Written by m4dz

We are more than halfway through January, and it’s time to wish you the best for 2018! We hope that the new year brings you success in all your projects and even better things than it did in 2017.

As in past years, we will take this opportunity to step back and present our upcoming projects.

So let’s remove our party hats and dive right into 2018.

2017: The Year of the Migration

You lived it with us. In early 2017, we began the transition to a new software infrastructure. It was a months-long process aimed at improving our solutions. With an upgrade of our stack, all efforts were made to bring you a hosting platform that would meet your expectations.

In addition, we added new features. Native support for new languages (Node.js, Go, Elixir, Lua) for your apps is now directly available from your cockpit. Don’t panic if you can’t find what you need. The user program entry lets you run any app in your home, even one based on an exotic language. If you host static pages on a Github Pages account, you can transfer them to a static-files site in your home, which will provide the same service. You’re at home with alwaysdata!

Offering new interpreters is a big deal, and we know very well the issues faced by our developer friends. Their stack is complex, which is why we’ve ensured that all package managers are also available: npm, composer, pip, bundler, and more. Everything’s here.

We’ve automated this process so that it functions at its best. It’s now our standard design. Anyone can freely run migrations as he or she wishes. Staging servers are now available with the new stack. From your cockpit, you can trigger a cloning process to those instances and ensure that everything is fine. Those test instances are freely available for a limited amount of time, and you can run all necessary tests. When everything’s fine, you just have to trigger the migration by yourself to get the final transfer, and there’s nothing more to do. Our next release that will need this kind of migration will be done in the same manner. It gives you the level of comfort that you expect. We have learned from this experience and have listed some things that we will improve. Feel free to give us some feedback.

2018: A More Comfortable Hosting Platform

Let’s take a look at a (non-exhaustive) list of our projects:

• a WAF that will allow you to protect your apps by preventing attacks, SQL injections, XSS, etc.;
• an HTTP Cache (RFC compliant) that will let you cache your regular assets and improve your performances;
• two new cockpit-integrated tools that will allow you to program repetitive tasks and register services to monitor in your instance. No more need to deal with crontabs anymore;
• HTTP/2 in alproxy is on the rails! We’ve talked about it for a while, but now we will start it for real. No deadline is available yet, but we plan to get as much as we can from these twelve months;
• Mailman integration into our email stack. You’ll get a smart system that will allow you to manage your email discussions and lists from your cockpit;
• are you a Java developer? If so, we have been thinking about you. This year, you will get your language natively supported like other languages; and 
• our marketplace: if you need to quickly host commons web apps quickly, they will be available and pre-configured to allow you to host within minutes.

Security, and FIC 2018

Let’s Encrypt is automatically enabled for all your subdomains. There are no longer any excuses not to serve your contents through HTTPS and contribute to a more secure Web.

Our admin panel allows for 2FA, giving you an additional guarantee that a malicious user won’t take control of your cockpit. We highly recommend that you enable it.

A note about the Spectre & Meltdown security issues: We’ve been keeping our eye on them. Our servers and instances were patched with the latest security updates, and, since then, we haven’t faced any performance issues.

If you’re involved in security, m4dz — who joined us as a Tech Evangelist — will be at FIC 2018 on January 23^th and 24^th. If you’re there, feel free to get in touch.

From you to us

2018 also presents the opportunity for us to provide you with more information and more content and help you get in touch with the blog and the other channels.

On that note, we need your support. For more than ten years, the alwaysdata’s community has been growing, and you are a part of it. We want to hear your opinions, and we want to encourage you to contribute to the marketplace and get involved in the community. If you’re interested, leave us a comment or send us a message at community@alwaysdata.com.

Welcome to 2018!