Let me tell you about our most recent email migration feat. On Friday, March 15, at 1.18 pm, we received an online order for email hosting from Geh of Chua Trading. At the time, our team was having a mini vacation in Port Dickson to watch Le Tour de Langkawi. The race had started in Muar and was ending in Port Dickson, and being cycling enthusiasts, we just had to be there!

Malaysian Anuar Manan creates history in Le Tour de Langkawi

Thankfully, with our Remote Office concept, it didn’t matter where we were. Upon receiving the request, the team was able to ascertain immediately that this was an email migration instead of new email setup. With that in mind, we knew we had to act fast, because usually, the customer must have encountered some serious email problems that had forced them to migrate.

Sneak peek of mobile office

First, we made a call and spoke to them about their problem. In this way, we wanted them to know that they weren’t dealing with a machine. Before that, we did some background checks to ensure that we had sufficient access to manage their email domains in order to estimate a completion time. The customer was relieved to hear that we could get it done within the same day, and we also informed them that our migration team was ready to continue working on their problem even on the weekend if necessary.

Guide to new email hosting

Geh was extremely prompt and helpful. He provided all the information we requested almost immediately. By 5.27pm, the email migration had been completed. A new email setup guide was prepared and sent to him to help him set up the new email system for all their email users.

Before we closed the case, however, our team made sure that the new Mail Exchange (MX) settings were propagated correctly. A call was made on Monday morning to make sure that everything was working well. Then, we helped the customer to remove their own email domain from their previous email service provider. If we didn’t do that, they’d encounter missing emails, which can be a big problem.

In response to our team’s quick action, Geh said, “Thanks for the info. Appreciate your fast reply.” Our team would like to thank you too Geh, for coming to us with your problem.

Malaysian Anuar Manan creates history in Le Tour de Langkawi

In a perfect world, your web hosting company might assume that every website consumes the same processing power, but this is not the case. Busy websites with heavy codes can take up more compute cycles. Compute Cycle (CC) provides a better way to measure how busy a website is, apart from its bandwidth and storage. It’s fair to say that those with higher CC’s should be charged more.

“Compute Cycles are a measurement of the processing time that your applications require, attained by calculating CPU processing time and accounting for the disk I/O consumed by your application’s operations”

Our standard web hosting comes with 10,000 CC a month, more than enough for most websites. So far, we’ve only had two customers who’ve exceeded their CCs. Instead of charging them (or penalising them), we work hand in hand with them to look into their site and find out if we can reduce the high CC problem. Since both of them are running busy Blogs, we introduced the WP-Cache, a plugin that serves content from the cache for faster access and reduced CC.

“XXX hosting company in Malaysia offers an unlimited hosting plan that comes with unlimited storage that allows you to host unlimited web sites”

The word ‘unlimited’ is catchy but doesn’t ring true. Many web hosting plans boast about supporting unlimited or certain number of add-on domains. In a nutshell, you can host a number of websites by subscribing only to one hosting package. Such a setup is messy and often turn the server unmanageable or abused.

We limit our hosting package to host only one website for each hosting package subscribed. For example, if our customer wish to setup a new sub-domain (eg, blog.xxx.com), they need to subscribe to a new web hosting package.

One of our friends who had subscribed to our web hosting service to host their Cradle award winning CRM project has subscribed to the additional hosting xxx.coconect.com. Each hosting is RM80 a year, though it doesn’t come with ‘unlimited add-on domain’ we are sure that is a better approach!

“We’d like to continue supporting you as we really like your service,” said one of the founder of Coconect.

Muhamad Aizam, the cute and macho IT veteran

Allow us to introduce you to Aizam, who outsourced us to host and support email facilities for the company he works for. They’ve quite a huge number of users, and our set up for them in February went smoothly. Now, their email users are using our services without any problems.

Q: Aizam, can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and your work?

I’ve been working in IT for more than 11 years. I used to work for IBM Malaysia (AS400) and CSA Malaysia ( KTM Komuter Project ), but now I’m with Sime Darby Eng ( Senior System Analyst ).This is my 10th year with them. I’m responsible for preparing bids for new projects (local and international), designing and ensuring that new and existing systems are in working order, and last but not least, to analyse current systems for enhancement, in accordance to the company’s growth and expectations.

Q: How did you find us and what made you choose to work with us?

I found 1.com.my via the Internet, after I Googled for a top email hosting service in Malaysia. I decided to choose 1.com.my due to your minimum downtime for the whole year, and the support you offer to your customers.

Q: Why did you opt to outsource an email host, rather than hosting it in-house?

I chose to outsource due to my project-based requirements, plus the cost to implement an in-house email host is much higher in comparison to outsourcing the solution.

Q: If you were to describe our email hosting services in one word, what would it be?

GREAT – Good, Readiness, Easy, Archive, Total Solution

Q: Okay, last question, which would you choose – iPhone or BlackBerry?

Blackberry :)

“Thanks Aizam! The interview really helped us to know more about you. Your words really motivate us and it’s made our team extremely excited! Rest assured, continued enhancement of services and support is at the top of our list of priorities, and it can’t be done without feedback and support from people like you!” said Pin, founder of 1.com.my

Download Pin’s Guide to Email Hosting

The first draft of our web blueprint has been circulated to others to gather feedback, so that it can be finalised. After each discussion, the blueprint will be updated and made ready for final submission.

Web blueprint discussion

After the presentation of the revamp goals, what’s next?

Many vendors walk in and out with solution that over promises many features, which may not solve customers’ problems. Some vendors would present themselves as consultants and start describing how the future of the web would be, not unlike fortune-tellers.

After several rounds of interviews and extensive studies into existing process flows, we managed to ‘diagnose’ the goals to revamp their website and the various measurable performance indexes of their website. Yet, managing the client’s expectations, which includes how the website would function, the cosmetic issues, the usability issues will be very crucial and needs to be addressed before the first line of programming code is written.

To better communicate with the clients, the client would need to look at a prototype. It could be sketches, storyboards or designs of the system interfaces. While presenting the prototypes to the clients, the clients would be able to assist us in providing any feedback that was missed out from the earlier stages of discussions. These feedback are then collected before the interface design is finalized. The process flows of the proposed revamped are also determined at this stage to make sure that the newly revamped site achieves the objectives.

Sketches of user interface prototypes from an actual discussion, image intentionally blurred to protect the privacy of our clients ;-)

If you are a web developer and is interested to see how we can add value to your existing services, let’s meet up!

EDMS recently informed us that they’ve decided to change their official domain name to reflect their new corporate identity.

EDMS Consultants provides software that makes business sense

We responded by wasting no time in registering the new domain name they wanted, and then we notified them about the scope of work that would be involved. This included addressing the following issues:

1) The old website address must point to the new one

2) We must update the content in the website to show the new names

3) An email migration must be performed to switch to a new email domain

4) Messages sent to the old email address must continue to be forwarded to the new email address

Our new client, Shima Asia Pacific, has had several bad experiences dealing with email service providers. They’ve often given her nothing but empty promises, but failed to provide her with the support she needs.

Shima's Third Email Migration

We were introduced to Shima by a friend who is a web developer. During our first visit to her office, we spoke to the people in charge to try and understand their issues with the existing email service provider. Apparently, they’ve been losing emails and having spam problems.

It was clear that Shima and her team were frustrated, so we did a thorough technical review of their current email server. We found a few incorrect settings in their DNS servers, and noticed duplicate MX records which were pointing to same IP address. To make matters worse, one of the pointing used was “.asia” which isn’t recommended.

Once the contract was signed, our email migration team took immediate action. There were several issues reported and our support team prioritised those issues and solved them immediately.

It is also worth mentioning that usually, previous email hosting service providers tend to not remove email domain names from their system when someone terminates their email services. This causes internal routing problems, so we’ve informed Shima, who will in turn inform her previous email host to make the necessary removal.

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