Customer Newsletter

Onweb News - 15th July, 1999

Hello onweb customers, and other potential customers...

Happy New (Financial) Year. This last year has proved to be an exciting time in the Internet arena. There have been many new developments across the board. Most importantly of all, there is an increasing number of people accessing the World Wide Web, and that can only benefit each of you website holders. After all, if you and the other web site owners did not have your web site, there would be no reason for these people to go web surfing!

Increased Transfer and Disk Space Limits

If you haven’t visited our site for a while, then you may not have noticed that we have increased the data transfer limits on most plans yet again. Having reviewed matters we have increased the transfer limits fairly broadly, and adjusted the disk space quotas upwards as well. These new transfer and disk quotas backdate to the beginning of July, so for the people who were nearing one or other of their previous quotas, the pressure is now greatly reduced. The new limits mean that you can get substantially more traffic through your site before any overage charges start bobbing up. Typically the increases have been around 20% or more. The new limits are:

Personal Plan - 1000 Mb per month; 20Mb disk
Plan 1 - 4000 Mb per month; 50Mb disk
Plan 2 - 5000 Mb per month; 75Mb disk
Plan 3 - 7000 Mb per month; 125Mb disk
Plan 4 - 8000 Mb per month; 140Mb disk

Technical Tip: Using Your email Forwarding

On looking over some of our customer sites, it seems that several of you are not getting the best use out of your email forwarding options. The most common non-use of the email forwarding is that people insert their local ISP email address in website email contact addresses rather than using a more appropriate domain name email address. Hence rather than having a contact of fbloggs@yourisp.com.au why not use inquire@yourdomain.com.au or sales@yourdomain.com.au instead?

When you set up your forwarding addresses initially, there is the default forward – which is the local ISP address you supplied us with when taking out the relevant plan – which means that all addressing to your domain which is not specifically identified by another of the forwarding addresses will be sent to that default address. So if you have set up forwarding accounts as say sales, inquiries, admin, accounts, etc… and all are assigned to your single ISP email address, then you are wasting the usage of the forwarding facility. (Others might interpret this as you do not need the forwarding addresses if you are the sole owner of the site and you only have a single email/access account with your local ISP) Certainly the main usage with email forwarding is where there are multiple people in your organisation who each have different access addresses, or you may have a business access address and a private access address. The great beauty of using the email forwarding facility is that your worldwide address can remain constant through your domain forwarding address such as tom@yourdomain.com.au and mary@yourdomain.com.au yet you may switch local ISPs as often as you wish, and never have to notify everyone about having switched ISPs.

The other instance where a good use of email forwarding might apply is where some of you rent out space for people on your site as an integral part of what you do. Again, instead of having a contact point of theirname@theirisp.com.au would it not be more professional to use one of your forwarding addresses as aclient@yourdomain.com.au to add that little polish to your site and have them working through your domain?

Domain Name Renewals

During the next year a number of you will be coming up for renewal of your internet domain name. Internet Names Australia (INA) is the registrar with whom your xxx.com.au names are registered, and the renewal fee of $125 will give you another 2 years registration of the name. As mentioned in the previous newsletter, the INA records database was a little haphazard when first constructed, so some of you may receive direct notification about renewal rather than through Onweb. You have a choice about whether you renew directly, or if you would prefer us to handle the renewal you can use your present payment mechanism to Onweb – either cheque, direct bank deposit, or existing credit card detail – to arrange the renewal on your behalf.

The Onweb policy remains the same as it has with respect to domain name fees. We will charge you $125 for renewal or initial name registration when taken out in conjunction with an Onweb plan. When done in isolation, there will be an additional $30 handling fee levied.

Another INA service that has occurred in recent times is the change of name (or additional name) to Internet Names Worldwide. In essence this means that there is now a local Australian company able to take .com registrations rather than people having to deal with the US registrar for the .com names.

Until next time, happy (on)webbing

Neville Williams

Director