Our shared web hosting NoLimit is the most popular and most widely used web hosting in the Czech Republic. In the eight and a half years since the launch of the service, almost 174,000 services have been ordered, of which approximately 104,000 are active. In total, we host about 140 thousand active domains on NoLimit web hosting.
Eight and a half years is a really long time for an internet service. You can see that in 2010 we had an estimate and came up with a groundbreaking service, but times have moved on. We have therefore decided to take the next big and important step. We will increase the parameters of the service according to the current requirements of modern websites of today, including a reserve for the future.
Website of the Year 2010 and Website of the Year 2019
Websites have taken a huge leap since 2010, the year NoLimit was originally designed for. It’s not so much fun anymore to make your own customized solution, optimize everything and save performance both on the server and visitor side. Instead, a one-size-fits-all solution, most often WordPress, is used literally everywhere, often without any optimization.
Websites are not made by programmers anymore, but by ordinary users who don’t mind not knowing how their content management system actually works, what it does or who is the author of the code.
Another big difference is the average size of the site. In 2010, websites had tens of megabytes, today they have hundreds. Websites that have tens or hundreds of GB of data are no exception. They no longer pay so much attention to the data limits of visitors. Demanding templates are used, photos directly from the mobile phone in high resolution, or the editorial system takes an uploaded photo in high resolution and makes it into several smaller ones. The big one will stay there. The average size of the front page is no longer the former several dozen KB, but nowadays several MB. It’s common to see sites that have a front page of several tens of MB, which is definitely wrong :-), but if it suits the site owners, we don’t bother.
In order to continue to offer high performance and unlimited space on branded SSD (or NVMe) drives, we need to move the price up slightly because the average site size is simply going up faster than the price of the drives is going down.
We decided that we would also advise and help all our customers with WordPress. We have started using this editorial system for our websites and we have several specialists who can do all the magic and magic tricks that will speed up your editorial system by tens of percent.
Old NoLimit vs. New NoLimit or LAMP vs. Cloud
We will gradually migrate all legacy shared web hosts to the new cloud solution, which runs on powerful HPE Moonshot server cabinets. It’s the most modern thing that’s probably in use now…
A very small part of the original websites on NoLimit webhosting still run on servers with efficient processors and regular HDDs, most of them on SSDs but with slower processors. And all this on our original solution.
We need to move all this and unify it. Only then will we be able to mass deploy new technologies that are being tested on the new NoLimit web hosts – such as proxy servers that handle all static traffic. We wanted to do the migration already in winter, but we want to do it properly so we are still preparing it.
We use only NVMe drives and very fast processors on the new servers. Each server is connected to 2 x 10 Gbps (instead of the original 1 Gbps) and everything is built on containers (kubernetes).
Just for the record, the most demanding NoLimit on the classic solution drew tens of thousands of accesses per hour. The record holder, who really had his site tuned out, gave over a hundred thousand hits per hour on a regular NoLimit. He had his website very well optimized and was able to get the most out of our NoLimit and within all conditions.
On the other hand, we can also find “record holders” who have a problem with hundreds of visitors per hour because optimization does not mean anything to them…
In contrast, record-breaking cloud solutions on HPE Moonshot servers with 3.4 Ghz processors, NVMe drives and proxy servers are already achieving higher hundreds of thousands of accesses per hour. It’s simply the solution of the future, and we’re improving it all the time.
We don’t deny that we struggled a bit with the new solution. It has been quite a lot, but the service is now working in an excellent way. We’ve had virtually 100% availability and very high performance there for several months. The databases operate in master-slave mode. We have new protections where, in addition to the original DDoS protection and IDS/IPS protection, we have additional new filtering. We’re moving forward. All the time.
The NoLimit web hosting service itself is technologically quite different than it was in 2010, when we started offering it. Back then, it was a relatively simple service. One server was running the web, the other the database and then we had a shared mailserver. Today practically everything is different.
The entire network is built on 100 Gbps technology, which no other classic hosting in the Czech Republic currently has. Behind the 100 Gbps routers are various DDoS filters that we have spent several years developing and can successfully filter tens of Gbps of traffic. We also have IDS/IPS protection for web hosting, which is also not quite common on the market (although many companies claim to have similar protections 🙂 ). At the same time, we have additional levels of filtering and blocking that we are constantly improving.
Our protections are working. For example, just test it with plugins like Wordfence, where you can see that almost no attack can get through to your site. Compare that to results elsewhere…
The new web hosting has preloaded proxy servers, which ensure higher performance and caching of static content and thus faster loading of all services. Proxy servers are PHP servers that handle pure PHP processes. To do this, we have database servers that are operated dually in master-slave mode (so there are 2 copies of the database data).
Everything works as containers and is controlled by Kubernetes. This makes everything easily scalable to your needs. There is plenty of power because we use very fast processors everywhere and everything is internally connected 2x 10 Gbps. We use distributed network storage on the fastest professional (and branded) NVMe server drives.
And so we could go on… In addition, we have mailservers where we have added an excellent antispam solution. No one has complained since he was deployed. For domains, we have DNSSEC. We’re still moving forward… Today, we offer a completely different technical solution with many times higher performance…
Today you can order a separate web hosting for domains III. order to share the power and workload and improve the availability of its services. You can make a development environment and more and more options.
We are improving and investing all the time. We are upgrading server and network components and building a second datacentre, which we intend to open this year. We are successfully resisting the constantly rising costs with a growing number of clients. We are not only the largest hosting company in the Czech Republic, but also the largest domain registrar in the Czech Republic. Step by step. Moreover, we are the only hosting company in the Czech Republic that has two datacentres of its own. Not to mention that we are a company without foreign owners and foreign capital. Purely Czech, which builds everything in the Czech Republic. And without any subsidies. 🙂
NoLimit parameters must be changed or what you get
Currently, there are more than 25 thousand NoLimit web hosts on the new solution. Most of them are content management systems, mostly WordPress. From monitoring, logs and tens of thousands of customer support requests, we have long known that some parameters need to be adjusted and something needs to be optimized.
The editorial systems at WEDOS work well, but sometimes you run into limits with plugins. For example, some customers need more memory for data processing. Currently the PHP memory_limit is 128 MB, which is enough for a regular blog or magazine, but WordPress shop owners with WooComerce need more when importing or updating products. That is why we have decided to increase this limit in the base to double, i.e. 256 MB.
We also encountered a problem with uploading large amounts of data via POST. This was causing a problem when importing the data. PHP upload_max_filesize and PHP post_max_size values will be raised to 128 MB, which is also 4 times more than now!
Next, adjust max_execution_time from the current 90 seconds to a possible 300 seconds. You will be able to set everything individually in the administration. In the future, we want to set the default value to a lower value, probably 10 seconds, which will benefit most sites. Those who want a different value will be able to set up to 300 seconds.
We increase the above service parameters by 100%.
The NoLimit Extra will also increase the above parameters from the current ones to double!
And now watch out, we saved the best for last 😉
We will increase the number of aliases you can use for web hosting from 1 to 3. In total, you will be able to run up to 4 websites on one NoLimit web hosting. So here we increase (improve) the service by 100%.
We will also increase the number of concurrently running PHP processes from 5 to 7. So technically, your website can handle up to 40% more traffic.
Another new feature we are working on, , is optimizing databases for content management systems. For selected problematic WordPress sites, we’ve seen up to 17x speedup.
NoLimit will get better and better
In the summer we want to add online access logs and error logs for everyone. Now on the new NoLimit we have a bit of a problem with classic logos, so we decided to go with a completely new solution, which we are now preparing and will introduce in the summer.
This year we want to add GIT for web hosting.
We also want to offer other innovations. We’ll be putting some output and stats into the administration regarding attacks or things we’re filtering. At the same time, we will also offer the option of filtering access by country. You’ll be able to set it so that only visitors from, for example, Europe or just the Czech Republic can access the site, or you can block all of China.
The need to scale customer support
5 years ago, the majority of customer support enquiries were about the state of the service, whether technical or billing. Only a minimum of queries were related to the content and settings of the CMS on which the service runs. At most we solved a problem with .htaccess. Customers with their own solution knew why it wasn’t running, knew how to debug it and actively solved the problem themselves without our help.
With the growing number of websites on content management systems, the situation has changed.
Now it’s the other way around. Most of the questions are related to content, CMS settings, problems with CMS and plugins in these systems. Customers install WordPress and if they’re not happy with how it works, they contact customer support, often not even knowing if there’s anything wrong at all. Therefore, we had to dedicate two colleagues to the position of CMS specialist to help customers with their editorial system, beyond the original concept of customer support. We did not count on this at all and it is completely beyond what we ever promised.
It really makes a big difference. It takes incomparably more time to find a problem in WordPress than it does to find a bug in .htaccess.
This has led to the need to increase the number of customer support staff and keep them there, even though they have already gained enough knowledge and experience to move up to technicians or development.
Just for the record, most of our company is dedicated to the development and evolution of new services and enhancements to existing ones. More than half of the employees do not deal with day-to-day operations, but mainly with innovations and improvements.
Human resources costs are currently the second highest item at WEDOS and will probably soon be the highest cost item. Average wages in the Czech Republic have grown by 46% in recent years and even more in IT. We are not complaining, we know that we cannot do without skilled people. Without them, there will be no quality support and no development and evolution of services. We are currently looking for employees outside the Czech Republic and we have a total of 7 employees (out of almost 40) of other nationalities than Czech.
One more interesting fact. We have calculated that if we offered NoLimit web hosting without any customer support, we could reduce its price by more than 10 CZK to only 15 CZK/month. Instead, we have to increase the price by 8 CZK.
In order not to have to do much more, we decided to automate some things and completely redesign others. Quality customer support cannot scale indefinitely.
For example, we will soon launch our own discussion forum with help for customers. The “non-public” beta test is now available at help.wedos.cz. By providing quality answers to the most common questions, we reduce the burden on customer support and also create a very high quality knowledge base for everyone. In the future, we plan to include a section for public discussion, a selection of articles on IT news and even a marketplace for services. Unfortunately, we don’t have the people to provide server management, but we believe that many of our customers have the necessary knowledge, so why not connect supply and demand.
We have a lot that is not yet automated. For example, restoring from backup. This is carried out by a technician after consultation with the customer. The automation that we want to launch at the beginning of the summer will free up the technicians to do more important things, like development. From deployment, automatic restore from backup will be free. We are also considering the possibility to back up the entire site individually on a click just before you want to make any major changes.
We are planning other things that we can and intend to solve by automation, and there is no other way in the future.
Summary
We have significantly improved our existing NoLimit web hosting. We will raise the price slightly, but we will improve the service by 40 to 100%. We are raising the price slightly, because today’s sites need a different product than the original NoLimit from 2010. It requires different parameters, different customer support, different settings and a different approach to the service itself.
We don’t think it’s worth the trouble. We will simply redo (upgrade everyone) the NoLimit webhosting to a shared webhosting that is designed for today. Unfortunately, today’s times are more demanding, so we will increase the price slightly. For 8 years for 8 crowns, you get significantly better (practically more than double) parameters. That seems fair to us.
By the way, even so, our service will be one of the cheapest services on the market and yet in terms of performance or the types of protection offered or our 24/7 customer support we are among the best on the market ;). Thanks to this, we are the largest, most widespread and best-selling hosting in the Czech Republic.
For existing customers, the price will remain the same until 10. June. Subsequently, renewal calls will be issued at the new price. Those who want it now can extend their service for 10 years at the old price. Just do a manual extension in the customer administration.
We will increase the service parameters in bulk from July 2019.
The future belongs to other services
We are currently in the process of finalizing the WMS – Webhosting Managed Server or WEDOS Managed Server (if you want it that way). It is a special VMS (virtual managed server), where you can set up individual NoLimit web hosts with your own parameters.
Everything that is normally allowed not only by PHP and MySQL, but also by the Apache webserver can be set up. You determine not only how much disk or database space the web host should have. How much CPU power and how much memory. You choose the PHP settings, but also how many CPU threads should be allocated to which site. All this on dedicated power. We will not offer any shared option, only dedicated power up to the size of your own server – yes, the entire server will be yours. You will not share with anyone. You’ll have all the benefits of web hosting and the options of a dedicated or virtual server. You won’t have to worry about anything, not even setting up system parts and updating the operating system. It will all be in our control. You also get SSH access. Dedicated performance for the most demanding clients. Yes, it won’t be a completely cheap service, but if you’re looking for the best, we’ll be ready.
The second service we are developing is our own form of content management system. We’ll take care of everything related to hosting and administration – it’s up to you to upload your content.
We are also just before the launch of the new WEDOS Cloud and VIP services.
Conclusion
You can trust us, we’ve had a lot of discussion about whether to keep the current 25 Kč even at the cost of NoLimit remaining a mediocre shared webhost for today. However, this seemed to us to be a path to stagnation. We are the market leader and the best-selling and largest hosting company and we certainly don’t want to stagnate. We also considered keeping two options, but we do not have such a strategy for any services. For the last few years we’ve been inventing amazing things, testing advanced technologies. We are not afraid to invest tens of millions of both time and money to advance our most widely used service. So why stop now? Let’s take NoLimit one step further.
We are probably the most progressive hosting company on the Czech market. We are moving forward and investing everything in development. We are building a second datacenter, improving the existing one. And yet we can all manage to fight for internet freedom too.
We still want to offer the best service on the market, so we’ve decided to adjust a lot of key parameters to help us do that.