Following the announcement that World Pay will be upgrading their systems on February 9th 2008.

Customers who use World Pay to take payments, please note that World Pay will not be accepting any payments on Saturday 9th for 8 Hours. While this upgrade goes on.

If customers would like Papal installed on their eCommerce websites while this upgrade is being installed. Please let us known, please note that we cannot modify 3rd party software.

We will also be upgrading our Word Pay payment modules to reflect these changes, and these will be installed on customer’s accounts on February 10th 2008.

We are pound to announce our latest release called VrAds. VrAds is ad management system. VrAds was designed with the website publisher in mind who would like to get his / her ads up on a site without having to spend ages climbing up a hefty learning curve. VrAds provides useful features such as Geo Targeting and ad expiration.

Virtual Web Designs will also be selling selected products as packages from the ‘Vr’ range of software.

VrAds is a trademark of Webnetics UK Ltd, and sells this script under the trading names of VrScripts.com and Virtual Web Designs.

We have decided that now is a good time to launch our own company blog. However, with every company in the world now blogging, we don’t just want to talk about Virtual Web Designs but want to provide interesting posts that are relevant to the running a company involved in website designing.

As such, we will post an entry covering a specific issue, in depth. This might range from the discussion of effective server backups, as we’ll move onto in this post to creating a form builder in PHP, from working with a specific payment processor to promotion techniques to marketing. We hope to cover topics that we are involved with on a daily basis and not just use the blog as a tool for promotion.

We are writing to inform you of an upcoming maintenance at Leeds data centre, this will affect all our servers held at this data centre

Start Date: 21/11/2007 00:01:00
End Date: 21/11/2007 04:00:00

Remedial work is scheduled between the above times for a UPS servicing multiple server racks in the data centre. Once this work is completed there is a small risk that a temporary Power Failure occur which would cause an unscheduled reboot of your server.

This only applies to customers who are currently using our spam bouncing software on there account(s).

Some of our customers may have noticed email messages “ Warning: message 1IqS2i-0004uK-7I delayed 24 hours”. This is due to our mail server being upgraded, with new spam filtering software. One of the new features is an e-mail Grey listing service.

Grey Listing works by imposing a short delay on the first e-mail we receive from each sender: when our server receives the mail it asks the sending mail server to try again in 5 minutes. This is something which all genuine mail servers will do automatically, but which compromised PCs used for sending spam often ignore.

Once the first mail is successfully delivered we then remember that sender and let further mails through automatically, without any delay at all. And a sender only has to be approved once across all users whose mail we process and so you benefit from the grey listing we do for our other users, and if somebody mails you (or any other user on our system) at least once a month then he/she will never be subject to any further grey listing delays.

Also we have placed restriction on email attachment sizes, this now has a limit of 8m per email, if the file size is greater than this. The email will be rejected by our mail server.

Since we have upgraded our spamming software. This has now produced some fantastic results in terms of eliminating time-consuming and sometimes dangerous junk mail from users inboxes.

Dear Valued Customers,

Very Important Information – Domain Name Scams

We have received a number of phone calls today from our various customers, who have received renewal invoices or emails, relating to domain names from a company called “Domain Registry of America” and emails saying that someone is trying to register there domain name(s) using keywords from there company name or existing domain names, these email are originating from Asia. These are domain name scans.

NOTE: You will only receive invoices from us, or reminders via email from us.

Email – Domain Name Scam (Asia)

“Dear xxxx,

We are a domain name registration center in xxxxx, mainly dealing with domain name registration and internet intellectual property rights protection. On xxxx we received a formal application from a company who is applying to register several domains, using "xxxxx "as the keyword. After investigation, we find that you are the original user of the keyword. Such similar domain cases may involve your trademark and company name, and may cause website confusion and conflicts. For a responsible attitude, we inform you here and ask for your opinion. If you don't mind, we will finish registration for the third company.

Regards,

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx”

Letter / email - Domain Name Scam - Domain Registry of America

Domain Registry of America our sending out "renewal notices" in official looking envelopes for international (.com .org .net) domains they do not control. The letter appears to be a legitimate renewal notice, but if you complete the tear off strip and pay your money, you will actually be transferring your domain into the control of DRoA. The letter is cleverly worded making this a legal deception.

Phone Scam - “Another company is trying to register your name”

Domain Registry of America are phoning you claiming that someone is trying to register an alternative version of your domain name. They will offer you the chance to register that domain name at a high price to "prevent the other person from taking your domain name". They will often give you a short time limit, maybe only a few minutes, to decide whether you want to register that domain name and prevent someone else from taking it.

The people allegedly about to register the other name rarely, if ever, exist, although there have been instances where the alternative domains have been registered by "the other person". If this happens, it is most likely that the domain scammers are "the other person" and have registered the domain name themselves.

Our advice is not to register any domain names with any company making such claims. If you feel the domain name is important to you, register the domain name online with us or another provider at much lower prices. You may be able to do this even while you discuss matters with the domain scammers.

On the 24th October 2007 we will be carrying out 2 sets of maintenance on our servers. This will involve brief downtime for customer.

Customer Hosting Accounts

We will be upgrading our servers 4207 & 994 to PHP 5.2.4. This was released on the 30th August and is a critical security upgrade. Sites will be affected by a minimal amount of downtime when Apache restarts after the installation. See http://www.php.net/releases/5_2_4.php for more information.

NuSphere – PHPExpress

We will be installing the NuSphere PHPExpress on our servers. PhpExpress is NuSphere PHP accelerator that provides support for loading of PHP files encoded with Nu-Coder - NuSphere PHP Encoder and also speeds up the execution of regular PHP files. While it is extremely easy to install and use, PhpExpress provides a spectacular increase in the speed of the execution of PHP scripts. If PHP script is encoded with Nu-Coder - NuSphere PHP Encoder PhpExpress loads encoded PHP scripts directly into PHP engine saving time and boosting performance of PHP interpreter. PhpExpress also implements caching for PHP engine and accelerates execution process even if PHP Script is not encoded.

For more information on this please visit http://www.nusphere.com

Due to the postal strike, we are unable to process any mail to verify renewal status of Domain Names, and Hosting accounts, until next Wednesday. If you have sent payment for renewal of domain names or hosting accounts, please contact us. If you have not yet sent payment, you can pay this online using the following URL https://www.vwdesigns.co.uk/payment.htm From January 2008, if you choose to receive your bill online, rather than through the post and pay online, we'll give you a 5% discount on all your invoice(s) and if you pay by the due date you will get an extra 5% discount.

It's all part of our commitment to keep our costs low, as well as helping to save the environment Of course, online billing also makes it easy to manage and pay your invoices, without the hassle of filing all that paper away. More information on this will be released in December 2007.

We have also introduced a new software bug tracking system. This allows us to keep track of any kind of tasks ranging from bug reports to new feature requests on all our software. Once added, each item is tracked through to completion with useful report displays to show progress of each task. You can use this system to report bugs or request new features.

We have also listed all our software on this system with version numbers. Some of the software will be labelled as project specifications i.e VWD-XXX or software titles ‘eShop, etc”.

Some of our customers may have noticed that we are in the process of upgrading our present support system. As from the 1st October 2007 our new support system will be fully operational. Our new support system will incorporate a number of new features, from live chat, to synchronising data with our local computer systems, mobile PDA’s, and have SMS support

You will still be able to send emails and reply to emails in the normal way. You are not required to log into our support system to read your emails. All your email history will be logged against your account.