We have had our most successful year yet. We have managed to move a lot of things forward and we have moved others forward.
While we are debugging this article in the new offices of our second WEDOS DC2 datacenter, our colleagues are evaluating the results of the latest generation of the oil bath, in which we “drowned” 90 servers and subjected them to demanding tests.
A little further on, our datacenter administrators are preparing for a big fiber optic welding, when they will introduce a connection from the second branch to DC2. In the meantime, other colleagues are developing new services, improving existing ones, examining and evaluating logs for further development, and connecting additional servers.
At the same time, DC1 is preparing documents for another new ISO certification. The sales department is preparing new advertising campaigns and strategy for the winter. Support colleagues answer customer questions via emails, chats, the community website and continuously expand the knowledge base or prepare new guides.
10 years ago there were a few of us, now there are nearly 40 of us. We devote all our working and often free time to the development of WEDOS. And it shows. Let’s move forward 😉
Company
Despite higher investments, 2019 was a record year (EBITDA of CZK 8.99M, an increase of 165.19% compared to 2018). This year our accountant “dissolved” the last losses from previous years (including the DC2 construction) and we ended with a net profit of just over CZK 6 million. And 2019 has been quite a challenge in terms of finances.
WEDOS has also been curtailed by the coronavirus crisis. Fortunately, we had a pandemic plan in place ahead of time and went into remote mode. Of course, there was always someone in DC1 and other work was going on. We just had to plan everything so that we wouldn’t meet. Over time, the ban turned into a recommendation and more and more of us came to work. In May, the management announced a “Return to Work” and everything gradually returned to normal.
The whole situation gave us plenty of time to think and plan. We adjusted some priorities and got down to work over the holidays. We have launched several services in a test run(WEDOS Cloud, WEDOS CD) and have given the green light for the development of another (WEDOS APPs). In the coming months, the plan is to complete everything that has been distributed and to focus on further development of existing services.
It will also all depend on the number of new colleagues we get. We want to focus mainly on the older and more experienced ones who have already done something. If we can’t find people in the Czech Republic, we will look abroad. Currently we have 5 colleagues from abroad (Poland, Russia). Of course, if there is someone young who wants to move forward quickly, we will certainly give him a chance.
WEDOS DC1
Our first datacenter has undergone a number of modifications over the years. Eventually, the large server room, which had two rows of enclosed racks and a large dominant freecooling, became several separate fire-rated rooms.
It’s no longer the handsome and spacious place it used to be. We have subordinated everything to maximum efficiency. All spaces are only as big as they need to be. That’s the way we like it. WEDOS DC1 is our private datacenter and only our technology and servers are there.
The other rooms on the ground floor, which were used as a warehouse and a development room for oil cooling, have been turned into separate rooms with air conditioning, switchboards, UPS and a battery room.
We replaced all the cables with fireproof ones. Colleagues – datacenter administrators, have stretched them for miles.
In the server room itself, everything has been redone. We switched from cables to a busbar system where one branch runs under the ceiling and the other runs under the floor, which is the best you can do for redundancy.
We have learned a lot from the construction of WEDOS DC2, which is designed to meet TIER IV requirements, and the upgrade of WEDOS DC1 is the result.
In April, despite the difficult situation, we received 8 new seagulls. After installation, there will be a total of 50 in DC1, which is not yet the final number. We still have a reserve. They’re stored in DC2 for now.
In March, our contractor completed the last motor-generator of the seven we ordered. It is custom built for WEDOS DC1. Hluboká Nad Vltavou is a very quiet town, so we required the maximum possible soundproofing.
If you want to know more about the event, read our article Despite the limitations we keep going – new gulls, new motor-generator, new challenges.
WEDOS DC2
Practically all construction works are already completed in our second private data centre WEDOS DC2. In November, we also poured concrete for a heated parking lot, which will also be used for heat dissipation, through one of the water circuits, from the oil baths. During this event we approached 2000 m3 of concrete used for the construction of DC2.
We used our return after the company lockdown in May for a big teambuilding event “Make your datacenter your home.” Many of us never returned to our original place. It was a fresh start in a completely new environment and with new tasks. A lot of things had to be worked out on the fly, but it was worth it 🙂
A couple of weeks later we tried out the multimedia training room, which we will use for smaller conferences, meetings, webinars, online discussions, etc. We hope to get started as soon as possible.
As for the server room itself, it has been cleared of construction clutter and a stricter regime is being followed to prevent unnecessary dust.
We already have two oil baths in the server room for testing. These are different versions. One of them is already filled with oil (read more in the technology section – oil cooling). Our progress in the field of efficient server cooling and waste heat recovery is gradually attracting more and more interest not only from the IT professional community but also from politicians. In July, Petr Fiala came to see us.
The datacenter is connected via one route to DC1. We are preparing for the “cooking” of the second route. Then DC2 will be connected redundantly. A separate route via X is also planned.
WEDOS DC3
This year we announced our intention to build the WEDOS DC3 data centre. It will be a complex of five buildings, where two will be server rooms, two administrative buildings and one warehouse.
It may seem a bit early to you, as DC2 is just being “revived” and there is room for 10,800 servers. However, the situation is that DC1 is slowly filling up, and we haven’t even launched the most physically server-intensive services (WEDOS Cloud, WMS) yet. In addition, DC2 is a pure oil datacenter and we are facing increasing demand for cheap backups. Just cheap storage is built on classic solid state HDDs that have a “little” problem spinning in oil 🙂
DC3 is designed as a classic modern datacentre. We’ll build everything economically. We have plenty of experience with this from DC1. We believe that we will be able to bring the price of GB down to such an extent that we will be able to compete with large foreign multinationals.
We are also planning to locate our business administration centre in DC3. Currently, the vast majority of us are purely dedicated to support, development and operations. Only a few people do the business, and that’s together with marketing, administration, graphics and other things. Virtually no one in our country does purely business. Yet we are in a state where 2/3rds of the people should be doing nothing but business.
Two office buildings are therefore planned for DC3. Each has two floors and each floor will seat 170 people. As you can see the title of the article did not exaggerate. Now we plan to get the ride going and you can be there with us😉
help.wedos.cz
Our community website help.wedos.cz, which serves as an extension of our customer support, has grown quite a bit over the last year and we still haven’t gotten out of beta testing. During the entire period of its operation, 10.5 thousand users have created a user account. Around 7,000 questions were asked, of which almost 6,700 were marked as solved. The total number of responses is around 8.5 thousand.
We are very pleased that so many people from the community have joined the project. It is regularly from them that almost half of the responses come. For now, we are trying to support the community with promotional items and beta testing. When the situation permits, we are planning a meeting in Hluboká nad Vltavou. We value the work of the community immensely.
New colleagues and new job opportunities
Monitoring
We have been the largest web hosting service provider in the Czech Republic for quite some time now. However, every year we are getting further away from the competition. Currently, more .cz domains are coming to us than the second, third and fourth competitors combined.
When you have numbers like that, any fluctuation in service raises a literal tsunami of questions about what’s going on. We totally get it. Everyone wants to know if we know about the problem, if we are solving it and how long before everything will be fine again.
We’ve tried a lot in these ten years. How to inform, what to say, how to communicate further. Not everyone can always be accommodated. Plus, a lot of things only look good on paper. In real traffic, they can do more harm than good.
What we know works:
- Always report truthfully on everything that matters. Trust is built on honesty.
- Better to inform quickly even if the information is misleading. If someone gets a notification that their site is down, but the problem doesn’t affect them, it’s better than being notified later.
- Customers need to be informed first, then the public. If possible, we send emails first, then post on social networks and put warnings in the administration/chat.
- There is no shame in admitting a mistake, the important thing is to learn from it and do everything possible to prevent it from happening again.
- Every report is worth checking.
Based on this experience, we launched status.wedos.hosting. It doesn’t look like much at first glance, but much of the information is downloaded from our WEDOS OnLine service. We use it to monitor all domains that are directed to us and VPS.
The service knows which domain belongs to which web host and which server it is running on. The algorithm then evaluates the current state. For example, if it detects that a significant percentage of sites are returning a specific error, are inaccessible, or are slow, it sends a warning to the engineers. At the same time, it will send a warning directly to status.wedos.hosting.
This exceptional solution can detect a problem on the server before it happens.
WEDOS OnLine, however, monitors much more than just the availability of anything. For example, it will warn you that certificates have expired or that the domain/IP address is on a spam list.
The service is still officially in beta test. Although everything is working more than well, more tests and monitoring are being added all the time.
Marketing and advertising
For our 10. year of existence, we have completed two major competitions. The Big Christmas Competition 2019 and the Big Summer Competition 2020. This is a classic format of a guessing game where no one, not even us, can know the correct answer until the end of the contest. A total of 333 prizes will be sent to the winners.
Last year we were the general sponsor of the football club SK Dynamo České Budějovice.
It was a bit of a risk, but we found that it works better than online advertising, which in many cases is starting to literally throw money out the window. This year we have added FC Zbrojovka Brno to SK Dynamo ČB.
We have also started holding regular competitions for tickets to matches on our Facebook profile.
Another of our great achievements is the general partnership of the Hluboká Zoo. We love and support animals 🙂 To celebrate our You will have your 10th birthday on Sunday the 13th. 9. 2020 (from 15:00 to 17:00) free entry to the zoo if you show something with the WEDOS logo) More information at wedos.cz/10-let/.
An important part of our promotion is our wedos.as commission system. In total, we have already paid out over CZK 17.6 million to our partners. Our services sell very well and you can make money from it too.
Technology
We keep an eye on the latest trends in technology and consider what might be useful to us. Our business partners often offer us technologies that are not yet on the market, or that may not even make it to the public market.
On the other hand, we are also very conservative. We have to test everything well ourselves. Everything looks good on paper 🙂
New repositories
Because of the WEDOS CD, we purchased a new HPE Cloudline CL5800 Gen9 Server. We have a variant equipped with two Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPUs E5-2680 v4 with a frequency of 2.4 GHz. These are 14-core processors with 2 threads per core. In total, the entire storage has 56 processors and a modest 512 GB of RAM.
This storage can accommodate 100 HDDs. In our case, these are 10 TB drives from Intel, which we have had very good experiences with. So we count on a total capacity of 1 PB of data.
We asked our colleagues from development if they could send us some graphs and they said there is not much to show yet. Should we start trying to get the shop to finally test some proper real load already 🙂
You can read more about the new data storage and our plans in the article The future of not only data backup belongs to big storage or where to go with petabytes of customer data.
Last month we had an interesting opportunity to try out a very powerful and fast storage system designed for the most demanding operations. The list price of one is around 8M CZK. We already have it in the datacenter and are starting to test it. If everything goes according to plan, it could replace the existing solution for NoLimit and WMS. It would also open the way to additional disk services for VPS ON, WEDOS Cloud and VPS SSD. We’ll see how the tests go.
DDoS, IPS/IDS protection and security
Last year was a record year in terms of attacks. But it wasn’t always so much fun, as we wrote in our article How we “slept through” the most powerful DDoS attack ever launched against us and nobody noticed. It is certainly a great achievement to even measure a 44.5 Gbps attack, let alone be able to fully automatically filter it, but it also shows where “normal” attacks are moving. In fact, we can’t imagine having just a 10 Gbps line anymore. We are happy for our 3x 100 Gbps. What seemed to some like a cannon for sparrows two years ago is now a necessity for us.
As you can guess, we are satisfied with the performance of our DDoS protection. We are not currently planning any massive expansion or improvements. Of course, there will be planned investments in reinforcements to be ready for everything. However, we want to focus more on Anycast DNS.
We’ve been writing about Anycast DNS for a few months now. We have the hardware ready and partners arranged who will take care of everything for us in far abroad. In total, 225 physical servers are ready for the first phase of WEDOS Anycast DNS. The service could provide CDN, proxy, protection and remote monitoring for our services in addition to the regular Anycast DNS. We are also considering VPNs, external backups, etc. There’s a lot to come up with there.
WEDOS Anycast DNS could provide us with strategic protection against extremely strong DDoS attacks in the future.
Unfortunately, everything currently falls down on the lack of people who could devote themselves to the project. We now have other projects that need to be completed. However, we hope to find more reinforcements for the team soon 🙂
As far as other protections are concerned, the IPS/IDS protection still does its job well. It had a major success in March when it protected more than 1,000 installations from exploiting a critical vulnerability in the WordPress plugin ThemeGrill Demo Importer. Unfortunately, we still can’t protect sites on HTTPS. We can’t see encrypted traffic. There are plans for a new proxy that will already be able to do this and then we will protect everyone 🙂
Another level of protection is provided by our CML (Central Log Monitor), which is a system where all logs from all servers are downloaded. In total, that’s over 700 GB of data. This data is automatically used by IPS/IDS protection and technicians to monitor sites that are overloading servers. In the future, the new diagnostics we are planning will also draw on them.
Our security experts can even find hacked sites from these logs because they see suspicious communications. You can read two such examples in the article How we protect our customers’ websites from backdoors and other malicious files. Since then, we have made progress and have complete exports of potentially compromised WordPress sites. For now, we’re just working with it manually.
Oil cooling
We’ve gone a step further with oil cooling. In the DC2 server room, there is an inflated bathtub with two fully populated HPE Moonshots. A total of 90 physical servers. We drowned the servers in July. We documented everything, of course 🙂
Several stress tests were carried out during August, some so intense that the Plexiglas on the lid came off. Of course, you can’t afford to do that in the air, but the server and all the hardware in it behaves completely differently in oil.
For the time being, the oil baths are not connected to the water circuit. This is planned for the next phase of testing. Then we should know the final parameters for the oil baths and start mass production 🙂
It doesn’t end there, of course. The HUPS project is still to come. Well, we’ll see, it’s going to be quite a ride 😉
Connectivity and network
In April, the last major adjustment to our network took place. We purposely dropped one of our 100 Gbps routes through Tabor. The automation took care of everything and there was no failure. It’s just like somebody somewhere cut the cable 🙂
The big modifications in April were intended to provide a better solution in case of a sudden connectivity failure or routing problem. Ensures that absolutely all paths are changed within 200 ms. This is the worst case scenario that can occur. Normally such an operation (changing all routing tables) can take several minutes. In our case, in the real case of a single branch failure, everything is recalculated in 100 ms, as it was in this planned outage.
However, this is only a small part of the complex network adjustments we have been making for several months. The entire network infrastructure has been improved, strengthened and made much more resilient. As a result, I was able to increase the guaranteed speed of the VPS ON from 100 Mbps to 200 Mbps. At the same time, it was a preparation for increasing the connectivity for WEDOS Cloud to 1 Gbps.
Everything is described in detail in the article How the WEDOS network works after the latest modifications.
We are also gradually switching to Arista for the internal network. So far we have only used these as edge routers (although they are smart switches) where I needed 100 Gbps. Specifically, we bought 10 pieces of Arista DCS-7050QX-32S. Each has 32 ports for 40 Gbps. The switch has a capacity of 2.56 Tb/s and 1.44 billion packets per second, all with a response time of 550 ns. In case of problems, it also allows hot-swap of resources. This series of switches is designed for datacenters where performance is paramount and future smart infrastructure scaling is anticipated.
Services
Among our services, WEDOS Cloud, WEDOS CD and WMS have been officially added this year. For now, all of them are running in test mode.
Domains
At the end of the year we started working on ICANN accreditation and 17. March 2020, we got it. Read more in the article WEDOS has received ICANN accreditation for domain registration and we intend to use it to the fullest.
A lot of time has passed since then and we have moved forward. We had to prepare our entire system for cooperation with registries and make our own WEDOS Whois for domains registered by us.
Technically, we were only able to complete it a few days ago, but that hasn’t stopped us from negotiating with the registries for months. As a market leader that can sell domains really well, we were in a very good negotiating position. Plus, our boss was really tough.
As a result, very soon you will be able to register and renew the most popular new domain extensions at the best prices on the market. In addition, we are preparing a lot of events where you can even get them for free for the first year 😉
It doesn’t end there, of course. We also need to arrange popular transnational domains like .com, .net or .org. A lot of new extensions are still under negotiation.
NoLimit Web Hosting
In May 2019, we took NoLimit one step further. Many parameters were doubled, we actually increased the performance (number of concurrent PHP threads from 5 to 7) and allowed to have up to 4 domains on one NoLimit. Many customers took advantage of this and a few thousand NoLimits were dropped, or customers continuously merged them.
Of course, new customers were added, so in the end we were plus or minus the same. The trend broke in December 2019, when we broke the 104 thousand active web hosts mark. We have been growing steadily since then.
And what can the new and improved NoLimit do? In April, we used data from our CML to find out how fast sites are on WEDOS or how many views the most visited site has on NoLimit.
NoLimit is currently working well. Those who know how to optimize their sites can run large websites with high traffic. We are not planning any major parameter adjustments now. It is true that some modern content management systems or ecommerce solutions require a lot more. From our point of view, there is no point in chasing some extremes. This will be handled by the planned WEDOS APPs service. It will create a VPS with ideal parameters, install the recommended operating system and other components, configure everything according to the developers’ requirements and perform the installation directly. So you’ll have the perfect environment and everything ready to go in a minute.
What we are planning for NoLimit is mainly to strengthen the performance of the proxy server. Customers who have become accustomed to using our proxy run most of their performance through it. It doesn’t burden their web hosting at all and everything is fast.
Here is an example of a large website on our NoLimit web hosting. This is a normal WordPress installation. It shows the proportion of PHP files generated by the webserver (green) and returned by the proxy (grey).
For this same site, a comparison of the average page generation speed on the webserver and proxy.
The daily average for the webserver is 194 ms and for the proxy 120 ms. This is a great TTFB (Time to first byte). We believe that in the future we can speed up the proxy enough to bring the average speed of this site to under 100 ms 😉
The proxy will also be an important part of our planned WEDOS AnyCast DNS. Together with the CDN, then the sites at WEDOS will be very fast from all over the world. In the first phase we plan to deploy a total of 225 physical servers in 4 strategic locations (POPs) around the world + 1 location in the Czech Republic. If all goes according to plan, we will add more locations in the next wave.
The new proxy will also allow our IPS/IDS to prevent active attacks on sites using HTTPS. For the time being, we defend them with passive protection (blocking IP addresses that attempt an attack).
WEDOS CD
WEDOS CD (Cloud Disk) is a smart cloud storage for synchronizing content between multiple devices and users. In addition, a range of online tools are available for convenient work with files, images and documents. With the OnlyOffice office suite, you can work conveniently with files from other extended office suites online. In addition, it is adapted to mass work with files of multiple users at the same time. For ordinary users, a nice free bonus to the service, for business owners, money saved.
We have built the WEDOS CD service on the NextCloud platform, which is currently the most popular cloud storage for content synchronization that easily rivals the services of large multinational companies. Our solution has been modified in many ways, but we have tried to maintain maximum compatibility with the applications and to allow the user who is used to NextCloud to use the WEDOS CD without problems.
Since the Czech market is really lacking a proper online storage for free, we decided to make a free version in addition to the paid versions. WEDOS CD Free has 3 GB of data space to start. Additional GB will be available in the form of various bonuses. We are planning a maximum size of 100 GB for the free variant.
We launched the service a few months ago in a test run. It is connected to WEDOS ID, a service for easy management of user accounts. Gradually we will connect more and more services to the WEDOS ID. It is mainly to simplify the overview and administration of permissions in companies (who has access where).
We have received a considerable amount of feedback on the service. We even wrote something in the article WEDOS CD – first observations from the test run. We also evaluate traffic data. WEDOS CD is an amazing service, but most people don’t know how to use it yet. They don’t see the true potential of cloud-based smart storage. Roughly 2/3 of active users use it only as regular “dumb” storage for backups. Which is of course also possible, but not ideal. A WEDOS disk is rather good for this.
For the next year our task will be to teach you how to use the WEDOS CD. We need to embark on tutorials, tutorials, webinars, training and other activities that will expose you to the true potential of smart cloud storage.
We have no doubt that the WEDOS CD will take off, because everyone will use it. A simple example. Do you occasionally need to email a large file as an attachment? Wouldn’t it be better to upload it to a WEDOS CD by dragging it into the browser and then sharing it? You can password protect it, limit the validity of the link, and see if it has been downloaded.
By the way, WEDOS CD has a built-in email client 😉
VPS ON
VPS ON was intended to be a prelude to WEDOS Cloud. Unfortunately, the development has dragged on for a few years and so VPS ON has a life of its own. It should be noted that for the last year, we have been mostly satisfied. We have ironed out a large number of technical flaws.
Compared to 2019, we have recorded 20% fewer terminations due to dissatisfaction. There has been a significant drop in the number of terminations due to outages or performance issues. Basically, we are at a point in the numbers where the line between us being to blame and a lack of knowledge is blurring. After all, VPS requires some more advanced knowledge.
This of course makes us very happy. However, our goal is still to gradually motivate people to use WEDOS Cloud. VPS ON is actually 1 VM (virtual machine) in WEDOS Cloud. Once you figure out the principle of interconnection, you can easily split the workload and tasks between multiple VMs. For us it will mainly save IPv4 addresses, which we still have a shortage of.
After network modifications, we gave all VPS ON users a gift this year. We have increased the guaranteed connectivity from 100 Mbps to 200 Mbps. Just restart the service in the customer administration.
The question, of course, is what to do with the service in the future. Firstly, after the launch of services in DC2 we would like to offer the possibility to choose where you want to run your VPS ON and we are also looking for a way to cheap storage. That is, an additional disc service. The next drive will not be fast but will provide a lot of space for a good price.
VPS SSD
We have wanted to remove VPS SSDs from our offer so many times, but every time we looked at the statistics and how much trouble we have with them, we thought it would be a great shame. After WEDOS Disk it is the least problematic service. They are mostly very experienced users, so even VPS SSD customer support doesn’t have to deal with much.
There are currently 3043 active SSD VPS and 1159 older VPS. We do not promote the service particularly well, so the year-on-year decrease is 451.
WEDOS Disk
A completely hassle-free service that thousands of our customers use to back up their data. It is very popular especially with operators of content management systems such as WordPress, where they use a plugin to make regular backups via FTP as they see fit.
We provide WEDOS Disk in 5 GB version for free with NoLimit web hosting and in 10 GB version for VPS SSD.
There are a total of 11,560 active WEDOS Disks.
We currently have no plans to expand or improve the service. However, there is a demand for a smarter version, which would be able to, for example, rights for different users, data consistency check, protection against ransomware, data encryption, etc. So WEDOS Disk 2.0 is possible 🙂
WEDOS Cloud
We launched the first beta test of WEDOS Cloud on 3. September 2019. We let it run for longer than planned, gathered reactions, went through the logs and decided that we still had a lot of development to do. In addition, there were a few new features that were worth implementing. After nine months of intensive development, it was time to launch the service.
We have to go slow on WEDOS Cloud. It is a complex and demanding service that is designed to offer maximum availability and options. That is why it is in test operation for now and we are in no hurry to switch to the live version. We are in contact with customers who test it and send us their comments. However, there are few of them, because only a few very experienced people can make full use of the real cloud.
We would like to launch WEDOS Cloud in DC2 next year. Customers would then be able to choose which Datacenter they want to set up the VM in. Low-cost data storage drives are also planned. These will be slower solid state HDDs with a very nice price per TB.
Another new feature will be hourly billing. WEDOS Cloud is an IaaS, so each VM is a service that can be scripted to be automatically created or deleted. Experienced users can create additional proxy servers to handle the load on their virtual infrastructure. Now, however, it requires having the resources already subscribed. With hourly billing, you will be charged back for the funds used. It will be enough to have enough money in your deposit account.
We also hope to motivate customers with VPS ON to migrate to WEDOS Cloud. We plan to do tutorials and training in this regard.
Dedicated servers
We have always considered dedicated servers as a bonus service. We wanted to offer something that could be used by customers who are no longer satisfied with VPS. Our emphasis was mainly on price. Currently, we still offer three reliable options:
- HPE ProLiant DL320e Gen8 v2, Intel XEON E3-1231v3 3.4 Ghz, 32 GB RAM, 2×1 TB HDD
- QUANTA E3, Intel Xeon E3-1230Lv3 1.8 Ghz, 32 GB RAM, 2×1 TB HDD + 2×120 GB SSD
- Fujitsu RX100, Intel Xeon L3406 2.26 Ghz, 32 GB RAM, 2x 750 GB HDD
Most of our stock is sold out. Units are available. We have dedicated servers ready. They are plugged in and once you order and pay for them, you can use them.
Of course, we discussed whether it would be worthwhile for us to buy more servers somewhere at interesting prices, like in the case of 255 HPE ProLiant DL320e, which we got for a fraction of the price and we can rent them to you for only 1000 CZK/month.
The problem is that we have minimal margins on dedicated servers, they take up a lot of space, and there is a lot of human work involved. For us, it would make sense to buy servers by the hundreds, which will only take you a few days to plug in. For the time being, we are not planning any more dedicated servers. However, with DC3 the situation will change a lot.
This year we also started offering VIP services. Our first customers are mainly companies that want to connect multiple dedicated servers via their own switch. We’re still testing how it works.
WEDOS WebSite
Our most anticipated service is WEDOS WebSite. It includes an easy-to-use drag-and-drop block editor that lets you create your own website in minutes. You don’t need a programmer, graphic designer or administrator.
Recently someone created this beautiful presentation of the Friends of Karel Engliš.
There are currently over 700 test websites created as part of the beta test we launched in January. Many of you like Wedos WebSite and ask us when it will be launched.
Unfortunately, it is not as simple as it seems. Since WEDOS WebSite is supposed to be as simple as possible, we want to separate it from our customer administration, which is for experienced users and requires some knowledge of IT concepts. We will force you to come to the administration only when you need, for example, emails.
So we need to create a separate administration and connect it to our entire system (hosting, billing, support, etc.).
We are also not completely satisfied with the generated pages. We know that many customers rely on good rankings in various SEO tests. We have already tested that we can generate pages from WEDOS WebSite that can give 100/100 on computers and mobile phones in Gogle PageSpeed Insights. However, it is necessary to add an intermediate step with optimization. We haven’t quite worked that out yet.
In any case, we are still counting on a free version for WEDOS WebSite. But maybe we’ll put a smaller strip of advertising down on it 🙂
WEDOS VIP
WEDOS VIP project is for individuals and businesses who want something more from us. For example, if you need a high availability SLA, a custom switch to dedicated servers, or the entire HPE Moonshot with 45 physical servers, etc., we can arrange that. However, it will be quite a bit more expensive as this price includes both the technician and possibly a salesperson who will deal with you individually and be on the phone if needed.
For now, we have only a few subjects in WEDOS VIP test mode with whom we are testing everything.
WMS
You could try WMS for the first time in September last year. This was an extensive beta test, where we mainly needed to see how much you can use the dedicated server performance if it is as easy to use as our NoLimit.
From testing, we found that the power is incredibly high. There was no one who could use the entire test account to its full potential. However, we have received a huge amount of feedback. This then influenced the further development of the service and configuration.
The test “live” operation started in March. Technically everything works with a few modifications to this day. Missing to finish mainly the frontend. More settings, performance graphs, etc. Then the service will be officially live. However, its development is far from over, on the contrary.
WMS is one of the few options on the market where you can have the power of a full physical server with the knowledge of working with a regular web host. Moreover, compared to managed dedicated servers, it is much cheaper.
It opens up a lot of possibilities for customers who want much more than just a regular shared web hosting, but are at risk of impacting others on the same hardware. This is not the case with WMS, because all the power is reserved there.
And what awaits us in 11. season WEDOS Internet, a.s.?
We’ve covered a lot of this in the individual services. We mainly want to finish things, and then tweak and improve. We’ve got a lot in the works. We don’t have money problems, we have enough hardware, places to put it, but what we lack is people.
It was recently mentioned in a meeting with the company management that we could easily recruit 10 well-paid experienced people to send the development forward at a rocket pace. As we work on more than one thing at a time, our development becomes fragmented and we could use people who will do their own thing and get the most out of it. People with vision and experience who are not afraid to do the unthinkable.
WEDOS is recruiting new people like never before. We have 7 different positions open. However, if you have a vision and can do something that would be a good fit, but you didn’t find yourself there, then email us anyway. We are not afraid of new things.
We have already discussed that if we can’t find colleagues in the Czech Republic, we will look abroad. We can arrange accommodation and paperwork. And that many are needed. But we are not afraid of that 😉
We have had a period of investment in the development and roll-out of services. We have already won our place in the market. Now we plan to finally start growing properly. So we’re going to give it a big push in the next decade. We hope you will be there with us 😉