourly rate for support from $170+GST to $155+GST, effectively immediately, based on feedback from our customers.
We’ve also included some important notes from the agreement below, many of which aren’t new, but worth re-iterating:
- Any support now requested, whether via email, phone, or the support portal will attract a $50 cost (and provide you with access to 1 full hour of support)
- All support requested will be billed at the end of the month (there is no concept of free support offered by Salsa)
- The only time support may not be charged, is during the 30 day warranty period
- Any work done within the warranty period that is not within scope of the original project, will be charged
- Any support required will be subject to electronic confirmation (via email or the support portal) before Salsa proceeds to provide the support
- Discount bulk support packages are available if more time is needed on a monthly basis
An important excerpt from our hosting agreement which is worth mentioning here:
You acknowledge that your website is hosted on computer systems and servers, whose environment, systems, software versions, log files, and other operating environments are constantly changing on a daily basis in order to keep the server operating smoothly. You also acknowledge that beyond the expiration of the 30 day warranty period offered, that your website may fail due to technical or environmental reasons without your intervention, or Salsa’s.
Where your website (in whole) is completely off the air and inaccessible to the public internet, Salsa will work at no charge to rectify this and make the site available to public internet users. Any other lesser failure and remediation of such lesser failure, such as one part of the site functionality becoming unavailable, images not displaying, files not being up-loadable, or other partial failures are treated as support, and are billable.
You can read more about our hosting & support agreement at http://www.salsainternet.com.au/website-hosting-support-agreement.html
I trust there will be some questions about this, and hope to hear from you if you require any clarification.
You should expect your automated monthly charge to change to this new rate, starting from November 1.
Thanks a lot,
John.
Tags: hosting, maintenance, support
