On Thursday 21.01.2021 we publicly launched the WEDOS WebSite service in the afternoon. It is officially conducted as a “final public testing” phase . Officially as beta3. What does that mean?
beta3 – final public testing phase
This phase is essentially a fully functional service. We fixed dozens of bugs from beta2 and implemented several new features in the site builder itself. Our engineers prepared the ideal environment for the operation of the generated websites on our servers and connected everything with our internal systems (administration, billing, monitoring, customer support, etc.)
So we have a fully functional service ready, which we need to test properly before we start the next phase of development and, most importantly, live operation.
Websites from WEDOS WebSite are in the cloud
We thought about how we would do the hosting for the generated pages themselves. In the end, we decided to go with a slightly modified version of the latest version of NoLimit. It’s a bit of “overkill” because NoLimit is optimized for more demanding content management systems with tens of thousands of visitors per day.
Pages generated from WebSite are incomparably less demanding. They don’t need nearly as powerful processors or even super-fast NVMe drives.
The decision to use NoLimit to host them is more to avoid potential technical problems that almost always accompany new services. We have improved NoLimit in many ways over the last few years. Thanks to the fact that everything runs in the cloud, there is virtually no overloading of servers. Even “catastrophic scenarios”, which would have previously meant hour-long outages, are solved without an outage, and if one does occur, everything is up and running within 10 to 20 minutes. When an outage does occur, it is usually an extreme anomaly, where the problem is not solving the problem, but rather waiting for an experienced technician to analyze the problem and choose an appropriate solution.
NoLimit is not just web hosting. It’s a service with preloaded proxies that automatically store frequently used content and serve it to visitors faster than the server. It’s IPS/IDS protection that protects sites from exploitable security holes. A large SYN filter that works with tens of thousands of rules and blocks or restricts hundreds of thousands of IP addresses, DDoS protection and of course advanced analytics tools that allow us to detect vulnerabilities before they occur.
As already mentioned, effectively for WEDOS WebSite, NoLoimit hosting is unnecessarily oversized, but if it works, why not use it?
Current status of WEDOS WebSite
The service is currently fully operational. It is possible to create websites of any size and publish them to the assigned webhosting. You can upgrade and use the emails as with the regular NoLimit.
We have managed to connect WebSite to a photo bank from where you can draw images for free, even for commercial projects.
Compared to beta2, the maps are fully functional. Forms are not working at the moment because we are still tuning spam protection.
My colleagues have prepared dozens of templates for you to use. Just activate the template, rewrite the texts, publish to the webhosting and you have a fully functional website literally in a few minutes.
For the first year, selected domains are free with WEDOS WebSite, even with the FREE plan. You can have your own website on your own domain for free.
What we are currently working on
So far we are not completely satisfied with the functioning of the contact forms and we will be redesigning them.
WEDOS WebSite is an incredibly simple Drag & Drop editor that anyone can use to make a website. However, we run into the problem that the user doesn’t think about the visitors, so they create pages tens of MB in size.
That’s why we are working on scripts that will take care of optimizing the site. Currently it is a script that shrinks images for you. So far we are testing classic formats, where we are only changing the resolution and quality. Once we’ve fine-tuned that, we want to convert all images directly to the next generation JPEG 2000, JPEG XR and WebP formats.
We are also preparing more and more templates. We want to have templates ready for everything and everyone 🙂
Of course, we are continuously fixing bugs and implementing various improvements.
What will be in the next version
Once we have debugged the above shortcomings, we plan to get down to the business of optimizing the generated pages. In the current test version there are “a lot of extra things” that the generated page does not need. Of course, we will remove them and thus significantly speed up the loading of your website. We would like to download everything we have under 200 ms (DNS, encrypted connection, communication with webserver, downloading page, scripts and CSS). Simply a clean WEDOS WebSite page will download in under 0.2 seconds and the rest (images, videos, custom scripts) will be up to the user and their connection speed.
Currently, we already have a development team working on WEDOS AnyCast. Once the first 5 PoPs are up and running in different parts of the world, WebSite should load in under 0.5 seconds from anywhere in the world. In the next phase, we will gradually increase the number of PoPs to 20 and the goal is to achieve loading a WEDOS WebSite from anywhere in the world in under 0.2 seconds 🙂
Conclusion
We will keep you informed about further developments of WEDOS WebSite. For now, you can try it out in a test run at https://order.wedos.com/cs/website/order.html?step=1