2023 is here!
We hope this message finds you well as we kick off the new 2023 year. As always, we are committed to provide the best possible services and products for your IT hosting requirements. 2022 introduced big changes in our back-end platform, with the introduction of the new account system for product management and billing as a first stage. This involved complicated changes not just in how we interact with customers but also how everything works inside Netz0 when it comes to support, billing, service management and provisioning.
For this reason, we had to delay several features and launches. One of them is the new Netzmin control panel, which seems is in development for ages at this point. This was not forgotten, Netzmin is actively tested internally at this point and implementation with developers was already resumed. While there are some things that need changes because of the new customer account system which requires a deep integration with the control panel, this will result in a more consistent experience while managing your services.
Changes like this are not as simple as they might sound, with active customers and data that requires live migration while rolling out to production. And even simple changes like support documentation must be completely rewritten when interfaces and services are modified.
In 2022 while you did not observe many improvements, believe us that we worked full time. Most of the projects are already launching in 2023, some big services like security, performance, and management. They will in most cases launch in parallel as they work in a relationship mode, and it’s not possible to release new features before another back-end system is working. This is the main reason some features available in the old customer system are still not here in the public site. As they are being re-written and modified to work with the new platforms, developed completely in house and customized only for Netz0 users.
For example, some customers asked us why they can’t reset their server passwords anymore, or why the IP unblock function is not available in the product management section. The main reason is that some of those features only worked in the old customer system with older servers and were developed to work in a very simple way with only specific services, like for example the cPanel control panel. It made no sense to invest resources in developing features that will be deprecated and since Netzmin is replacing cPanel the new account functions must work with our new platform. That is just one of many examples, but we made the decision not to invest in releasing older features for services that are being deprecated.
That does not mean an old feature is gone, it means it will come back once your product/service is migrated to the new platform, regardless if it’s a hosting account, an enterprise server or email services. Netzmin is just not a control panel like cPanel, it’s a completely new network, hardware, and software platform that works completely different both in the user front end side and the hardware back end inside the datacenter. That includes how websites are served, the CPU they consume, the security, isolation, and even the network that routes traffic in and out of the Internet which is filtered in a new security network service.
Instead of launching Netzmin last year, we took the hard decision to first have the new customer account system working, which also forces us to change sections of the main website.
If you are an older Netz0 customer, you probably noticed some changes. The domain service area is now completely managed from the new account area, and this already is featuring new options. Services that we could not offer before or were very hard to integrate efficiently that made sense for our customers in terms of quality.
Some options are not available yet. We are not planning on offering less, but more. Every feature you had before in your account area will be added at some point. The same is true for every new service that will be re-introduced. We made the hard choice to stop selling existing services to new users at the expense of profit loss, just for the sake of not trying to offer them an inferior service. Every customer of Netz0 will be migrated to the new platforms without any cost at some point, and we have not raised or changed existing hosting prices for years. Don’t worry, we don’t plan on increasing pricing either in 2023. New features will in most cases be introduced directly into existing plans and if we launch extras that were not available before, they might be free or with a small upgrade. Part of the changes were planned years ago to avoid going against the trend of the rest of the hosting industry that keeps raising prices every year.
Being able to offer quality services to our customers involves them directly. We have received tons of feedback and all the suggestions through the past year are recorded. Every suggestion, every bug report or idea was saved and analyzed. We want to thank everyone who helped us with suggestions and recommendations. 2023 is an exciting year, and it is only the beginning.
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