New implementations in the first 8 months of 2020

It's true, everyone knows, when you buy a car, its value is destined to drop the moment it sets foot (or rather wheels) out of the dealership! Is it the same thing for Hosting? No in HOST. We learned from our brothers at Welcome Italia, indeed, we inherited their "Value over time" and applied it to Hosting services.

It means that if you buy one of our HOSTING products today, after a year (for the same price) it is worth more, why would you say? Because in the meantime we will have added features without price increases. This is the value over time.

What did we do for you from January to August 2020? It was the first 8 months of a very particular year, we all found ourselves locked in the house from one day to the next. ONLINE services have become essential and therefore our work even more important. We kept our promises and stood by you, literally day and night. In addition to keeping our customer service running, we have also continued to develop and release important parts of our infrastructure.

Here are the most important, noteworthy news: COVID-19 Activities

Release of new ANYCAST DNS infrastructure

Release of customer area functionality - DELEGATION

Release of customer area functionality - PREPAID CREDIT

Release of shared hosting functionality - EMAIL SSL

Release of shared hosting functionality – AUTO SSL

Release of tool speed improvements – WEEKLY REPORT

Release of customer area improvements – UX IMPROVEMENT

Cerbero plus waf testing – PROTECTED CUSTOMERS UNDER ATTACK (COVID-19)

Bee release – FIRST API RELEASED

Academy course release – 10 NEW COURSES

COVID-19 Activities We have opened our academy to everyone, free of charge for 3 months. Over 1300 people/companies trained for free during the lockdown. Together with the training offer, we activated a promotion (BONUS600) which allowed all VAT numbers and individual businesses to take advantage of a BONUS worth 600 euros, for the renewal of domains and hosting currently active on other suppliers. The BONUS was a huge success, bringing the number of domains that were renewed for free to almost 1000. Thanks to our irreplaceable Cecilia, we created a video, it was our way of sharing what we all felt in those months of lockdock. Here is the VIDEO

ANYCAST DNS infrastructure release DNS is the service that makes the internet work par excellence. Every time we visit a website, download e-mail, there are dozens of DN S requests that are performed to make us "see" everything correctly. When you buy a domain or hosting, you are not just buying the name or the web space. You are also purchasing a DNS service, often hidden, no one talks about it, provided by the provider you have relied on. If the DNS doesn't work, nothing else will work, so choosing a provider also based on the characteristics of its authoritative DNS becomes fundamental.

Anycast technology has allowed us to create a DISTRIBUTED GEO DNS service, initially between our two core data centers in TURIN and PISA. The activation of a third location in Amsterdam is already being tested, which will officially start the release of our "EDGE" services. In short, what are the advantages of having anycast technology for your domain? – the DNS requests made by site visitors are satisfied by the servers closest geographically, this translates into a faster page opening time – the service is natively redundant on multiple physical data centers, in the event of a failure the reconvergence time is less than 1 second – the service is able to better mitigate DDoS attacks The new ANYCAST DNS service is already active for all new activations, while for domains activated before July 2020 a progressive migration to the new one is taking place service that will be automatic and transparent.

Customer area functionality - DELEGA Web agencies, webmasters and freelancers have often asked us to introduce this functionality, perhaps with a little delay, but we got there. In the customer area, today it is possible to add a user delegated for access, for example an employee or a temporary collaborator or an external web agency. It depends on which point of view you look at it, the Webmaster can be delegated by the end customer to access. Or, the web agency can delegate its employees to access. In this way, with a single user, I (webmaster) am able to access multiple customer areas, without knowing my customers' passwords and in full compliance with the GDPR. Here is an in-depth video

Customer area functionality - PREPAID CREDIT In HOST since 2006 it is possible to pay either by bank transfer or with one of the main credit cards (VISA/MASTERCARD). Over the years we had then introduced an alternative payment system (prepaid credit) which has always been very popular with our reseller and webmaster customers. In 2016 we temporarily suspended it, to redesign it and make it compatible with the new tax regulations, which are increasingly complex and "Europe-centric". After a few months of development, we reactivated it again and more powerful than before. Today it is possible to top up a free credit, with a minimum of 10 euros and use it for any operation (new purchase, renewal, modification or upgrade). Very useful for those who manage a large number of domains and want to reduce payment operations and invoices to a minimum, in fact with this functionality our Customer only receives two invoices, one for the top-up operation and one at the end of the month (at 0 euros) with the summary of all operations. Here is an in-depth video

Shared hosting functionality - SSL EMAIL Access to IMAP/POP3 email services has long since become necessary to make it secure under SSL in order to avoid hacking attempts and (it seems trivial but it is even more important) not to have continuous warnings from the various email clients. In order to improve these two aspects, we have activated the SSL certificate valid for mail.domainname smtp.domainname pop.domainname and imap.domainname for all our shared hosting services. Functionality highly requested by our webmaster and agency customers, in this way we have also managed to reduce their workload (fewer requests for assistance from end customers

Shared hosting functionality – AUTO SSL Linking to the previous functionality, we have automated the activation and creation of an SSL certificate for each activated hosting. Within a few hours, when creating hosting, an SSL certificate is also automatically requested and installed.

speed tool – WEEKLY REPORT Speed ​​is a tool that we have created and released completely free of charge. It allows you to measure (even maintaining a daily history) the performance of your website. Through an integrated Coach, the tool gives the user useful information for improving the performance (front end) of a website. The user who uses SPEED can survey unlimited websites and monitor them from a single integrated dashboard. With this new feature, every Monday morning at 9 am, a summary email is sent with the TOP domains and trend changes.

UX improvements The User experience has always been a central point in which to invest, in fact at Host, EVERYONE does UX, every day. Every time one of our customers talks to a customer service colleague, leaves feedback on any platform, we intercept it, work on it and put it as a priority among the things to be developed. Month after month, we release continuous improvements to the UX, in some cases even several times during the same week. In recent months we have focused on the customer area dashboard, on direct access to services and to the DNS section (the most used), also in relation to a recent infrastructure update relating to the DNS service.

Cerbero PLUS – testing Cerbero is a set of protection technologies that we introduced in September 2019 suitable for the protection of most websites. The lockdown has generated exponential growth in some e-commerce sectors. When a business grows so quickly, many get rich, but often someone else doesn't... and if this other counterparty is not an "ethical and legal" entity, real wars can be created which in the case of the web become DDoS attacks. These attacks result in millions of apparently legitimate http requests which however cause the server to overload to the point of making the website invisible. Distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate calls is an increasingly complex job and mitigating an attack of that size can prove unsuccessful using standard technologies. So our Cerberus PLUS, created on a geographically distributed architecture and capable of scaling practically infinitely also thanks to Amazon AWS, intervened to mitigate attacks aimed at these e-commerce sites. This experimentation concluded successfully and we therefore plan to integrate Cerbero PLUS in the near future for all our customers as well, with technical/commercial methods yet to be defined.

PUBLIC BEES It would be fun to tell you that everything was born from the love for bees, excellent workers who produce a very important nectar for nutrition and health in general. Instead, it all arises from the needs of some of our Wholesal customers who activate a very high number of domains. Just before the holidays we proudly released our first two public APIs, already working and usable if you have a HOST account and prepaid credit. The first two published APIs allow you to search for the availability of a domain and, if necessary, register/transfer it.

Here is the endpoint and documentation

HOST ACADEMY Training, first of all. There are 9 video courses that we have released since the beginning of the year. Those who have an active subscription will automatically find them available in their reserved area. Here is a list of the courses we have added:

WooCommerce Extra course – Online Ticketing (7 lessons).

WooCommerce Extra Course – Membership (11 lessons).

WooCommerce Extra Course ( Subscription )

WooCommerce extra course (Booking)

WordPress and WooCommerce Multilingual course (12 lessons).

OsCampus Pro Course – Joomla LMS

LearnDash Course – WordPress LMS

Bingwebmaster Tools course

In conclusion Choosing HOST for your domains and HOSTING means investing in your future, put us to the test, we won't disappoint you.