Posted: March 30, 2011 at 7:10 pm |
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If you’re in the technology industry and especially if you run any critical services, the last thing you want to do is contact support. Let’s face it, with the best possible customer service, the last thing you want to be on is on hold while your boss reminds you that the server is down (or rather, the internet is down). While developing the next generation of CloudManage control panel that has already been released, this was an extremely important focus of ours.
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. 
Posted: March 11, 2011 at 12:52 pm |
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We’re extremely excited to make this announcement, we have been working and testing this for the past weeks in order to make sure that it’s launch is as smooth as possible, and we’re happy to announce today that you can run Ruby on Rails 3 applications on our cPanel shared and semi-dedicated web hosting platforms. The implementation that we created is completely transparent and you can create and manage applications from cPanel just like any other provider, however only with VEXXHOST that you can host your Ruby on Rails 3 application.
For those who are curious about the technicalities behind this, the issue was that by default, cPanel uses Mongrel which does not support Ruby on Rails 3 at the moment because of it’s entire overhaul and it’s conversion to a Rack application. We studied all the alternatives and the most popular and impressive choice, Passenger, came up first. We have made modifications to the backend of the control panel, which allowed us to use Passenger to run applications in the background.
We are extremely proud of this announcement and we hope to bring more features to our hosting platform, which are not available with any other provider. We are also working on a lot of other features that will be unique to our hosting platform and not available with any other company.
If you require any assistance in setting up your Ruby on Rails 3 application on cPanel, please contact our support team. If you’re looking to host your Ruby on Rails 3 application on a shared hosting account, you can get started easily today as low as $3.99.
Read more about Rails Hosting
Posted: December 15, 2010 at 5:35 pm |
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Our newest partner to be introduced to our cPanel control panel, Attracta, has been fully deployed to all of our shared and semi-dedicated web hosting servers. Attracta is a powerful solution engineered to help you increase the ranking of your website and get more of your pages indexed on search engines such as Google.
We are proud to announce that their offerings are now accessible directly from your cPanel control panel. You will see a new set of buttons in your control panel under the name “Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tools” — Also, our partnership allows us to provide our clients with the basic paid version of Attracta tools at no cost (value of $4.95 per month).
On another note, we’d like to wish everyone Happy Holidays from part of the entire VEXXHOST staff. Be on the look out for more value features in your web hosting account soon. 
Posted: December 13, 2010 at 7:35 am |
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It’s finally here. We have been working on this feature with CloudFlare directly for the past couple of days. CloudFlare helps you make your site much faster and increases the security of your website, for free.
The service is implemented directly within our web hosting platform. With other providers, you have to go through the fuss of changing name servers and other troubles, where as with VEXXHOST, everything is instantly done for you, without changing nameservers.
Read the press release and login to your control panel today and select “CloudFlare” from your control panel.
Posted: December 11, 2010 at 10:42 am |
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Last night, we deployed an awesome new feature for all of our web hosting clients. We’re not going to say a whole lot about it but if you’re intrigued, you should probably login and take a look for a new button in our control panel.
The new feature speeds up your site by bringing expensive CDN technologies and high security features to your website with a couple of clicks. All for free, all directly from your control panel. If you need any assistance with it, feel free to let us know
The official announcement will follow on Monday.
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