It’s been a busy year at 20i towers for our development team.
20i’s services continued to develop faster than ever, alongside the ongoing work, like ensuring that everyone has access to the latest versions of PHP or one-click software installs.
While we’re happy with what we’ve achieved so far, we’re still working hard to remain the UK’s best web hosting package. So as well as updates to our hardware and the code running on it, we made improvements to our control panels and added some great new features for all our customers, all at no extra cost.
Many of these changes and additions were requested by our customers: thanks for those – keep them coming! In 2019 we’ll be able to fulfill more customer requests as we continue to develop.
Here’s a review of the year from a development perspective:
January: My name is URL
These updates were all about new and better ways to re-brand 20i services. Custom-branded URLs for resellers’ customers could now include free SSLs, and temporary staging domain URLs could be given custom domain names.
February: WHMCS discounts and My20i refresh begins
We introduced discounted Web Host Manager Complete Solution (WHMCS) licences for resellers – offering savings of up to £111 a year – and the first stage of updates to My20i rolled out.
March: Wildcard SSLs, custom Nominet WHOIS & premium domains
Free SSLs were upgraded to wildcard certificates, offering the convenience of securing an unlimited number of subdomains with a single certificate! Also, you could now put your business details in to the WHOIS system and premium domains became searchable via 20i.
April: HTTP/2 and global FTP
HTTP/2 was rolled out across our shared hosting, meaning that browsers could make concurrent requests to the server, speeding-up loading of websites. Global FTP Unlock allowed you to whitelist an IP address across all your packages in a single click: great for power-users.
May: Malware scans, autoresponders & Office auto-config
Web security affects everybody, so it’s of supreme importance to us. Therefore we became the first web host to add a powerful anti-malware scanner to keep your sites secure, for free. As well as scanning every day, it gives you the freedom to perform scans on individual websites on demand. This month also saw the introduction of autoresponders and a way to configure Office 365 automatically.
June: 2FA, message centre, malware alerts, SPF and better business info
StackCP experienced two major changes. Two-factor authentication was added, meaning that reseller’s customers had the option to add an extra layer of security to their login. Also we made it easier to communicate with your customer: notifications could be sent direct to their StackCP control panel. In addition, email malware alerts were introduced, SPF records could be added automatically and we made it easier to manage your business information.
July: Welcome emails and customer update
We made it easier for resellers to welcome new customers, automatically. A personalised welcome email would now go out to all new users of StackCP, containing all the details they needed and any other information the reseller wished to add. Those same Stack Users could also now update their own details from StackCP, reducing admin-work for resellers.
August: Email campaign tools and UI changes
Another free tool to help resellers grow their business: an email marketing suite. From My20i, you were now able to send personalised, templated email campaigns to customers, easing marketing communications – and negating the need for third-party paid tools. We also made it easier to manage domains, users and VPS.
September: WHMCS module update
We updated our integration module so that the latest WHMCS domain suggestions were supported. This blog also saw its first post!
October: StackCP Help Desk
We released StackCP Help Desk – a customer support system for My20i. Using this, it was possible to deal efficiently with customer enquiries by email. For example, you could track cases, assign custom support ticket statuses and create automatic or stock replies. All these developments were with the aim of making My20i a one-stop shop for successful hosting businesses.
November: Terabit+ DDoS protection, more bandwidth & domain resolver
Christmas came early for our virtual private server users: we announced powerful new 1Tbs+ DDoS protection and a free bandwidth upgrade for all our VPS. We also introduced a new domain resolver for everyone.
December: My20i refresh, PHP & storage notifications
The brand-new My20i was released, giving it a more unified, cleaner and modern feel. The enhanced user experience for highly praised, for example: “I’m loving the new improvements to the design, much better and more fluid across the whole system.” We also introduced an easy PHP version switcher for our WordPress users and email storage-limit notifications.
There were plenty of other changes – but I’ve limited this to the highlights for the sake of brevity.
Plus there were other projects – still in development – that we can’t wait to show you!
Stay tuned for more exciting announcements in 2019…
It’s like being back in 1997 in a good way… 20i reminds me of the independent ISP I used to work for before Freeserve destroyed the market.
Good Customer service
Excellent Support
Feeling like a customer and not just a number
Telling all my Tech friends about this wonderful new experience after 20 years of shite from fasthosts.. 20i you are like a breath of fresh air and fantastic.
I have to say you are a very good company and your support team are in my opinion the ROCK. They are so helpful, nothing and I mean nothing is to much trouble. I am sure though that when they see a support ticket opened by Davide they draw straws to answer it 🙂
Great work guys, you are amazing and this year I intend to have all websites moved over from heart! Your customer service is world class and keep up the great work ?
You are a fab company and can’t wsit to keep migrating sites to you one feature request though is the ability to install a free SSL without having to pount nameservers but via just a A record change to point the domain to your server, this would work do much better for my clients!!
Stay awesome!
Hey Brett, thanks for the kind words. There’s an explanation of why we don’t do the A-record thing here: https://www.20i.com/blog/why-i-love-lets-encrypt/
try: https://www.sslforfree.com you can generate and validate your own letsencrypt and implement via 20i SSL control panel but you will have to manually re-validate every 90 days! im looking forward to 20i finding a way. maybe a nice wordpress plugin via the wordpress platform or something like sslforfree where you can manually generate the validation.
Happy New Year to the 20i Team, and thank you for all the additions and improvements made throughout 2018, not to mention the excellent technical support. Here’s to more of the same in 2019!
Thanks Craig!