Some of you will have heard of the ThePlanet.com datacenter explosion and subsequent downtime over the last 3 days. We use ThePlanet.com for hosting our main billing server and our Colorteck.com website. We do not host any clients with ThePlanet (rather we have our own racks elsewhere).

Also our live support system has experienced some technical issues with live chats being disconnected. This is down the software we used. As a result, and a temporary measure to ensure we still serve those of you who prefer live chat to using our helpdesk@colorteck.com email (24/7), we have opened a GTalk service using Google.com’s GTalk client.

1) Download the safe, light-weight GTalk client from http://www.google.com/talk

2) Add the contact: humanassistance@gmail.com

This will not be a 24/7 service. If you want to get helped faster, please open a helpdesk ticket by sending an email to helpdesk@colorteck.com first. Then you can reference your ticket number with live support to get priority assistance.

Remember- when you write to helpdesk@colorteck.com you will get an automatic reply. If you do not, this is because your email account or settings are wrong or your client is incorrectly filtering our reply as spam. You need to whitelist helpdesk@colorteck.com to prevent this.

Well, some say no news is good news- it’s certainly the case with a server network. But it’s not really been all that quiet. We’ve been keeping the servers fully up to date, managing to patch the recent CPanel updates in record time and many of you have commented on how much you’ve been enjoying the X3 features (if you want to try it- just send us a helpdesk email).

Further to this we’ve been concentrating on reducing helpdesk response times, and many tickets are now responded to within 20 minutes. We’re still seeing technical issues be resolved well within 24 hours, even for complicated cases.

Some of you have noticed the introduction of new phone numbers- and I have to say I have enjoyed talking to clients again as it sometimes gets a bit isolating when you only interact via email or helpdesk! We’re still not letting Jeff anywhere near the phones though, his strong Welsh accent would probably be enough to scare customers away…

As always if you need some help, have any queries or find something you want to check on, just let us know. helpdesk@colorteck.com is the helpdesk email, and you’ll receive an instant response with your ticket ID and details. If you don’t receive an email straight away then something is stopping it from getting to you- if you use yahoo mail, for example, it may have gone straight to your SPAM folder. Annoying!

If you submit a helpdesk email but don’t hear from us- please just give us a call. There is a local rate number for the USA and a London number for the UK. We can’t always pick up the phones, but there is a voicemail system which we 100% react to. If you leave a message, you *WILL* get a response and a call-back if you leave a number.

I hope you all enjoyed Valentines day- we didn’t get any roses here in the office, but there’s always next year!

From all the team here at Colorteck, we wish you the very best of whatever type of celebration you are enjoying at this time of year! May your websites stay strong, your adverts turn a good profit and your family not bother you about spending too much time at the computer!

We will be running on a slightly reduced team for the next three days, but since we experience slightly less volume of tickets and problems at this time of year this is unlikely to be noticeable.

P.S Did you notice Santa dropped us off a new phone number?

Here’s a competition which might interest some of you- but hurry: only 24 hours remain!

http://www.splashpress.com/2007/worth-value/

How would you apply the techniques needed to value a website or network of sites to your own websites? Have you valued your own site? If I had the time, it would be fun to work out the estimated “value” of  all the sites Colorteck hosts!

I’ve just finished paying out a bunch of affiliates and it reminded me that I haven’t mentioned it on the blog for a few months.
So I’d like to take a moment to mention our affiliate center again today – at http://colorteck.com/idevaffiliate/ you can sign up and start selling colorteck services to your website visitors and customers, for 50% of the revenue. We take care of everything- the order, the setup, the support. All you do is bring the customer to our website in the first place. We think it’s a pretty sweet deal. 50% of what they spend is the pumped back into your affiliate account, and as soon as it reaches the payout level we send you the cold hard cash via paypal.

Why not give it a try? At the very least, it might pay your hosting fees in return for just putting a banner or text link on your website! We have some affiliates earning hundreds of dollars a month.

Hi Folks,

We have made a small change to the front end of the helpdesk, it will look slightly different but functionality is the same- same email address (helpdesk@colorteck.com) and so on. However those of you who registered with the helpdesk will no longer be in the database. We have made it so that you don’t have to register in order to submit a ticket.

As soon as you submit a new ticket you will be automatically registered and emailed a password which you can update if you so wish.

As usual, any questions just let us know.

Thanks,

Will and the Team.