Moonfruit Lounge

Effective immediately, we have had to raise our domain name prices from a basic price of £8.99/$12.99/€11.99 to £10.99/$14.99/€12.99 including UK VAT. There are several reasons for this, which are really based on the wholesale prices of domains increasing and not us wanting to take more of your money.

As some of you may know, most domain wholesale prices are actually set in USD (US Dollars). Two things have happened to affect the rate here. Firstly, Verisign (the registry that manages COM/NET domains) has decided to increase domain name prices for the 3rd time in 4 years by another 7%, taking the total increase to about 22% since 2006. Secondly, the GBP (British Pounds) exchange rate has fallen vs the Dollar (and Euro) significantly in the last couple of years, which makes prices more expensive for all domains. We try to keep all domains at the same price and manage profitability across them all as a group, which is why all domains are affected by this price increase.

Many other domain providers have also raised their prices in the last year or so in response to the price increases. They also tend to quote prices excluding VAT, while we quote prices including VAT. For example many providers may quote for a £9.99 domain + UK VAT = £11.73, while we are charging £10.99 including VAT.

Remember, you still get a free domain voucher with SiteMaker Standard and Plus accounts with two vouchers for a Max account. So these are now even better value.

And with all of our domains you still get 5 free mailboxes, so we hope you still feel it’s a good deal.

We did notice that there was a bug with the voucher pricing: they were still at the old prices and did not fully cover these price increases. We have now fixed this bug and we have a list of customers who have had to 'top-up' with a payment to make the purchase. We will refund that 'top-up' to all those customers over the next 24-48 hours. We can only apologies for the inconvenience that this has caused.

So there you have it. And just in case you thought this was a sign of things to come, we have no plans to increase our prices on the software. In fact we haven't put prices up on SiteMaker for over 5 years even though we continue to develop the product and release more features on a regular basis.

If you ever have problems accessing your email through the Moonfruit portal i.e. moonfruit.com (via the Domains tab) or you seem to be getting errors in you mail client e.g. Outlook or Mail then the quickest way to access your mail is via Webmail.

Simply access your account using:

• http://webmail.mysitename.com

So simply add 'webmail.' to the front of your domain name without the www. This will bring up your webmail login page. Add your mailbox name (not an alias as this won't work), i.e. your full email address in the top fields and your email password in the field below e.g. mailbox@mysitename.com

The same applies to all other domains where a mailbox has been set up, and don't forget to use the mail box name not an alias.

The other good thing you can do with webmail is that you can bookmark this webmail address to your Favorites in the browser.

Hope you find this useful.

Walt

Well, more half a dozen simple steps than just a few. But it is fairly simple.

Once your domain order is complete, you can associate your domain with your website. You can also create up to five individual mailboxes with your domain. Within each mailbox you will also be able to create as many unique aliases as you wish. Alternatively you can also forward your addresses to external email accounts like GoogleMail, Yahoo and Hotmail, which you already own or have access to.

For a quick introduction on how to set up your email just read the instructions below...

So you're now the proud owner of a domain name or you've been one for while and you want to set up your email so that you can access it on line.

It's all pretty easy with webmail, you just have to remember to use your mailbox name and not an alias to log in. There are a few other rules but we'll cover those below. So if you need some help, have a problem to solve or you're just curious please read on...

Hi, Dan here, SiteMaker's HTML developer guy. I've been working to make the HTML that we output a little more user and search engine friendly. As you may or may not know, we generate an HTML version of your site mainly for SEO reasons but also as an alternative for people who don't have Flash or are using a non-visual web browser. If you wanna know exactly what I've been up to, then read on...