Site hosting news, tutorials, tips, How Tos and more
From now through the end of the year, you will receive a 25% discount on all new sites ordered through Control Panel. The discount applies to whichever plan term you select, so the longer the term, the more you’ll save.
To get started, go to the “Sites” section of Control Panel and click the “Order New Site” button. Your discount will be automatically applied.
If you’ve been putting off purchasing a new site for that special project, now is a great time to get started. This discount is for current Winhost customers only. It’s our way of saying thank you for being a loyal customer. We appreciate your continued support!
The discount applies to hosting fees only for the first payment term. Subsequent terms will renew at the regular price. Domain registration and other third party services are not included.
We apologize for a lack of updates. It’s just been busy here at Winhost. Here’s a list of what was updated:
If you use WordPress and are worried about being hacked or compromised, or you just don’t have time to keep up with the frequent updates and maintenance, we just launched a service made for you.
Our Managed WordPress Hosting service includes:
And if you need it:
You can learn more about Managed WordPress Hosting and find a link to sign up here.
The Managed WordPress Hosting service includes the Winhost Max Plan, so if you are an existing Winhost customer and already have a hosting plan, contact us for pricing or open a helpdesk ticket and we’ll take it from there.
Every day we clean up compromised WordPress sites for our customers. For them it’s an inconvenience and an expense that they weren’t expecting and don’t welcome. But since WordPress is the most popular blog/CMS application in the world, it’s a natural target for hackers. If everything in your WordPress installation is not up to date, you are at risk.
And unfortunately, even if everything is up to date, you can still be vulnerable. That’s why Managed WordPress Hosting includes a WordPress hardening service, to increase security and reduce the chance that you will become a victim.
So if you love WordPress but could live without the constant maintenance and security tasks, let us do it for you!
We’re rolling out a change to the email system that you should be aware of.
The “postmaster” account is set up by default when we establish email service for a domain, but you have the ability to delete that account. The problem with deleting postmaster@ is that some important messages can be addressed to that address, and that’s because the SMTP RFP says the postmaster account for a domain is required to accept mail.
The change we’ve made is implementing behind-the-scenes forwarding that makes your primary domain admin the “postmaster” account (assuming you have deleted the postmaster@ account – if you have not deleted that account, you won’t see any changes). What that effectively does is ensure that email addressed to the postmaster@ address for your domain is delivered.
The side effect of this change is that you may see an increase in spam on your primary domain admin account, since spammers sometimes send to postmaster@, assuming that it exists on every domain (because they know that it’s supposed to exist).
A possible increase in spam is an unfortunate side effect of this change, but the alternative is the possibility of missing legitimate email addressed to your postmaster@ address. Those legitimate messages can be important, so we had to weigh the value of those important messages against the possibility of an increase in spam.
It’s worth noting though that we made this change on a small group of servers a couple of weeks ago, and we didn’t receive any feedback regarding an increase in spam, so the likelihood is you won’t notice much of a change with this new configuration.
As always, if you have any questions or concerns, open up a support ticket and let us know.
ASP.NET Core 1.1 is now available at Winhost, as is .NET Core 1.0.3.
We will be supporting two different versions of .NET Core because Microsoft is developing two different versions: “Long Term Support” (LTS) and “Fast Track Support” (FTS).
LTS (the 1.0.3 version) is focused on stability and use on production sites, so its development will take place more slowly. FTS (the 1.1 version) is the latest and greatest version, with more new features, but potentially more new issues as well. We don’t recommend it for use on production sites, but it’s there for you to tinker with and check out the latest Core features.
We’ll always support the latest LTS and FTS versions, with the priority given to the more stable LTS versions that are intended for production. The versions run side by side, so you can use whichever you choose (or use both for different purposes).
We’ve run in to some issues already where the latest Visual Studio version supports later (newer) versions than our servers support. That is going to continue to happen from time to time, because it isn’t feasible for us to keep up with the FTS versions across all of our production servers. The development cadence is too quick. What we will probably do with Core from this point on is update quarterly. We’ll try to post in the forum when we make those updates.
Note that .NET Core is only available on the Windows 2012 servers. If your site is running on a Windows 2008 server you’ll have to migrate to a 2012 server to use .NET Core. We can do the migration for you, just contact support and we’ll take it from there.
For more information on how Microsoft is developing the versions and how the version numbering works, check out this post on the MSDN site.
The latest versions of the following applications are now available through our App Installer tool in Control Panel:
Starting today, December 1st, new ICANN rules are in effect that change the way some domain contact information changes are done. The change affects all generic top level domains, such as .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, etc., (including all of the new domain extensions, like .blog, .photo, etc.). Country code domains (.uk, .TV, .co, etc.) are not affected.
When you change the first name, last name, email address or organization for the registrant (i.e., the domain name owner) you have to acknowledge the change in two separate emails. This applies to changes made to the registrant’s contact information. Changes to the admin, billing and technical contacts are not affected.
Changes to the registrant’s name, organization or email information are now treated the same way a “registrant change” was treated in the past. But in the past the registrant change was assumed to be a change of ownership from one person to another, so emailing both parties was necessary.
Now those emails are triggered any time you update your name or email address, and two emails will go to the same person. You need to approve the change by clicking the link in both emails, or the change will fail.
If you want to learn more about the new policy, check out this Knowledge Base article.
We’ve added php 7 to the mix, it’s available to use now.
We’ve also updated the 5.3, 5.4, 5.5 and 5.6 php versions to the latest (and in some cases final) builds.
You might notice that we’ve labeled php 7 as “beta,” and that’s because it’s still pretty new and there are a lot of known compatibility issues with older code or applications. But if you’re bold and adventurous type, it’s there for you.
To change the php version for your site, log in to the Site Tools section of Control Panel, and click on the PHP Version icon.
Use the handy dropdown to select the version, click the “Update” button, and you’re done.
