Autumn has disrupted many of our plans. There are new government measures that affect us directly or indirectly, some colleagues have had to switch to homeoffice and some have gone through covid.
However, the operation of services was not affected. We have had a pandemic operation ready and tested since the spring. This originally envisaged a partial reduction, or rather delay, in non-acute customer support. In the end, however, it turned out that we managed the home office better than originally planned. Our community website help.wedos.cz has also played an important role, which has greatly facilitated our customer and technical support.
Of course, there are some complications associated with all of this that have disrupted some of our plans. Some of the projects and major tasks have dragged on. Conversely, other smaller ones, where the cooperation of so many people is not needed, have been given priority.
This time we would like to briefly summarize what is new with us.
We have surpassed the 10 thousand new domain extensions (nTLD) mark
Monday 16. November was 2 months since we publicly started registering new domain extensions. It turns out that there is interest among our customers and everyone wants to at least try them, which is not a problem 🙂
So far, the .online domain is clearly the favourite. We like that too. We run our WEDOS OnLine web availability monitoring on it.
Czechs obviously like to have fun and so the .fun domain is the second most popular. In our company, it is particularly popular with colleagues for various testing purposes.
For now, the .tech domain is in third place.
We have also made progress with online video conferencing
Thanks to the dozens of testers with whom we have tested our Jitsi installations several times, we have received enough feedback to improve the service. It took a few reboots and a few hours of A/B testing, but we like the result.
We have tested both E2EE and P2P connections. So maximum safety and speed. More in the article We are preparing video conferences for WEDOS CD and you can try them now.
For the time being, the service is available free of charge to everyone on an unlimited basis. Only the recording function is deactivated (it will be deactivated after connecting to the WEDOS CD). But you can stream straight from your browser without the need for additional software 🙂
Check it out: https://meet.wedos.com/
PHP 8.0 on NoLimit and WMS
On Friday 13. In November we quietly launched PHP 8.0 support on NoLimit and WMS. Since PHP 8.0 won’t officially come out until the 26th. November, it is PHP 8.0.0RC3. So it’s Release Candidate 3 version, which if everything goes according to plan will be used as “sharp”. For now, however, please follow the recommendations of the PHP developers and do not use it for production sites. It is intended for testing purposes only and no warranties are given on our part.
How to change PHP version:
- Log in to your account in the customer administration.
- Select the web hosting tab.
- Select a specific service from the list and open its details.
- In the left menu, select PHP Configuration.
This version of PHP is only running on the new fast servers on HPE Moonshot where NoLimit web hosts are being set up after November 2017 and WMS. Migration of older NoLimit is a long term plan. Unfortunately, this is a challenging process because they are completely different technologies. The old NoLimit is a classic solution and the new one is pure cloud with all the advantages.
WMS performance improvement
Our WMS (Webhosting Managed Server) service is still in test operation. It offers dedicated hardware power on which you set up regular NoLimit. Advanced settings for webserver and PHP are available.
This service is one of the best we can offer in terms of performance. However, it is also much more expensive. For now, we don’t have a large enough user base for it yet, so debugging and improving it is slow.
But that doesn’t mean we forget it. On the contrary. Many of us work with WMS on a daily basis. We are also in contact with customers who send us feedback. We note everything down, test it and pass it on to the developers, who then have enough input to improve the next version of the service. WMS is not about getting done and done. It’s a service we intend to keep improving and refining.
We added one big improvement a few days ago.
This is an experimental functionality that will increase the raw computational power of the WMS. It will be especially noticeable for customers who have, for example, dozens and sometimes even hundreds of WordPress site installations on a WMS with 1 or 2 CPUs. So more demanding scripts where there is not so much CPU. And under the term more demanding, imagine hundreds of SQL queries on DB, working with multiple tables and then processing this data at the level of PHP scripts.
Everything is working well so far. We are waiting for feedback.
Otherwise, even more demanding customers who have hundreds of thousands of accesses per day are slowly getting used to the WMS service. We are even considering allowing the rental of a dedicated proxy server for these customers. Imagine you are planning to run a large advertising campaign to which hundreds of thousands of people will respond. So rent a dedicated proxy server for 2 days, or two just in case 🙂
New disk storage
We purchased two more HPE Cloudline CL5800 Gen9 disk storage devices, each with 100 disks. They are designed for large cloud solutions. In our case we use them for WEDOS CDs. If we fully populate one storage with disks, we get up to 1 PB 🙂
We also started experimenting with HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage. It is a repository that uses AI to optimize performance and predict problems. This storage can handle 3 million IOPS with a response time of under 1 ms. HPE guarantees data availability up to an incredible 99.9999%. They can scale up to 80 PB / one system.
We currently have 2 in DC 1 and are testing them. We are also testing remote replication between 2 datacenters and we want to get a 3rd machine that would be completely outside of us (in a secret and unknown location).
WEDOS WebSite
We wanted to launch WEDOS WebSite already in November, but as we mentioned above, big projects are complicated now. We have prepared so everything is at least businesslike. WebSite already has a production page on our website.
In a test run, the PROFI variant will be misleadingly half the price. Anyone who buys the service at this price will have it for half off forever 🙂
For all variants of WEDOS WebSite, we will also guarantee the traffic it is capable of drawing. For the Premium variant, this will be a respectable 100,000 visits per day. The service is optimized to pull in more, but 100K will be guaranteed, which at 99.99% availability isn’t bad for 200k/month 🙂
We also managed to connect WebSite to one big photo bank. With the Profi and Premium variants, you’ll be able to use more than 2 million photos for free.
Of course, we will still be optimizing and tuning some things during the test run. A couple of blocks will also be off initially.
We plan to expand and improve the service based on how you like it.
WEDOS EWS
WEDOS EWS (Early Warning System) is the working name of an upcoming add-on service that you will be able to activate for your domain. This is a series of monitoring, tests and status change detectors designed to alert you to a potential problem or bug that could affect your internet business.
We built EWS on our experience in solving our customers’ problems. Often it was human error, software failure, but also deliberate attempts to harm someone.
So what will the EWS be able to control everything?
- Comprehensive DNS check (functionality, response, records, correctness).
- WHOIS records (change reports, expiration checks, similar domains on other TLDs).
- Web reputation check (hacked sites database, Google Safe Search, hacked email accounts database, blacklists …)
- Checking the reputation of the IP address of the site and the mailserver (blacklists)
- Checking certificates and their expiration (SSL, DNSSEC)
- Checking the site (functionality, speed of response, common errors …)
- Email checking (sending and receiving emails)
- Additional controls (remote storage, ports …)
This is just the beginning. Our support has resolved over one million customer requests since 2010. We know how much can go wrong and how fatal the consequences can be. With our early warning system, we can help you avoid problems.
The outputs will be sent mainly by e-mail. We are also planning SMS and JSON/XML for connection to your internal monitoring systems.
The goal of EWS is to offer a simple service that you can start and run. More advanced options can be easily set up step by step by following the detailed instructions.
We believe that not only you but also your tutor will love the new service. It will ensure you sleep soundly 😉
Protection enhancements
We are continuously improving the protections. We protect our infrastructure and our customers’ websites in 3 layers:
- DDoS protection – classic large attacks up to tens of Gbps.
- SYN filter – fast filtering based on static or dynamic rules.
- IPS/IDS – protection against specific forms of attack.
The SYN filter filters out the most real threats to our customers’ websites. It collects data from a large number of sources, including our CML (central log monitoring), where logs from all servers and important parts of the infrastructure are collected. We then search for dangerous activity via Elasticsearch (ELK) and send the attackers’ IP to the SYN filter.
In recent months, we have been increasingly responding to threats related to holes in CMS, frameworks, etc. In October, for example, it was a critical vulnerability in Nette.
It is precisely because of such cases that we are preparing an enhancement to the system, where technicians will be able to more easily enter attack features, such as pieces of strings, into a special script, which will facilitate the blocking. For the time being, 2 – 3 people have to make similar critical interventions.
In general, we are not keen on limiting traffic on customer services. For example, if someone doesn’t use the latest update, it doesn’t necessarily mean they didn’t patch the security hole. However, sometimes the situation is so serious and the number of potentially affected sites so large that it is necessary to block certain forms of access, at least temporarily. This will help us with that.
WEDOS Energy is running out
One of our most successful promotions will soon be coming to an end. Only the last WEDOS Energy pallets are left and we are thinking what to do next.
The event was a success. WEDOS Energy is the most successful promotional item we have ever done. 140,000 cans in 2 years, and we were thwarted by the coronavirus this year. We planned to include them for free at every IT event, football and hockey games and we will also hand them out at the zoo.
Even so, we evaluate the event as very successful. the question is what next? 🙂
Shall we do something new? WEDOS Beer? WEDOS Coffee? Will we go back to WEDOS Energy or make an improved version with a different recipe, for example in WEDOS Pink Energy? 🙂