We performed our second Windows Azure Pack (WAP) update yesterday. Did your users notice it? Probably not, since websites were operational during the update.
One of the benefits of Azure Pack and the Everleap platform is the ability to roll out updates across all of the servers without any interruption in website availability. A significant improvement over traditional hosting where brief outages for updates are unavoidable. The roll out of the update actually went on all through the night and into this morning.
We offer traditional Windows shared hosting over at DiscountASP.NET and cloud hosting at Everleap.com. So naturally people ask us, “What’s the difference between shared hosting and cloud hosting?” In this post, I want to address this question in a general overview.
Wow. Another year passes. 2014 just flew by so fast that I didn’t even have a chance to post this in December! Every year I try to look back and talk about the top ten things that we accomplished during the year. This is the first of such lists for Everleap. So for 2014 – here goes…
We think that our cloud hosting solution is awesome but we wanted to get some seasoned developers out there to test Everleap out and let us know what they thought and what they experienced. We put the message out in the CodeProject community and here are some of the reviews that came in.
For traditional hosting, it is typical to display information about how much disk space and bandwidth your sites are using in the control panel.
Our control panel provides that data. But we know that customers want more insight into the behavior and health of their web applications. So we now deliver enhanced usage stats including memory usage, CPU usage, HTTP requests and errors.
In the Site Overview section of the control panel, we now display a point-in-time snapshot of the site’s usage stats. You can refresh the data but note that the data updates in our database every 1-2 minutes. Below I took a screenshot from the control panel of this very blog.
SSD Reserved Cloud Severs
We have many customers who are enjoying the performance of our Reserved Cloud Servers. I’m happy to announce that we’ve made them even better.
All Reserved Cloud Servers are now upgraded with high performance Solid State Drives (SSD) and with no additional cost. With this upgrade you should see an increase in site performance.
We just launched the latest sprint and we realized that we didn’t announce updates that were pushed out with the Windows Azure Pack update (though we did blog about how we did the WAP update). So here’s some of the enhancements that you’ll find now.
1. We’ve added the ability to bind different SSL certificates to your domain pointers and subdomains. Before this update you could only bind SSL certs for your primary domain. Now with this enhancement, you can bind SSL certs to your heart’s content. This applies to SNI SSL.
2. We’ve removed most restrictions from the DNS Manager to allow you more flexibility In managing your DNS. So now you can create multiple records with the same name, you can edit or delete the root domain A record, create CNAMEs with the root domain name, pretty much anything you might need.
We talked about this over on the DiscountASP.NET blog, but it’s well worth mentioning here that we have successfully renewed our Microsoft Partner Gold Hosting Competency for 2014! This is our 9th year of maintaining our Microsoft Gold Partner status.
It is no small feat to attain or keep this status. Microsoft has raised the bar significantly to attain the Gold level status over the last few years.
We announced previously that we partnered with SiteLock to bring our customers website security solutions which includes a free level of basic Content Delivery Network (CDN) service.
The Basic CDN service caches static content in servers located around the globe and performs some content minification, speeding up delivery of your site and improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Through our chats with people at Code Camps, from the sales questions that come in and from the partners and vendors we interact with, we’ve heard the question “What is Windows Azure Pack” many times, so I wanted to address the question here.
Windows Azure Pack (WAP) is a collection of Microsoft Azure technologies that Microsoft is making available to Microsoft partners. It’s not the entire Microsoft Azure back end and it’s not the new stuff in beta or preview. WAP encompasses some of the more mature and tested portions of the Microsoft Azure technologies – it has to be mature since Microsoft will need to support it if they are giving it to partners.