We've slowly been making a number of changes, and enhancements to our hosting services over the last several months. While we are going to continue to find ways to improve things, it's about time to tally up the most important changes.
First, a little background: We began hosting sites because we found building and maintaining sites hosted with other services frustrating. We were always running in to strange policies, limited resources, slow or unhelpful support, and a lack of full control over the hosting environment. While not every site we work on is hosted with us, the move has drastically reduced the amount of time we have had to spend working around the roadblocks on other systems. And honestly it's pretty fun!
Redwood Host
Doubling Down
Having completed the major work of transitioning to the new billing platform we celebrated by doubling the resource allocation on every hosting package for disk quota (the amount of data storage allowed per account) and bandwidth (the amount of data allowed to pass in and out of each account per month), all at no cost to current or future hosting clients!
The most obvious change we've made is moving our billing system into a modern, more powerful, flexible and fully maintained platform. We took the opportunity during this change to rebrand the hosting system as Redwood Host. Now that the transformation is complete, we expect to roll out other changes in the hosting system that will be much easier to implement.
Simple things like generating and sending out invoices in PDF format is something the old system couldn't do. It's also much easier for clients login, place new orders, make payments, check their payment history, allow another person to access the same account. There is also now a knowledgebase feature that we'll be adding to over time which should help people understand how easy it is to manage their own hosting accounts.
Cloud Linux
We've added another layer of security and stability to our servers by installing a system called Cloud Linux. You can read more about this service at their site if you are curious. Without getting too geeky, essentially the system separates users in a shared hosting environment so that no one user can (usually not due to any malicious intent) use up so many resources on a server causing all the other hosting accounts to suffer, their sites slow to respond, or even become unavailable.
An additional feature that has become extremely useful is the ability to assign different versions of PHP (a main website scripting language) to each account. This has allowed us to continue hosting older sites built on legacy systems without compromising security and also take advantage of the latest versions of PHP with enhanced features a performance.
Softaculous!
Last, but certainly not least, we've add a new service to all hosting packages above Basic. Softaculous is the leading Auto Installer for cPanel. It has 413 great scripts and they are still adding more. The installation of incredible systems such as blogging platforms, content management systems, photo galleries and more is very simple and smooth. Basic hosting accounts can continue to use the built in cPanel installer which still includes several of the most popular systems such as WordPress.
More to Come
It's really great to be able to offer better value for all our hosting clients. And there's more to come as both our efforts and the Cpanel platform look for ways to make hosting a more stable, secure and feature-rich service.