Important News!

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Corey

I Break Things
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Hi all,

It's been a while since we had a news post, it's time for an update. We've been working on quite a few changes over the past year, a lot of these were behind the scenes changes that started with moving to our own private cloud last April. Along with that many other things have changed, some noticeable like our new website, some not so noticeable like an overhaul of our abuse monitoring systems. I have a few things to talk about here so I'll break it into sections.

Forums
If you didn't notice, the forum has moved locations again and is now at x10hosting.com/community instead of community.x10hosting.com. With that change we've also re-designed it to match the site, I think it looks much better and hopefully you do too.

With the increased usage of social media, forums aren't as popular as they once were so I've went ahead and merged some forum sections and hid others that I felt were no longer needed. The forums are still going to remain the primary support venue for free hosting users, hopefully it will be easier to navigate now.

Help Center \ Self Help
One problem we've always had was the same questions being asked over and over, some people are not used to a forum setting and have a hard time using the search feature. To hopefully help with this we've launched a new self help knowledge base located at https://x10hosting.com/support

With the new knowledge base we're able to track what people are searching for and create articles for those missed searches. This should help fill in the gaps with common and unanswered questions. Because we just launched it we only have articles created for some of the most common questions, it will fill up with more articles over the coming months.

Status Site
We are replacing the status site with a more streamlined one that will make it much easier for you to see if there is a current issue or if there is an upcoming maintenance planned on a server. I'm hoping to have this live by the end of today, in the coming weeks we will be hooking it up to our automated monitoring system so it will be updated with issues automatically. This will hopefully make it much easier for everyone to plan ahead for maintenance or to know if a server\network wide issue is occurring.

Terms of Service
The terms of service has been updated, it's mostly the same, don't do illegal things and we're good. :) A big change is that we no longer have a language restriction, tools for translation have come a long way since that was initially made a rule and I no longer see a point in preventing people from creating sites in their native languages. Two larger changes that are being implemented is a file size limit and a new timeout period for unused accounts.

Going forward we're going to automatically remove files over 10MB in size, to be fair this will only happen for files that are 4 hours old. This will allow you to upload an archive and have time to unpack it but you won't be able to forget about that archive now sitting on your account taking up space. We've done a lot of test runs and just the amount of space taken up in Wordpress.zip files is hundreds of gigs. From our testing very few people are actually going to be impacted by this change, the majority of files to be removed aren't actually files we allow to be hosted (backups, movies, tv shows). Before anyone freaks out, we have full daily backups of all the servers... if a file you need gets removed we'll get it back for you. Because our cloud is 100% SSD storage and all your data is not only replicated in the cloud it's backed up we needed to come up with a fair solution to stop wasting so much space on non-website related data. This change will not be applied to prime\illuminated\premium accounts.

A lot of people create a hosting account either for later use or find that it may be a bit more daunting than they originally thought. If an account meets our criteria for abandoned we will be suspending and removing it within a week instead of the normal 30 day timeout then 21 day termination period. This only impacts newly created accounts that show clear signs of non-use.

One additional note regarding the terms, we are going to start cracking down on people with multiple accounts. It has always been a rule that you're allowed a single account, unfortunately many people ignore this rule and have numerous accounts with different websites. The free hosting accounts have a limited amount of addon\parked domains for a reason, we offer paid upgrades to get more. These upgrades are what fund our free hosting service and the development time to add or improve features. It's unfortunately gotten to the point where some people have 10+ accounts and we have actual companies selling our free hosting accounts to their customers. If you like the service enough to have multiple accounts please consider upgrading, we offer a few different options for budgets of all sizes. There are also some upcoming changes to our upgrades that I'll talk a bit about below in another section.

Country Restriction
This has always been a hard thing for us, we get quite a few emails every day asking why we don't accept sign ups from a certain country. I would absolutely love to accept sign ups from every country in the world, however some countries view copyright laws a bit differently than we do here in the US. Not only that, some countries such as Nigeria have a very high rate of fraud when it comes to phishing and 419 scams. At one point in time our abuse rate was over 50%, this means that half of the accounts that were being created were being used for some type of illegal activity. This put us in a bad spot as we could either risk everything by continuing to allow these sites to keep going up or block the countries they were coming from. I'm pretty sure Paypal's legal team would eventually get tired of sending us take down notices for phishing every day (sometimes multiple in one day) so we decided to block the countries that exhibited over a certain % of fraud signups.

Let me also just say, we *know* that everyone from these countries is not bad. We get called racists on a daily basis because of these blocks. It's hard to explain to someone that they can't sign up because 50% of their countrymen that have signed up in the past chose to do something illegal. The last thing we want is people thinking we're purposefully discriminating against anyone rather than making a decision to protect our company and our customers. With that said, we've put a ton of time in to our abuse and fraud detection methods. I think we're ready to start opening sign ups to more countries again, at least on a provisional basis as we closely monitor things. Expect to see another update on this in the next week or so.

Upgrades
We're going to be revamping the upgrade system a bit, I don't have specifics to share just yet but any changes will be favorable for anyone who currently has an upgraded account. We're going to streamline this process a bit more and make it less confusing with all the different options we have.

More changes...
Sorry for such a long post, there's a lot going on and we've definitely been slacking on the communication front. We're going to have a blog up and running soon and you'll also see us a bit more on the social media front too. (Read: Follow us on Facebook and Twitter!). Expect to see some more posts in the coming days and weeks as we implement some of the things I talked about above.

Also, the feedback and suggestions forum has been moved up in our forum cleanup, you can't miss it now. :)
 
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