Written by Nicolas

Hello everyone,

It’s with a slight delay the the alwaysdata team joins together to wish you a 2015 beyond all your expectations. We hope that your projects see ongoing success and that your ideas come to fruition under the best possible conditions!

What’s new

Let’s take advantage of this chance to give an overview of what has kept us busy in recent months, since the last edition of our What’s new? publication.

• Redesign of DNS records: the display now allows you to see all the records configured on your domain (including those created by default) and export the zone file. Of course, you can always create your own records.
• Renaming of the server addresses (hosts): the addresses of the type mysql1.alwaysdata.com have become mysql.<account_name>.alwaysdata.net, so that you don’t need to depend on a specific server, so nothing will need to be done during a future migration (also valid for PostgreSQL, FTP, SSH, IMAP, SMTP servers, etc.)
• Dedicated servers:
  • We now manage the installation and administration of OpenVPN for customers upon request
  • Management of the email queue: viewing messages, forcing immediate deletion, delete one by one or in batches (via a regular expression).
• New VAT regulations: The information may not tell you anything, because it only applies to ‘electronic’ services. To summarize the change that concerns us, we must now apply the rates in effect for the country of the buyer (not the rate in the seller’s country). Therefore, please make sure the country is entered in your profile, and possibly the name of your company and its intracommunity VAT number.
• New domain extensions were added (see our domain prices):

Alwaysdata infrastructure

Also note this change that we have decided to make and that has kept us busy for many months.

We can certainly say that the most difficult part is over:

• Our new physical infrastructure is operational
• Trade and processes with our suppliers (datacenter, equipment manufacturers, networks, etc.) are going very well
• The dedicated servers have all been migrated to the new infrastructure and the clients affected are satisfied and report better performance
• Some new shared servers have been deployed: still in beta at the moment, we have migrated several volunteer clients.

But there’s still more to do:

• Open new shared accounts directly on the new infrastructure: this should happen very shortly
• Migrate the remaining shared servers (HTTP servers and databases): this will be the last task to completely leave our old provider, which we expect to address in the middle of 2015.

So what does this mean for you?

Obviously, this transition has kept us very busy, but aside from strengthening the flexibility of our offerings and the reliability of our services, this doesn’t necessarily change much for most of you… Rest assured, other projects are under way and we are working hard to offer you some important and necessary innovations this year:

• A graphic overhaul: because we believe that we should not allow our platform to age, we have tried since its creation to regularly update its appearance, while keeping the interfaces that you know and have mastered;
• Some more modern and scalable technologies: we are currently reviewing the heart of our packaging system in order to more quickly support new technologies (to be faster with new versions of languages, and adding new technologies such as NodeJS, to mention only one…);
• Consumer resource graphs of your accounts in real time in the administration interface.

And again, a happy new year to everyone, see you soon!