SUBJECT: IMPORTANT Appnet Hosting Notification
Your account is one of the few who are still receiving printed invoices sent via US Postal on a monthly basis. We JUST sent out October 2024 hosting bills as usual and those invoices will reflect ONE MONTH as due, plus any additional fees for work requested or past due amounts due, etc.
PER THIS EMAIL, we are DISCONTINUING MONTHLY BILLING and requiring all hosting clients to contact us to provide a CREDIT CARD or CHECKING ACCOUNT INFORMATION to setup ACH payments – to make payments on an annual basis.
We can no longer accept paper checks or payments by mail.
OUR REASONS FOR GOING TO ANNUAL HOSTING
We so appreciate all of our clients, many of which have been with us for nearly all of our 28+ years. We have always attempted to keep pricing down and the only way that we know that we can do that right now is to reduce OUR costs.
We are fully aware that there will be some clients who may feel that they need to STAY with monthly hosting, however, we simply cannot support monthly billing anymore.
Everyone in America is fighting rising prices, inflation, and the costs of doing business. In the last year alone, we have seen our server costs; the costs for keeping servers secure and our manpower costs go up. At the same time, we have seen the level of spam and malware attacks on websites and servers increase dramatically, which also takes more time and manpower to monitor and handle.
Additionally, over the last several months we have seen a significant increase in accounts PAST DUE, and accounts with credit cards on file decline due to fraud alerts, clients changing credit cards multiple times a year and more.
Appnet has more than 1700 clients and due to the reasons shared above, our staff spends 4-5 days a month to reach out to more than 200 clients who are past due, or whose credit cards fail for various reasons. Multiply that by twelve months and we are spending 36-48 days annually trying to ensure that websites don’t deactivate.
Appnet does not make money hosting websites and devoting 36-48 days annually to collections is time spent that should be spent in designing websites and handling edit requests, SEO, etc.
OUR REQUEST EFFECTIVE 9/3/2024
The latest invoices that you should have JUST received should reflect only October hosting fees, plus any domain name renewal OR previous month(s) unpaid. However, we are asking you to call our office at 980-378-1845 and provide a credit card (Visa, MasterCard, Discover or American Express) to us to place on file.
APPNET ANNUAL HOSTING will run THROUGH MID JUNE of each year. ALL accounts will be renewed and charged on JUNE 16th from now on, so once you’ve made your payment, you will not be due again until JUNE 2025.
HOSTING PAYMENTS ARE BEING PRORATED FROM NOW THROUGH THE END OF JUNE, SO THE ANNUAL PAYMENT DUE WOULD CURRENTLY BE:
10 MONTHS + ANY AMOUNT DUE FOR EDITS, CHANGES, OR NEW WORK.
KNOW YOUR OPTIONS:
We realize that this may catch some people “off guard” a bit, and we apologize for any inconvenience. We do hope that you like doing business with OUR support staff and our hosting services. However, if for ANY reason you do NOT wish for us to host your website ANNUALLY, you do have the option of moving your domain name and website hosting to any provider.
If that is the case, please note the steps.
1. Upon receipt of this month’s invoice, please call the office advising us that you are moving your website away from Appnet.
2. We will zip up all of the website files and email them to you.
3. You can then contact another host to take your website LIVE on their servers. (Bear in mind that any new host will probably charge you from $150-$200 to handle that work, and also bear in mind that Appnet will not be responsible if portions of your lead / contact forms no longer work. (Some servers use different scripts for handling mailto: forms.
4. Please ensure that you SEND YOUR SEPTEMBER PAYMENT and move your website prior to October 1st or your website may shut down.
We hope that we have earned your business over the years and that you will choose to remain with our support and hosting. However, for full disclosure we want to ensure that you re aware of your options.
# About Appnet New Media Studio:
Appnet New Media Studio has been hosting and building websites for 28+ years. We are among the most hired (over 8000+ websites built), most reviewed (over 1000+ reviews on Bark, Thumbtack, Google, Better Business Bureau and more), highest rated (4.87 out of 5 stars) web design firms nationally. Our 22-person marketing and support staff is second to none. Our team is your team.
