The first customer support request came in 23 minutes after midnight. My colleague was able to check him in in a minute. Our services run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Whether it’s a holiday, a pandemic, a crisis, or a blackout. Everything has to be working around the clock and someone has to keep an eye on it. There’s always someone sitting in the data center, one staircase and several security doors separating us from the server room, and others waiting ready on the phone because they’re on call.
So began the year 2023 for WEDOS … we didn’t even know it 🙂
This applies mainly to the Operations and Customer Support departments. They handle customer requests and solve problems. Robots, automated scripts and various diagnostic tools help them with everything. Thanks to this, they are able to handle thousands of requests and perform hundreds of tasks and interventions per day in a relatively small number. The operations department currently has 12 colleagues and customer support 7 people, including the manager. With this, we are able to ensure a true 24/7 operation, meet all legal requirements and give colleagues plenty of time to rest (there is an extra week of holiday at WEDOS).
When you consider that there were 43 of us at the end of last year (most doing new service development), you can see that WEDOS itself could be run with far fewer people if we didn’t want to grow.
But we want to grow and a lot! 💪😎🫳
Others are getting laid off, WEDOS is hiring!
Colleagues in charge of recruitment have not received as many CVs or had as many interviews as in recent weeks. Both the number and the quality of applicants are growing.
In January, our team expanded by 5 new colleagues (that’s more than 1/10). We have added 2 programmers, 1 customer support colleague who will be in charge of specific tasks, 1 foreign colleague for the position of UI / UX designer and also a colleague who will start a new position of event manager.
Event manager?
As you may have noticed, in the past year we have attended and also organised a number of conferences and events. WEDOS is perceived as a company that delivers quality and affordable services, thanks to its emphasis on automation and innovation. But to do this, we also need to invest in education and content creation for all. Without that, any disruptive technology will have no one to use it, no matter how much it would make their life easier, because they simply don’t know about it or have no idea how it will help them.
In 2023, we would like to focus on creating just such content. More tutorials, useful tips, workshops, etc. But just creating this content and distributing it over the internet is not enough. We need to take it directly to users who don’t yet know they need our services. Services like WEDOS OnLine or WEDOS Global are completely unknown to most people. They have never heard of anything like it and have no idea how crucial it can be for them.
The new event manager will help us with conferences, workshops and other events 🙂
And other colleagues are “on their way”
In February, we expect our team to grow by two more colleagues. A server solutions developer and another programmer will be added. That’s not the end of our recruitment. More people will help us grow faster, but also improve our existing services.
We are not afraid of the crisis, we are not a startup dependent on “burning money” from investors who keep it alive in the hope of future profits. WEDOS has grown in the crisis and our growth is based on stable income from the operation of quality services.
So even in these challenging times, we intend to expand our ranks because it simply pays off.
TIP: Would you like to work for the fastest growing hosting company on the market that is not afraid of innovative solutions in hardware, software and research of non-standard technologies? More at wedos.cz/career
WEDOS Global
The highest priority is given to WEDOS Global, as the creation of a decentralised global network is the basis for our other services to use it.
Especially WEDOS Global Protection, which has already saved the business of many users. Literally every month someone comes in that they are under attack and their hosting solution provider can’t handle it or doesn’t want to deal with it. For WEDOS Global Protection it is not necessary to switch to us. Just set up our DNS and we will take care of everything.
We put the protections in place and suddenly it’s on. The customer is delighted, his hosting provider is satisfied and we are happy for another success.
TIP: Read the article WEDOS Global Protection in action – L7 attacks every day at 7:00am to find out how we helped a successful Czech company with offices in many European countries.
However, WEDOS Global Protection still has a long way to go. It’s already getting great results, but we’ll have to simplify things a lot more. We wanted to give the user choice and customization. But the fact is that the user just wants to press a button and not worry about anything else. Leave it all to us.
Currently, two solutions are implemented that take the initiative in case of an attack on behalf of the user. Each evaluates the defective operation differently and individually according to the location from which the suspected operation originates.
Of course, there is also interest in content caching. Something that WEDOS Global Protection can already do directly, which uses caching as one form of protection. However, the interest is mainly in the classic CDN, which will speed up the loading of the web around the world.
We are also seeing interest in “cloud usage of WEDOS Global”. We were asked if we could run a certain script on points, which is simple, but the author needs a fast response worldwide and millions of runs per day. We are not that far with WEDOS Global yet, but if there is interest, why not. We choose partners for our points who can provide us with housing and connectivity for other HPE Moonshots (each with 45 physical servers) if needed.
Of course, WEDOS Global will grow in 2023. More points will be added and both computing capacity and connectivity will increase. We would like to have 40 – 50 points worldwide in the first phase. This will ensure that we have pretty good coverage of the entire planet.
At the same time, we want to make WEDOS Global affordable for everyone. All with jurisdiction in the Czech Republic (EU), which is often a problem for foreign services. You have no idea where the data is, how it is handled and who has access to it. In the EU, we need to address this.
The big step is then to move all shared web hosts behind WEDOS Global. This will allow us to better protect our customers’ websites.
We are also addressing the possibility to easily protect customers with VPS and dedicated servers directly through WEDOS Global. Of course, it’s more complicated there than on a shared web host, where you only have a certain kind of content.
WEDOS OnLine
The WEDOS OnLine project was prioritised around the middle of last year and we have made good progress since then. For more information, see the article WEDOS OnLine – Completion of Phase 1. It was originally created mainly for us, so that we could monitor hundreds of thousands of services of our customers. It was later launched as a standalone service that is still in test operation.
Currently the final version is almost finished. We have a credit system in place that includes generous credit distribution and paid features (texting, challenging tests, etc.). Just connect everything to our billing and payment gateway.
However, the development of WEDOS OnLine is far from over. We have prepared the basis for further extensions, such as integration into WordPress (using the features of WordPress itself).
Most people think of WEDOS OnLine as just monitoring the availability of websites. However, this service can do much more, including alerting you to potential problems, but more importantly, it can be an important part of your other systems. You can set up your own controls so that if something specific happens, it sends an alert to your server/script (via webhook). There you can have an API that responds to that. For example, it will turn off the advertising campaign, turn on protection, create another proxy server if the server is down, send information to social networks, etc. The possibilities are countless.
And we’re just getting started 🙂
What about other projects?
As we complete the restyles, many of our developers are getting their hands free. So it’s time not only for new services, but also for improving and fine-tuning existing ones. Of course, it doesn’t make business sense everywhere.
In 2023, you’ll see a number of improvements to existing services, new features added, and we’ll also work on performance. Everything will not be as visible as new PHP versions or DKIM deployment, but you will notice it in the availability and speed. Especially those of you who use WEDOS OnLine, they won’t miss any change 😉
When it comes to brand new services, it’s about priorities. We still have limited human resources and we also have to take demand into account. A lot of things are nice (like Python) and you’d want it on NoLimit, but there’s much more demand for mail hosting or dedicated WordPress hosting.
If we can recruit more skilled people and the new services make economic sense, we will do them.
Conclusion
If you want to stay up to date on other WEDOS news, follow us on social media(FB, Twitter, Linedin), subscribe to our podcasts(Apple, Google, Spotify) and sign up for our newsletter.