Frequently Asked Questions

In keeping with our ethos of keeping everything simple and easy for our customers, we accept only a single form of payment: Direct Debit payments made through GoCardless.

GoCardless is one of the UK’s leading Direct Debit payment systems, and includes among its customers the likes of Virgin, The Guardian, and even HM Government.

The advantage for you, is that there are absolutely zero fees incurred when making payments (all fees are paid for by the recipient, not the sender); the advantage for us, is a streamlined and fully automated method of keeping track of standing order payments.

We do not charge a setup fee, and while we do require all new clients to submit a completed Direct Debit mandate form through GoCardless (to ensure that we’ll be able to bill you), your account will not be billed until the 1st of the following month.

If for any reason you decide to cancel your account, all you’ll need to do is let us know, and we’ll begin the process of closing your account with us. There’s no minimum stay, no contract, no cancellation fee, and no hard feelings; whether you’re closing up shop or you simply want to move to another provider, we feel very strongly about making the transition as easy for you as possible.

If you’d like to close your account mid-way through a billing cycle (for example, fifteen days into a month), then your website and email account(s) will remain active until the end of that month. That month will then constitute your final month’s payment to Nice As Pi, and we can set a cancellation date for your Direct Debit.

After this final month, your website and email address(es) with us will become inactive, so be sure to make a backup of any emails you need to keep. However, if you’re opening a new website with a new provider, most providers can usually recreate your email address on their servers just as we can when customers move to Nice As Pi from other providers. In this case, you’d simply need to communicate this to your new provider to ensure your Google Apps for Work account is re-provisioned for their servers, rather than ours.

If you decide to leave us, your website and the upkeep of it will be taken down.

Your monthly fee covers the cost of designing and building your website, along with its hosting, domain registration, and continuing maintenance. If a customer decides to leave us, it’s generally for one of two reasons: either their business is no longer operating, and a website is therefore no longer required, or they wish to have a new website built by another provider, which renders their existing website with Nice As Pi obsolete anyway.

In the case of the latter, it’s prudent to keep your existing website with us active until your new website with your new provider is complete. We can then work with your new provider to facilitate the transfer of your domain(s) to your new website provider.

That being said, if for whatever reason you’d like to retain your website and simply move it to a new provider, you absolutely can. The cost for doing so depends on how long you’ve been a client of Nice as Pi, to allow for us to recoup the cost of building and populating your website with original content.

This fee is also applicable if you’d like to copy any original content we’ve created for you, from your website with Nice as Pi, to your new website. This includes (but is not limited to) any original text, images, logos, and graphics, which, until the fee is paid, remain the property of Nice as Pi.

If you’ve been with us for 1-12 months, the cost will be £2500.

If you’ve been with us for 13-24 months, the cost will be £1750.

If you’ve been with us for 25-36 months, the cost will be £1000.

If you’ve been with us for 37+ months, the cost will be £0.

If you simply stop paying without discussing your monthly payment plan with us first, then yes, your website will have to come down. We’re flexible regarding payment plans, and we would ask you to contact us directly to discuss alternative payment plans (quarterly plans rather than monthly, for example) if you have any issues with payment, before taking the site down.

Ultimately however, we cannot provide a service for free.

Your website won’t be deleted from our servers, but rather placed into a “quarantine” state; appearing to the outside world as if the domain is parked until further notice. This will happen one month after the last failed payment, unless an alternative payment plan has been arranged.

If you’d like to leave Nice As Pi and move to another provider at any point, you can of course keep your domain(s).

Porting domain(s) out incurs a one-time fee of £19.99 per domain.

We host with SiteGround, using lightning-fast SSD servers based right here in London.

Founded in 2004, SiteGround is now one of the highest-rated and most consistently reliable server companies out there, hosting more than a quarter of a million websites worldwide, and classed as “Outstanding” (4.7 out of 5, based on 799 reviews) on WhoIsHostingThis.

Boasting a 99.9% uptime guarantee, super responsive servers, and 24/7 technical support, hosting with SiteGround means that in the unlikely event that something server-side might bring your site down, we can communicate directly with them immediately, to get things up and running again.

Also in keeping with our firm belief in keeping things simple and solid, we register all new domains through our hosting company, SiteGround.

Registering domains with the same company we host with means we can work on both your website and your domain through a single, secure point of access. This drastically reduces the time inherit with actions like moving websites built on a test platform, to their permanent domain.

It keeps things simple and easy for us, which keeps things quick and reliable for you.

Absolutely!

Domain registration and the transferring of existing domains, by default includes a single domain – although many businesses opt for additional “redirect” domains to aid their customers in finding their website. For example, our website is niceaspi.co.uk, however we’ve also registered niceaspi.com to help redirect visitors to our website who happen to mistype our web address. If a customer visits niceaspi.com, they’ll automatically be redirected to niceaspi.co.uk.

If you would like to register or transfer more than one domain for your website, additional domains can be registered or transferred for a fixed price of £19.99 per domain, per year.

Of course!

We can build your new website on a test platform, before linking your existing domain(s) to your new website’s permanent location on our server. However, we generally advise moving your domain(s) to our account with SiteGround.

Having your domain(s) listed in the same location as your website’s server means incorporating your domain into your package with Nice As Pi. It keeps things simple and easy for you, as your domain(s) and hosting are all under the same roof. You wouldn’t need to worry about paying an external domain provider an annual fee to keep your domain active anymore, because that annual fee would be included in your package with us.

Keeping your existing domain registered with an external provider poses no technical issues, but it does mean that your current domain provider will continue to charge you an annual registration fee, to keep your domain active. Such a fee would be completely separate from Nice As Pi, and it would therefore be entirely your responsibility to make sure your external domain provider is paid.

Moving a website from one domain to another domain is a process known as “site migration”. You might come across the need for this if, for example, you decide to rebrand your business.

It’s important to be aware that migrating a website from one domain to another can result in a negative impact on your search engine rankings.

This impact may be significant at first, but it’s ultimately a temporary concern. As internet traffic begins to flow through your new domain, search engines will begin to “trust” it. This growing trust will see your rankings improve again, over time.

Website migration is something that lies outside the realms of typical website maintenance, and is therefore a chargeable extra. We charge £39.99 to migrate a website, and the bulk of this fee goes directly to our server provider, SiteGround, to assist us in facilitating the migration of your website.

Building your website will typically take between four and six weeks, depending on the complexity of the design and the amount of new content required. This timescale includes the full design and build from start to finish, along with all email setup and domain registration.

If your website does happen to be particularly complex or heavy on original content, we will of course provide you with a more specific estimate of timescale prior to starting work.

Yep, that’s basically it!

The whole idea at Nice As Pi, is to keep things as simple and easy for you as possible. Whenever you need an edit, addition, or update for your website, just pick up the phone* or shoot us an email, and we’ll take it from there.

* We’ll provide you with a direct contact number, so you can even reach us out-of-hours.

During the design process, you can be as involved or detached as you’d like to be. If you have an idea about how you’d like your new website to look or function, then just let us know and we’ll be more than happy to go over your content with you.

This is your website after all, but if we feel you might be leaning towards any catastrophic design or content choices, then we believe it’s our duty to let you know. A good case in point would be the inclusion of low resolution images on your website. Sometimes, there might be specific images you want to include, however if those images are of a poor digital quality, then it can make even the most beautifully crafted website seem far less effective than it otherwise could be. In instances like this, the best option can often be to either compromise on including the images, or to re-create them from scratch if possible.

After your new website goes live, we will at times need at least a little direction from you regarding updates, edits, and additions, in order to assist us in maintaining a high quality user experience for you and your customers.

Regarding your text content: we will of course require pre-written copy from yourself (either from your current website, written by your own hand, or by a copywriter of your choice) to include in the final build. We include the checking of grammar, spelling, sentence structure, and formatting of all text, before taking your website live.

If you need images or video uploaded to your website, then we can provide you with a secure method of getting the highest resolution files to us, over the air.

“Terms & Conditions” pages are detailed, legal documents that we ourselves do not write. We recommend enlisting the services of a legal professional to assist you in the creation of such a document.

However, once the “Terms & Conditions” document has been created (or if you already have one you’d like to include on your new website), then we can of course create a page for your website to house it.

Our websites are generally limited to 1Gb in size, including all media files, databases, scripts, and styling.

The “average” webpage currently (as of September 2016) sits at around 2.3Mb in size. With 1000Mb to every 1Gb, a full website would therefore need to comprise 434 pages of average weight to hit a 1Gb total website size. With our background systems and processes generally weighing in around 100Mb-300Mb, that leaves us with more than 300 pages of average weight to play with, per website!

Along with high resolution images, video and audio files are the biggest culprits of a large website file size, and the largest the website’s files, the slower it is to load. This is why we offer full video and audio optimisation for your new website. We’re able to balance the highest quality picture and the speediest video stream with the smallest possible file size. The smaller the files contained within a website, the quicker it will load.

Nice as Pi can assign and set up a near-unlimited number of email addresses for you; each fully push-compatible, and professional branded with your company name.

All of our email addresses are set up and hosted through Google Apps for Work.

Google’s G Suite (formerly Google Apps for Work) is widely regarded as one of the very best in the industry when it comes to professional email hosting for businesses. It includes familiar services like Gmail, Drive, Calendar, and Docs, all branded with your own company name. It also offers users the enormous advantage of practically eliminating the risk of your legitimate outgoing emails winding up in your customers’ junk folders.

More than five million companies worldwide, including Uber, FedEx, and Ocado, all rely on G Suite, and 60% of Fortune 500 companies have chosen the service as well.

As part of your monthly package with Nice as Pi, we’ll set up your email accounts for you from start to finish, making sure all of your devices are fully synced and operational. We can even create a customised email signature for you, including your logo and social networking links, at no extra cost.

We rely on G Suite ourselves, which is why we feel confident in offering it to our customers. However, please be aware that Google Apps for Work itself is a separate service provided by Google, and you would thereafter be billed separately and directly by Google themselves.

The service is currently (as of April 2019) priced by Google from £4.60 per user (individual mailbox), per month. Although a single user can have as many email address aliases (combined mailbox) as they require, even with only the basic £4.60 plan.

There is reasonable limit on the amount of edits and additions we’re able to perform on an individual website over the course of a month. At the moment, we’re placing that (flexible) limitation at five updates each month.

This means that if you need additional copy to be written, images or videos to be optimised and uploaded, or the creation of an additional email account, then any one of these tasks will typically count as one of your five edits and additions. However, if you’ve used each of your five edits and additions before the end of the month, and you desperately need something new to go live on your website, it’s very unlikely that we won’t be able to accommodate the edit or addition.

The limit is more to prevent a hypothetical situation in which a single customer monopolises our time, to the detriment of our other customers. We want to be able to consistently provide a timely, high quality content creation service to all of our customers, and the best way to guarantee this is to impose a (flexible) limitation on the amount of edits and additions we’re able to make to each individual website over the course of any given month.

We employ a number of redundant safety systems ranging from hard copies of websites to weekly, cloud-based backups. The chances of a catastrophic server failure is an extremely slim one, but as the potential damage from such a loss could be significant, this is precisely why we so vigilantly safeguard both you and ourselves against such events.

In the enormously unlikely event that the worst does happen, we cannot be held accountable for any subsequent loss of business due to your website being inactive or corrupted. We will however work tirelessly to ensure that your website returns to full functionality as quickly as possible.

Absolutely not.

Selling or communicating our customers’ private information to any third party is something we have never done, nor will we ever do.

The best way to reach us is by email, phone, or via our contact form.

Our hours of operation are generally 10am-6pm, Mon-Fri, although emails and messages via our contact form are checked seven days a week, and virtually round the clock. So, if you have a pressing need and it’s 6:30pm – send us a message anyway, and we can often get started on addressing your need right away.