Another year has passed so I thought I would give you an update on what we have been up to over the past 12 months and share our plans for 2014. We have come a long way over the past year and have a great deal in store for the year ahead. Let me recap on what we have done so far and what we have in the pipeline for 2014
Migration to VMWare cPanel Cloud Based Platform
Recently we migrated all of our customers websites on to a new VMWare cloud based platform. This was a solution that had been designed in collaboration with Dell and Digital Pacific Engineers.
The highly available SSD based platform has shown a great increase in performance and a noticeable increase in our already high uptime. Having this new SAN based platform allows us to scale well in to the future.
New Data Centre location (SY3)
When we set up our VMware cPanel platform we decided to locate them at Equinix who are one of the worlds most trusted datacentre providers. This is the same datacenter that some of the major banks use and you can rest assured that your data is in safe and reliable hands at this location.
New Office Location
We have finally moved in to our new office location at Circular Quay after 4 years at our previous office. This new office has an abundance of windows and a spectacular view of the Harbor Bridge on one side and the Opera house on the other side. Check out our Facebook photos.
Product Changes
Shared Hosting
After a review of our products and services a few adjustments were made in order to streamline our shared hosting plans. We have reduced the number of plans, increased allocations of remaining plans, offered more flexible pricing options and now even offer add-on domains for business plans.
Dedicated Servers
Last month we launched a new range of Dedicated Servers with improved availability of dedicated and shared SAN storage. This provides greater flexibility for our Dedicated Server customers and enables us to offer complex solutions including private customer cloud solutions.
We now also have a $99 Dell branded dedicated server, which is the very first of its kind introduced in Australia!
New Senior Appointments
Chief Financial Officer
For years we have had an in-house accountant who helped us process invoices and process pays, but we felt there was something missing in that area. We wanted someone who would grow with the company and bring more to the table which prompted us to start a man hunt for one of Australia’s most experienced CFO’s and we are pleased to say we have found him, James Crawford brings a combined 7 years with two of the Big 4 Audit firms. He thinks outside the square and will be focussing on acquisitions and other strategic financial decision making.
Further Changes and Updates
New Payment Options
We found that many customers were requesting to pay for their hosting upfront without having to worry about renewal dates so have introduced new payment options with many of our web hosting plans which give you big savings of up to 35% when signing up for 3 year terms.
New Support Platform
We have revamped our online support platform which includes new video’s, tutorials and a handy auto-complete search function. This new support platform has proved to be very useful to our customers and we have a seen a 40% increase in its use since the launch.
OnePanel
Digital Pacific offers many products and services, and every single one of them comes with a control panel to access these products. As you order more products and services we give you more access to their control panels. The upside to this is that you have 24/7 control to these services however the downside is that you need to remember passwords and URL’s to multiple control panels.
Over the past few years we have been thinking about a way to tackle the issue of all of these logins so we decided to develop a solution and subsequently came up with our new product called OnePanel; which is what the name implies “One Panel’. This is one control panel you can log in to and manage every single aspect of each product we provide. We are excited about this product and expect to see the launch of this around mid February 2014.
New Website
Some of you may have noticed that we launched our new website back in July. We had been working on the new design for a great deal of time and are proud of the result. The response from our customers has been fantastic so far with great feedback and overall results.
New on demand Cloud Platform
Over the past 18 months we have been designing and developing a self service cloud hosting platform codenamed “flashcloud”. This has now been setup and will be ready for launch mid February around the same time our “OnePanel” control panel is launched. Initially, this will be a beta product to ensure everything works as it should. We are quite excited about this product that is based on high availability Dell hardware running SSD or “Flash” based hard drives. This is the perfect product for those who want to get serious performance and power with the ability to scale up and down on demand.
There are many more things that we have achieved this year, but I thought I would point out the majors, going forward next year, we plan on keeping you more informed at regular intervals on what we are up to.
All of us here at Digital Pacific would like to thank you for your ongoing support and look forward to working with you in 2014.
I would also like to take this opportunity to publicly thank all of the staff here at Digital Pacific, without each and every one of you we would not have achieved what we have this year. I look forward to working with you in 2014. Lets go have a drink and celebrate the end of the year!
– Andrew Koloadin
Founder and CEO
Digital Pacific Pty Ltd
