This has been a crazy week for us at VEXXHOST, we will be introducing a new set of partners in the coming week and the ones after however our first announcement is with our partnership with 123ContactForm!

We have heard a lot of input from our customers that host a simple HTML website that they designed using an offline web page editor then published it, such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver. However, one of the most commonly asked questions is how can they setup a contact form.

Previously, most customers would leave their email on a contact page, however, that caused a bunch of problems for customers. You would have online bots that crawl emails online, once they find it, you’re in for a large amount of incoming spam, which can in turn increase the possibility that you’ll miss a legitimate email through the spam.

The other problem was the amount of people that engaged you. Nowadays, people using online email clients such as Gmail or Google Apps is extremely common. If someone is hesitant about contacting you, it feels like a much longer process for the customer to copy the email address, sign in to his or her email account and compose an email.

Also, if you use an online email client, you’ve had the misfortune of clicking on an email address that ends up opening Outlook, slowing down things on your computer and getting you frustrated. These points really show the importance of having a good contact form to maintain a good engagement.

123ContactForm allows to get up a simple contact form without having to know any programming skills. The code is generated for you and all you have to do is paste it in your editor. Once that’s complete, your form is up and it is entirely managed by 123ContactForm. That’s all! No extra work, no worries, just plug and play!

When we were approached by 123ContactForm for this partnership, it was great for us to be able to offer a tool that helps solve our customer’s problems with simplicity and ease. After working with their staff, we are happy to form with partnership with them!

From now on, anyone can login to their cPanel control panel and click on the “123ContactForm” link, where they will be redirected to their site and from there, you can start building your contact form for free!

• Developers
  If you are looking to test out an application on the cloud and review the performance, evaluate your customer needs and see for yourself the huge performance difference.

• System Administrators
  You can check and review the state of cloud servers and evaluate them for deploying and migrating your current infrastructure towards cloud servers for no cost at all.

• Virtual Private Server Users
  The cloud presents a large amount of advantages for VPS users, such as full server scalability; high availability, redundancy and extremely high performance compared to regular virtual private servers.

• Dedicated Server Users
  Our cloud servers are the only platform that allows you scale all the way from 256MB RAM to 95GB RAM without unnecessary migrations and long downtimes. It offers you much faster disk and CPU performance.

We hope that this incentive helps and assists all types of customers that are looking to bring their infrastructure to the cloud and aid the adoption of cloud. We want to really show how easy it is to get started on our infrastructure! Get Started Today →

• cPanel Servers
  With our cloud server reseller system, hosting companies are able to offer servers with cPanel included at an extremely competitive price. As a cPanel authorized partner, we have access to extremely aggressive pricing on cPanel licenses, allowing hosting companies to offer cPanel based servers to all of their customers at an extremely competitive rate.
• Windows Servers
  As a long time partner in Microsoft’s Service Provider License Agreement program, we have access to very low pricing for leasing Windows Server licenses. Hosting companies can pass on that low pricing onto their customers in order to convert more sales and start offering Windows based servers without entering any long-term agreements or commitments.
• Redundant Cloud Platform
  Our infrastructure has been designed and tweaked to perfection by numerous engineers, allowing all the components in it to work perfectly together. It has taken us years to get to the level of correct and proper, redundant and self-healing infrastructure that hosting companies can leverage and get started on at no cost at all.
• Aggressive Pricing
  The pricing that is offered to our resellers is extremely aggressive and hosting companies will have no problems offering an extremely competitive price in the market. With such a big cloud infrastructure, we are able to have access to hardware and resources at a much lower rate. Hosting companies can leverage an existing time-tested platform with no upfront fees at all, saving thousands of dollars in investments.
• Full Program Setup Assistance
  For each reseller that we setup, we give full assistance in the entire process of getting started. From the setup of the initial control panel to assistance of setting up a customized order form, similar to the one offered on our website, in order to help convert sales. Hosting companies will be dealing with one dedicated account manager that will always stay updated with them and which they can contact at anytime.
• WHMCS module
  We also offer a full WHMCS module, included for free, which we can install for hosting companies, or that they can install themselves. It automatically sets up everything in order to use the automation of WHMCS and it will automatically provision, terminate, suspend, unsuspend and renew accounts in the reseller system. Hosting companies don’t have to do anything but setup the pricing for your service.
• Full Control Panel
  With all of our billing system modules, we include a full version of our control panel that can be customized using templates. It offers all features of our control panel, including firewall management, console access, full power control, password resets, activity logs and performance graphs, all included for no costs and fully white-labeled.

We are extremely happy and we have seen a high satisfaction rate with the select clients that were testing our reseller environment that uses WHMCS, we have tested it extensively and hosting companies can easily get started, today, for free with no commitments or hidden fees. For hosting companies that are interested about this offer, you can read more about our cloud servers reseller or you can get started today by contacting us!

One of, if not the most influential person in marketing, design and innovation of consumer electronics and the entire technology world as a whole. If it had not been for Apple’s innovations, we could well possibly be still using flip phones, with no such device such as tablets.

He remained committed till his last days for his company, paved it’s way to continue it’s success and never lost focus of what he truly wanted. He had a clear point. He wanted to create products that changed the world. Not make money, and this might well be one of the biggest reasons of his success.

He leaves us on this sad day with memories of countless product introductions in his classy black shirt and jeans. The same attire he always kept in his product announcements that impressed all of us. He does not go unforgotten by his peers.

“I will miss Steve immensely.”
— Bill Gates (Microsoft)

“Steve, thank you for being a mentor and a friend. Thanks for showing that what you build can change the world. I will miss you.”
— Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)

“He was a great man with incredible achievements and amazing brilliance.”
— Larry Page (Google)

“Steve, your passion for excellence is felt by anyone who has ever touched an Apple product (including the macbook I am writing this on right now)”
— Sergey Brin (Google)

You can’t also forget what he’s done with Pixar studios: 12 movies, 26 academy awards, 7 golden globes & 3 grammy awards. There are few people that know about Pixar’s story and how it would have not been where it is at today, without Steve Jobs. For those with Netflix, The Pixar Story is a movie available on Netflix Instant documenting their start and Jobs’ involvement.

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
— Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement Speech, 2005

Within our team, we found inspiration in what Apple does to bring into our service. Implementing customer service that leaves our customers always happy, bringing the latest technologies to consumers while making them easy to use and bringing bold changes to the hosting industry. We are saddened to hear the news of his passing away and we would like to wish our deepest condolences to his family.

Signing this post off with proudly this signature, that he never removes when replying to emails sent to his personal address:
Sent from my iPad

Also, with the new system, we will be able to accomplish far faster response times which means a better service and happier customers! Hugs all around!

We have big plans coming up for our cloud (we know we keep saying that!) but we’re talking about 10 times the performance, faster provisioning times and even more high availability options. Stay tuned!

Also, we hate 404s and we didn’t want to break the browsing experience for our customers so with our new knowledge base, we implemented a system to make sure no pages end up lost, we’ve also open-sourced this code so check it out on GitHub.

All new servers will continue to be loaded with 4 IPv4 addresses as well as 1 IPv6 address for free. This means that you will be running a dual-stack setup that is accessible by anyone both over IPv4 and IPv6. When the time will come that people will be forced to run over IPv6, your site will be ready and accessible with no problems.

The next phase is allowing current clients to add an IPv6 IP address to their server, this should be added in the coming days. It will allow all of our clients to enable IPv6 on their server by getting assigned an IP address and then it will automatically be deployed on your cloud server.

We are extremely happy to be one of the first cloud platforms to deploy IPv6. We are looking forward to bringing our entire cloud platform to IPv6 before World IPv6 day so that our clients are able to participate in it using our cloud platform. As usual, if you notice any issues where something doesn’t go right or you have any questions about IPv6, please contact us. If you have any suggestions, please feel free to mention them in our feedback forum.

New dashboard
You should have noticed by now that we have an entire new dashboard that you go to when logging into your account, previously, you would go to your profile section of the website. Now, from your dashboard, you have a small section on getting started and getting assistance for your cloud as well as the latest updates and news. You can also search our knowledgebase for any assistance there instantly.

However, the feature we find the coolest is your “Cloud Statistics” which gives you at a glance, total usage of CPU, memory, network and bandwidth utilization of all your servers. This allows you to see where you stand at the moment and if you require any upgrades. We also included global capacity statistics and status of our entire network so you can monitor the health of the network.

Easier navigation
We were not entirely satisfied with the old navigation system around the website and we kept reviewing all sorts of different options until we implemented a new breadcrumb navigation system that facilitates navigation around the portal and locating where you are exactly.

You should see the breadcrumb at the top of the page, it always starts from the cloud icon, which is your dashboard, and works itself into any specific page, clicking any section of the breadcrumb takes you to that exact page. This should be a lot easier to use than the previously in-navigation setup

Reverse DNS modification
This was a big feature request from our clients. Usually setting up rDNS involves sending an email to our support and having someone manually adjust it for you, which we did not like, mainly because we wanted a fully automated cloud where the customer can manage everything.

If you navigate to your IP addresses page for a specific server, you should see reverse DNS for each IP, by clicking on it, it will transform to a text box, edit the content and either click outside the box (or press enter) and the DNS value will be modified. Please note that changes may take up to 24 hours to propagate through DNS servers.

That’s about all for new features, however, we’re not quite done. W still have a long list of new features coming soon (hint: API). We appreciate all input from our clients and we welcome all new feedback for our panel.

Instant cPanel provisioning on the cloud
We have added a cPanel template which is automatically configured to your requirements when you provision your server. When you will be creating your server, simply select the “cPanel” template and it will be installed and setup instantly. This is something that is currently not offered with all cloud providers, if you have any further template or control panel suggestions, please feel free to let us know.

New knowledgebase
We are increasing our focus towards making a centralized support environment in our CloudManage platform — The first step of this was implementing the new knowledgebase software that was entirely developed in-house, we have other new support features coming up soon and they will be announced as they are released.

We hope that you enjoy those new updates as much as we hope you do!

After seeing how NASA is able to create their cloud of rain, we asked ourselves, as leaders of cloud hosting, why can’t we make our own real cloud machines?! The minute the video was displayed in the meeting, our engineers simply said “Challenge Accepted” and left the meeting room, no one ever heard of them ever since, until today.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are proud to announce the first ever cloud hosting service, fully scalable, redundant and reliable. We’re not talking hosting a machine on a server mumbo-jumbo, no, the real deal, real, cloud, hosting.

Now, you might ask yourself, how can you possibly do such thing?! That’s impossible! Well, allow us to explain to you how this great platform works.

When you create a new server, our system sends a scheduled task to one of those machines like in the one in the video (except ours is located in Montreal, QC) — When you come up in the queue, the machine automatically grabs the amount of CPUs that you required from a large inventory of CPUs, creates a hard drive with just the right amount of space required and includes RAM chips as required.

We add to this a special liquid named “code cloud” which contains minerals extracted from the moon, a lab-generated top secret mixture, and a drop of ketchup. The final mixture is then poured into a Blendtec blender and mixed at super-speeds (important detail, we hired someone to say “will it blend?” before each server creation)

Afterwards, the generated liquid is then poured into a machine equivalent to the one that NASA has and provisioned into the world, as a real cloud server. Now you ask, how in the hell will it connect?!

We thought of this, we have implemented top of the line technology with 16 satellites all over the world connecting these clouds and providing them with high-end bandwidth. We have did it, real cloud hosting, and we promise that you will not be disappointed. Try it out today.

Hint: Have you checked what day it is today?

On the other hand, our cloud service is exceptional and provides you with a service that’s almost inexistent in the cloud industry, with providers simply supplying regular virtual servers and labelling them as “cloud” — While boasting about 3 hour recovery times if a server fails.

Our cloud platform consists of a centralized storage system connected to numerous hypervisors over redundant networks.

Internet provider failure? Recoverable instantly with no downtime.
Internal storage network failure? Recoverable instantly with no downtime.
Centralized storage failure? Recoverable instantly with no downtime.
Storage disk drives failure? Recoverable instantly with no downtime.
Power failure? Recoverable instantly with no downtime.
Hypervisor/host failure? Recoverable within 2 minutes as your server reboots on another host.

The only possible time where your server could fail is if the hypervisor hardware fails, which includes built-in components such as CPUs, RAM or motherboards, something that almost never ever fails.

We all love the ATMs, could you imagine waiting in line every time you wanted a quick $20 to use?! The great thing about them is they allow you to perform a task instantly and automatically without the presence (or having to deal with a human) — Sounds so futuristic, but it makes everything so much simpler! As banks started to realize how useful people find ATMs (and also, they reduce lines at banks) — They started to include more features, so the typical ATM went from one button of Withdraw to Deposit, view balance, etc.

After countless hours of meetings, we got a pretty decent list of tasks that server administrators would love to perform on their own, without the requirement of contacting their vendor or support, so that they can get back up as soon as possible.

It’s 3:37 AM, your boss calls you to remind you that the 12 free website monitoring tools that he setup all report that the internet is down, and someone has to fix it! Half-asleep, you stumble to your laptop and try a few pings, connections and right as expected, the server is not working!

As the cloud server is a virtual server, you’d need to contact your cloud hosting customer support, at 3 AM, to ask them what is going on. However, on our platform, we do offer a remote console, think of it as your personal teleporter at 3AM instantly right in front of your machine. Regardless if your server has internet access or not, the console will always work, it is the equivalent of connecting your monitor to the server directly.

So, the kernel crashed huh? You write down the errors that were raised, now you can’t even login to the server to restart it. No worries, with a fancy swipe of a selector, your server is turned off. Also, our system is smart enough to detect the current state of the server and attempt a soft shutdown, and if that doesn’t work out — well, we bring the heavy weaponry and forcingly shut off the server.

Another swipe, the server is restarted and running again. However, it’s still not pingable, the sun is starting to shine and you could really use some sleep right now. At this point, if it wasn’t for our magical console, you’d need to contact the support team for them to see what’s up, however, one click at “Server Console” and you can see that the server is simply running a file system check for consistency, so you can follow it until it’s complete, make sure everything is up, tell your boss that the “Internet” is working again, and hit the sack.

Now, all of this could probably take from 1 to 3-4 hours if you had to keep going back and forth with support, the whole duration of this without contacting support takes you a maximum of 15 minutes and allows you to take full control of the server.

This is just one of the great automation systems that we put in place, there are tons more that we implemented in order to reduce support contact time and increase automation.

Protip: Not only does the server console help you access the server when it’s crashed, but changing the servers boot parameters to include “single” will boot the server in single user mode to run any file system checks, bet your provider doesn’t allow you that.