Archive for March, 2011
Who are we and who works there?
Mar 11 22
Who are we?
Who works there?
Doug Smith – Boss/Godfather
One of two partners who started Your Name Here back in 1998.
Starting from our back room we soon reached sales figures of £25,000 per week (yes – per week). A quick move was required as we took staff on and over the years have worked in a number of locations. Nowadays sales are much more modest and because I have such FANTASTIC staff I really have very little input. I’m so proud of the way they look after my business and let me pursue other interests. I really do owe a huge debt of gratitude to them. Please people…when you’re dealing with Alison, Craig or Christine just mention “Dougie really appreciates you” (because I don’t tell them that enough).
Alison
I was born and bred in Lytham St Annes and started out as a Sales/Support Advisor in March 2000 and was promoted to Manager back in 2002 by Doug when he decided to open a hotel in Blackpool and take more of a back seat, he did deserve a break though he worked 24 hours some days and none of this would be here without him! (curtsy/bow) So I do a bit of everything really, sales, marketing, support and general server admin. My Blackberry is always on so if you have an emergency (obviously not a medical one) email me on alison@your-name-here.co.uk and I will help.
Craig
Craig was born and bred in Blackpool and started in April 2006 when he decided on a career move to IT, he will help you with your sales/technical support queries by email and phone and won’t patronise you with technical talk, he also does general server admin and updates our blog with helpful tips on everything and anything, he has a great sense of humour and supports Manchester United which is either a good or a bad thing depending on your view.
craig@your-name-here.co.uk
Christine
Christine has been here since May 2005 and also has a great sense of humour and looks after all the sales ledger accounts and renewals. She also answers general queries on domains and hostings, she’ll send your invoices and receipts and remind you by email when your domain and hosting are due, so make sure your email address is up to date or you may miss it.. she’s from Yorkshire and keeps us in all check so it’s always a good idea to renew on time…
accounts@your-name-here.co.uk
We work really well as a small team along with our sister company Best Designs which is also owned by Doug, they have designed many of our customer websites along with our own, some of you may have spoken to David who’s worked here since July 2001 and is a bit of a technical guru, he looks after the other web designers Danny and Jordan. Gillian is their Manager who is from Ayrshire and has worked here since 2001, she also manages Best Hotel which offers hotel advertising with a new booking engine coming soon!
Competitor Pricing & Our Service
Mar 11 22
We’ve noticed many of the larger hosting companies will offer you large amounts of disk space which you either don’t need or will never use.
Many of these don’t offer Mysql databases on their small hosting which you will need if you want to use software like WordPress or Joomla or anything you want to install which requires a database. So it may sound great but in reality it means you need to upgrade to the next package which will invariably cost you around £100 a year, so not so cheap afterall..
Through our experience over the years with our customers we feel our packages reflect the right amount of space and features which do include Mysql databases and we don’t charge the earth, starting at £21.25 plus VAT per year for 50Mb of space is really all you need for your personal or small business website, this can accommodate 20 plus pages depending on your content. Obviously we do larger hosting packages as well, have a look at these here:
www.your-name-here.co.uk/hosting.html
We’re a small business and want to look after you, we’ve been looking after you since 1999 and you’re not just a number to us…and we don’t have a call centre.. we always answer the phone, in fact Christine will answer it so quickly it barely has chance to ring! Some customers leave us for the ‘big boys’ and discover they don’t look after them or ‘it’s not what they thought’ so they come back..they really do..
We don’t have an email ticket system, you email myself (Alison), Craig or Christine directly or contact us via the website which goes straight to our inbox. We won’t ignore you for 2 days or be in a queue like the larger companies (we know this from experience). We answer emails within the hour during office hours because we really are here to help you. Our servers are montitored 24/7 at the datacentres in the UK & US where we lease our servers.
If any of the services go down, a technician is notified and the service is restarted so we have it all covered and just thought you might like to know a bit more about how we do things, and it’s just worth seeing exactly what you’re getting for your money when you see those cheaper deals.
Problem sending emails from your domain, if you are a Sky Broadband customer
Mar 11 22
SURF – SPEAK – SEE (But not Send!)
When you’ve set up your emails for your own domain and you are setting up the account in Outlook you would normally use mail.domainname.co.uk for your incoming mailserver and your outgoing mailserver would be the address of your Broadband provider’s SMTP server.
The SMTP address for Sky users is smtp.tools.sky.com, but you cannot use this server to send emails from your domain name’s email address.
With almost all other Broadband providers you can use their SMTP server for your domain name, and it never used to be a problem with Sky but now you can only use smtp.tools.sky.com if you want to send an email from your Sky address.
We can provide users with an alternative SMTP server if they are having issue sending through their Internet provider but this also does not work as it seems that Sky block and third party SMTP server for their customers. So this leaves users a bit stuck when they want to send out emails from their domain or website.
The solution is to use webmail. You can login to our own Webmail service at http://webmail.domainname.com. This will allow you to send and receive emails from your domain name regardless of who your Internet is with. Some people will find this a bit different from an email client such as Outlook or Thunderbird, but until Sky lift their current restrictions (if they ever do) then this would be the alternative.