State Of Site5 February 1st 2010

Just like we do every month, we’re taking a moment to update everyone on the State of Site5. As usual we’ll tell you what’s been happening since our last update, and what we’ve got coming ahead this month and next.

First, we started the first migrations of our existing shared boxes to our new central mail system. We have done two live tests so far and the results are looking good, we have a few more tests and then we will slowly be rolling this out to all our servers. Our goal is to make this process as near to 100% seamless as possible, unfortuntly there are a few rare mail setups that might cause a problem. We will be giving our customer’s plenty of notice, explaining these very rare circumstances and helping you to fix them if needed. Site5 knows how important email is and we will do our best to ensure there is no disruption.

Second, Redundant Hosting is almost ready for launch and is coming this month! To learn more about this new product head on over to Defeat Downtime for a short FAQ and to sign up for a special pre-launch coupon!

Third, testing is continuing with VPS hosting and we hope to have that ready for launch in March. We are still testing a number of different configurations and will announce more info in the coming months.

Fourth, we have an update coming soon for BackStage to improve performance along with a slight update to the UI. These improvements are part of the coming update for SiteAdmin, which we are aiming to have ready in early March.

As always feel free to email me with any questions at Ben@Site5.com or post on his forum post!

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Hosting for Haiti

Just like most everyone across the world, the staff at Site5 has been captivated by the recent earthquake in Haiti. Last week, a joint initiative was launched to provide relief awareness amongst the hosting community.

From the Hosting For Haiti website:

Although normally fiercely competitive, as members of the hosting community we know that the power we wield as a group is much more than we can wield individually. And so we’ve come together to help assist those affected by this disaster. With the generosity of all our combined customers,we hope to make a difference. And you can too. One dollar helps. One hundred dollars helps one hundred times more.

Site5 is proud to support this movement by pledging a donation of $250 via HostingForHaiti.com.

Remember – every dollar helps! Let’s join together and support the people of Haiti in their time of dire need.

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State of Site5 January 1st 2010

Happy 2010 everyone!

Just like we do every month, we’re taking a moment to update everyone on the State of Site5. As usual we’ll tell you what’s been happening since our last update, and what we’ve got coming ahead this month and into 2010.

Since our last update we’ve released some really great free WordPress themes for our customers, so check them out and if you like them feel free to use them; we made them for you! Also, last month we doubled the diskspace and bandwidth on our reseller plans! Check out this post for more info. And for those of you who work with a lot of audio and video files, we’ve pre-installed the ffmpeg-php extension on all of our shared and reseller servers. You can find out how to enable it here.

For the coming month, we are continuing to work on three big projects: As we mentioned last month, testing of our new redundant hosting product and the updates to SiteAdmin are progressing nicely. In addition we’re also preparing and testing so that we can migrate all of our existing users to our fancy new centralized mail setup. We hope to have updates for you on all three of these fronts before or in our next State of Site5 post.

Last, we wanted to give you a little behind the scenes info from our new support desk. One of the biggest changes is how quickly and easily we can look at how we’re doing with ticket volume, response times, and, of course, your feedback. For example, here’s a snapshot of volume and wait times by hour for December ‘09:

We’ve done a lot over the last year to make those wait times as short as possible, and now with this kind of data we can fine tune our scheduling, our policies, and the way the support desk itself operates in order to make wait times even shorter. But being fast isn’t enough, and we are already planning version 2 of our support desk; it will do some very cool stuff to improve the accuracy of those responses, so stay tuned.

And that’s just a small taste of what’s in store for this year. We’re very excited for where site5 is headed in 2010, and we can’t wait to help you have a great year too!

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Free WordPress Themes!

Site5 is proud to now offer FREE WordPress themes to our customers! These themes have been developed in-house by our web developer exclusively for our customers. We even have a special Christmas theme for you to use for your blogs on the holidays!

Just visit our WordPress Themes Page to download and preview.

Here are some quick screenshots of the five themes:

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Updated Reseller Plans

Greetings!

Effective immediately, Site5 has upgraded our Reseller plan offerings. Each plan’s disk space and bandwidth allotments have been doubled!

resellerStarter
$23.95/month
50GB disk space
500GB bandwidth

resellerStandard
$33.95/month
80GB disk space
700GB bandwidth

resellerPremier
$49.95/month
120GB disk space
1000GB bandwidth

In addition to the spec increases, we have modified pricing to be the same amount no matter the contract term selected.

Existing customers may upgrade via Backstage or by contacting the Billing department.

Happy holidays!

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State Of Site5 For December 1st 2009

Every month we post a State of Site5 here on our blog to go over what we have been working on the last month and what we have planned for the next month. You can view all the past State of Site5 posts here. Please leave any comments here on the blog or in the official forum post.

New Help Desk
As you know we launched our new customer help desk last month and I finally have some screenshots and details for everyone!

The first is the home screen followed by an example ticket and what it looks like internally. The personal information has been removed of course.

The new system has a ton of improvements that help our staff do their jobs easily and efficiently! We have a lot more plans to improve and tweak the help desk throughout the year. Most of these changes won’t be visible to customers, but they are all aimed at making the support we provide faster, more accurate, and making us better able to recognize patterns, and problems even faster than ever.

New SiteAdmin Interface And Backend
We are working hard on upgrading SiteAdmin’s core backend to include a lot of new features and we also are working to update the user interface. We are going to start testing the new interface and features by the end of this month and we will post updates here as we get closer to launch.

The first screenshot is the interface if someone is logged into BackStage. The second shows what it will look like if they log directly into SiteAdmin. Keep in mind this is still being developed, and a lot of improvements and changes are still coming. That being said, I would welcome any feedback or suggestions in the comments or official forum post.

Redundant Hosting
We are still hard at work on this new product and are now in the final stages of testing our virtualizaing software! We are aiming for a launch date of January 15th and I will have more information on that later this month. This is the same technology we will use in our planned VPS product, so after this Redundant Hosting is released, VPS will be soon to follow!

Please comment on this blog post or on this forum post if you have any requests, comments, or want to share your thoughts. We’d love to hear from you! My email is always open as well, so feel free to email me at Ben@Site5.com.

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Did Someone Say Swag?

Greetings!

Some of our longtime clients may remember the old Site5 store over at CafePress. It went neglected for a few years..

Until now!

I am happy to announce the return of the Site5 Swag Emporium! New designs have been added and some legacy designs retained for fun. Examples of a couple new designs:

(Who better to model but my daughters? Okay, make a little doting father there..)

If you see any products you would like but don’t see, feel free to comment on this entry and I’ll see what I can do.

Keep an eye on the store for updated designs. Who knows – maybe we’ll run a contest to see who can create the best design.

Enjoy!

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State Of Site5 For November 1st 2009

Every three months we post a State of Site5 blog post to outline the changes we have made over the last three months and what we have planned for the next three months. Starting this month we are going to change the frequency of these posts and start making a State of Site5 post once a month to keep everyone updated with what we are working on.

This State of Site5 marks the 1 year anniversary since Joel and I took over Site5 and I hope everyone is happy with the changes! You can view the past blog posts on what the Site5 team has been working on here, and we’re excited to tell you we have a lot more planned for the coming year!

First, here’s what we have been working on over the last three months:

1. We will be launching our new customer support desk this week! This is one of the bigger projects we have been working on this year and it allows us to improve support in a number of ways. For the launch it will improve our staff’s efficiency, allow us to track performance better, and hundreds of little tweaks that will streamline our support process to make it faster and more accurate than ever. Later this month we will post screenshots and more details so you can see the insides of this project. Over the next 12 months we will be improving the support desk even further to give our customers more details on what is going on with their tickets, how many are waiting in the queue, and a lot better tracking of repeating server issues, etc.
2. We launched our new central mail system about one month ago which is another monster project we have been working on! Currently it is live for all new clients since October 1st and we are using this time to make sure everything is running correctly and fix any issues that come up. So far we have only had a few issues with mailman which were fixed right away and everything is looking fantastic! We will continue this live testing for the coming months and, once we are satisfied that it’s ready, we will be announcing our the schedule for switching our existing user’s to this setup. I will make a dedicated post with further information on the mail migration when we are ready. Our goal is to make this migration 100% seamless for our clients.So what benefits does this central mail system give our clients? Here are some of the biggest:
   • If your web server is down due to a problem your email will still be up since it is running off separate hardware.
   • Increased spam filtering options for both incoming and outgoing mail. This makes it a lot easier to prevent any blacklisting or disruptions for our customers.
   • Email services on a separate hardware grouping means less load on web servers.
   • Very high level of hardware and software redundancy for the email system to prevent any data loss or problems for our customer’s email.
   • Increased customization of our webmail system to give our customer’s a better UI and options!
   • And a lot more!
3. We also have been working hard to improve the Site5 website so that it is easier to navigate to what you need. We also added a page on Site5’s green web hosting so you can see how we are an environmentally friendly hosting company.
4. Over the last three months we have hired 6 new staff members! We would like to welcome Jeremy, Ben, Maria, Orien, Gabi, and Charles to the Site5 team!
5. Server issues have stayed low except for a bug we found in our kernel this month that caused a lot of reboots. That is now fixed and there should be no further issues with that. You can read further information from our COO and CTO on that issue in our forum here.
6. We also have a number of odds and ends we would like to mention! For our U.S. customers we now offer Google Adwords advertising credits and as soon as Google has the same offer for our international clients we will set that up. We also now offer the WHMCS billing solution for our resellers for only $10 dollars a month. Just email sales if you are interested in that option.

For the next month we are going to be working on quite a bit, here are some details:

1. We are working on upgrading SiteAdmin to include a lot of new features including an upgrade to the file manager and a lot more! We are testing these and should have them deployed by the end of the month. After this update is out, we will be improving the UI of SiteAdmin and doing all we can to give our customers the tools they need.
2. We are testing hardware and software now for our VPS and redundant hosting solutions, and those tests will continue over the next month. We hope to have further information on this later this month as well as some concrete dates to give out.

Please comment on this blog post or on this forum post if you have any requests, comments, or want to share your thoughts. We’d love to hear from you! My email is always open as well, so feel free to email me at Ben@Site5.com.

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