If you have any questions or comments about this change, please let us know.

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What’s going on? Have you been bought out or purchased by another company? Is my hosting service going to change?
The answer to all of these questions is a very clear “no”. The reason for the change to a UK limited company is simply one of convenience. The director and majority shareholders of ThisWebHost are UK citizens, so it seemed only appropriate to register the company in the UK. The internal structure (staff, servers, support) remain exactly the same with no change(s) at all so there will be no difference to the service that we provide.

Again, these are merely internal changes.

What happens to the pricing?
Due to fluctuations with exchange rates, we are going to effectively have 2 different pricing options. Our current pricing in USD will remain, but we will also add prices in GBP for those within the UK. If you are purchasing from the UK, you will notice a ‘GBP’ currency option within the shopping cart area and may pay in GBP if you wish. We will try our best to keep the pricing as close as possible but you may notice a small increase.

If you are outside the UK and pay in USD, depending on the payment method that you use you may or may not notice any changes. If paying by Google Checkout, you will notice that the USD value is converted to GBP during the checkout process. Please note that whilst the conversion occurs, you are still paying the same price, just in a different currency. If you pay by PayPal or PayPal subscription, you will notice no changes at all. The payments will remain in USD and no conversion is performed.

What happens to my currently active PayPal subscription?
Before we migrate gateways, we will be canceling all recurring payments from our previous PayPal account. If you had a current PayPal subscription setup, you will need to create a new one to our new PayPal account. You can do this by viewing a due invoice on or before the due date, and selecting the ‘PayPal Subscribe’ option.

When will these changes occur?
We will implement these changes on August 1st 2010.

I am a UK customer/live in the UK. Does this mean I can now get my hosting in the UK?
We are looking at colocation providers, and our aim is to be able to offer UK hosting solutions in the near future.

I’m a customer in the USA – are you moving my site/servers to the UK?
Absolutely not. These changes are internal only, and no changes are being made to our network or customer websites.

Should you wish to discuss this change, or have any questions, comments or concerns; please either create a ticket within your client area, or respond to this blog post.

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What we Need

We’re looking for someone to help design and develop the new client area with us. The key goal of the new client area is dramatically improved user interface and accessibility. The client area currently runs off WHMCS using the Smarty templating engine, but familiarity with this isn’t required – just the ability to code valid xHTML and CSS. The current client area feels very confusing and doesn’t ‘flow’ very well at all. We’d like to change that and redesign it completely from the ground up, so we can present the correct information where it’s needed and in a manner that’s easy to understand. Essentially we want a clean and accessible user interface.

Ideally we’d prefer someone who isn’t in school or college, to prevent the distraction from important curriculum work. Experience with jQuery or general Javascript would be hugely advantageous, as is PHP/MySQL. These extras are very helpful, but not required – so if you’re a competent designer who can also output their work into xHTML and CSS for the web, we’d still like to hear from you!

So, to recap; are you familiar with designing user interfaces? Can you design clean, easily accessible control panels/backends? Can you also code valid xHTML/CSS?

If you’re interested in applying, or have any questions, please e-mail jules@thiswebhost.com. Please be sure to include examples of your work.

UPDATE: This is not a request for a full or part time position, merely a request for work. You will be required to work remotely, so you are not needed in-house.

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The edit the DNS for your domain, simply login to your cPanel account and look for ‘Advanced DNS Zone Editor’. Resellers (with WHM Access) can still edit all of their clients DNS via WHM directly – or can edit it in this fashion. You can now add/edit A records, CNAME and TXT records. MX records will still need to be edited via the ‘MX Entry’ option of cPanel.

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Enjoy the discount, and please spread the word, so we can continue to grow!

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What does this mean for you? Whilst you may not see any immediate performance improvements (and if you do, by all means please let us know), it should mean that during periods of higher activity, such as sites being Digg, StumbleUpon’ed, Reddit frontpaged, etc, the servers should cope generally better than they would on Apache. Overall, it allows our servers to handle higher numbers of requests more efficiently than Apache otherwise would.

This doesn’t mean that we’re going to cram our servers with many more websites to compensate for the change; so please don’t worry about that. The purpose behind the move to Litespeed is to try and ensure that sites which are peaking in popularity are handled sufficiently better, and faster. This should ultimately mean less concern for those expecting higher peaks of traffic to their websites.

If you notice any problems with the change (and we didn’t during testing), please get in touch with us and we’ll investigate and try to fix them for you. If you have any other comments, questions or concerns about this change, please let us know.

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• Facebook – Become our Facebook fan! Feel free to chat with us, ask questions, or share your website!
• LinkedIn – If you’d like a more professional environment and would like to connect with us, we have a company page over at LinkedIn.
• Twitter – This is where we’re most active, and most of you are probably already our friend, but for anyone who’s not, we’d love to be!

Let us know if you’re current anywhere else, so we can sign up and chat with you there!

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On another quick note, we’re making huge leaps with the new website, and it should be up and running before you know it, so look out.

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The key area we’re now looking at is daily CPU usage per account. This gives us a far more accurate representation of single site resource usage consumption, than on a per-process basis where you may have a very high period of activity, but not much happening for the rest of the day.

This is a very difficult topic to write about and discuss, since it effectively hits at the very heart of a topic which is essentially “Is my site fit for shared hosting?” Many hosting providers in the past have put limits in place on resource consumption, and whilst we don’t want to do that, we do need to have limits in place which provide a guideline we can use to determine when a site has exceeded shared hosting placement and needs its own dedicated set of resources.

At this*, as you should know, we don’t oversell our servers. This lets your sites run very well in all but the most extreme of conditions. Whilst we don’t oversell, given the nature of shared hosting, it’s simply not feasible for us to host websites which by their nature or by the mere traffic they receive, out-consume others by many many times. Out anti-overselling policies simply aren’t in place to allow very popular and active websites to “get by” on a shared hosting account without needing to upgrade to something that better suits them.

Many people may instantly jump to the conclusion that “If you need to take action, you must be overselling!”. That’s simply not the case at all. To throw an (extreme) analogy your way; if we deploy a brand new server and had a single account running on it that consumed approximately 60% of the load (permanently) – that’s most certainly a site that needs its own server. It’s not financially viable for us, or any other hosting provider out there, to maintain a website that large at the cost of shared hosting.

We’ve been monitoring accounts for the past few weeks, and we think we have a good idea of a guideline on CPU resource consumption in a “minutes per day” measurement. The sites that have currently exceeded our approximate guideline generate (on average) at least 750,000 hits (and in some cases much more) every day. We feel that’s certainly beyond what you would expect from a shared hosting account, and we’re happy that the guideline is “fair”. If we were to implement a guideline or “limit” on CPU minutes, we would not take immediate action on websites – such as a suspension or termination. Instead, we would notify the user and offer them an alternative solution, or at least make it clear that action needs to be taken, whether that’s a VPS or Dedicated solution with us (coming soon) or another provider. Our intention isn’t to disconnect anyone and leave them without their website. Your websites are important to us, and ultimately we want you to be in the best possible position.

To be clear, this isn’t a package issue. We’re more than happy for our lowest package users to use exactly the same amount of server resources (CPU and RAM) as our highest package users. This is fundamentally a Shared vs VPS/Dedicated issue.

We’re looking for your feedback on this subject. Do you believe what we’ve outlined is fair? Do you have any questions or suggestions on this topic?

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Enjoy!

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