connection

Updates, new services and price changes

posted in: News

I hope this finds you well. I’ve a few updates to share:

1) Services via CDN
We have been quietly incorporating many of our services to be delivered via CDN / Content Delivery Network. In case you were wondering what this is and how it works, please check this out: https://www.purpledogdesign.com/pddwp/news/what-is-a-content-delivery-network-and-how-does-it-help/ We don’t currently have any plans to charge for this service. However, we do offer additional benefits for professional plans that provide additional enhancements. If you would like to discuss this further, please get in touch.

2) Two Factor Authentication
Did you know that most passwords can be guessed or “cracked” within a matter of minutes? A recent article highlighted how long it would take to crack typical passwords (see image: https://i.redd.it/jzm72aec8ff51.jpg)

If you use weak passwords, or reuse them on several sites, you risk getting hacked and that brings a whole heap of trouble. As an alternative, you can try using Lastpass password manager – or at the very least, you could try using something like a three-word-phrase, so that it’s easy to remember but hard to guess. Where possible, always use Two Factor Authentication. You can now enable TFA on your purple dog account here: https://www.purpledogdesign.com/pddwp/clients/user/security

3) New Service: Dark Web Monitoring
Most of us store information online, whether personal or for business. Hackers and identity thieves don’t sleep. They use multiple methods, cyber-attacks and phishing scams to try to access your sensitive information. Cyber-crime is real and includes a huge range of fraud, identity theft and scams. If you or your business fall victim to any of these, it can be a massive problem, costing time and money to fix.

We already provide basic web monitoring for Club Purple subscribers, which includes scanning your website for any malicious hacking attempts or content. Now you can go one step further with our dark web monitoring service, which proactively scans and provides alerts if any keywords, names or emails you provide are flagged up. We will monitor these 24 x7 x365. Interested to discuss this further? please get in touch.

4) New Service: Live Chat
Have you ever visited a website and used live chat to get instant answers? Well now you too could have live chat on your website to provide fast response to customers. You can either manage the chat yourself, or we can provide that service for you. If you would like to discuss this further, please get in touch.

5) Price Changes effective 1st April 2022
We have not introduced any price increases for a long time, instead choosing to wear a few extra costs ourselves in order to pass on continued value to our customers. However, this is our first price increase since 2015.  A number of factors have impacted our ability to keep recurring prices static – brought about by Covid, inflation, low NZ dollar exchange rates – amongst other factors – all of which have led to increases in our supply chain costs as our suppliers increase their prices, thereby impacting on our ability to earn. While we are reluctant to increase prices, we’ve kept these as small as possible simply to cover our cost increase – and typically this is at approximately 3% across most services, which is less than inflation.

  • For an average customer, the price changes represent a monthly increase of around $2 ~ $3 per service.
  • We have decided not to increase domain name pricing.
  • If you are affected by these price changes, you will see the increase in your next invoice.

We trust that you’ll agree these still represent excellent value.  If you have any questions, please get in touch.