So we finally got off our butts and got a bona-fide SSL certificate for Sabrienix’s client portal instead of making do with one from CACert. We’re still going to use CACerts for the https access to things like Mail administration and suchlike, but for prospective customers to click on “order” and then see “security alert!” – that just looks bad.
I’ve been doing a lot of hacking on WHMCS integration, and today I managed to get the affiliate program integrated with the main website – meaning that people can drive traffic to specific parts of our website instead like this of to a basic “affiliate” URL and it’ll still count as an affiliate link. Sabriena (who’s the only artistic person in the whole company at the moment) said she’s going to work on some button graphics pretty soon too. We’re trialing it out at 5% commissions, recurring, but I hope to raise this later – I’d rather raise it later on than have to drop it in future because we bit off more than we can chew. If you’re interested in putting this stuff on your site to maybe earn a little cash, let me know – you don’t have to be a customer to be an affiliate.
I also started working on an automation plugin so that Mumble servers will automatically provision after someone’s paid for them, but that’s proving to be easier said than done. I would like to automate most everything if I can, but I don’t want to use something dodgy and I don’t want it to be fragile.
Oh and I also spent the better half of yesterday configuring Nagios for our network monitoring, since we’re outgrowing most of the paid monitoring sites and I need to cut back on expenses and concentrate on growth. Nagios certainly is a beast to configure for the first time, but I finally have everything up and running smoothly. I had it pointed at a test Murmur for monitoring, which I stopped and started repeatedly to check the notifications system… The downside? I can’t seem to find a way to scrub that downtime from the history, so Nagios insists we’re at 99.95% availability because of that and a couple of misconfigured checks. It’ll grow over the next month, I’m pretty sure of that.
Tags: sabrienix