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.

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.

To use Python 2.6, simply execute “python2.6″ anywhere you’d normally use “python”. For example, if you use Django then you can just change the first line of django.fcgi to:

#!/usr/bin/env python2.6

All our prices are staying the same, however we are overhauling our addons. Previously we charged $2 for 100MB of space or 5GB of transfer, now you can upgrade either disk space or transfer to the amount you’d get with the next plan up for half the price difference. That works out as the following:

V1 - 1GB space or 100GB transfer - $42.50/yr

V2 - 2GB space or 150GB transfer - $6/mo or $60/yr

V3 - 4GB space or 200GB transfer - $8/mo or $80/yr

They are now listed alongside account upgrades rather than the separate addons section, this way you can boost your quotas instantly (previously they required a manual upgrade). And because we always treat our existing customers right, we’ve checked every account to make sure you’re getting the best deal possible.

For those of you on our V4 plan, the addons still require a manual upgrade, but we’ve upped the storage to $2 per 1 GB and transfer to $2 per 10 GB! Again we’ve made sure our customers have received that already.

We’re always looking for useful new features to add to our services, so if there’s something you’d like us to support please let us know!

We can’t transfer the old notices to the new system, but we have manually transferred existing email subscriptions. So, if you were subscribed before you should be subscribed now (it might be worth checking that your subscription is all in order so that you don’t miss any announcements). We recommend that all customers subscribe to the RSS feeds or subscribe via email, as this is the main way which we use to communicate scheduled maintenance and other issues which might affect your sites.

We’ve pre-installed a few Python modules which we think people will need, but there are bound to be customers who need more. If you find we’re missing a module that you need, head over to our support web site and open a ticket, and we’ll get it installed right away.

We will also be adding Ruby on Rails support shortly, so watch this space.

All existing customers have already been upgraded to the new plans, free of charge.

Remote Backup

In addition to our new shared hosting plans, we are pleased to announce that we are now operating an automated daily remote backup system for all customers at no additional cost. This will aid any future recovery efforts should the worst happen.

Watch this space for more service announcements in the coming weeks!

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