This year everything got pretty messed up for us, as it did for most of us. We had to improvise a lot, adapt to the current situation and overcome many problems. Fortunately, we are no longer a small company, but a successful large hosting company with plenty of financial and material reserves and a great team of people who have gained a lot of experience over the past 10 years and this year it was evident.
🎄 Let’s start with a Christmas event first 🎁
This time we started the Christmas event a bit early. You can find all our gifts one by one at wedos.cz/christmas. We have prepared free domains and web hosting for you, and you will also find great discounts on new services. We may have something special in the works. Be surprised 😉
What we failed to do this year
Let’s start with what didn’t go so well this year. The whole situation with the new coronavirus (whether quarantines/isolation or government regulations) has crashed practically everything for us. We have had to change our plans for service development and enhancement, infrastructure expansion, advertising, marketing, construction of DC2 and the planned DC3.
Our biggest regrets are the slow development of the WMS service, the delay of WEDOS WebSite and the postponement of the migration of NoLimit set up before November 2017 from older servers to new powerful ones. Unfortunately, it is with these more complicated services that it is noticeable when the whole team cannot work together and ideally agree on the spot.
Homeoffice is great for solo projects by people who enjoy it, but great things come from teamwork.
WMS
We have imagined the WMS service somewhere else for a long time now. Comprehensive charts to help diagnose any problem, optional add-ons that we don’t allow on shared web hosting, and most importantly, additional services that allow you to increase the performance of your WMS to the sky.
At least we have been able to test the latter with a few VIP clients. We are testing dedicated proxy servers that can handle heavy loads. In the future, it might be possible to rent a dedicated proxy for a few days if you are planning a large advertising campaign, for example.
However, this does not mean that WMS is lying fallow. Our technicians are constantly there to tweak and improve things. It’s a completely different service than NoLimit and requires a slightly different approach and mindset. We have also recently made a number of modifications that have led to significant speedups especially in the 1 and 2 CPU versions of WMS.
WEDOS WebSite
WEDOS WebSite … hmm this awesome service, which you have created almost 1000 websites on its test version, we still can’t finish successfully. Hopefully soon, but really, we don’t want to make any more promises.
Migration NoLimit
The migration of NoLimit has dragged on in the past for many technical reasons. There are tens of thousands of web hosts that we would like to move to more powerful servers with support for the latest technologies and ideally without downtime.
However, at least thanks to this, as a side project, a quite successful migration script was created that can move almost anything anywhere and, if the procedure is followed, without failure. This is how we migrate customers who need the latest version of PHP or proxy servers, which are available for free at NoLimit.
Other unfinished and deferred projects
Other unfinished and postponed projects are also regrettable, but in the current situation we will regret them just as we could not take full advantage of our partnership in the football clubs FC Zbrojovka Brno, SK Dynamo České Budějovice and Zoo Hluboká. We had joint events planned everywhere, free tickets, etc. Hopefully next year will be better, we have to be positive 🙂
When the situation allowed it for a while, we took advantage of it. On our birthday, we provided free entry to the Hluboká Zoo for all our customers and fans. When it was still possible to play at least to a limited extent in stadiums for spectators, we used to organize competitions for tickets.
Hopefully next year will be more cheerful. We have so much we would love to share with you live 🙂
What we did this year
The new unexpected situation brought new challenges. We expected a slightly different development of the current situation, so we had to rethink mainly advertising and marketing. Thanks to homeoffice, many people from the sales department started to work completely individually, most of the meetings were eliminated, there was less approval from the management and more improvisation. When you suddenly have the opportunity to fully capitalize on all those years of experience and what you’ve learned from more experienced colleagues, just don’t be afraid to go for it 🙂
Less investment in online advertising and more in the community
As a result, for example, we spent only a fraction on online advertising from March to September. Instead, we used our own promotional channels. For example, with one business partner with whom we ran a joint marketing campaign, to which he contributes, we met all the agreed targets. In fact, we outbid them almost 6 times, and they had nothing to invoice him.
In recent years, we have been investing in building content not only for our customers, but also for the entire IT community, and this year we have pushed more on the share of advertising and marketing in these channels.
Well, where are the days when we were afraid to send you more than one email a month or publish social media posts once a week 🙂
By the way, we have set up an Instagram and LikedIn profile for WEDOS this year.
We have new skilled colleagues
During the year, we managed to recruit more skilled colleagues to the team. This time not only for technical positions, but also to help with the business. Thanks to this we managed to organize for example WEDOS Derby.
It was a demonstration of what can be done by combining WEDOS videoconferencing and VPS ON. You can find instructions on how to do this on our community website:
- Stream on multiple platforms simultaneously using a virtual server
- WEDOS MEET – setting up, connecting and conference functions
- WEDOS MEET – Frequently Asked Questions and Troubleshooting
Because of this event we had to upgrade our conference room in DC2 with a green screen.
More people are known. We’re writing more tutorials, we’ve been able to dedicate one support colleague primarily to our community site, and there’s more room to help customers beyond support.
Community website
Our community website help.wedos.cz deserves its own paragraph. It’s still officially in beta testing and awaiting new looks, features and extensions, but it’s doing great. There’s a nice atmosphere.
We don’t have the final numbers yet, but we can already see from the statistics that this was a step in the right direction. We have seen a decrease in dissatisfaction with customer support and a significant decrease in the number of complaints in the category “Customer support did not solve my problem.” We felt it in business terms. There has been a significant drop in the number of terminations due to “Dissatisfaction with customer support” or “What I wanted didn’t work”.
But a community website is not just a big help forum. There are also tutorials at help.wedos.cz/all-tutorials/ and kb.wedos.com. Especially for the knowledge base, we decided to abandon the strict concept of documentation and make the tutorials more user-friendly. We rely a lot on feedback on our community website. If something is not clear or needs to be expanded, we will modify/update the instructions.
There is a lot of work behind this, but we are seeing real results. We are moving in the right direction 🙂
Wish everything would be cleared up next year so we could meet the community in person at our DC2 🙂
Datacentre WEDOS 2
Speaking of our second datacenter, we had problems with suppliers, manufacturers and colleagues who couldn’t go to work due to quarantines/insulations, but we still moved forward with a lot of things. The offices are now fully functional and very pleasant and comfortable to work from. This helped us a lot because we could split teams of people into multiple datacenters.
The buildings are already connected. We are gradually connecting new Arista switches, then the servers will come next.
Oil cooling
We’ve also moved the oil cooling. Over the holidays, we drowned 90 servers in the latest prototype oil bath.
At the beginning of December, we moved on to the next phase of testing the oil cooling of servers in the WEDOS 2 datacenter. The new oil bath is already connected to 1 of the 2 cooling circuits (due to TIER IV the cooling must be redundant and the heat supply/exhaust must be separate – we run under the ceiling and under the floor).
It is not yet a final solution. Mainly we need to test how efficient the cooling is and how much heat we can remove, if the tub as designed can handle it, or if we can find some other things that could be improved in the next version of the tub. We are doing the actual development and testing of all the oil cooling components for the massive deployment of this technology. If it works for us, others will be inspired. Why would anyone pay far more for ever more expensive electricity than they have to?
We’re gradually moving on. Once everything is tested and more vans are produced, all we need to do is “drown” the HPE Moonshots with the servers, connect everything and we can get it up and running. There is plenty of space in the DC2 server room. It is built on 10,800 physical servers.
New domain extensions
In March, WEDOS became an ICANN accredited registrar. We immediately started negotiations with the registries and technical preparations. Negotiations were tough, but in the end we managed to negotiate really great conditions and events.
We officially started registering new domain extensions in mid-September. On November 16th, we passed the 10,000 new domains mark and a month later, on December 17th, we reached the 20,000 mark. We are now the largest registrar of new domain extensions on the Czech market, but it was not a real challenge. We are much more pleased that our customers are moving to us with nTLDs from our competitors.
By the way, on 21.12.2020 the total number of domains under our management exceeded 400 thousand 🙂
Faster deployment of new technologies
WEDOS NoLimit is one of our most popular services. We therefore take due care and always try to bring all the latest innovations to keep our customers happy. This year we did pretty well. Before the stable release of PHP 8.0, we offered our customers PHP 8.0 RC3 in advance so they could try everything out. We then deployed PHP 8.0 on release day in the evening. It is true that we still need to finish the JIT compiler.
Improved attack filtering
As we have already written, this year has favoured individual projects where individuals could work solo. Thanks to this, our filtering of attacks and unnecessary traffic directed to web hosts and WMS has moved another step forward.
In October, we devoted a separate article to this issue. The number of blocked transmissions exceeded 60%, or how we made progress in protecting your websites.
Our boss Josef Grill also spoke about our protections at the OpenAlt 2020 lecture in November.
Our protections currently work with hundreds of thousands of IP addresses, which they either block completely or restrict for specific operations and under certain circumstances. They’re also smarter. Especially with well-known CMSs, we can, for example, predict where the backdoors will be and block attempts to call them.
Again, there’s one big rest, and that’s that the IPS/IDS layer can’t filter traffic over HTTPS, which in the case of whitelisted IPs, such as large CDN services, is the end-all for many non-updated sites.
What’s in store for us next year
Well, we’ve got a lot to do. This time we don’t have an annual marketing strategy planned because no one knows what it will be. A lot of actions will be spontaneous. On the other hand, we did pretty well in this tough year 🙂
News we are finishing
These projects have already been completed. Some details are being debugged, or waiting for the command to start.
- WEDOS WebSite – the service will run in test operation first. Whoever subscribes during this period will be permanently guaranteed half price on the PROFI tariff. The service will be further developed according to market requirements. There are also plans to end the test operation in 2021.
- WEDOS EWS (provisional name) – An additional service to domains that is based on monitoring everything that can go wrong (DNS, WHOIS, blacklists, database of hacked and dangerous sites including Google Safe Search, IP reputation check, certificates, functionality and speed of protocols, checking incoming and outgoing mail and many more …). We know what can go wrong and how much money and reputation such mistakes cost. With WEDOS EWS, you can prevent everything.
- More nTLDs to our offer – we are in hard negotiations with other registries about other new domain extensions. Contracts are continuously signed and domains are introduced into our system. Soon you will see some popular domains at great prices and of course there are new promotions planned.
- WEDOS Whois Protection – Domain owner protection that meets all applicable legal and domain ownership rules with an increased focus on the security of the domain itself.
- New app installer – The current app installer is not working perfectly. We are finalizing a new custom solution that will directly install fully functional and tested versions of popular content management systems, e-shops, frameworks, etc.
- Services in DC2 – We are finalizing the connection of servers within the internal network. This will be enough for a test run of the oil cooling services.
- Drowning the UPS in oil – ready. See HUPS project.
- Completion of the oil bath testing phase – Once the stress tests are completed, we will prepare the documentation and have the first batch of the “stable” version produced.
- Start of construction of DC3 – we already have the papers ready, financing too.
Services being worked on
These projects are actively developed by individuals or entire teams.
- WEDOS AnyCast – The service concept is ready and tested. Functional prototype. We’re waiting for an available team to take over.
- WEDOS Filter – Our database of problem IP addresses and tens of thousands of filtering rules are ready to deploy on any domain. We can block traffic by location, clean suspicious traffic and redirect to captcha. Your server doesn’t even have to be with us. Tests are currently underway with several customers. The results so far are well above expectations.
- WEDOS Apps – SaaS with hundreds of apps that are set up with a VPS just for you in 1 click.
- WEDOS BareMetal – Greater performance of dedicated hardware.
- Community marketplace – There is a lot of demand on our community website for tasks that we can’t perform (website editing and optimization, VPS management). We thought of adding a marketplace for community members to meet supply and demand.
- Advanced diagnostics – we are preparing a series of advanced diagnostic tests that can detect most common and very complicated problems on websites. Advanced diagnostics is primarily designed to relieve our customer support, but we believe it will also save our customers thousands in optimization costs. We believe that together with WEDOS EWS we will take our services one step further.
Services “on paper”
These projects are approved by the company’s management. We are waiting for people to take charge of them.
- WEDOS ProtectedMail – Fully encrypted emails that no one but the sender and recipient can access.
- Encrypted dedicated WEDOS CD – Currently the WEDOS CD is connected to our administration via the WEDOS ID service. It allows you to centrally manage user accounts for selected services at WEDOS. We plan to create dedicated instances of a specially modified WEDOS CD, so that everything is encrypted as much as possible, including the data on the disk and separated. The aim is to create a technically and legally protected service not only from third parties, but literally from us as well. The service will be maintained for 1 customer. We will not have any information about other users and there is no way to find out.
- WEDOS insurance services – We have been cooperating with insurance.cz for many years and we help each other. All the time we are also trying to create a suitable joint product that a large insurance company could also guarantee. Maybe next year you’ll see the first one.
- MojeID integration – We are following very closely the success of MojeID, which has managed to build enough authority to be recognised by some state institutions. We are currently investigating how much we could use this to make the “paperwork” easier for our customers, or to increase the security of authorized requests. We already have some promising concepts.
Conclusion
As you can see, we’ve got a lot. These are just NEW things that are in the works or planned. They do not include improvements and modifications to existing services, of which dozens are planned. And we’d better not even mention the “What we’d like” list, that’s much bolder 🙂
What is holding us back the most is the lack of colleagues to take on new tasks. We currently have 7 positions open and could use a few more people for some of them. Try looking at wedos.cz/career