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The lost month

9 July 2025 03:53:53 +0000

If you’re following our status blog (which we hope you are), you’ll note that we had planned to send our June invoices a few weeks late. Well, we’ve decided to reset the clock. June is a lost month in more ways than one for us, so we’re giving up on sending June invoices and just going to send July invoices.

For most clients, who are invoiced quarterly, this just means that your June invoice will be a month late, and your September invoice will appear to arrive two months early … although it will still be sent in September, but that will be two months after July instead of three months after June! Confused yet? Sorry. For our resellers you’ll essentially be billed for two months in July, but we’re assuming that you are not as disorganised and have not suffered the technical problems our office has in June, and so you’ve been invoicing normally all along.

As always though, please keep in mind the actual expiry dates of your products and services contracted with third parties: domains and certificates. Under normal circumstances we invoice clients 30-60 days in advance of expiry, but if you were scheduled to be invoiced in June you’re now going to be invoiced 0 to 30 days before expiry. For anyone whose service expires very soon after 15 July we will contact you proactively, but if we have left you too little time to make your payment for your domain or certificate, but you intend to renew it, please contact NinerNet to let us know. We will renew services in advance of your payment so that you stay online. We will continue to send scheduled reminder notices; it’s not that we’re uncaring expletives who don’t realise that our invoices have been sent late, but we’re just doing our job of making sure that you’re aware of dates and what you need to do. Just reach out to us and yell at us as needed; we can take it.

This is a less-than-optimal situation (to put it in words that any PR agent worth his or her salt would envy), we get it. (A disaster, I’d put it, more explicitly.) June was (and July continues to be) a nightmare for us in the office, but we’re just thankful that our servers have managed to run smoothly, except for the issue on the mail server that kicked off the turmoil in combination with failures of technology in the office on the very same day. The nightmare continues, to be frank, but things are finally coming together and there is light at the end of the tunnel, so it will hopefully be over soon.

Cookies scam

28 December 2024 01:28:00 +0000

Please do not fall for this scam!

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I’m from tech support. I’m here to delete your cookies.

NinerNet Christmas hours and wishes

24 December 2024 16:12:55 +0000

We’re a little late in getting this out, but our office is closed for the season and will reopen on Monday 6 January 2025. Any non-emergent issues will be dealt with at that time; emergency support continues to be available 24/7.

Of course, our servers will continue to be monitored 24/7 for the remaining seven days of the 365 they are monitored this year, not to mention the first six of the next 365. 🙂 That is to say, they are monitored 24/7/365 each and every year!

We wish all of you, your employees, colleagues, families and friends all the best. We thank you for your ongoing patronage, and we look forward to talking to each of you in the New Year. We are pretty excited about what 2025 has in store for NinerNet.

Payment dates

21 November 2024 23:20:19 +0000

Executive summary: Please pay your invoice on or before the due date!

We are writing this brief post to address a trend we have noticed in recent months. I want to make clear, though, this it does not apply to most of our clients, but it does apply to a significant number of them. However, it’s something everyone needs to know.

The trend is a tendency to leave payment of your invoice until what some people seem to think is an acceptable last minute.

I will admit that I myself have said a few times in the past that you have until the expiry date of your service to pay your invoice. My bad. This does apply to services that are 100% under our control — e.g., shared hosting (not VPS hosting though) — but if you wait until the expiry date of a service that is partially under the control of a third party — e.g., a domain registrar, a certificate authority, etc. — you are taking a big chance if you wait until the expiry date, because the chances are now significant that the service provided by the third party will go offline for a time.

If you look at our “billing procedures” page you will see that we aim to send our invoices on the 15th of the month. I admit that we don’t always meet that self-imposed deadline, but even if we miss it by a couple of days, this doesn’t affect the fact that our invoices must be paid in good time before your services expire. (Please keep a record of those dates and pay attention to our reminder emails.) Let’s look at the first example on that page, with an expiry date of 10 March. If it’s only your shared hosting that expires on that date, you get a one-week grace period (unless you’re in the process of transferring out), so even if you pay a day or two late, your hosting will not be interrupted.

However, if it’s your domain registration that expires on that date, it will go offline sometime on the expiry date between 00:01 and 23:59. So if you pay a couple of days late, your domain will be offline for a couple of days. If you’re one of the few people who don’t mind that, no problem; if you do mind that — as, I believe, most of you do — don’t wait until the last minute! Seriously.

The big however here though is that the registrar we currently use — which has changed names so many times in the last few years it’s difficult to keep track, but they currently go by the names “Team Internet” and/or “CentralNic Reseller” — actually deletes some domains before they expire! We currently know (without being informed in advance, mind you) that they delete dot-africa and dot-za domains two days before they expire. Why? We have no idea. We brought this to the attention of the dot-africa registry (Registry Africa Limited) and the dot-za registry (ZA Registry Consortium (Pty) Ltd.) earlier this year and, while they initially seemed to understand our outrage, six months later they sided with the registrar who is selling 365 days, but only providing 363 days. This is because the registrar has re-written contracts to redefine the term “year” to be whatever they want it to be. (They used to do this with dot-ca domains as well, but when we complained to the dot-ca registry, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority did the right thing and put our registrar in their place and made them comply with the dot-ca domain lifecycle.)

The result is that clients with dot-africa and dot-za domains who thought they had until the day their domains expired to pay their invoice, found that not only did their domains stop working two days before they were supposed to expire, but they also had to pay additional fees to have the registrar “un-delete” their domain, and wait for them to do so. These fees add up to several years worth of renewal fees. This also used to happen to dot-ca registrants until we complained and won that case.

It is also worth pointing out that if you acquired your domain through a “drop catcher” — a company that snaps up expiring domains the moment they “drop” — you also need to ensure that you pay your invoice well before your domain expires, at least a week if you’re paying by an electronic method. This is also because the domain registrar that almost always catches these domains (Network Solutions, aka Netsol) also engages in subterfuge to prevent our normal process of transferring your domain to our registrar, and also charges additional fees that add up to several years worth of renewal fees. If you wait until the day your domain expires to pay your invoice, you will find that we will have to issue a new invoice to you to pay these fees before we can transfer and renew your domain.

But the point of this post — which is much longer than I envisioned — is this: don’t delay paying your invoice until the day your service expires or a day or two beforehand. Sure, if the money sits in your bank account for a few more days, and you’re lucky enough to earn interest on your balance, you’ll earn a few cents or ngwees more, but at the risk you’ll have to pay significantly more dollars or kwachas! Is that worth it? No, it’s not.

Our invoices used to include a “PLEASE PAY BY” date, three weeks after the invoice date. That was our overly polite way (although that’s not the full reason) of describing a due date. Because most of our services are prepaid, and we stopped charging interest on late payments many years ago, we became quite loosey-goosey. However, we have gone back to describing that date as a “due date”, and on that date the clock starts; every day you wait to pay after that date increases the risk that your now-unpaid service will go offline when it expires.

DON’T TAKE THAT CHANCE. PAY BEFORE THE DUE DATE!


Update, 2024-11-25: Clarified that you only get a week’s grace period on shared hosting if you are not already in the process of transferring your hosting out.

Impending registrar transfer of your dot-ca domain(s)

16 November 2024 10:39:38 +0000

This post confirms a mass email we have just sent to a number of registrants of dot-ca domains.

We have decided to change the registrar with which we register dot-ca domains. We are actually returning to OpenSRS; the reasons we left them in 2018 have never really been fixed, but we maintained our account with them because, despite their operational issues, they are a decent registrar that generally tries to do the right thing by dot-ca registrants. Considering the trouble we have had with our current registrar — who go by more names than you can shake a stick at, but they include “CENTRALNIC CANADA INC“, “Team Internet” and “CentralNic Reseller” — this is a significant improvement! The new (old) registrar is, as stated above, OpenSRS, but they also trade under the name of their parent company, Tucows.

We are letting you know that you (as your domain’s owner, or registrant) need to approve this transfer because you ultimately have choice in the matter and have control over your domain. As your domain advisor and host, we recommend that you accept this transfer because it means that pretty much everything will stay the same for your hosting and billing, and the domain renewal you have already paid for will take place at the same time. Additionally, approving this transfer will not interrupt your domain’s service in any way. This is how we continue to serve you and provide our services.

One of the ways in which OpenSRS has not improved — it blows my mind after six years — is that they still can’t seem to decide from which domain they send their emails! You will receive emails from addresses on the opensrs.email and opensrs.org domains. After your domain is transferred you will go back to receiving emails from the “domainsupport” address on the niner.net domain. The initial message will have the subject, “Transfer Request for DOMAIN.CA”, where DOMAIN.CA will be your dot-ca domain. Please click the approve.domainadmin.com link in the message, select the option to approve the transfer and enter your “transfer key”, which we will send to you separately immediately after this message.

After the transfer completes a few minutes later you will also receive confirmation emails from the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) using the email address info_AT_cira.ca. All of these messages that you’ll receive around the time you approve the transfer(s) are legitimate, but if you have any questions please do contact NinerNet support.

Thank-you for following these instructions, and thank-you for your continued business.

Quarterly kwacha rate review, Q4 2024

1 October 2024 00:00:52 +0000

We no longer invoice our Zambian clients or accept payments in kwachas due to the incompetence of Stanbic Bank. This will change in early 2025 due to our planned change in management structure, which will include banking with a competent Zambian bank. Until then invoices will be issued in US dollars.

We apologize for this temporary interruption.

Quarterly kwacha rate review, Q3 2024

12 July 2024 14:10:40 +0000

Based on the current value of the Zambian kwacha in US dollars and recent trends, we are decreasing our retail kwacha prices effective today and until the next quarterly review by about 7%. The base USD rates remain the same, as do our kwacha rates for the Zambian TLDs, dot-zm and dot-zam.co.

Some sample rates:

  • webONE hosting plan (monthly): ZMW 385.00
  • mailONE hosting plan (monthly): ZMW 255.00
  • gTLD domain (annually): ZMW 485.00

Our new kwacha rates will be online within 24 hours. We are very sorry that this review is so late this quarter.

Adventures in blocking spam

7 May 2024 06:42:30 +0000

As we’ve said outright and intimated over the years, the battle against spam is never-ending.

One thing we have noticed in the last year or so is that a huge amount of spam comes from certain TLDs (top-level domains), but blocking entire TLDs is a bit radical. We have generally avoided doing so, but the time has come to block the following two alternative TLDs:

  • sa.com, and
  • za.com

These are simply two regular domains, but they are owned by CentralNIC (now “Team Internet” because they can’t make up their minds about how they want to be known) who market them as TLDs — just as NinerNet markets the zam.co domain as an alternative TLD (actually, SLD, second-level domain) for Zambia. Therefore, you can buy the sub-domain your-name.sa.com and your-name.za.com. CentralNIC doesn’t seem to make even a cursory attempt to stop spammers from using their domains to spam, so we now block all messages sent from all addresses on those two “pseudo” TLDs — e.g., spammer1@spammer1.sa.com and spammer2@spammer2.za.com. We’re considering blocking the .top TLD as well, for the same reason, but we haven’t yet. You can certainly block entire TLDs from reaching your email addresses as well, if you feel this rather extreme move will benefit your domain.

If you happen to correspond with a legitimate correspondent on one of those alternative TLDs, please contact NinerNet support and we will work with you to address the problem you will now have communicating with them.

Thanks for your attention to this matter.

Quarterly kwacha rate review, Q2 2024

3 April 2024 23:06:32 +0000

Based on the current value of the Zambian kwacha in US dollars and recent trends, we are increasing our retail kwacha prices effective today and until the next quarterly review by about 4%. The base USD rates remain the same, as do our kwacha rates for the Zambian TLDs, dot-zm and dot-zam.co.

Some sample rates:

  • webONE hosting plan (monthly): ZMW 410.00
  • mailONE hosting plan (monthly): ZMW 275.00
  • gTLD domain (annually): ZMW 525.00

Our new kwacha rates will be online within 24 hours.


Update, 2024-04-09: Corrected the webONE example rate.

Email DNS settings

28 February 2024 06:27:08 +0000

A little earlier this month several of our clients with websites contacted us as a result of being sent an email message by their website designer/manager with the subject, “Updating sending DNS for newsletters”. This is as a result of the fact that Yahoo and Gmail recently decided to start enforcing email rules that the rest of us have been following for many years, but since those two providers have a huge share of the market, when they sneeze the rest of us catch a cold.

The fact is that all domains we host are already configured to follow all the rules to ensure that your messages are securely received by destination mail servers, so you and we are already in compliance with the rules that Gmail and Yahoo have just finally woken up to.

The only difference of which some of our clients need to be aware comes up when they’re using a mass-email provider to send out mass emails. As we have long advised, even though that particular post is from only last year, we strongly suggest that mass emails be sent using a service provider that specialises in that service; NinerNet does not. Yes, we have an option in our mail server’s control panel to create mailing lists, but doing so is inadvisable unless you’re just creating a very small list of your own employees, or maybe a few of your customers … with “few” in this case being defined as only a few dozen, definitely fewer than 100. If you have more than one hundred, which we certainly hope you do, then please use a company like Mailchimp. (They’re just one example; we don’t have any sort of deal with them.) Getting many emails out to many recipients successfully is not for the faint of heart; it’s a time-consuming process involving staying on top of all of the rules to avoid spam filters that enforce those rules and deem messages as spam if they are not following all the rules. And it’s especially time-consuming to prevent spam from being sent out using those services!

To follow the instructions that your mass-email provider provides you will need to log into and check the DNS settings for your domain in the nameserver control panel, and either add the records they suggest or modify the ones that already exist. For example, your domain already has an SPF record, so you will need to modify the existing record while keeping the information that the existing record already contains. If the instructions you’re following don’t make it clear how to do that, please contact NinerNet support and we will assist you.

Thanks.

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This is the corporate blog of NinerNet Communications. It's where we post announcements, inform and educate our clients, and discuss issues related to the Internet (web and email) hosting business and all it entails. This includes concomitant industries and activities such as domain registration, SSL/TLS certificates, online back-up, virtual private servers (VPS), cloud hosting, etc. Please visit our main website for more information about us.

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