Perhaps the most important aspect of any hosting company is the provisioning of their outage monitoring (and notification) system. Since April this year we’ve entrusted this task to the brilliant guys at Panopta, and for good reason.

There are many different monitoring services on the Internet, and we’d trialled pretty much most of them in order to find the “right” one for us.  Many of them did what they claimed to do, and did it well, but we always felt they were lacking something vital. It wasn’t until we trialled Panopta that we realised just how little control and monitoring the other companies gave you. Almost immediately, we’d discovered the right guys (and/or gals) for the job.

The team behind Panopta are fantastic people, and have been very receptive to our feedback and suggestions on how to potentially further improve their service. Today, they announced that due to popular feedback from their clients, they’ve added some wonderful new reporting information that helps us to show our clients what’s going on under the hood.

If you haven’t seen it already, for the last few months at the footer navigation of our website has been a link to our uptime reports. This page is hosted on the Panopta network (bar a few cosmetic items which are hosted with us) which means that you can safely bookmark it for reference if you think we’re currently experiencing network or server issues. Before todays updates, you could only see the current months uptime, the total uptime in general, and whether or not a server was up or down. These new updates now allow us to provide you with much more in-depth monitoring information:

Historical Availability

As the name suggests, now you can see previous months uptime reports to get a much better idea on the reliability of our service and/or a particular server. We feel this is important not only so that potential new clients can get a good overview of how reliable we are, but also so that we as a host can see potential “problem areas” and review past outages or issues that contributed to the downtime, so that we can better act upon them in future.

Current Status

Current status has now been expanded so that you can see if a particular service is up or down. This is extremely beneficial from a support point of view, as now all customers are able to see whether or not a service is up or down before reporting a potential outage.

Recent Outages

This is perhaps my favourite addition, and one that I imagine many hosts will be shuddering at the thought of. All recent outages are reported here, along with when they started and how long they lasted.

This, again, I feel is an absolutely vital tool as a hosting provider. Now we are able to see when outages occured and which services were affected, so that we can correlate the downtime to particular issues on servers and use this information to prevent the same issue from happening again in the future.

Conclusion

All in all, these changes don’t mean a great deal for our clients in terms of service except that they can now see more information about potential downtime or server problems. We’ve never been a company to hide the facts (or figures), and we feel that as paying clients you deserve to know exactly when your service is or isn’t working.

These changes are really geared towards allowing us to provide you with a better service. Now we have a far greater overview of our network (and one that is set to improve in the future, with the help of people like Panopta) we can periodically review any downtime that occurs and plan how we can reduce it in the future.

We strongly recommend Panopta if you’re looking for any outage monitoring or notification services. Thanks guys!

Though you wouldn’t think it from looking around our website, it’s been a pretty constructive few weeks since my last blog post. We’re still working hard to bring you the new features that we’ve planned, and although they are taking longer than anticipated, things are looking great. Soon we will be at the stage where we’d like a handful of our clients to become testers and provide feedback and suggestions on these features - so if you’d like to help out, please let us know.

6 Month Recap

It’s been around 6 months since our public launch, and we’re extremely happy with how things have progressed up until this point. We’ve made a few positive changes (such as increasing our packages) and all in all believe that so far we have established a service that our clients can be extremely happy with, not only from a hosting performance and reliability perspective, but also from a customer service and support perspective. But… there’s always room for improvement. We absolutely welcome any and all feedback from our existing clients, and we invite you to tell us how we can provide you with the best hosting service around. Even if your suggestion involves an extremely complex new system that could take us 6 months to develop and put into production; we’d like to hear it.

A Little Extra

When looking at our packages page, I noticed that compared to the amount of diskspace and bandwidth that we were offering, the number of subdomain and addon domains we provided wasn’t really balanced. I’ve now increased these to try and obtain a better ratio of space and bandwidth, and believe these to be much more in line. As always, existing customers will receive these changes immediately.

Faster than MediaTemple VPS’s?

It’s not often that our clients actually test the performance of our servers and compare them against their existing hosting, so it was nice to see this post on our forums, informing us that our shared hosting server “Elisha” outperforms their existing $150/month VPS from MediaTemple. MediaTemple are an extremely large and well known hosting company, so this was a hugely positive comment.

As our Why Us? states, we use powerful hardware to ensure that performance is top notch. Additionally, we also continually monitor and adjust our servers for optimum performance - something very few hosts do. Why should shared hosting have to be slower than dedicated? We don’t believe it has to be at all.

Thanks for the report, daniel!

Help Spread the World

Many of you will have been customers of ours now for several months, and we’d like to ask you to help get the word out about ThisWebHost. It’s certainly no mystery that the best form of advertising is direct or word of mouth advertising. With your help, we can grow this* substantially and improve upon every aspect of our hosting further.

Please consider taking a few minutes of your time to write a review of our hosting. Places like WebHostingTalk are fantastic communities that have “real” feedback from real clients, and are completely invaluable from a marketing perspective.

If you have a blog, please blog about us or mention us in one of your posts. If you use Twitter, feel free to twit about us. If you frequent a forum and somebody asks which host you recommend, please spare a thought for us.

Anything you can do to help spread the word about us is heavily appreciated. So much so that… who knows? Maybe we’ll reward you for it (yes, seriously). Let us know where you’ve helped tell the world about ThisWebHost!

More is (in most cases) always better, and hosting is certainly no exception. Following up from our previous blog post, we’ve been working hard on our new products and services and expect to have these completed very soon. Stay tuned (again!).

Whilst working on these products, we’ve managed to cut some of our local disk space and bandwidth usage on all servers dramatically. We sat around contemplating what to do with these additional resources, and out of the two suggestions we had, we’d decided that creating a Paris Hilton Fanclub perhaps wasn’t the best choice. Instead, we’ve decided to pass these savings back to you.

Effective immediately, all current and future hosting accounts have had 50% disk space and 50% bandwidth added to them. If you’re an existing reseller, you’ll also see these resources added to your accounts.

Thank you for hosting with this*. If you aren’t an existing client, now would be a good time

With a new month and a new season emerges a new coupon code. Simply enter the coupon SUNSHINE during purchase to receive a one time 30% discount on any hosting package, and any payment period.

Communication is a very important part of what we’re all about at ThisWebHost, and we like to keep our existing and potential clients informed of how things are progressing, as well as outline our plans for the future. As it stands, right now we have some very big things lined up in the way of new products for the remainder of the year, and we’re absolutely positive you’ll love them.

The first, and perhaps my favourite of these products, should be released within the next 4-8 weeks providing development goes according to plan. Regrettably I can’t say much about this product at this stage, except that it (in the opinion of myself and those asked) may prove absolutely indispensable, and should certainly make you feel even more confident about hosting with this*! I’m really looking forward to hearing your feedback after launch, so expect to hear something soon.

Don’t forget that we also have the official ThisWebHost Forums online, so if you have any questions, concerns or comments, you’re more than welcome to raise them there.

In other news, we are now offering dedicated (or “unique”) IP addresses for hosting accounts if required. Some users have illustrated interest in this not only for reverse DNS purposes, but also to give their site the appearance of dedicated hosting. This product can be added during checkout, or added to existing hosting accounts within the client area.

You wanted it, so you’ve got it. You may be pleased to know that we’ve now added Ruby on Rails support for ALL shared hosting packages. Enjoy

We’ve just launched the official ThisWebHost forums, so if you have a question for us or just want to talk to the guys who make this* tick, feel free to hit us up over at http://www.thiswebhost.com/forums/ - we won’t bite, honest.

In more important news, we’ve just added Moneybookers as a payment option. If you currently live in a country that PayPal doesn’t currently support, we hope that we can now accomodate you. If you’d like us to add any more payment options, please get in touch.

When looking at something that says “free”, I generally think to myself “What’s the catch?”. Even when I can’t find a catch, I’m one of these people who absolutely hates to have to put in card details for something and remind myself to cancel before I’m billed automatically because I’ve forgotten to do it. Sound familiar?

If you hadn’t already guessed by our “Guide to hosting” articles - at this* we’re different. We don’t hide behind small-print, and we certainly don’t try and mislead you. When we decide to offer free trials, they are just that, absolutely 100% free with no need to enter any payment information at all. Why offer a “money back guarantee” when you can just give away a free months hosting?

So, for a limited time only we’re giving away a 1 month free trial to our Starter/Blog package. What’s the catch? There isn’t one. You don’t need to enter ANY payment information at all during checkout - only a uniquely generated coupon code which gives you that all important first month for free. You’ll receive exactly the same awesome level of support from our engineers as a paying customer - including having your existing site transferred if you’d like. There are no hidden restrictions on these accounts, and they are exactly as you see on our packages page.

If after 1 month you’re happy with your service and you’d like to stay, that’s great - you’ll receive an invoice and all you have to do is pay it to continue to be hosted with us. If for some reason you’re not happy with the service, or you’d simply just like to host elsewhere, that’s fine. You’ll have access to your data for 7 days so you can prepare to transfer somewhere else.

If you’re interested in participating then please respond to this blog post requesting your free trial code. Because we’ve advertised this promotion elsewhere (in various forums and what not), trials will be limited to the first 10 interested responses only. The coupon codes you’re given are only valid for up to 48 hours, so please only request them if you actually intend to use them.

For those who have been interested in our articles on web hosting, thanks for your feedback. We’re currently working on part 3, and it should be up this week coming.

In response to customer feedback, we’ve now doubled all disk space allowances across all of our packages. This is a 100% free change that has been applied to all of our existing clients, so if that’s you, then you can take advantage of your new space immediately!

All new clients will automatically obtain the new doubled packages, as per our order page.

Due to popular request, we’ve now enabled our affiliate system. That’s right, now you can earn money for hosting with us and referring other people! Here’s a breakdown of the ins and outs.

Firstly, you must have a hosting account with us already. This is essential because the affiliates system ties into your already existing account details, giving you your own unique link. Once you have a hosting account you then have to enable the affiliates system if interested. You can do this by logging into your client area and hitting the affiliates link at the bottom right and following the instructions.

We pay 25% commission on every referral after their account has been active for 30 days. This is just to safeguard ourselves against people signing up with their own fake referrals to earn immediate credits, and then cancelling their account a few days later. Commission is paid monthly, and you will receive affiliate report earnings via e-mail to let you know how you’re doing.

Affiliate reports can be tracked in real-time via your client area, so you’ll always know if that person you’ve been bugging on IRC/MSN etc has actually signed up yet or not! So what are you waiting for? Get earning with this* today!

After several months of providing “private” hosting to numerous clients, we’ve now decided to open our doors and allow the rest of the world to get their hosting fix from ThisWebHost.

To celebrate our launch, we’re offering a one time discount of 25% across all hosting packages. To clarify, if you pay monthly then you will receive 25% off your first months bill. If you pay annually, you will receive 25% off the annual cost (which can be quite substantial *hint hint*). To utilise this discount, all you have to do is enter the coupon code LAUNCH (original, we know) during purchase, and you should see it applied instantly. But hurry, this coupon can only be used a limited number of times! We’d tell you just how many, but that would spoil the fun, wouldn’t it?

Anyway, thanks for looking into hosting with this*. We look forward to working with you.