We had a little surprise today when we tried accessing our support systems and got the following message:
What the?? To give you a little background, we actually use 3 web servers, each hosted by different web hosting service providers. Two of the servers are in the US and one is in the UK. Our main website is on one of the US servers while we have various support systems, our ordering system, license server, etc. on the other two.
Imagine our shock when we discovered that our account had been suspended on the other US server we use because of one of the following reasons: “Warez, Rude behaviour, Blackmailing, Harassment, Threatening, Offensive behaviour with other company’s employees, Other”. Hmm, don’t remember doing any of those. Being a software company we definitely don’t have anything to do with warez. And I don’t believe we have committed any of the other alleged reasons. At least not in regards to our customers. 🙂
Turns out the reason was “Other”. There was a technical problem with the commercial mailing software we use. For some strange reason it caused a spike in CPU usage on the web server, which resulted in our account being automatically suspended by the system. Apparently it’s all sorted out now. It’s unlikely you were presented with this message too but, if you were, please accept our apologies. We promise not to be naughty again.
We have just introduced live chat support to our website. If you want to talk to sales or support staff live just click on the icon, which is visible on most pages, and you’ll be able to talk to someone in real time.
If live support 
is offline you can leave a message and we’ll respond as quickly as we can. We’ve also recently implemented an issue management system for support requests we receive. This allows us to track their progress and make sure that none fall through the cracks.
We previously used email software and a separate support application, and it was getting difficult to manage. The new system has integrated email management and maintains a complete history of communications, which makes things a lot easier.
The system automatically adds an “incident report” number to the subject of your email. It’s important to leave this number intact as the system uses this to identify your request and to maintain a history of it.
We’ve also recently completed a major upgrade to the software we use for the support forums, knowledge bases and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs).
All of these support systems are part of our strategy to continually refine and improve the support we provide to you.
As it’s been a while since we have done a minor release I thought I’d let you know that Version 4.11 is currently in the works and we hope to release it early next year (2008). There will be quite a few new features so it will be worth the wait.
Watch this space. 🙂
We finally resolved all of the issues with moving ClientCentral to the new web hosting service. It is now back online and ready to go. The new link is http://www.cybercom-software.net/cgi-bin/clientcentral2.isa .
After several attempts we managed to restore the support forums. Not sure what the problem was with the PHPBB software because is took 9 tries to get it to restore the data. Everything seems to be working fine now though. The forum address has changed to www.cybercom-software.com/forums.
As part of the change in service providers we have had to make a change to the PhonePad License utility. If you downloaded PhonePad before 29 October 2007 then you will either need to download and reinstall PhonePad again, or download the updated License utility: www.cybercom-software.com/files/License.exe.
Although most of our systems are now back online after finding a new web hosting service, the support forums and ClientCentral are still down. We are working on setting them up and restoring the data, and hope to have them back online within the next few days.
Well we finally managed to get all of our automated systems back on line after our previous web hosting service provider went AWOL. We found a new service provider to host our systems, so the ordering system, license database, online support request, etc. systems are all back up. If you have any problems at all please let us know.
After having DigiBuy as a payment processor for many years, we were saddened to hear that they have decided to close shop, effective early December this year (2007). In preparation for this we have removed DigiBuy as a payment option for our products. However, we still have PayPal as a payment option and have been very happy with their excellent service. We are currently reviewing other payment processors and may add others if we find any that are suitable.
Our automated ordering system, ClientCentral and support forums are all temporarily down.? These systems are hosting by a different web hosting service (Powerlynx Hosting)? and there seems to be some problems with their servers.? We are trying to get in contact with them to find out what’s going on.? In the meantime, you can still place your orders via our website but we will be manually processing them until we get our systems back up again.? In the event that these servers are down permanently, we are scrambling to find an alternate hosting service for our systems.
Our main website is hosted elsewhere and so everything else is working fine (eg. website, email, etc).
Sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.
