Imagine this horrible hypothetical situation: you’re deep in development mode making changes all over your site. You’re in the zone - nothing can stop you as you move about the options as fast as humanly possible. Your site is going to be a miracle, you’re a genius, ideas keep flowing through your head and you’re going to change the world. After making several changes, installing several extensions, posting multiple articles, you refresh the page to see the changes live only to cry out in pain and anger because your site suddenly looks something like this:

Or this:

Also known as the dreaded “500 Internal Server Error”.

The Cloud Control Panel, or the CCP, is an easy-to-use interface used to manage each website hosted with CloudAccess.net. We recently redesigned the entire CCP and this blog describes the process we went through and offers a little history of one of the most important pieces of our platform.

In the beginning, the CCP was actually a custom Joomla component we built and pre-installed in Joomla sites that were launched through our platform. It was completely separate from what we called the “Client Area” at the time.

When Joomla 2.5 was released, we removed the CCP from the Joomla application and added those features to the Client Area, unifying account and application management tools. The result was the second version of the Cloud Control Panel, which you can see below.

Last week we hit a big milestone as a hosting provider: the number of active hosted applications on our platform reached 20,000! Every once in a while we like to recognize accomplishments like these and to celebrate our clients because, although we’re not one of the giants in the industry just yet, each client helps us get there. Keep reading to find out who got free lifetime hosting for launching the 20,000th site!

To be honest, we didn’t expect to reach this milestone just yet - we were projecting this to happen in July or August, but we launched WordPress as a fully integrated product throughout the entire platform in March, which helped us reach this goal a little quicker than anticipated. Active websites on our platform include demo trial sites, websites that have been launched through our CMS in the Classroom program, and clients who have upgraded to one of our hosting & support plans.

It’s almost Spring, and there are several refreshing changes happening at CloudAccess.net. We have a new website and a new office location, and (most importantly) a new product to announce. WordPress, the world’s most popular content management system powering close to 20% of the world’s top websites, has now been completely integrated into the CloudAccess.net platform!

For the last 4 years, we've focused 100% of our attention to developing the most complete web hosting platform available for the Joomla Content Management System. We've scaffolded support services around Joomla and we've helped tens of thousands of people learn how to build and maintain their own Joomla sites. We've now set our sights on doing the same thing with WordPress.

Over the years we've received countless requests to extend our services to incorporate WordPress. After a great deal of hard work by the entire CloudAccess.net Team, we are happy to announce that we are officially providing managed hosting and support for the WordPress application. Just like with Joomla, clients can immediately provision a WordPress website through the Cloud Control Panel™(CCP) and use all the CCP features to manage their application.

We take great pride in our customized Cloud Control Panel™(CCP) that is simple, intuitive and powerful. The CCP is at the heart of our platform and the main interface between CloudAccess.net clients and team members. You won’t find a better control panel at any other hosting company. Today we are launching a new version of our Joomla-specific, feature-rich CCP and we know you'll enjoy your new client experience.

The Basics of Compression and Caching

When visitors come to your site, their browser displays content that is served from a web server. The web server is told what content to send based on the output of the Joomla application. Each page that the visitor loads requires Joomla to generate content into an html page for the visitor's browser. Sometimes Joomla has to generate the same content over and over. When this happens, site administrators can take advantage of caching to reduce the amount of work required from Joomla and the web server, which can greatly improve performance.

Compression comes into play when the files and data that is generated by Joomla gets sent from the web server to the browser. In many cases, compressing that data can increase the speed at which the data is sent, as well as the performance of the web server itself. In combination, these two factors can greatly decrease the speed at which your pages load for site visitors.

Warning to all readers: this is not a blog post. It is a shameless brag post!

Now that you have had fair warning, and you've chosen to continue reading, we would like to unveil the latest CloudAccess.net news tid-bit. Earlier today, during some routine Google PageRank checking, we found that the CloudAccess.net PageRank has risen to the astronomical value of 8!

The History of PageRank

Developed way back in 1996 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page (that’s where the “Page” comes in), the system was set to use algorithms that ranked sites on a 1-10 scale based on link popularity. Soon after this system was designed, it was put into use when the same two gentlemen founded a company you may have heard of, Google. Essentially, PageRank is one of many indicators to a sites link popularity. 

When GoDaddy's down, who ya gonna call? CloudAccess! 

Godaddy’s DNS network went down today, and it's not a surprise. This was caused by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack causing extended downtime for millions of websites world-wide. At CloudAccess.net, we've built a very special DNS network aptly named “Bolt-DNS”. Bolt-DNS is a distributed DNS network that allows us to handle very large volumes of traffic even during a DDOS attacks. Our Bolt-DNS network will distribute the traffic evenly during these attacks, and it quickly reacts by working with our DNS data centers to stop or block any denial of service attacks.

The Godaddy DNS outage has also affected the sending and receiving of email messages for thousands of people. CloudAccess.net partners with Google for email services for a more reliable email hosting service. In the case where Godaddy email is down, our system stays up. In fact, taking down both Google and CloudAccess.net would be nearly impossible. You cannot take down two of the biggest players in DNS world down at the same exact time. Both providers have cached networks that would continue to route mail even on the largest of network attacks. Since your Godaddy email is directly connected to a non-distributed DNS network rather than on a massive network like Google and CloudAccess.net, you're subject to failures.

We don't only work with Joomla, we also use it. A lot of us help clients on a daily basis, but we also create our own personal sites.

My father is a (retired) military man, and I am very proud of him and his service. The unit that he was stationed with the longest - the 7th Radio-Technical Battalion of Łask, Poland, where he served as Chief of Arms, had a fairly poor website and I decided to build them a new one using Joomla.

The old site had a lot of  features when I took over, but it was still in the raw HTML form, and, speaking frankly, it would have made a 1990's web developer cry blood. I decided to remake it in Joomla! The military unit (Siódmy Łaski Batalion Radiotechniczny in Polish) no longer exists, as the splash page states. The site was initially just a single page where the unit's “sympathizers” could learn about future reunions. Later, as old service men and other staff found each other, they started exchanging photos, and a gallery was born. The history of the battalion was developed in much the same way. Subsequent reunions produced even more photographs and the gallery currently features 13 years of reunion photographs from 1998 to 2011. Older photographs of equipment the men when they were soldiers were also added. Images of Polish-made and USSR-made weapons, radio turrets, guidance systems and much more were also added.