Update News for April 2016

Here is a quick run-down on what you will find in this bulletin:

• • Term4sale Price Change April 1st

     

     

  • SSL Certificate Progress

     

     

  • April’s List Of Work

     

     

  • Price Changes Delayed to July 1st

     

     

These topics will be dealt with in more detail throughout this bulletin.

Term4sale Price Increase – April 1stAs we indicated in the February bulletin, the cost to purchase a zip code is increasing from $1.25 per month (payable to the end of the calendar year) to $1.50 per month.

Standard license subscribers (“Compulife Advanced”) who are buying more than 90 zip codes, will have that price increased to $2 per month.

Once again, those new prices are effective April 1st.

IMPORTANT: These changes do not affect those who have already bought and paid for their zip codes for 2016. Only additional purchases made on or after April 1st will have the new prices applied.

Renewals for 2017 will be invoiced at the new prices. Further, Standard License subscribers (“Compulife Advanced”) who were able to purchase up to a total of 360 zip codes in 2016 will now be offered up to 320 in 2017. We encourage those moving from 360 to 320 zip codes to take steps to analyze your results from this year’s contacts to ensure that you identify the best zip codes from your current group.

SSL Certificate ProgressDuring March we were able to move two important Compulife sites/services to our new GoDaddy server, and apply the SSL security certificates to those services. The process took longer than we thought, for a couple of reasons.

The first site/service we moved over was “compulife.net”. This is the domain name and service from which subscribers obtain the “webquote” option, which allows their sites to quote life insurance products for the cost of $96 per year.

Unfortunately the functionality of the new server, with respect to the .php software code, was different. In other words, what had worked quite nicely on the old server didn’t work on the new server, even though they were supposed to be the same.

That difference required a significant amount of time to re-write some of our code. And of course all those changes needed to be duplicated into the hundreds of subscriber accounts who use our software.

The changes especially affected those of our subscribers who use the “consumerID option”, which requires that a consumer enter their name, email and phone number prior to being able to obtain a quote. When the consumer clicks the “Compare Now”, that sends the information on to the subscriber by email.

If the subscriber was simply displaying the page from our server, in a frame on their server, there was no problem. But if they had taken the code from our server, and placed the code on their server, it required that changes be made. The code on their server needed to be updated. That proved a significant problem/challenge for some customers who have others taking care of their websites.

If we are sometimes reluctant to make changes, or are slow or extra careful in making changes, this illustrates the dilemma. On the one hand we have had subscribers pushing us to apply an SSL certificate to our site/service. This is because they themselves have upgraded to an SSL certificate for their site and it creates an incompatibility issue if you call a non-secure site from your secure site (note, the reverse is not an issue).

Further, GoDaddy was bugging us to move to a new server, as the one we were on is getting quite old (we have been on it a long time). They assured us it was the same linux operating system and it was as simple as transferring over the files. In fact, they wanted to do it for us. I said no, that we would move the service over ourselves, one at a time. I simply don’t trust promises that it’s going to work and it’s a good thing we did it that way.

After moving over compulife.net we received a number of contacts from subscribers with problems and spent quite a bit of time getting all that settled down. Subscribers wanting the changes were happy, subscribers who were operating happily were unhappy to be required to make some changes. These transitions are never easy, EVER. We apologize to anyone who was negatively affected.

The next site to change over was www.term4sale.ca, the Canadian version of Term4Sale. That also proved problematic as the company which holds the domain name could not point that domain name to the new site/server for almost 24 hours and the site was down for most of an entire day. Other problems with the changeover also emerged. We got through those relatively quickly because the software is on our site/server. Even so, we did not like being down for a day because Term4Sale is far too important a service to Compulife and our subscribers to be off-line for any period of time.

April’s List Of WorkDuring April our first objective will be to switch www.term4sale.com to the new server. The problems we uncovered in switching over www.term4sale.ca will put us in a better position to make the same changes for www.term4sale.com and do so more quickly. However, and just in case, Chris and Jeremiah will make the transition starting very late on a Friday night. They will deal with any problems that emerge on the Saturday. If all goes well, their weekend will not be too badly ruined.

Following that we will get back on schedule and move the Canadian “Compulife Basic” and “Web Quote” services to the new server. The Canadian Web Quote option will also be placed under an SSL certificate.

Price Changes Delayed to July 1stA number of product price changes were discussed in February’s bulletin. If you missed it, you can read it here:

Update News for February 2016We have decided to delay the product and price changes to July 1st. Once the above reference website work is complete, we will need to upgrade our customer database and the websites to accomodate the product and price changes, and with the delays to this point, we are going to add a month to the transition.