Following the feedback from our last blog post, ThisWebHost is pleased to announce that we have launched our first European shared hosting server. When purchasing a shared hosting account with us, you now have the option to select your desired location from a dropdown box. Currently the options are;

United States – Lansing
Europe – Germany

If the location of your hosting account is not important, you may specify any location that’s suitable for you. Customers within Europe may notice improved performance (and decreased latency) by selecting the Europe option. Currently the location options are rather limited, but if this is a feature that our customers find useful, we intend to add and launch additional locations in the future.

If you are an existing European customer and wish for your website(s) to be moved to this new European server, we will gladly transfer your sites over free of charge. Simply open a new support ticket from within the client area and let us know which account(s) you would like to be moved. Please allow up to 2 working days for accounts to be transferred.

Finally, because this is a new shared hosting server and because PHP 5.2.xx is now deprecated, this is the first of our servers to be installed using the latest version of PHP shipped with cPanel; 5.3.10. Customers wishing to take advantage of PHP 5.3 should select Europe as their hosting location until such time as future servers are deployed running 5.3.xx. We currently have no plans to upgrade older servers to PHP 5.3.10 as this may cause PHP errors for existing websites. If you are an existing customer and wish to use PHP 5.3.10, please submit a support ticket requesting to be moved to the new server, and our team will gladly assist you.

We hope that these new changes improve your experience with this*. As always, if you have any feedback, comments or suggestions, please let us know by leaving a comment on this blog post!

First of all, Happy New Year! We hope that 2012 is a prosperous new year for you all. At this* we have some great things planned for 2012, but we wanted to get some feedback from you all as to what you would want to see from us.

So let us start the new year with a poll. Is Geographical based hosting something you would be interested in? To clarify the question for those who may be unfamiliar with the term(s), we essentially mean would you prefer to see a choice of hosting servers based on different countries? That is, when purchasing hosting you could choose to have your account based in the US, Europe, UK, etc. Initially these options would likely be limited to the UK and US, but we would look at expanding them in future.

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Please vote and let us know your thoughts! Additionally, if there is anything you’d like to see us offer in 2012, please let us know in the comments below.

We hope you all had a happy holiday and are looking forward to the new year!

Despite the holidays, we have been working hard on making some much needed enhancements and “fixes” for our PayPal users. For our billing system we run WHMCS, which we are fairly happy with. Unfortunately though there are some limitations when it comes to PayPal;

• If using a PayPal subscription to automatically pay for your service with us, when cancelling the service, you must cancel the PayPal subscription manually within your PayPal account.
• If using a PayPal subscription to automatically pay for your service with us, if you upgrade or downgrade your product, the PayPal subscription is not updated to match the new cost of your service and therefore you either pay too much or not enough when the subscription next occurs.
• If using a PayPal subscription to automatically pay for your service with us and you manually pay your invoice (forgetting there is a PayPal subscription setup), these additional funds are added to your account as a credit with us.

Admittedly these are not so much problems with WHMCS, but with the (previous) inability to do anything about these via the PayPal API. Fortunately, the PayPal API receives updates now and again which allow us to expand on it. Because of this we have now implemented the following changes;

• When cancelling a service with us, if you are using PayPal and have an active PayPal subscription setup, we will automatically cancel this subscription on your behalf. This should eliminate any invalid billing of accounts that are no longer active.
• When upgrading or downgrading a service, if you are using PayPal and have an active PayPal subscription setup, we will automatically cancel this subscription on your behalf. This will allow you to setup a new subscription for the correct amount when a new invoice is generated.
• If an invoice is accidentally paid for twice (either because of a subscription or manual payment), the duplicate payment will be automatically refunded back to you instead of being added to your account credit.

We hope that these new changes address some of the billing issues and complaints experienced by some of our clients.

At ThisWebHost we are more than happy to resolve any PayPal billing issues that are experienced by our customers. If, for example, you have accidentally paid an invoice twice – we will certainly refund the duplicate payment back to you if you contact us and let us know. Please be advised that opening a PayPal dispute (as per our terms and conditions) may cause your services to become automatically suspended. This occurs because of automated system that are designed to prevent possibly fraudulent transactions from taking place and to prevent people from trying to obtain free services with us. With the above new changes, this should be a thing of the past, additionally we believe we are the only hosting provider out there has such a system in place!

Please let us know what you think about these changes in the comments below.

In preparation for Black Friday (November 25th) and through to Cyber Monday (November 28th) we have decided to offer 75% off all of our shared and reseller hosting packages! We wanted to let you know in advance so that those of you who are looking to purchase hosting can sign up at the best time and get some fantastic discounts!

Starting November 25th and continuing until the end of November 28th, you will be able to obtain 75% off all new shared and reseller hosting purchases with us. This is not a recurring coupon, but can be used to purchase hosting at any term. This means you can pick up a year of Starter/Blog hosting for just $8.97! How about a year of our Reseller Standard hosting, for just $41.85?

We expect this to the be last “huge” promotion this year, so if you’ve been thinking of getting hosting with us – this will really be the best time indeed. To take advantage of this promotion, be sure to take a look at our Promotions Page on November 25th through to November 28th.

Becoming somewhat of a yearly thing for us, it is now time again for our annual Halloween promotion! For those who have not seen it before, a quick explanation. This is our take on the “trick or treat” festivities surrounding Halloween. To take part, simply click on the ‘Trick or Treat’ button and one of the following will happen.

• You receive a “trick” and a randomly picked message will tell you to come back again later.
• You receive a “treat” and are given a promotional code offering between 5% and 30% off any new purchase of our shared and reseller hosting packages, on any billing cycle, until November 1st.
• You receive a “golden pumpkin” giving you 1 years free Starter/Blog hosting!

Rules/Disclaimer:

You may take part once a day (every 24 hours). Any codes generated will expire at the end of November 1st 2011. You may give the codes to others if you wish. Please do not use proxies or web anonymizers to try and exploit the system (we do check for these). You do not need to be an existing client to take part – anyone can take part. Promotional codes are for purchases of new hosting accounts only and cannot be applied to existing active hosting accounts.

We are currently looking for someone who can make a more awesome Halloween themed image than the one that is currently on the promotional page, incorporating our logo. If you have the time and skill, please get in touch!

Click this link to access our Halloween promotional page