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.

We are pleased to announce that we have now started offering semi-dedicated hosting packages. The semi-dedicated level package is intended to sit between our existing shared and dedicated hosting packages, providing a more cost-effective solution for customers who require more resources than our shared plans can offer.

Semi-dedicated means that each server is effectively broken up into a very low number of clients. This allows each individual client to consume more resources than they typically would on a shared hosting account, because more are available. Additionally, because it’s semi-dedicated, many of our shared restrictions will not apply, namely;

• No MySQL database size restrictions.
• InnoDB is available.
• No restriction on the number of hourly e-mails that can be sent.
• No CPU limit (in minutes).

We’re happy that this new product now almost completes our product range, providing customers with all of the options available to host anything from a simple private website to a fully fledged several million post(s) forum.

Well, it’s April 2011 and fortunately there’s not much to report. I say fortunately because as it happens most of the time at the this* camp, everything is working as it should! We’re still developing things behind the scenes to make our hosting more fluid and automated, saving time for both you and us, so I wanted to take a little time to talk about some of the latest changes we’ve made.

Automated and Automatic Affiliate Payouts
I’m pretty sure we’re the only one, if not one of the very very few hosting providers out there who have any kind of automated affiliate payout system in production – and we’re proud of that. This means that without needing to get in touch with us, you can view your affiliate account balance and either send the money directly to your PayPal or add it to your balance with us. All in a few seconds and a few mouse clicks.

Redesigned Ticket System
We’ve redesigned our ticket system slightly so that whilst submitting your ticket and before it is sent to us, you are prompted with possible suggestions and solutions to your questions or issues you may be facing – with information pulled directly from our knowledgebase. This is primarily to reduce the number of what we refer to as “obvious tickets” containing very common questions which are already covered within our knowledgebase. We’re really trying to push our knowledgebase as the first port of call for any questions clients have, and we’re always adding to it. Many companies have knowledgebases and Wikis detailing how to complete common tasks, and the intent is to reduce support time.

I’m very happy to say this is working well, and our support times are lower than ever

Automated Domain Name Changes
Previously a feature we’d charge for (due to the Administration involved), we’ve now developed a system where you can modify the domain name of your account from within the client area. This is to assist those who may “flip” their websites regularly, or want to let their domain expire and utilise their hosting account on another domain instead. You can find this by selecting ‘My Hosting Accounts’ and then clicking the ‘Manage’ button next to the hosting account in question. At the bottom there will be a new button allowing you to change the domain name.

Promotions Page
Many people ask or want to know if we’re currently running any promotions. To aid those and to boost the use of our promotional codes, we’ve created a page on our website that pulls currently active promotional codes out of our system and displays it on the website, along with the value of the code and the expiry date(s). Never miss a promotion again! Don’t forget, there’s currently 50% off all hosting accounts throughout April.

As always, we’d love to hear from you if you have any comments or suggestions. Thanks for being a part of this*.

We have now completed the development of account upgrades, allow customers to upgrade or downgrade from our “old” packages to the new ones. Previously you were only able to upgrade from the “old” packages to one of the higher or lower “old” packages.

Please be advised that downgrading from a reseller package to a shared package will result in any accounts you’ve created within WHM to be terminated. This is of course because reseller permissions do not exist on shared packages, therefore accounts via WHM need to be removed as a result.

The upgrade pages themselves are currently being reworked and redesigned, as the default templates are… rather ugly. Please bear with us whilst we complete this over the next few days.

In other news, we’re looking at launching “semi-dedicated” packages for those who currently have higher CPU usage than our AUP allows. Semi-dedicated packages are essentially the same as normal packages, except that there are far less accounts per server, resulting in those accounts being allowed to consume more resources than on a typical shared account. Currently you are allowed to consume up to 120 CPU minutes (2 hours) per day. With semi-dedicated accounts, we expect to allow significantly higher margins of usage. Before offering this, we’d like to know if this is something that customers may see a use for. Naturally these semi-dedicated packages will be provided with the same this* quality you expect from us. If there’s an interest in this, we’ll spec up some approximate details and pricing and let you all know.