Corporate Blog

Welcome to Night Sight Zambia clients

17 October 2023 11:05:46 +0000

We welcome those clients who are existing clients of Night Sight Zambia.

As stated in the email from Francois Marx at Night Sight Zambia on 2 October 2023, all future invoices for your hosting services and domain registration renewals will come from the same company that provides them, NinerNet Communications. Our rates for our services are available on our website. We invoice for hosting services quarterly (on the 15th of the month), and we invite you to familiarise yourself with our billing policies and procedures. Please remember that all email from NinerNet comes from addresses on the niner.net domain; do not act on any emails that purport to come from NinerNet (or people claiming to be your “hosting provider”, “email provider”, etc.) that do not come from email addresses on the niner.net domain. If your email program or service does not show the actual email addresses of the senders of email messages you receive, please configure it to do so. This is vitally important to protect yourself from phishing emails.

Night Sight will continue to provide support services in line with their current agreements with you. Please contact them if and when you need support, including for NinerNet-provided services. Emails from Night Sight come from email addresses on the nsz.co.zm domain.

Here are some additional sources of information:

Our blog, where you can find general company information and security information and warnings. At the beginning of every quarter we review our kwacha rates and revise them up or down (yes, we really do occasionally lower our rates!) depending on the exchange rate between the kwacha and the US dollar. We also confirm any mass emails we send to our clients on our blog so that you can distinguish real and legitimate notices from spam and phishing.
Our status page, that reports in advance on planned maintenance and provides information about any unplanned outages.
Our live status page, that reports in real time the health of our servers and past uptime.

We look forward to continuing our relationships with you, some of you after many years! If you have any questions about your billing, please reply to any billing-related email from NinerNet, or contact us through our contact page.

Thank-you.

Tags: billing, contact information, happy hosting customers, kwacha, quarterly kwacha rate review, support
Categories: Announcements
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We now offer dot-zm domain registrations

25 April 2020 01:56:29 +0000

As some of you are aware, we have been pursuing accreditation with ZICTA so that we can register and manage dot-zm domains. In order to accomplish this we partnered with registered ISP Preworx, and our application was recently approved.

This will be particularly good news for those of you who have dot-zm domains registered with a certain registrar who suspends and deletes domains without notice and without billing registrants, as happened most recently in February and will undoubtedly happen again in the future.

We have already transferred those domain registrations for which we are responsible. At the same time we have corrected the registration information for these domains to ensure they are registered by the correct organisations, and are using current contact information.

While we have not recommended dot-zm domains in the past for both technical and administrative reasons, the technical reasons were addressed by ZICTA within the last few years. The administrative reasons are primarily related to poor management by registrars, such as the aforementioned registrar that suspends domains without notice and without issuing invoices. This, as all NinerNet clients know, is not how we conduct business.

Also in the past we have not been able to offer any assistance — only advice — when clients had issues with their dot-zm registrations and registrars. Now, for those clients who have dot-zm domains, if you transfer your dot-zm registration to NinerNet/Preworx, you will be assured of the same service and attention to detail that you are used to with your hosting and other domain registrations. In fact, while it is ultimately your choice whether or not you transfer your dot-zm domain under the management of NinerNet/Preworx, we do strongly recommend that you do.

If you have an existing non-dot-zm domain that includes the word “Zambia” or “Africa” — e.g., company-zambia.com or company.africa — and would like to consider registering a dot-zm instead or as well, please contact us to advise us and we’ll respond with options for you. Your options include:

.ac.zm: Academic institutions
.biz.zm: Businesses
.co.zm: Commercial entities
.com.zm: Commercial entities
.edu.zm: Academic institutions
.gov.zm: Government
.info.zm: Information
.mil.zm: Military
.net.zm: Networks
.org.zm: Non-commercial organizations
.sch.zm: Schools

Of course, some of the above are restricted.

Pricing has been another reason that dot-zm domains have not been popular. To be frank, we don’t have any firm commitment from ZICTA on our pricing yet. We’d love to be able to say that we know what price we will be charging for domains next year and five years from now, but we can’t. However, as part of our application we did commit to pricing “in line with industry standards for most TLDs.” What this means for now is that we intend to charge the same price for a dot-zm domain that we currently charge for a dot-com, which is K351.50. Actually, considering we’re not paying for dot-zm domain registrations in forex, we’ll peg that at K350 per year unless and until ZICTA makes any significant change to their pricing model.

Even better is that — subject to ZICTA’s pricing — we will charge only half that, K175 for a year, for all transferred and new domains for the rest of 2020. This applies to all existing clients, and any new clients. And remember, we pay a 10% bounty for new clients — to both the referring client and the new client — based on the new client’s spending with us for their first six months.

Please contact us to transfer your existing dot-zm domain (if you have one), or register a new one. Thank-you.

Tags: domain registration, domain renewals, domains, dot-zm domains, registrar transfers
Categories: Announcements
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Rate pages updated

9 October 2015 09:29:08 +0000

In addition to posting the new kwacha rates we mentioned here last week, we have updated all of our rate pages to lower our managed VPS rates in all currencies, and provide a complete list of the huge number of top-level domains (TLDs) that we now offer. In addition to a comprehensive array of country code top-level domains (ccTLDs), we now offer 364 new TLDs, such as (for example) the following:

.amsterdam
.club
.design
.golf
.irish
.london
.news
.ngo/.ong
.ninja
.online
.rocks
.site
.space
.taxi
.tech
.website
.work
.xyz

Please check out the new rates pages:

If you have any feedback, please let us know!

Tags: accounts receivable, billing, rates
Categories: Announcements
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A note to our Zambian clients on the value of the kwacha

3 October 2015 08:13:59 +0000

As you have no doubt noticed too, the recent slide in the value of the kwacha has not escaped our notice.

Although we bill and accept payment locally in kwachas, most of NinerNet’s expenses are paid in foreign currency to offshore suppliers where our servers are located. The reliability of these offshore systems is one of the reasons we’ve heard from our clients for choosing NinerNet over other local companies with data centres in Zambia. Before the current situation, our kwacha pricing had already fallen behind the kwacha’s trajectory against the US dollar, and we were considering options to address this that did not involve a pricing shock to you, our client, and simultaneously laid out plans for future price changes (even decreases) in a predictable manner.

When we first started operating in Zambia we, like many companies, invoiced in US dollars while accepting payment in kwachas. In 2012 the Government issued The Bank of Zambia (Currency) Regulations, 2012, outlawing the use of foreign currencies for domestic transactions. As NinerNet Communications is a Zambian-registered turnover tax company, we complied. For philosophical reasons (not the least of which was to keep our pricing predictable) we did not return to invoicing in US dollars when this law was later rescinded, and the kwacha rates we set in 2012 have not changed in the three years since.

Unless the kwacha loses further value in a short period of time, this is an issue that we will deal with gradually over the next few months by bringing our kwacha rates back into line with the kwacha’s value against the US dollar.

Effective with our October 2015 invoicing at the middle of the month, our rates will increase by K3.00 per US dollar — i.e., from the K5.50 per US dollar we set in 2012 to K8.50 per US dollar. In other words — to use our most popular hosting plan (webONE) as an example — if the monthly rate was K82.50, the rate effective with this month’s billing will be K127.50. Similarly, our price for generic top-level domains (e.g., dot-com) will increase from K104.50 per year to K161.50 per year. (We will leave the price of our alternative top-level domain for Zambia [dot-zam.co] at K66.00 per year.) You can use our US dollar rates page to see where things are going; our kwacha rates page will be updated in the next few days to reflect rates at the current exchange rate that will be charged for all NEW business.

Something important to note is that accounts that are already paid up to a certain expiry date will NOT be affected. In other words, if your expiry date is set at 1 June 2016 (for example), your hosting will still expire on that date and you will not be billed anything extra. This will also continue to apply into the future; your expiry date will remain your expiry date no matter what happens to the exchange rate in the meantime. Refunds for cancelled hosting will be refunded at the rate that was paid at the time the service was invoiced.

We would like to return to stable and predictable kwacha rates as soon as possible. Assuming that the exchange rate does indeed stabilise in the near term, we will look at revising our kwacha rates — up or down, as the case may be — every three months going forward to avoid sudden changes like the one we are being forced to implement today. Of course, if there are any wild swings like there have been since the beginning of September we will have no choice but to react more quickly.

We welcome any feedback you may have on our plans. Thank-you for your understanding, and thank-you for your business.

Tags: accounts receivable, billing, exchange rate, foreign exchange, forex, kwacha, quarterly kwacha rate review, rates
Categories: Announcements
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New phone number

15 January 2014 13:58:41 +0000

We have a new phone number for our Vancouver, Canada, office, which we have added to the contact page on our website, but which has actually been on our invoices for some time now.

The new phone number is 604 630 1772. For those of you in North America but outside of the Vancouver local calling area, you can also still reach us using our toll-free number: 1 855 NINERNET (1 855 646 3763).

Those of you outside of North America may also be able to reach us using the toll-free number depending on the services available to you through your phone company or VoIP provider. If you can’t use the toll-free number, please use the 604 number after dialling your country’s international access code and the country code for North America (1).

The above two phone numbers are our only North American phone numbers. Please discard any old North American numbers that you may still have on file, as they no longer work or will cease to work shortly.

We continue to provide most support via email, and we encourage you to continue to submit support requests via email or through the contact form on our website at the above link.

Thank-you.

Tags: contact information, support
Categories: Announcements
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iCash.ca domain on auction

29 December 2013 01:18:35 +0000

We are selling the domain iCash.ca, and it is currently on auction until Thursday 2 January 2014 at 15:11 EST (20:11 UTC, 3:11 pm Eastern Standard Time). (See the World Time Server to calculate the time in your time zone.) The minimum bid to surpass the current bid, which has met the reserve price, is US$1050. Please visit the auction website, run by the domain brokerage Sedo, to place your bid.

Because the reserve price has been met, according to Sedo rules the domain will sell at the end of the auction, so if you want to buy it you need to bid on it now.

With the ubiquitous “i” prefix everywhere these days, iCash.ca could be used to promote a banking app for mobile phones — the iPhone in particular, of course.

If you have any questions, please contact NinerNet support. However, please note that all bidding and payment transactions (including escrow) must take place through Sedo on their website.

Tags: apple, branding, domain sales, domains, dot-ca domains, iphone
Categories: Announcements
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Christmas and New Year hours and wishes

24 December 2013 22:25:28 +0000

It’s the end of the year again, and a fitting time to thank you once again for the custom that you have given to NinerNet in 2013. This year was challenging in some respects, but looking at things from the positive side the challenges were the result of growth. Some of that growth continues to be the new business that you, our existing clients, continue to refer to us, and for that we are most grateful.

Looking forward to 2014 we, as always, have plans to expand and improve the services we offer to you. Some of the new services will involve “private clouds”. We have avoided the buzzword “cloud”, bucking the industry trend in recent years, but with the news that broke this year about pervasive, worldwide, government surveillance — especially through big hosting companies based in the USA — we’re getting more enquiries about setting up a cloud-type infrastructure for in-house use only, and on servers outside the US. Look for an announcement about this in 2014.

On a wider scale, 2014 will see the introduction of new top-level domains (TLDs) and stronger enforcement of the requirement to use real and working contact data for domain registrations. Early in the new year we’ll be contacting you about the latter. As for the new TLDs — a TLD is the part of your domain to the right of the last dot (e.g., .com) — early registration for some of these are underway. Their introduction has been controversial, but they may see use in certain regions and niche industries. At this time they would appeal to only a limited number of our existing clients, but we’ll be providing information about them early in the New Year too (although we can immediately register in some of them). Some examples of new TLDs include .bike (e.g., example.bike), .clothing, .construction, .contractors, .diamonds, .enterprises, .guru, .holdings, .singles … and so on. Eventually there will also be a .africa too. Please be aware, though, that there are already scams involving fake registrations in these new TLDs, so if you get spam about these please keep that in mind and ask us if you need guidance.

Finally, our offices will be closed over the Christmas break for routine business, but support continues to be monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We will re-open on Monday, 6 January.

We wish you and your family, business, organisation, employees and/or colleagues who celebrate it a very happy Christmas, and all the best for the New Year.

Tags: domain registration, domains, facebook, google, new services, scams, service hours, support
Categories: Announcements
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Kwacha rates published

27 October 2012 05:55:19 +0000

We have published our kwacha rates on our website four our Zambian clients. If you have any questions, please let us know!

Tags: accounts receivable, billing, paying your bill, paying your invoice, rates
Categories: Announcements
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Getting started with WordPress

30 April 2011 23:16:16 +0000

We’ve put up a page on our documentation website entitled Getting Started with WordPress, which is aimed at our clients that we have set up with the WordPress content management system. This is intended, as the title suggests, just to get you started — heading in the right direction — with WordPress, so that you’re not flailing about in the dark with nobody to hold your hand at the beginning. Once you’ve got the hang of things and learnt some of the lingo that WordPress uses, you can then strike out on your own, taking your blog or website where you want it to go, using WordPress to help you.

Tags: documentation, support, wordpress
Categories: Announcements
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Domain iCash.ca up for auction right now

20 March 2011 01:27:21 +0000

We have, over the years, acquired a number of domains which we have not yet used for anticipated projects. One of these — iCash.ca — is currently in a seven-day auction which ends on Thursday 24 March at 18:55 EDT (15:55 PDT, 22:55 UTC). (See the World Time Server to calculate the time in your time zone.)

With the ubiquitous “i” prefix everywhere these days, iCash.ca could be used to promote a banking app for mobile phones — the iPhone in particular, of course.

If you’re interested in acquiring this domain, please place your bid at the Afternic website by Thursday. Thank-you.

Tags: apple, branding, domain sales, domains, dot-ca domains, iphone
Categories: Announcements
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