Reference: Notices-RSU Valuation 2015

5 November 2015

Effective immediately, RidgeStar announces an adjustment to the POP3, Email, Graphics, and Disk RSU valuation.

This adjustment has been motivated by increasing time and costs related to the operation of traditional Internet Mail Service (thus, POP3 and Email valuations are increasing) and decreasing costs associated with disk hardware storage (thus, Graphics and Disk valuations are being reduced). The adjustments are, as always, an effort to fairly distribute costs of operation across all RidgeStar clients, according to their Resource consumption and the time, energy, and costs is takes to support the specific Service.

As a result, if you (as a RidgeStar client) make limited use of the RidgeStar Mail Service, your RSU consumption should decrease (eventually leading to a lower Service Tier and a lower annual billing). On the other hand, if you make extensive or heavy use of RidgeStar Mail Services, your RSU Consumption is likely to increase, which may lead to a higher Service Tier and a higher annual billing.

We believe that for "most" RidgeStar clients, these changes will result in a smaller RSU total which will either lead to a smaller annual renewal billing or, at the last, an increased growth capacity within the existing Tier.

The technical description for the specific changes can be stated as:

#	Service	Old RSU	New RSU	New Description
1	Email	0.001	0.01	Email message handled by the Mail Server
2	POP3	.01	.02	Mail Server Login activity
3	Graphics	2	1	a Picture or graphical file
4	Disk	0.2	0.15	a Megabyte on disk

The net effect of this change in pricing and Fee allocation will be dependent upon the individual Domain(s) and whether or not the Domain's RSU consumption is significantly impacted by Disk, Graphics, Email, and/or POP3 Resources.

Why Change the RSU Fees?

The rationale behind any adjustment to Service Fees is made up of several factors, including but not limited to:

1. How to fairly distribute costs of operations across all Clients
2. Overall Business tactical strategy and objectives
3. Encouraging desired behavior

Email and POP3

Managing a standard Mail Server continues to remain a problematic exercise with continual battles dealing with SPAM and other inappropriate usage of the SMTP Protocols. We plan to continue operating the Mail Server for those clients that desire it, but we have moved all our own Domain Mail Service that we can to Google's GMail service and we continue to recommend the same (or similar) to our clients.

Graphics

The original intent for the Graphics Resource was that it cover only those files that were utilized in the interactive environment to directly support web pages. But, over time, our clients have increasingly stored other sorts of information in JPG, PNG, and GIF files that are used for different purposes. For this reason, we have cut the RSU valuation for Graphics by 50% in an effort to recognize that many "graphics" files...aren't actually graphics files.

Disk

As the costs and stability associated with disk space has improved and in recognition of same, the RSU valuation for Disk space has been reduced by 25% to pass along corresponding savings to the clients through reduced annual renewal.

When it will take effect

The modification to the RSU Fee Scale for Disk, Graphics, Email, and POP3 is being put into effect today (November 5, 2015) and will be reflected immediately across all RidgeStar sites via Administrator: RidgeStar-RSU Chart.