Thanks for your ongoing support for 123host by being a customer. 123host is your classic “small business”, which means I can give personalised support and be agile, not necessarily having rigid policies. I get the opportunity to watch projects progress from an idea to fruition…you aren’t an anonymous username to me.

Keep in mind that pretty soon plain .au domains are going to become available.  For example I will most definitely register 123host.au.  If you have a .au domain (.com.au, .org.au etc) already, you will be given first option to grab your domain in plain .au.  You don’t have to do this, but I don’t think it will be expensive.  I will update everyone when I hear more.

While we are on domains, some of you are going to receive an email from the domain registry, emailing on behalf of 123host.  It seems they have done an audit of ABNs and Business Numbers used to register .au domains and have identified those that have expired or are invalid for some reason. There are about 30 people with domains that won’t be able to be renewed if their details aren’t updated.  This is completely out of my hands and I am happy to give you some ideas if you do receive one of these emails.  The first thing to do is not panic, in most cases it will be easy to resolve if you want to keep the domain – contact me.

I learned something recently, but first some background. If you have a multi-word domain, especially if it has the same letter at the end of one word and the start of the next, it can be hard to read when written e.g. beattheearthheart.com.au (I just made that up). Many of you would have had me suggest Camel Case, so the domain would read BeatTheEarthHeart.com.au – this is perfectly legitimate and doesn’t need any settings or anything…just get in the habit of writing your domain like that. It is much easier to read and more memorable.

But I learned there are other lettering cases too.

As I mentioned, my favourite, Camel Case; “TheQuickBrownFoxJumpsOverTheLazyDog”. But did you know that there is also Snake Case? “the_quick_brown_fox_jumps_over_the_lazy_dog”? I didn’t. So I did a bit of research and discovered the delightfully named Kebab Case “the-quick-brown-fox-jumps-over-the-lazy-dog”. I suggest you drop this bit of trivia into a conversation one day to appear very smart and geeky.

I know I waffle on about awesome customer service and truly try to live up to the 123host slogan of “giving the level of customer service I wish I received elsewhere“. I shake my head when I send an email somewhere and they auto respond “you should receive a reply in 48 – 72 hours“. I reckon I am living up to the 123host promise; during May, 58% of support tickets were answered within 1 hour and 73% were answered within 4 hours. I am pretty happy with that. To open a support ticket you can either log into the client area at https://123host.com.au (this verifies you) or send an email to support@123host.com.au – if it is an email, I may ask you to verify yourself if I need to make any critical changes.

WordPress continues to dominate as the software of choice. Please make sure your are keeping your plugins and the WordPress core up to date (Currently 5.7.1) or you may suffer the same fate as a new 123host customer whose site had been shut down elsewhere because out of date plugins had allowed malware to be inserted into his site. Keeping things up to date is relatively easy. Log into your WP dashboard and you should be notified of anything out of date. Updating is a couple of clicks.

If you want it to be even easier, subscribe to the 123host WordPress management service. I keep everything up to date for you and help with other administrative and security related tasks. You receive a monthly report on all the activity carried out. It is only $55 per year and includes some bonuses like a Divi license and any other perks I spot for subscribers. More information at https://blog.123host.net.au/wordpress-management/