Company Blog

Our new web site is coming along nicely. If you haven’t seen it yet, be sure to take a look and if you have any comments, suggestions or criticisms then feel free to leave feedback.

Since our last blog post, we’ve created a new CMS and created most of the main pages so most of the links on the site should be working now. We’ll be creating the rest of them shortly, and then we’ll create updated templates for the other areas of the site (such as the billing and support system). Stay tuned!

Anyone who’s looked at our Current Projects page will have seen that we’ve been working on a new “Community Discussion” forum to replace our existing forums. All of the basic features are now finished, so we’ve made the new forum live: check it out!

It’s still at the “testing” phase, so expect there to be a few bugs and rough edges (if you find any, let us know), and there are a few features that we won’t be adding until our new web site is live.

Existing customers can log into the forum using their Account Control Panel login details, which we are now referring to as your Valcato Account since the same login details will be used for other things we’re planning in the future. If you’re not an existing customer, posting a message to the forum will automatically create a Valcato Account for you.

With this change, we’ve also simplified our login form, which now allows customers to log directly in to cPanel using the same form that logs you into your Valcato Account. (cPanel can also be accessed from inside your Valcato Account without you having to remember your cPanel password.)

New feature development is in full swing here at Valcato, and we’ve decided to maintain a list of everything that we’re working on so that everyone can see what’s coming in the future. Our Current Projects page lists the details and current status of all of the projects we’re working on, as well as the ones we’ll be starting in the near future. Check it out, and be sure to let us know if there’s anything else you think we should be working on.

On a related note, as some of you may already know we’ve been working on a new design for our web site for a few months. We’ve recently put up a preview of the new design, and we’d love to hear what you think of it. At the moment there are only a handful of pages online in the preview, but we’ll be adding more soon.

A serious security flaw has been discovered in version 3.8.6 of the popular forum software vBulletin. The flaw enables anyone to easily access the main administrator username and password for a site. And could potentially allow hackers to access data, such as e-mail addresses, and edit the site at will.

We could therefore strongly encourage customers who are running version 3.8.6 to immediately apply the patch provided by vBulletin with the version number 3.8.6 PL1

BBC News reports:

The flaw affects version 3.8.6 of the software, which was released on 13 July.
The simple hack, which the BBC has confirmed, allows even unskilled people to access many websites.

With a few key strokes the person can obtain the administrator’s username and password for the website. This can be used to log in to the site and modify and delete elements at will.

The wholesale price of domain names are increasing, but we are not passing this increase on to our customers.

Effective from 1st of July 2010 the authority which maintains the most popular Top Level Domains (TLDs) on the internet – Verisign – have increased the wholesale price of .com and .net domains. In a press release they stated:

As the economy and society becomes increasingly dependent on digital technology, it is imperative that investment in the underlying infrastructure, including .com and .net, continue to keep pace with the robust growth of the Internet and ensure its continued security and reliability. Over the last decade, the volume of Internet traffic and domain name system (DNS) queries on VeriSign’s global infrastructure has increased from an average of approximately 2 billion queries per day in the year 2000 to more than 50 billion queries per day today while maintaining 100 percent operational accuracy and stability for the last eleven years.

At Valcato we are pleased to announce that these wholesale price increases will not be passed on to you, our customers. Through strategic partnerships we are able to absorb the costs and provide you with great value domain registration services. All applicable domain names include ID Protection at no extra charge where our competitors charge $3-7 for this service alone. Furthermore we respect our customers’ inboxes and refrain from sending unnecessary promotional emails or filling our control panel with adverts.

Visit our Special Offers Page to find our about our current promotions or click here to register a domain name today.

Last week we upgraded the cPanel software which powers our Web Site Control Panel to the latest version, 11.25. This upgrade brings many performance and security improvements and innumerable bug fixes. It also provides a few important new features which we think our customers will find useful.

First, there are a couple of improvements to the control panel’s email options. Most notable is the Email Accounts page — this has been completely re-written to make use of JavaScript (AJAX), meaning that email accounts can be created, edited and deleted much more quickly, without the need for the page to be reloaded after each action. Also, the MX entry editor, which controls how email for your domains is routed, has been expanded with additional options to allow you to have more control over exactly how the server routes your incoming email.

This upgrade also adds a new “Simple DNS Zone Editor” to the control panel, which allows customers to easily create and modify entries in their DNS records. This means that customers who wish to create custom DNS entries can do so without having to get us to do it for them.

As well as upgrading cPanel, we added the mod_cache module to Apache. This module provides efficient caching of pages to disk, allowing you to significantly reduce the time it takes for pages to be rendered, and reduce the amount of CPU time required to load each page. Caching can be configured using a .htaccess file — check out the Apache manual pages for mod_cache and mod_disk_cache for more information. (mod_mem_cache is not supported at this time.)

We have also taken this opportunity to upgrade the Account Control Panel, and beyond the behind the scenes changes there are a few new noteworthy features I’d like to explain.

Sub-Accounts

Clients can now create sub-users under their main account to allow multiple people to access the same account without having to use the same login details.

We call the primary login the “master account owner”, and any users they create under their account are called “sub-accounts”. Each section of the client area has its own permission setting so the access rights can be fine-tuned by the master account holder (and any sub-accounts which have been given permission to manage contacts), so different people can perform different actions. For example, you might wish to create an account for your web developer to allow them to communicate with our technical support staff without having access to your billing information.

Mass Pay

The new Mass Payments feature allows you to pay for multiple due invoices in a single payment attempt, which will be more convenient for you and more efficient for us since we will have fewer transactions to process. To use this new option, select the invoices you want to pay from the Dashboard and click “Pay Selected”, or just click “Pay All” to pay all your unpaid invoices.

Domain Renewals

The renewal system has received some attention. It is now possible to renew multiple domains in one go, and it is easier to see which domains are eligible for renewal.

I hope you find yourself using these new features. And as always, if you have any comments please feel free to reply to this blog post or drop us an email to feedback@valcatohosting.com.

We have just completed a total refresh of our managed dedicated server product line. As computer technology develops apace we have have focused our range into 5 standard configurations; removing our single core offerings and introducing a new entry level Pentium E6750 Dual Core Server.

Of course these technical developments also mean that the cost of hardware has reduced, so we are pleased to pass this onto our customers:

Xeon 3210 Quad Core – $269.00, now only $209.00
Xeon 3060 RAID – $349.00, now only $289.00
Dual Xeon 5405 Quad Core – $519.00, now only $309.0
Dual Xeon 5130 RAID – $529.00, now only $379.00

Not only have the base prices been reduced, so have the configurable options which are now half their previous price. For example an additional 4GB of RAM previously cost $50, it is now just $25!

But we’re not done yet, all dedicated servers now include an optional license for the premier hosting automation software WHMCS absolutely free.

We hope you enjoy our new simplified lineup, but of course if none of our standard configurations meet your needs, let us know and we’ll happily put together a custom box for you.

This month we are offering a record number of special offers on domain name pricing; .mobi, .me, .tv, and .asia are all reduced for a limited time only! The promotional pricing is as follows:

mobi – Usually $20, now only $11! (Expires 31st August)
asia – Usually $16, now only $13! (Expires 29th September)
me – Usually $27, now only $13! (Expired)
tv – Usually $29, now only $25! (Expired)
in – Usually $19, now only $6! (Expires 30th September)

Click here to register now.

Our excellent support is the reason 98% of our customers remain with us!

Yes, that’s right. Over the course of the past two months we have been grilling our customers in our annual customer survey to gather their honest opinions on our service, support and plans for the future. The results are in and we are pleased to announce that for the second year running they are overwhelmingly positive.

You can find some of the comments received on our customer comments page and a selection of the results below:

New Website Layout

As a result of the feedback we have changed the colour scheme of our new website layout and will be keeping the classic red colour, keep an eye on our blog for updates in future.

The speed your website loads

1 meaning slowly, 5 meaning extremely quickly

The reliability of your website

1 meaning unreliable, 5 meaning extremely reliable

The flexibility of your account

1 meaning not at-all flexible, 5 meaning extremely flexible

Valcato staff worked on my issue until it was resolved

1 meaning strongly disagree, 5 meaning strongly agree

The speed of support response

1 meaning slow, 5 meaning fast

Would you be interested if all our plans become eco-friendly (carbon offset) but as a result the price is increased by $0.50

1 meaning definitely not interested, 5 meaning definitely interested

Would you be interested if we introduce an optional addon to offset the carbon of your hosting plan for an additional cost of $0.50-1.00 per year.

1 meaning definitely not interested, 5 meaning definitely interested

As you can see there is a dominance of dark orange, which means the vast majority of our customers rated us 5/5 in these key areas. We welcome feedback at any time of the year and have a special address set up for your comments: feedback@valcatohosting.com.

Now is the perfect time to give you business a greater online presence with the global business domain, .biz is only $8/year! for a limited time.

Our .tv and .eu domain offers are coming to a conclusion at the end of the year so we are pleased to announce its successor. Ends 12th February 2010.

Click here to register now