Singapore Pricing Changes

Effective immediately, we have significantly lowered the pricing of our Singapore-based Shared, Reseller, and VPS offerings! Additional costs for selecting Singapore are now as follows:

• Shared Hosting – $1 more per month
• Reseller Hosting – $2 more per month
• VPS Hosting – 10% more per month

The new pricing is for new and existing customers alike!  Current customers will receive the new pricing on their next renewal invoice.

If you have any questions about the new pricing, feel free to submit a ticket to our sales team and we’ll be happy to assist you!

Stop SOPA Website Blackout

Many of you read my previous post about SOPA, The Stop Online Piracy Act, and how it poses a real threat to future freedom and innovation on the Internet. Websites built around user-generated content, like Twitter or Reddit, simply could not exist if SOPA was law. In order to increase awareness about the dangers of SOPA, many websites will be staging “blackouts” to show their opposition to SOPA and educating their visitors on this misguided legislation.

Site5 will be staging a blackout of our website on the 18th and 23rd of January and if you operate a website we encourage you to do the same! If you are using WordPress there is a plugin that we are hosting which will allow you to easily display a message about SOPA to your visitors and customize the dates it will be shown. You can view a preview of that message and the plugin can be downloaded directly from the WordPress website below:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sopa-blackout-plugin

Saying Goodbye to a Founder

It’s with great sadness that we announce that Matt Lightner, founder of Site5 and former co-owner, passed away this week.

Matt was naturally key in the early days of Site5 and had a direct impact on the operation and success of the company. He had a very large role in the Site5 Engineering Team and the development of Backstage, Synco (our internal customer management and billing system), and SiteAdmin. In fact, Site5 was one of the first (if not the first) cPanel-based web host to offer add-on domains before cPanel actually had the feature. Matt even contributed to the cPanel control panel codebase when it was in its infancy.

Even after Site5 was sold to Ben and Joel, Matt would still keep in contact with us to see how things were going. He had a genuine care for Site5 that continued on beyond his leaving the company.

Without Matt, none of us would be here at Site5, and we all appreciate the energy and work he put into Site5.

A few of us that had the pleasure of working with Matt wanted to write a litte something about him, and those are included below.

Rest in Peace Matt and thanks for everything.

We first met Matt in 2006 when we started working with Site5 on a few projects. We were always impressed with how accessible Matt was; at the drop of a hat, even in the middle of the night, he would jump on chat to answer questions and give great advice. When we approached him about selling Site5 in 2008 he was very keen on finding someone who was a good match for the spirit of Site5 and didn’t want to hand the company over to just anyone. He seemed excited to start new projects, and we are incredibly sad to to see him depart this earth. Site5 will continue to be influenced by his vision of a Ruby on Rails software platform backed by performance and a caring team. Our hearts are with his family and we wish them the best during this difficult time.

- Ben Welch-Bolen & Joel Brown

I never had the opportunity to meet Matt in person although we tried to arrange it a couple times. I worked with him for a little over a year, and I knew early on how passionate an individual he was. From coding to music, it was obvious that he had lofty goals and ambitions.

My coming to Site5 was due partly to Matt, and I owe him a great deal for that.

One of the memories that sticks out, funnily enough, is our many conversations regarding the English language. He minored in English and I tend to be rather *obsessive* with proper usage of English.

Gone far too early, Matt. Rest in Peace.

- Tom Sepper

I first “met” Matt in 2007 when I started working at Site5. Matt was a smart, caring and creative person — he built a successful and innovative web hosting company at a young age and wrote most of the billing system that Site5 still uses today. He was dedicated to making Site5 a community, not just a job, something that I feel we do today and will continue to do thanks to his influence. Matt was truly a renaissance man and it’s very sad to see him leave us at such a young age.

- Graham McMillan

I first met Matt almost 11 years ago now, back when Site5 was a teeny tiny company with barely 5 servers. He and I worked together quite closely in those early years, since we were basically the only members of staff at that stage!

Matt was always extremely smart and innovative, even back then. Some of the ideas Matt came up with I’ve witnessed blossom and become the core of our (and other companies) businesses.

Matt was always extremely ambitious, and it almost seems that whatever he wanted to take his hand to was destined to be successful.

Matt’s loss is a great shame, and it’s disappointing that we’ll never get to meet up in person.

– Vince Stratful

Save the Internet!

In an effort to combat online piracy, new legislation is being introduced in the U.S. Congress that will ultimately stifle future innovation and effectively lead to censorship of the Internet. The most recent bill introduced this October is called SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and it seeks to increase the powers available to fight piracy. Although we believe that intellectual property should be protected, this specific bill is misguided and will ultimately have little to no effect on stopping piracy at a severe cost to Internet freedom.

SOPA would grant the U.S. government the ability to block almost any website on the Internet if the site is perceived to be an “infringing site.” Search engines would be required to remove the site from their search listings and payment processors and advertisement networks would be forbidden from doing business with the site. The bill provides little detail about what would constitute an infringing site, which makes the potential for abuse far greater. We have already seen how these kind of systems can be abused. In 2010, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) mistakenly seized a domain name belonging to a music blog and labeled it as a “rogue site” — the domain name was not returned until a year later (source: http://nyti.ms/uF73mZ).

As any online business owner knows, the loss of their domain name is the loss of their online brand. Pirates will simply relocate their website to a domain outside the control of the United States, but a legitimate business would not survive being mistakenly added to this blacklist. This bill also calls into question the legality of many websites that exist today which are based largely around user-generated content.

You can help stop this legislation! Please take a moment to call your representative in Congress to let them know how you feel about the Internet and how SOPA threatens the future of the Internet. You can find contact information for your specific representatives here: http://www.contactingthecongress.org

State of Site5: 2011

Happy holidays everyone!

It’s hard to believe December is already upon us! Since it’s the end of the year, that means it’s time to post a yearly State of Site5!

Boy, we’ve been busy this year!

• We added many location options: Amsterdam (The Netherlands), New York City (United States), Miami (United States), Singapore (Singapore), San Jose (United States), Sydney (Australia), and Vancouver (Canada)
• Our long-awaited release of SiteAdmin 2.0 was released to great fanfare and reception!
• Reseller Cloud Hosting was released
• Shared Cloud Hosting plans were revamped to provide additional bandwidth and disk space.
• We are 98% completed with a year-long server migration. The final notices to customers have been sent, and the remaining few servers will likely complete shortly after the new year.
• Our systems team has done a lot of refining to ensure our servers are optimized for the best possible performance.
• Our engineering team has been working on a rewrite of our billing system with the goal of the first release occurring within the first few months of 2012. Additionally, our engineering team has been working on a new internal system that will allow our phone, chat, and L1 ticket staff to be able to perform many tasks previously unavailable to them.

For 2012, we have some great things planned! Some of these items include:

• Unmanaged VPS and “Managed Lite” VPS
• Softaculous added to our servers
• Additional location options
• Additional domain registration/transfer TLDs

There’s more in store, but if I tell you, I’d have to kill you.. ;)

In all seriousness, we hope everyone had a wonderful 2011. Thanks to all of our customers for your constant support!

Here’s to an even better 2012!

State of Site5: October 2011

Happy Fall!

Every month we post a State of Site5 update to let our current and future customers hear about what we’re working on and give a behind-the-scenes glimpse into our company.

Among the items we’ve been working on:

• Miami, Florida is now a location option for web hosting, reseller hosting, and VPS hosting!
•  Our Engineering Team relaunched their website showcasing the projects they’re working on.
• We’ve added a new Question & Answer feature that’s integrated with our KnowledgeBase. We’re also adding tons of video and text-based tutorials to the KB this month!
• Our systems teams continues server migrations with goals of completing them within month or so.

Did you know?

Did you know that resellers can obtain a ClientExec or Blesta license for free with their reseller account? Simply complete the form in Backstage to request your license!

Be sure you log in using the master/owner email address. If you have any problems submitting the request, simply contact our team for assistance!

Ask Site5

Each month, I’m answering one user-submitted question, and if that user is a customer, their account will be credited with $10 that can be used towards future invoices and/or purchases with us (ie, it’s not redeemable for cash). As for stipulations on the questions that can be asked.. anything goes! Keep in mind though that only the questions that are most appealing to the widest audience will be selected. They shouldn’t be only applicable to your own account! So, start sending in your questions to asksite5@site5.com being sure to include your account number or domain name with your email if you’re a customer!

This month’s question comes from a potential customer that wishes to remain anonymous.

Is Site5 looking at offering other script installers besides Fantastico?

The answer to that is question is yes! We are working on moving to Softaculous in the not-too-distant future. It will be fully integrated with a custom interface in SiteAdmin and included in cPanel for reseller accounts as well.

Last month, the entire management team met up outside New York City. As we’re a completely virtual company, it was nice for the entire team to meet each other and get some work done. You can read about some of the shenanigans here.

As always, if you have any questions please post in the comments or on the official post in the forum. Thanks for your continued business and support!

Meeting Up in New York

As a completely remote company, online communication is very important since we aren’t working in the same building. We use email, jabber, Skype, and teamspeak regularly, but sometimes meeting in person can be refreshing change. Last week, the management team gathered outside New York City for a few days to discuss long term plans, projects, and whatnot. Many of us hadn’t actually met everyone in person prior to last week, so it was finally time to do that!

One of my biggest takeaways from the week:  we are all extremely passionate about what we’re doing here and want only the best for our customers. At one point, we even had to break out the proverbial talking sticks (okay, so they were a pen and a chili sauce bottle) so that everyone could hear who was talking without having someone else talk over them. No, seriously. Aside from that, another takeaway is that apparently the Site5 Management Team is sponsored by Apple.

It wasn’t all work though, and some interesting observations from the gathering:

• We take our ping pong seriously.
• If you have Vince as your doubles partner, you’re more than likely going to lose. (except for me, naturally..)
• We all are equally bad at 8 Ball except for maybe Vince. I’d like to blame Vince’s silly British 8 Ball rules, but I don’t think that’ll fly.
• Beating the owners at ping pong or 8 ball isn’t a bad thing.
• Justin makes a mean chili.
• Justin’s wife makes an incredible blueberry french toast casserole.
• Paul can take quite a bit of friendly ridicule.
• Paul drives like a maniac.
• Vince and Justin have a love/hate relationship:

Some of us went to the city one of the days to do the typical tourist-y things. Here’s the sole group shot from Times Square:

(Left to Right:  Vince, Graham, Paul, me, Justin)

While downtown, we ate at the famous Carnegie Deli. Great food, and Vince should definitely know. He ordered what’s called “The Melo” — an incredibly huge sandwich. He was determined to finish it and somehow actually succeeded.

About two-thirds the way through, Vince started feeling a little defeated..  until the waiter says in his seven years there, neither he nor his manager had ever seen anyone finish that sandwich. That was just what Vince needed to finish the rest! To make matters worse, the waiter then brought a comped large slice of strawberry cheesecake because Vince had actually finished the sandwich.

We went to Central Park next so that Vince could “rest”.

It was a great trip, and a lot got accomplished! We have many things planned out for the foreseeable future, and we cannot wait to see them materialize!

Host in Miami, Florida!

I am pleased to announce that we have added Miami, Florida as an option for shared, reseller, and VPS hosting! This provides us an option in the southeastern part of the United States.

As with our other location options, there are additional costs. These costs are as follows:

• Shared Hosting – $1 more per month
• Reseller Hosting – $2 more per month
• VPS Hosting – 10% more per month

If you are interested in having your existing account migrated to a new location, you can fill out the form located in Backstage and our migrations team will be happy to take care of this for you. There is a one-time fee of $5 for us to migrate an existing account.

If you have any suggestions for locations, please let us know in the comments!