Spring 2019

Hello Netuxo clients

A belated “Happy 2019!” and thank you for your continued custom.

We’ve got some important service and pricing announcements to share with you, along with a few updates on recent work and news about Drupal 7 "end of life".

Lets get the dirty money business out of the way first...

Labour

We have always operated a sliding scale of fees as a way of enabling us to carry out labour at a low rate for the smaller and less well-funded of our activist and community group clients. We feel this approach is in keeping with our values and we want to continue to offer a range of fees.

However, we have not increased our hourly rates for several years and now we need to. We are making increases across all bands and this table explains what that means in practice.

Updates service

The cost of the Drupal (only) updates service (https://netuxo.coop/en/service/drupal-and-wordpress-updates) will also increase after being held for the past few years. Typical increases as follows, individually priced agreements will also see an equivalent % increase.

We will be phasing out our very lowest hourly and updates rates as these are no longer sustainable for us. We will manage this transition over a two-year period and will take the same approach for clients we feel need to be placed in a more appropriate band and offer a phased process. Over the next 10-14 days we will be contacting some of you directly to explain what this means for you in practical terms.

In brief

• From April 2019 the lowest  labour rate we will offer to new clients is £45 per hour.  

• From April 2020 the lowest labour rate we will offer all clients is £45 per hour.

• From April 2019 the lowest update service rate for new clients will be £90 per quarter

• From 1 April 2020 the lowest updates service rate for all clients will be £90 per quarter

Hosting

From 1 April 2019 we will also be restructuring and increasing mail hosting prices in a bid to support increased infrastructure, features and management.

As an aside, in addition to adding mail records to improve your domain sending reputation (as part of the new mail hosting set up process and cost), every website hosting package will now come with an included SSL certificate. A small part we can play in helping to secure the web.

We know our rates continue to be well below average and hope you feel Netuxo provides you with good value for money. If you have any questions about these pricing changes and how they will affect you, please contact us and we will be happy to help: office@netuxo.coop

“Thelma” and “Louise”

One of the infrastructure improvements we want to fund is to provide our customers with the ability to manage their own DNS records from within the ISPConfig interface (https://controlpanel.netuxo.coop).

To do this we intend taking on two new servers to act as Domain Name Servers, to hold and serve domain name records for your domains. This will enable us to provide customers with a single point of administration for another aspect of the hosting ecosystem.

Further news on this later in the year.

Recent project: Bridge47

Over the autumn and winter we were heavily focused on developing this Drupal 8 website for the Bridge 47 network: https://www.bridge47.org. This EU-wide group of NGOs “mobilise civil society from all around the world to contribute to a transformation towards global justice and eradication of poverty through Global Citizenship Education.”

Project requirements included high accessibility score, remote user testing for UX quality and improvements and the development of an animated data feature that takes values from Drupal nodes and displays them here: https://www.bridge47.org/global-citizenship

The site also provides landing pages for the Bridge 47 partners, news, events and blogs and a resource library with a custom search behind it.

Hosted on its own Netuxo-provisioned server, we will be providing support and updates for the site until 2020.

“I enjoyed working with a team of committed professionals who shared our values, the smooth communication on the project and the commitment and flexibility you showed to help us meet our deadlines” Nora Forsbacka | Bridge 47

Want to see what we can offer? Check out https://netuxo.coop/en/service/web-development.

New web hosting clients

Over the past year we welcomed some new web hosting clients to the Netuxo community. We would like to introduce some of them to you:

• Santa Cleta: a non-profit cooperative based in Sevilla that includes a bicycle shop and workshop, and a range of cycling workshops. The aim of Santa Cleta is to promote the bicycle as a means of urban transport, as a tool of citizen empowerment, ecological responsibility and social change.
• Fractal Collective: FRACTAL is a collective of women researchers who share aspirations and concerns, passion and determination, to address the socio-ecological challenges the world is facing. FRACTAL emerges as a group identity to make visible a space for work, collaborative learning and mutual support among women scientists. As such, our goal is to contribute to the necessary transformation of integrated systems of nature and society by addressing real problems, through action research and training based on the three pillars social participation, inter and transdisciplinarity and a commitment to transformation.

If you too want to join the Netuxo community, please check out our page on web and mail hosting.

Drupal 7 End of Life

The long-expected important announcement arrived this week: “Vulnerability:  Drupal 7 will reach end-of-life in November of 2021” (https://www.drupal.org/psa-2019-02-25 ). This provides a window of 18 months in which to plan and execute migrations for sites currently using Drupal 7.

We would recommend that more a 2-step migration is carried out, to ensure continuity. That is, to migrate to Drupal 8 and after a period of Drupal 9 stability then make a final transition to Drupal 9 in a more relaxed time frame. On that topic, the Drupal Security Team note that “... the transition from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 will not be the significant effort that the transition from 7 to 8 was” [is!].

Moving from Drupal 7 to 8 is a process, but luckily one where we have build up a wealth of experience in recent years. You can read a bit more about that here: https://netuxo.coop/en/service/migrating-tofrom-drupal

Please contact us if you would like to discuss migrating your site from Drupal 7.