EZ Marketing | Updates | Tips

Ezcapper is a business that has been operated as a side-gig for over 10 years. We are not a dedicated sports handicapping software company fighting for every customer in the market. Most of our team are freelancers and have day-jobs. Therefore our customers must fully understand the following prior to engaging with us:

• We do not provide Phone Voice Support under any circumstances – There is no client or business large enough for us to engage in providing phone support. Most phone dialogs are non productive, repetitive and without purpose. If you require detailed explanations, have difficulty in writing or are not comfortable with communicating using modern communication tools then please try another company. We understand some clients are “old-school” (i.e. elderly) and many handicappers are telemarketing types and thus love to talk. Unfortunately we are also not sales guys and are don’t have the patience to engage on this.
  
• Support is via Email – We will respond to most emails within 24 hours. Our emails are concise, detailed with screenshots and precise instructions. We are developers and are used to working 100% virtually. If you can’t handle this, we are not the right firm for you. We shoot for a one day turn around time but on holidays we may be away and not respond. On average our customers (after their site has been setup) contact us no more than once per month (90% of our customers contact us only perhaps 2x per year). If you feel that you are going to need to communicate with us daily, then we are not the right
  
• Text support only for emergencies – In the case of emergencies such as the server being down then please contact us by text. Otherwise we will not respond to non-emergency text messages sent to us and will block you if it is repeated.
  
• No provide computer support or education – We often get customers who know nothing about computers and have problems setting up their computer. Note that we don’t support your computers or provide any education whatsoever. As a business policy we prefer to deal with tech savvy low maintenance customers. If you are not at least technically proficient, then we are not the company to work with.
  
• We are not Amazon or Walmart – We do not provide real-time support and certainly are not a consumer-facing business. Therefore don’t expect that level of service from us.
  
• Notify us on Updates – Often teams will change names especially in college sports. If you notice something that has changed, let us know and we’ll update it. Note that changes will be done as soon as we are available but some changes require
  
• Software Customizations – Some customizations are easy to perform. These include labels and image modifications. Functionality changes are difficult and we do not provide functionality customization.

Note that we reserve the right at anytime to terminate any customer engagement without notice. All fees owing will be refunded within 24 hours of termination.

We’ve recently been experiencing DoS attacks on our server.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack.

After further investigation we’ve found a patch that will prevent our SQL database server from shutting down in case this reoccurs.  This patch will be applied at midnite September 7th, 2010.

In addition we’ll be transitioning some clients over to new cloud-based servers shortly that will provide infinite scalability.

I get a lot of emails from customers who tell me that their site is slow or that they can’t access the site.  Our servers are hosted at a state of the art data center and the server is very rarely down.  If we need to reboot the server we typically do it in the middle of the night and it takes no more than 5 minutes.  We also continually optimize the server and upgrade it so our customers get the best performance available.   My answer then is that the issue is rarely from our end.

Out of 10 customers who complain nearly 10 always come back and tell me that the issue was on their side.  Either because of their computer or their own network connectivity.  When reporting a slow site response please send in a screen shot of these two tests:

1. Speedtest – http://www.speedtest.net/results.php – This will tell you the speed of your network connection.
2. Traceroute – http://network-tools.com/–  Type your website name (e.g. www.ezcapper.com) in the submit box and press GO.  Also select TRACE as the option in the above section . On the next page you will get the Traceroute results.  Please copy and paste that and send it back to us.

We have upgraded our server and facilities since May 27, 2010.  Here are the specs of the new server.

1. Intel Xeon 3110 with redundant hard drives.
2. Daily Backup
3. Data center in Texas

You probably have noticed that the server is much faster than in the past.  Also for some customers who wish to obtain their own IP address, this can be done as well for a small monthly fee.

This blog is to keep our customers apprised on all our developments.  As a full-service company we provide complete solutions to help our customers earn more money.  Subscribe to our RSS Feed by adding us to Google Reader or other RSS reading tool.

Contact us if you have any questions on any of our services.  We can be reached at your convenience.