Categories
Changes on the LB platform NetEarth One Registry Price Increase

LB price increases for ccTLDs and nTLDs

These changes will go live on Saturday 28th August at 1900 BST. We were assured by LogicBoxes that the changes made on the 5th August (which was notified to the reseller base) were the only ones that affected our account, however, it appears these were “missed” and thus are now being made live.

My apologies for the short notice period on this, but, we found out last night (Wednesday).

.HOSTING Restoration pricing goes from : $350 to $450
.JUEGOS Restoration Pricing goes from : $380 to $450
.MN Register / Renew and Transfer increase by $6.00 through all tiers. Restoration increases by $40
.US Register / Renew and Transfer increases by $3.50 through all tiers. Restoration increases by $3.50
.WS Register / Renew and Transfer increases by $6.00 through all tiers. Restoration increases to $95.00
.Donuts Group 1, Restoration pricing goes from : $70 to $85

We are now able to re-enable the following TLDs :
.ATTORNEY Register / Renew and Transfer increases by $13.00
.DENTIST Register / Renew and Transfer increases by $13.00
.LAWYER Register / Renew and Transfer increases by $13.00

Categories
Changes on the LB platform NetEarth One

LB- Introducing new plans for Linux Reseller Hosting

As you may be aware, cPanel whose control panel is used for the reseller hosting service increased their pricing last year. Logicboxes have now got around to increasing the pricing for all new reseller hosting packages from August 12th. Since the new pricing model resulted in an increased cost for many web hosts, many hosting companies immediately updated their prices and plans to accommodate the new cPanel prices. 

After considering how to best address this change, LB have decided to introduce new prices and plans for all new orders starting 12 August 2020.

All new orders placed on and after 12 August 2020 will be subject to the new prices and plans. Accordingly, existing prices and plans will no longer be available and will be set to “No New Orders” beginning 12 August 2020. Orders made prior to this date will continue to renew based on the existing plan structures until further notice. We will provide nearer the time the new pricing (the link above will work).

Please note that under the new plan, customers will be able to purchase additional cPanel accounts from their control panel.

Categories
Changes on the LB platform NetEarth One

.FR Now Live on NEO

We are excited to announce the launch of .FR on the LB platform today, I had hoped to give a few days notice, but a slot with LB developers came up and we were squeezed into it 🙂

Pricing for this is as follows:

Add / Renew is $ 6.95 per year

A transfer is $6.95 including a 1-year renewal.

Restoration is $ 60.00

You will need to signup for this if you want to sell .FR, login to NEO (https://manage.netearthone.com/reseller) click Settings >> Manage Products and Pricing >> Domain Registration >> Manage TLD’s, here you can select .FR sell, then accept the Terms and conditions, and hit submit, then the same place, instead of Manage TLD’s, click “Manage Prices”.

Categories
Changes on the LB platform NetEarth One

.IO TLD gone live on NEO

We are excited to announce the launch of .IO on the LB platform on today, I had hoped to give a few days notice, but a slot with LB developers came up and we were squeezed into it (thank you LB for getting this done so quickly) 🙂

Pricing for this is as follows:

Add / Renew is $ 49.95 per year

Transfer is $49.95 including a 1 year renewal.

Restoration is $ 120.00

You will need to signup for this if you want to sell .IO, login to NEO (https://manage.netearthone.com/reseller) click Settings >> Manage Products and Pricing >> Domain Registration >> Manage TLD’s, here you can select .IO sell, then accept the Terms and conditions, and hit submit, then same place, instead of Manage TLD’s, click “Manage Prices”.

Categories
Changes on the LB platform NetEarth One Registry Price Increase

New TLD’s going live on NEO

We will be shortly adding the TLDs listed below, which will go live on Monday 15th June 2020.

As previously set, the platform will not be emailing individual signup emails (otherwise you would get spammed) and therefore we will be sending out an email on Monday 15th June to confirm they are live. If you have auto-signup enabled on your account, they will go live, otherwise, you will need to manually set them to “Sell” in NEO >> Settings >> Manage Products & Pricing >> Domain Registration >> Manage TLDs. You can then change the pricing as you wish, the automatic upsell amount is 10%.

TLDAPI Product NameRegister / Renew or Transfer Restore
iddotid$17.99$150.00
appdotapp$14.95$150.00
devdotdev$12.95$150.00
pagedotpage$10.95$150.00
lawdotlaw$82.99$150.00
traveldottravel$96.95$250.00
scotdotscot$29.90$250.00
homesdothomes$29.95$90.00
cldotcl$12.95$50.00

We will place a post on the announcements page referencing this blog post, and send out on Monday the email once it is live.

Categories
Changes on the LB platform Downime notice NetEarth One

LogicBoxes Scheduled maintenance on 15 March 2020 – updated

Updated: Friday 13th March @ 10:10

As a part of LB’s endeavours to constantly upgrade their platform, they will be performing constructive maintenance on the database. During this maintenance, they will be switching the Database WAL(write-ahead logging) level to logical. 

Affected Services : 

This update will have a direct impact on the Control Panel and API services. Hence, during the maintenance you may not be able to:

1) Access and manage your orders from the Orderbox Control Panel.
2) Purchase orders from the Supersite.
3) Access the CSV Reports portal.
4) Manage the domain forwarding service from the Domain Forwarding interface. 
5) Use the API service
6) Access the Whois service.

UPDATED:-

Date: Sunday, 15th March 2020
Duration: 30 Minutes
Start Time: 1:30 AM GMT| 7:00 AM IST
End Time: 2:00 AM GMT| 7:30 AM IST

Though the scheduled maintenance window is of 30 minutes, you may face intermittent connectivity issues for around 5 minutes or less.

Their development team will be actively monitoring the system to ensure that there is minimal degradation of services.

Categories
Changes on the LB platform NetEarth One

LB platform now has GA 2FA

LogicBoxes today completed the addition of Google Authenticate to the OrderBox.

To enable this for your account, login to NEO >> Person Icon (top right corner) >> Your Account & Security and you will see it half way down in the middle.

Please set this up as soon as you can to protect the domains within your accounts.

Categories
Changes on the LB platform NetEarth One

LB Important Announcement: Updated Terms of Service for Shared Hosting

We have received the following from LogicBoxes regarding use of the platform for shared hosting :

This is to notify you that LB are updating their Terms of Service (ToS) for all our Shared Hosting Products. In the recent investigation of their current Shared Hosting packages, LB have identified websites that consume excess bandwidth resulting in a strain on the server resources, thereby adversely affecting the server performance for the rest of the users. Given the excess bandwidth they consume, LB strongly believe that such websites are best compatible with a VPS or Dedicated Server as opposed to a Shared Hosting Package.
In order to control unfair usage of the performance of their servers, LB will be implementing certain checks on their platform. The anti-abuse checks that will be implemented are as follows:
1. LB will be explicitly calling out capabilities of Shared Hosting servers and their use cases. As a violation parameter, LB have added limitations on the usage of disk space for storage of emails and other content.
2. LB have updated the ToS, thereby allowing LB to ensure that they can put suitable restrictions on the amount of resources consumed by “very heavy traffic websites” (websites running on packages that use up 25% of server resources for longer than 90 seconds) which include but are not limited to disk space, bandwidth, number of domains, disk I/O, DB space, etc.
How does it affect you?
These changes will only affect very heavy traffic websites, i.e., those who are using 25% of server resources for longer than 90 seconds, as mentioned above.
These very heavy traffic websites will be intimated and asked to move to a more suitable platform by upgrading their package. You can optimize on this opportunity by pitching a better fitting option (for example, a VPS or a Dedicated Server) to these website owners so that they don’t have to suffer from consequences such as reduced website speed, etc.
In case owners of these websites refuse to move or upgrade their package, LB will start limiting the resources they can consume, which in turn will ensure that the rest of the users continue receiving the best quality service available.

New terms of service for the LB platform and Shared Hosting is here

Categories
Changes on the LB platform EMERGENCY downtime NetEarth One Registry maintenance - scheduled

nTLDs being set to “Do Not Sell”

We are in the process of moving the following nTLDs over to our own credentials, whilst this is happening they have been set to “Do Not Sell” on the platform.

HOST
ONLINE
PRESS
SITE
SPACE
STORE
TECH
WEBSITE
XYZ

We estimate this will be for a few days. Whilst at this state any already purchased domains will still work and you will be able to manage those domains as normal.

As soon as we are back up on these, they will be set to “Sell” again.

Categories
Changes on the LB platform NetEarth One

Further GDPR changes on the LB platform – PLEASE READ

Further to the previous blog posts on GDPR, there are now more points that have changed/updated with regards how LogicBoxes is handling this through the platform.  (a lot of the below is a cut/paste from LB information provided to NEO regarding platform changes, so we/us/our etc = LogicBoxes)

Previously LB was going to deploy TrustArc throughout the platform, this has now changed :

Applying TrustArc to SS, Partnersite:

We will not be deploying the TrustArc tool throughout the reseller chain. However, If you use cookies on your website, there are a variety of  open-source tools you may be able to utilise to obtain and manage cookie consent from your customers such as  

  1. Cookie Consent by Insites

  2. Tarteaucitron.js

  3. Cookie Consent

.ES domain registrations :

.ES domain registrations will be set to “do no sell” throughout the platform.  The reason for this is NIC.ES is not GDPR compliant, and therefore the “registrar”/Data Controller in this case, LB, would be liable for any fine.  You could argue that .ES is the entity that is creating the problem, but, as we have seen in the past with .ES they are not the fastest registry to fix things.

Webform for external contact to a domain contact: 

We will be launching a site within the next day or so to allow anyone to make contact to a domain contact as WHOIS will be anonymized for certain individuals.  More will come on this shortly.

SuperSite & PartnerSite
1. Data Transfer and Marketing Consent on SuperSite:
New Checkboxes have been introduced to the storefront that are shown to EU users. These will be shown when a new user selects a country from the European Economic Area and indicates that their account will be associated with that region. The other condition is when the user is an existing one and logs in to select an EEA country contact to associate with the domain name purchase; the checkbox will be shown before transaction completion.

 

Please find a brief understanding of these checkboxes below:
a. Your Terms of Service & acknowledgement of your Privacy Policy*
i. You are solely responsible for providing your customers with a Privacy Policy that accurately describes what data you collect from your customers and how you store, use and share or disclose such data and what choices your customers have with respect to such data.
b. Receiving marketing emails from you by providing your customers with the opportunity to opt-out of receiving such emails
i. If a customer opts-out of receiving marketing emails, that customer’s email preference will be sent to you in the customer sign up email. You must exclude all customers who opted-out from your marketing email campaigns.
ii. PLEASE NOTE: While we have currently provided you with the functionality to allow your customers to opt-out of receiving marketing emails, it is solely your responsibility to determine whether it is appropriate for you to rely on this opt-out solution or if you are required to obtain opt-in consent from your customers through alternative means.
c. For new sign-ups, the interfaces will collect consent from the customer to allow personal data transfers outside the EEA for processing because our platform servers are located in the USA.
d. If a customer selects an EU country during the purchase flow, an EU VAT ID box will be displayed to the customer.
e. For customized SuperSites, this code will be pushed into the site’s code bank, you will need to accept these code changes and check the integrity of your design and form changes. For your reference, here are the files that will be modified from our end:
i. misc/login/includes/customer_signup.html
ii. misc/signup/signup_form.html
iii. misc/login/includes/customer_signup.html
iv. legal/legal/legal.html
f. If you are using our API to send user sign up forms to the platform, please use the API methods here to send the consent you collect to OrderBox. You can also log this on a local DB to manage the opt in based marketing for new customers.
2. Consent on PartnerSite:
If a new reseller selects an EEA country from the country drop-down menu during sign up, three consent check boxes will be displayed to the reseller:
a. Agreeing to your Terms of Service & acknowledging the Privacy Policy
b. Receiving marketing emails from you
i. Your customer’s email preference will be sent to you in the Reseller sign up email. You must exclude these users from your marketing email campaigns
c. For customized PartnerSites, this code will be pushed into the site’s code bank, you will need to accept these code changes and check the integrity of your design and form changes. For your reference, here are the files that will be modified from our end:
i. legal/reseller_legal/reseller_legal.html
d. Consent from the customer to allow personal data transfers outside the EEA region for processing because the platform servers are located in USA
API changes to OrderBoxFor all LogicBoxes partners using the API, we will be making some changes to a few domain registration API calls which you will need to incorporate in your existing domain registration setup. We have documented these API changes in detail here.

Control Panel

 

1. Enabling/Disabling GDPR Protection:

 

Customers from all EEA countries using the OrderBox customer control panel will be given an option to enable or disable the GDPR Protection, which masks the customer’s WHOIS data to comply with the GDPR requirements, from their control panels. However, by default GDPR Protection for EEA customers will be enabled.
2. You will need to upload your GDPR compliant Privacy Policy:
We are introducing a new feature, which allows you to upload a privacy policy on SuperSites, PartnerSites and Control Panels. If the GDPR applies to you, it is your responsibility to ensure that you have a GDPR compliant Privacy Policy. As an organization and service provider, we have updated our Privacy Policy which you can find here.
a. There are a few tools available in the market that can help you draft a GDPR compliant Privacy Policy and make it GDPR compliant at a minimal cost
b. https://termsfeed.com/privacy-policy/generator is an example
c. Other such tools are listed here: https://digital.com/blog/best-privacy-policy-generators/
API changes to OrderBox

For all LogicBoxes partners using the API, we will be making some changes to a few domain registration API calls which you will need to incorporate in your existing domain registration setup. We have documented these API changes in detail here.