Reference: Notices-Pricing Model

14 July 2004

Today, RidgeStar is announcing its intent to restructure the manner in which it charges Clients for Services rendered.

Effective, 1 January 2005:

• Renewal Fees will be established as identified at Services: Fees-RSUs
• Existing clients with a service period started before 1 Jan 2005 will continue to receive service through the completion of the current interval and under the prior Service Fee structure until the natural anniversary of the Service period after 1 Jan 2005.

Why the change?

Predefined Service Packages (used prior to 1 Jan 2005) were intended to group Sites with similar characteristics together and to establish similar fees based upon the anticipated volumes of the services necessary to support the Site. This was RidgeStar's effort to provide each client with a fixed term (usually, 1 year), fixed fee approach to web design, development, support, and operation. As the Client base has become established, it has become clear that there are more variables than can be easily quantified through a series of predetermined Service Packages.

To address this, RidgeStar now measures each Site's consumption of 15 individual elements (Resources) during the course of a single Month. Each Resource is assigned a predefined RSU (RidgeStar Service Unit) value and the site's monthly consumption of Resources is simply the sum of the RSUs for the measured elements (Hits, Graphics, Database elements, etc.).

The defined Resources are:

#	Resource	Description
1	Bandwidth	a Megabyte of data transferred (HTTP+SMTP)
2	Disk	a Megabyte on disk
3	DNS	a Domain serviced by DNS entries
4	Email	Email message handled by the Mail Server
5	Fields	a Field in a Database Table
6	Graphics	a Picture or graphical file
7	Hits	an HTTP request for a file
8	ListService	for each ListServ list
9	OtherFiles	a file that is not a graphic or script file
10	PHPFiles	an operational script file
11	MailService	Mail Server Definition
12	Records	a Record in a Database Table
13	SSL	each SSL Certificate managed
14	Tables	a Database Table
15	TouchLine	a TouchLine User

RidgeStar believes this approach will permit its Clients to operate more freely to change the focus of their Site to their specific requirements without concern for "exceeding the package". Additionally, as the RSU consumption is a monthly average, each Client can determine during the current Service Period the likely fee for the next interval in advance (trends should be recognizable without much difficulty).

In principle, the Site that consumes or uses more Resources will have a larger Invoice for Services. The Site that consumes or uses less Resources will have a smaller Invoice for Services.

What's the effect?

For most RidgeStar sites, this change will mean you can expect to see either no or a small change in your annual fees. For some Sites, the annual Service fee might go up and for others it might go down. We have attempted to make this adjustment in fees to be an overall "revenue neutral" adjustment, but you SHOULD expect some sort of a change.

To determine if your site will be charged less, more, or the same for the "NEXT service period", you should be able to look at the RidgeStar-RSU Chart page on your own Site (usually in the Administrator Segment, but could be named slightly differently on your Site) or after Logon at RidgeStar.com. This will show you the monthly consumption of the various Resources associated with your Site. Finally, it will also show you the average Monthly RSU consumption during the last 12 months (this is the numeric value that will set the next Invoice Amount).

If you have any questions about this new approach, please do not hesitate to contact us.