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Today we announce the launch of a new Premium Private SQL Server solution! Private SQL is your own dedicated Microsoft SQL Virtual Server that is not shared with any other customer. Since your SQL databases reside on their own server, they will have access to all of the server resources, like CPU, RAM and disk space.
But don’t your hosting plans already come with SQL databases?
Yes, all of our hosting plans include Shared SQL server databases. With Shared SQL, many customer databases use the resources of a shared SQL server. Therefore, there are constraints imposed so that all SQL databases on the server performs well for all our customers. And on occasion, there can be a case of a “bad neighbor”, where another customer’s database can use up a lot of server resources, slowing down the SQL performance for your database as well as other customer’s databases. Our staff monitors the Shared SQL Servers and we will work to resolve such performance issues as quickly as possible.
With the Private SQL service, these constraints go away and you don’t deal with any “bad neighbor” situation. For example, you can have a very large SQL database.
SQL Server Customization
Because the Private SQL Server is for just your SQL databases, we can offer server customizations that we can’t do for the Shared SQL servers. For example, we can enable SQL Jobs, SQL CLR, install special monitoring software, or setup custom backup services.
Private SQL Server Plans
There are two base Private SQL plans – one plan with 4 CPU Cores and one plan with 8 CPU Cores. The server disk space storage starts at 200 GB and can be expanded if needed. You can select how much RAM you want for your Private SQL Server starting from 2 GB. And finally, you can select the SQL Server version that you want to use.
Visit Winhost.com to learn more about features and pricing of Private SQL Server solutions
The newly released nopCommerce v4.5 is now available in the WH Control Panel Application Installer.
Visit Winhost to learn more about our nopCommerce hosting solution
Microsoft released .NET 6.0 last month. We are happy to announce that .NET 6 hosting is now available on our hosting platform. You can use Visual Studio 2022 to deploy your .NET 6 applications using framework-dependent deployment.
Visit Winhost to learn more about our ASP.NET Core hosting solutions
As we move forward into 2021, I wanted to do our quick look back on 2020 and talk a little about some of the enhancements we introduced.
EmailBackup – Your Email Backup Solution
We introduced a cost-effective EmailBackup solution that can automatically backup virtually any email box – from your email hosted at Winhost to other email boxes at other hosts to Gmail and Office 365.
We are also offering email backups for 30 days free so you can test it out and see if it is right for you.
O365Backup – Your Office 365 Backup Solution
For those using Office 365, we launched a comprehensive Office 365 Backup solution. This service will automatically backup your email, attachments, calendar, contacts, tasks, OneDrive, SharePoint, Groups and Teams. There are search and restore tools available.
You are welcome to test the O365Backup solution for 30 days free to see if it is right for your needs.
.NET Core
We’ve kept up with the .NET Core releases – making .NET Core 3.x available on our platform. Recently, we introduced support the .NET 5 (or ASP.NET Core 5 – Microsoft is dropping the “Core” moniker)
SQL 2019
We introduced SQL 2019 into the mix of databases we support.
PHP
We added support for PHP 7.4 and updated PHP 7.3.x and 7.2.x
Application Installer Updates
As usual, we kept as up-to-date as possible with the application versions in our Control Panel Application Installer
Maintained Our Great Service
When the Covid 19 pandemic hit, we quickly transitioned to a remote workforce and we’ve been operating this way since March 2020. Of course, we had to deal with a variety of issues and learn how to better operate in this type of situation. But I’m glad to say that we’ve been able to still deliver on our hosting service promise and even introduce some useful services in 2020.
THANK YOU!
We thank all of our customers and we wish you a safe, healthy New Year!
Visit Winhost to learn more about our ASP.NET hosting solutions
Microsoft recently released .NET 5.0. Note that Microsoft is changing their naming convention for .NET. Instead of calling this new major release .NET Core 4.0, they went with .NET 5.0 (or you may see it out there as ASP.NET Core 5.0).
Naming convention aside, we want to let you know that ASP.NET Core 5.0 is now available on Winhost’s Windows 2012 and Windows 2016 hosting platform. We support framework dependent deployment (FDD) for applications created with ASP.NET Core 5.0.
Note: If you cannot use framework-dependent deployment for any .NET Core version, remember that you can always publish using self-contained deployment (SCD). (For example, we show how to use self-contained deployment with Visual Studio 2017, in our knowledge base.) If any customers have questions about deployment, contact technical support.
Visit Winhost to learn more about our ASP.NET Core hosting solutions
.NET Core
On our Windows 2012 and Windows 2016 web servers, both .NET Core 3.1.9 and .NET Core 2.1.23 are now available for framework dependent deployment (FDD).
Note: If you cannot use framework-dependent deployment for any .NET Core version, you can always publish using self-contained deployment (SCD). (For example, in our Knowledge Base, we show how to use self-contained deployment with Visual Studio 2017.) If any customers have questions about deployment, contact our tech support.
PHP
On our Windows 2012 and Windows 2016 hosting platform, we have made the following updates to PHP versions:
Visit Winhost to learn more about our ASP.NET Core hosting and PHP hosting solutions
We were notified by our upstream provider about a recent rise in hacking activities related to older Telerik Web UI Controls that were integrated into older Sitefinity and DotNetNuke applications and may have been used in older custom ASP.NET web applications. Since the warning, we have indeed seen sites hosted at Winhost getting hacked due to this vulnerability, so we wanted to let you know about it.
Some in the security industry are calling this hack Blue Mockingbird and Telerik has even posted about this issue on their blog.
In general, what hackers are doing is using a built-in function of the Telerik Web control – a function that the website may also use – to upload files to the site. Once uploaded, the hacker uses the files to do malicious stuff or the files may just sit there and do nothing (until some future time when the hacker decides to wake it up).
Apparently, there are many different hackers and hacking groups that are exploiting this vulnerability. If the hacker messes up the customer’s website or uploads some phishing site, the customer and/or the host would probably notice and deal with it. But the major issue is that many times the files that are being uploaded are doing nothing – so the site owner doesn’t know something was uploaded to their site and the host won’t know the site got hacked. The hack is clever because its use of the Telerik control looks legitimate.
To deal with this hacking activity, we are monitoring our intrusion prevention system more diligently and made updates to our server security. And our staff are actively looking out for any indication of hacking activities.
Sitefinity and DotNetNuke users
If any customers are running Sitefinity or DotNetNuke, get in contact with our technical support and we can check if your site is vulnerable. If your site is vulnerable, we can discuss next steps in how to deal with it.
Custom Applications Using Telerik Web UI Controls
If you use Telerik Web UI control in your custom ASP.NET web applications, get in contact with our technical support and we can check if your site is vulnerable. if your site is vulnerable, we can discuss next steps in how to deal with it.
If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us.
Visit Winhost to learn more about our Windows hosting solutions
SQL 2019 is now available at Winhost. Customers can create a SQL 2019 database through their Control Panel. And of course, there are no extra fees for SQL 2019 hosting and it is included as a database option for all Winhost hosting plans. Enjoy.
Visit Winhost to learn more about our Windows and SQL hosting solutions