From March 2012, we have doubled all hosting account traffic allocations for existing as well as new accounts.

Bandwidth & Internet Traffic is one of the few services which are becoming less expensive by the day, therefore it is only fair for us to pass that cost savings on to our customers.

No action or activation is required from any customer. All accounts have automatically been upgraded accordingly.

The new rates are tabulated below, and can also be viewed at: Hosting Packages Available with Pricing

Since we are going into winter in South Africa where power failures are quite common, and there is an increased risk of load shedding happening – we have started looking around for more cost-effective solutions to this problem than big heavy noisy generators and extraordinarily expensive long-term UPS Systems.

A clever solution to this problem comes in the form of ultra-capacity notebook batteries. If you are working from home or in a small office where most users use laptops, this might just be the answer for you.

A standard laptop battery will last an hour or two, perhaps even more when setting your laptop to an absolute-power-saving profile. However, it is definitely not going to last the 4+ hours needed to get through a power outage or load shedding without losing any productivity. For on-site travelling engineers and reps, HP has a 12-cell battery available which according to specifications would give you 10 hours (of course, in the real world, our experience has been more around the 8 hour mark) of uptime.

Naturally other brands such as Dell have similar products available. However these high capacity secondary batteries seem to only be available for Business (non-retail) products. It shows that there are still some great benefits to purchasing your I.T. equipment through value-added reseller channels instead of bargain hunting in retail shops!

An extended battery should set you back around R 1250.00 per laptop, which compared to the cost of productivity loss is quite affordable. It has to be mentioned that the HP 12-cell battery does not replace your existing laptop battery – instead it clips on to the bottom of your laptop and act as a secondary battery. Therefore, your current / existing laptop battery will still be used and is required.

The laptop also doesn’t fit into a docking station with the battery attached which makes getting in and out of your office slightly more inconvenient, but the battery does come with a DC power connector with which you can charge it directly using your existing laptop power supply.