Changing the rules. A registrar that excels across all services
A couple of months back I wrote a blog post on whether a registrar can make a good web host. I made a strong argument that a registrar could, provided the right investment into hosting was made.
Winning the accolade marks just how good our current hosting services are. But with Namecheap, better never stops. So I’m going to take the remainder of this blog post to tell you about what’s coming in 2014 and beyond.
Bringing services closer to home is important to us. We launched shared hosting and reseller hosting in the UK in 2013 and this has proved to be extremely popular with our European customers. We are expanding our product line to include UK dedicated servers. These will launch Q1 2014. We will also be adding business class hosting along with virtual private servers. And our business class product on both sides of the pond is being tweaked and overhauled.
We are also launching our first AsiaPac location in Singapore. Singapore is the best connected hub in all of Asia, making this an ideal location to serve customers from India, China, Australia and many other countries within the region. We will be rolling out our entire product range from day one. Shared, Reseller, VPS and Dedicated will all be available with the usual Namecheap commitment to quality backed with low pricing.
You may be wondering why I haven’t mentioned cloud yet. In short, it’s coming. But for a fuller explanation, we wanted to do it right. We’ve invested heavily in building a true cloud. A cloud that will scale, will have fault tolerance built in and that will offer real world advantages over the typical single server environment. We, and I, saw no point in building just another cloud with slow network connections and SATA disks. This type of cloud, which many of our competitors employ, will have an inferior performance level to the shared server environment because of the storage component.
So from the ground up, we’ve built our cloud to be fast. Very fast. Our storage is a SAS/SSD hybrid offering a significant speed increase over a typical SATA disk. Our storage is connected to our hypervisor nodes by a redundant 10 Gigabit network using Arista low latency switches. Why? Because 1 Gigabit Ethernet and other slower networking technologies just don’t cut it in performance terms.
Spinning up cloud instances will be a breeze. Fault tolerance will be included as standard and will work transparently. Two billing options will be available; a pay-monthly option and a pay-as-you-use option. Additionally, our cloud will also be available in multiple locations with fail-over between locations as one of the future features.
When will you see this? The answer is later this year. We aren’t rushing something unstable into production. We will have a period of beta testing before we make it a fully functional product. Existing Namecheap customers will be invited to beta test our cloud, free of charge. The final product will have a blend of performance, reliability and features at a cost you will love.
SpamExperts premium anti-spam protection is being rolled out across our hosting and our email forwarding infrastructure. It is currently protecting our email forwarding as I write this. And next, SpamExperts will be introduced across the rest of our hosting products — including our newly updated OX Private Cloud Email.
And lastly, we have some exciting developments coming from our recently created Transfer Concierge department. In 2014, it’s going to be easier than ever to transfer your domain and hosting (of any type/service) to Namecheap from a competitor. Transfer Concierge is worthy of a separate post of it’s own, so stay tuned for that.
Matt
