On Valentine's Day we announced to our Annual Support Plan subscribers we were offering them "a gift" for subscribing to this service because we valued their business, we wanted them to get the most out of your ACT investment.

In the past, our support contracts have always worked in a “reactive” way, wherein we provided support when you asked for it. And while we believe this service has a lot of value, we’d like to do a little better, and provide a more proactive service.

Here’s the scoop.

Recently we announced our new ACT Self-Hosting Maintenance Plan. As the name suggests, the Maintenance Plan is designed for customers that manage the hosting of their own database, but want the peace of mind of being hosted. We knew from the MANY customer requests that there was a demand for such a service, so earlier this year we set about to build it. The challenge for our in-house developers was to build a service that provided 24-hour monitoring of vital ACT related services, automatically restarted services that were subject to memory leaks, supported the last five versions of ACT!, and do all of this at a cost few could resist. Tall task, but I think we’ve done it.{C}{C}{C}{C}{C}{C}{C}

Here’s what our new plan includes:

• An overview of the existing ACT! settings, including sync, sharing, and publishing settings to confirm they’re configured properly for the environment.

• Your server will be monitored 24-hours a day for select changes to the ACT working environment. If for any reason the sync service or web publishing service stops on your server, or if the server restarts unexpectedly, you will receive an email notification immediately.

• We will schedule regular ACT database back-ups and maintenance, and configure our service to send you customized email notifications based on these tasks, and not simply the notices provided with ACT v16 & v17.

• In the event of a stoppage of SQL, Web Publishing, Sync Service, or any other vital ACT related service on your ACT server, you will be notified by email immediately. You can also select additional services to be monitored at no additional charge.

• Receive weekly synchronization reports emailed to you to confirm all your users are synching regularly, and whether any user’s database is scheduled to expire (requires purchase of Topline Alerts)*

• Implementation of our custom Firewall service that blocks all inbound Internet traffic from over 2000 known suspicious sources from around the world.

• To ensure your vital ACT services are running optimally, we’ll configure the web publishing service, the ACT indexing service, and the Smart Task service to restart every morning at 3AM to prevent sluggish performance due to memory leaks. This also ensures ACT Premium Mobile runs optimally.

Normally this service would cost self-hosters $179 annually, with a $45 setup fee, but as an ACT Support Plan subscriber, you'd get this as our gift to you. There are no hidden fees, its a gift. There are some optional upgrades that you can purchase like Topline Alerts, but these are not critical options and it is your choice. And just to be clear, this would be a gift you'd be able to use for as long as you're a support contract subscriber . No upgrade fees, no setup fees, no extra charges of any kind. It’s all included with the support contract.

At this point, though, we'd like to extend this gift to all our customers interested in subscribing to our Annual Support Plan  We hope everyone finds value in this gift, and contacts us subscribe.
Details of our support contracts can be found HERE, or we can provide you with a direct quote upon request. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to call or email us.