Clockwork Internet
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Lightning Fast Internet Hosting

Clockwork Internet provides all of your internet hosting needs from just basic e-mail accounts, using your personal domain address for that professional appearance, through to sophisticated, full-feature website hosting with your personal control panel, enabling you to display to the world that essential, professional internet presence. Here at Clockwork Internet we talk your language and we take away the technical worries. We are proud of the relationship that we establish with our clients and we enjoy seeing them grow and flourish. Take a look around and if you have any questions don't hesitate to Contact Clockwork Internet today!

Clockwork News

cPanel Price Increases

Posted by Nick">Nick on Wednesday, 3 July, 2019

On Thursday, 27th June cPanel made an announcement that sent shock waves through the web hosting industry.

What is The News?

In early 2019 cPanel were bought out by Oakley Capital, a venture capitalist group. Oakley Capital already had a business portfolio that contained a number of web hosting companies as well as the Plesk control panel. With their purchase of cPanel they now have almost total control of the web hosting control panel market.

Most web hosts were expecting the price of cPanel licences to increase after this takeover but not by the amount that was announced last Thursday.

About The New Pricing

In the past cPanel has always used a simple pricing structure with a flat rate for all server licences. This flat rate was applicable regardless of the number of accounts hosted on a server.

This has now changed and the new pricing model is based on the number of accounts running on each server. This means that the cPanel licence cost for heavily populated servers could increase by as much as 1,000% (yes – that is 1,000%).

How Will This Impact Clockwork Internet clients?

We still are looking at various options but we anticipate that we will move to an alternative, cheaper control panel provider which will enable us to retain our existing price structure.

Assuming that we do decide to move to an alternative control panel provider, any of our clients preferring to continue with cPanel will be able to do so but (regrettably) the cPanel price increase will have to be passed on to those clients in the form of increased hosting fees. We shall contact our clients individually during the course of the next two weeks to determine their preference and a quote will be provided to any client that wishes to retain cPanel.

That said, we are assessing alternative control panels and in particular the DirectAdmin control panel. A move to DirectAdmin would obviate the need for an increase in the cost of your hosting plan as the DirectAdmin pricing is pretty much in line with that of the current cPanel pricing.

However new accounts would have to be created for all of our clients, followed by a migration from your old cPanel-enabled account to your new DirectAdmin-enabled account. We would handle the migration for you. Whilst we would hope, and do our utmost to avoid it, we may have to consider a small fee for this move as it requires quite a lot of staff time.

DirectAdmin

DirectAdmin is a web hosting control panel that has been around for more than fifteen years and whilst it has nowhere near the market share of cPanel or Plesk it’s still a very capable control panel with a good track record. It doesn’t have the same number of features as cPanel but it does the basics very well and we’re happy to use it. It already integrates with CloudLinux, Softaculous and other things that you will be familiar with.

You can view a demo of DirectAdmin here, and if you think the interface may take quite a bit of getting used to they plan to release in the next couple of weeks this new skin that should help cPanel users to feel at home.

When Does The New Price Come Into Effect?

cPanel have announced that the new pricing will start on September 1st, 2019 so any and all moves across to DirectAdmin will have to be completed by 31 August.

We hope this has provided some clarity on the situation. We hate having to raise prices and/or cause disruption to clients but due to the actions of cPanel we are left with little choice but to seriously consider a move to an alternative control panel provider and/or to pass cPanel price increases on to clients who wish to retain cPanel.

Welcome to the new Clockwork Internet website

Posted by Ryan on Saturday, 1 September, 2018

Following the launch of this, our updated company web site, we shall continue to publish on this page: news, updates, comments and recommendations from the team at Clockwork Internet.

We started in the web hosting and development business in Europe in late 2000 and we brought almost ten years of experience with us when we relocated to New Zealand in 2009. Over the years we have been involved in many exciting projects, both large and small and we have been delighted to see our clients grow and flourish. In addition to New Zealand, we have team members in the USA, the UK, Serbia, Nepal, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, The Philippines and Indonesia.

In addition to sites that we have designed, we also host many sites designed by our clients themselves and we are happy to help with any difficulties that they might have. Check out our web hosting packages where you will find our rates to be highly competitive.

Subscribe to this page for future announcements and please do contact us at any time with feedback about any of our sites or if we can help you with any aspect of your online business.

Faster Website Loading Times

Posted by Nick">Nick on Wednesday, 10 May, 2017

Over the past couple of weeks and behind the scenes we’ve been quietly rolling out some web server changes that will have dramatically decreased the load times of our clients’ website(s).

What’s more, unlike other companies that charge extra for this service, we’ve included it free of charge in all of our hosting plans.

For the geeks among us, here’s what we’ve done:

1. We’ve moved over to a Litespeed PHP handler, meaning PHP requests are now processed much quicker than before.

2. We’ve upgraded the Apache web server to include the OPcache module, which again, improves PHP performance.

3. We’ve implemented a server side cache (Varnish) to cache content. This means that a lot of content will now be served directly from the cache, rather than being passed to PHP to process each time a visitor accesses your website. This means quicker load times for your website and less strain on the server as it isn’t needing to handle as many PHP requests.

Our real world tests have shown a speed increase on EVERY website that we’ve tested, with some websites showing as much as a 66% decrease in page load times.

Quicker page load times mean higher visitor retention and potentially better search engine rankings, as recent indications are that Google favours sites that load faster.

Facebook or Website?

Posted by Ryan on Thursday, 16 October, 2014

Are you trying to sell on Facebook, but losing sales because your posts are slipping down the Facebook page(s) and out of sight as other posts are added?

If you have your own Facebook page, have you considered what might happen when Facebook changes its rules or the way their site works? This has happened before and it will happen again.

If you have a range of 2 or 3 items to sell and you are selling on Facebook, that may work for you. But if you have more than a few, then you need an online shop to manage and sell your products while using Facebook to drive traffic to your store.

A dedicated website presents a professional image and is far more powerful than a Facebook page. You should not use Facebook alone. Facebook should be supplemental to your website. Why? Here are just a few of many reasons:

  • You have no control over Facebook. It’s a ‘free’ service that they provide for you to use at their pleasure. And they will do whatever they want, whenever they want, with your presence on their site. Facebook is a constantly evolving, social website and the service that they provide could be changed, taken away, or be the subject of a number of other undesirable events at any time. Without notice! You do not own your Facebook page – but you do own your online store/website.
  • You should not place your online business presence into the care of an entity over which you have NO control whatsoever.
  • You grant Facebook the right to do absolutely anything they wish with absolutely everything you put on Facebook – even to the point that you waive your rights over any intellectual property that you own (read their Terms!)  Scary eh?
  • Understand that your website brands you, but your Facebook page brands Facebook. Your colours, your style, your logo – you can customize absolutely everything on your website to suit your brand. Facebook does allow some customisation of pages and images, but overall the site still looks like Facebook. It does not properly represent you.
  • People searching the web for your store or your products will NOT easily find what they’re looking for on Facebook. And if visitors have to search, they’ll very often just go somewhere easier.

We are not anti-Facebook. Used correctly, Facebook can be a fantastic tool to help grow your brand and your business, but its real power lies in the way that it can complement your standalone web presence.

Client Testimonials

Clockwork Internet 5 out of 5 based on 17 ratings. 17 user reviews.
Clockwork Internet
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