Mail Updates

Some of our Enterprise Hosting customers have had these features for a while now, but they filtering back across all packages now.

MailBox Quotes

We’ve worked with a number of customers to figure out how certain mailboxes were going over their assigned quotes and updated the system. The improvements mean that webmail, desktop and even your phone should be able to see the correct quota when set.

MailBox Search

All mailboxes now have search indexing enabled and available using full IMAP search. Roundcube, our preferred webmail client, supports the interaction with the server-side search indexes, as does Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird. We’ve already heard back on improvements from Apple users too.

Your very first search on a large mailbox may be a little slow as the system doesn’t enable the index until at least one search takes place. After that, results should be incredibly quick to return.

Spam Filtering

As with some of our previous mail upgrades, we’ve worked hard to clamp down some of the rules. This new update has worked well with some of our larger mail customers and is now being rolled out to all other accounts.

That said, we’ve much more coming. We hope to be able to port back features like our auto-whitelisting and per-mailbox auto levelling in the next couple of months too. Both of these combined have proved very effective in reducing false-positives and false-negatives.

Server Upgrades

Beyond what we’ve listed below, a number of other improvements have been rolled out to reduce disk latency, increase CPU response times and all together make your site that little bit more responsive. While subtle enough that you may not notice, we’ve seen measured improvements on site response times for some of the more complex installs.

MySQL Server

There has been quite a bit of work going on to improve the speed of MySQL. One such improvement was to ensure even more of your data sits natively in memory so there isn’t any disk lag.

We also have some upgrades to the control panel coming to help developers with MySQL over the next few months but if there is anything in particular you are looking for, please do let us know.

MySQL Backups

We’ve upgraded the scripts we use to do our MySQL backups and they’ve been running across all servers for over a month now. The benefits are that your database spends less time locked when we are doing a full backup run. Our largest database lock time has dropped by almost 90%.

In case you are wondering, why do we lock the database? This will ensure we get consistent backups. If it ever comes to recovery, we can be sure that it will restore correctly too. Things are also tested quite often so you can have piece of mind. More information on the backup system is on our blog.

New Control Panel

Okay, so not really new, but it looks so great we are calling it new. The whole look and feel has been re-vamped and things generally made easier. Log on today and let us know what you think or if there is anything in particular you’d like improved.

One major new feature we have for our resellers is the ability to brand the control panel. Yup, you read that right, a fully brand-able control panel, and no, we don’t just mean changing the logo.

Wrap-Up

We have more to come so stay tuned. For existing customers, check inside your control panel for some special…

Edit: You can replicate the old behaviour simply by renaming your php.ini file to .user.ini. We are automatically doing this on we upgrade each server to the new version.

Date/Time settings Error

Our testing has however shown up this error affecting some sites.

Warning: date() [function.date]: It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings.
You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set()
function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning,
you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier.

For those of you that are familiar with php.ini files will know that you can set this variable there. And we have. There is just a small bug in PHP which unsets this settings if you use a local php.ini file to over-ride settings. Unfortunately this means that users with these files end up with no date.timezone value, and the error above.

You can fix it by adding the following value to your php.ini file or contacting our support team who will be happy to help.

date.timezone = 'Europe/Dublin'

Additional PHP Errors

Because of the same inheritance issue listed about, some sites may see additional PHP generated error messages. The easy way around this is to add the following to your folder specific php.ini file for the affected application.

error_reporting = E_ALL & ~ E_DEPRECATED

We are working to find a fix that doesn’t require user intervention and hopefully it will be in place before your server goes live with this change. As always, we will be pro-actively monitoring and updating users of any issues we notice.

Customisation

One of the best features of WordPress is its extensibility. There are hundreds of useful plugins and thousands of themes freely available, all installable by a few mouse clicks in the Admin Suite. Some themes will layout your blog in a default post by post basis, quite similar to our blog, others can change the whole look into something you would barely recognise. From custom post names, to static pages, to full galleries, it is all possible. If you are ever stuck, our friendly support team are here to help.

Plugins

WordPress doesn’t try to be all things to all people. That is actually a good thing. You really don’t want to be overwhelmed by buttons or options when you start. However the plugins allow you the freedom to expand out to achieve just about anything you want.

Some plugins you may find helpful are listed below in no particular order:

• Google Analytics – For tracking visits to your site. This allows you to use the Google service.
• Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin automatically builds a sitemap of your blog, a very useful feature so search engines (not just Google) can find you.
• Feedburner Plugin – Blogs are built around RSS and feedburner is a popular service for hosting your blog feeds. It’ll also give you a nice reader count and help build statistics.
• All in One SEO Pack – Search Engine Optimisation is the art of “helping” search engines understand your web pages. While search engines do love WordPress, this plugin surely helps you climb up the rankings.
• WP Captcha Free – The downside to WordPress lies in its popularity. Automated spam bots will try to post comments quite often which can ruin the experience, however plugins like this one make it much more manageable. Akismet also provide another spam solution for blogs.
• Lightbox 2 – Lightbox, those clickable popup images, may be one of most seen features on the internet and this is how you make it part of your blog.

Expandability

While this may not be on your mind now, your blog may one day receive a huge amount of web traffic. Generally if you stick with it and write a lot of quality content on a regular basis, your readership will grow. The last thing you want is to have to migrate your blog to another platform or system when that happens. Luckily WordPress is able to grow with you due to its plugin system. The same plugins will help it handle correctly under high traffic and keep it responding quickly. Our team can offer any advice when you need it to help your site to grow with you.

Additional Services

After you have ordered your web hosting, if you want help, just ask. Our team can even install the blog for you. We also understand that sometimes you just want to write, and not have to worry about the management of the blog. There is the ability to leave all that to us, let us handle the upgrade, the plugins, the spam comments etc. Contact our sales team to discuss your unique needs.

The new quick order form has three fields, your name, your email, and your domain. Yes there is an assumption that you want to register a new domain and put it on our brilliant Primus Web Hosting Package, but we have found that this is a pretty common option.

So you submit the details…

And then what? It will ask you to confirm things and pay via our secure, third party gateway. Once the payment goes through, our sales team will get to work and start provisioning your order. Next, you will get a Welcome Email with details to login to your site. If you are an existing customer, your order will be tied into your existing billing account too so everything stays in the one place for you. As quick as three clicks!

Other Options

As always, you can just contact us using our web form or email us at sales@vade.ie and we can process the order too. We are always here to help and will do our best to accommodate any order you may have.

Really its just that simple. Fill in the form over here, telling us what we are missing or why you didn’t buy today, and as soon as we can fill the gap, you’ll get free hosting on our Primus Web Hosting package for 1 full year (subject to our normal T&C of course).

Where is the catch???

We know we know, these things are usually too good to be true and there is always is a catch. Well to keep the higher ups happy, there is one or two small ones for this.

You need to fill out the form in full.
Obviously if we can’t contact you, we can’t give you some free hosting can we?

The feedback needs to be printable.
We aren’t looking for a story fit for an evening newspaper, what we mean by this is that it can’t just be random text. If it has a point, then that is enough. If it is a missing feature you are after, more is better. The more information we have, the more likely we are to get it right.

Domains are not free.
It is free hosting after all. We’d like if you bought your domains from us, but it isn’t something we require. We would like if you told us why, but again it isn’t required. We do need to know the domain you’ll be hosting so we can add it to the package.

And that is it!

Not much to it is there now. So go on. Contact Us. Help us help you.