Happy New Year from all of us here at File Sanctuary! Once again it’s time for our annual State of the Sanctuary blog post with a roundup of what happened in 2018 and what lies ahead in 2019.
Uptime matters
2018 was a record year for us in terms of uptime, seeing our platform reach 99.993% uptime across our entire Cloud.
As always, our status page is the place to go in order to receive updates about scheduled maintenance and service availabilty information. This page is hosted outside of our network in order to ensure it stays online even if our other systems are unreachable. You can also sign up for email updates from our status page.
Security
2018 was a difficult year for the entire IT industry with the difficult to resolve L1TF vulnerabilities such as Foreshadow, Spectre, and Meltdown. As patches became available we of course made it
a very high priority to get those patches and firmware updates applied. As new problems are detected and workarounds are found, we expect more patches in the near future, and will continue to the monitor the situation.
We take security very seriously here at File Sanctuary, and we will continue to monitor the IT landscape for any issues that arise and apply any security patches that are required.
Cloud Servers
In 2018 we launched our fourth generation of File Sanctuary Cloud node hardware, completely removing hard disks and going full SSD for optimal disk IO performance. We have seen (and have had feedback from many customers) that there has been a dramatic improvement in almost all Cloud Server activities as a side-effect of this change.
Our 4th generation hardware also includes dual Intel Xeon Silver Skylake-class processors, offering a significant boost to CPU performance, as well as faster-clocked DDR4 RAM for increased memory performance.
File Sanctuary’s Cloud Servers are being used by customers like you to perform a wide range of sites: hosting websites with Virtualmin, hosting source code repositories with GitLab, running office phone systems using FreePBX, running powerful web applications, 4G mobile data networks, and there are now several other hosting companies using File Sanctuary behind the scenes to power the services they provide to their own customers.
In the year ahead we’ll be continuing to help customers migrate away from Ubuntu 14.04, which reaches its end-of-life in April 2019.
Web Hosting
Due to some unexpected delays last year with Virtualmin support for Ubuntu 18.04, we’ll be looking at launching our Ubuntu 18.04-powered hosting service this year with newer versions of Apache, PHP, MySQL, and many other components.
As part of our retirement of the Ubuntu 14.04-powered hosting service, we’ll start offering upgrades to our Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04-powered services.
SSL/TLS
In 2018, browsers continued to step up their mission to flag non-HTTPS websites as “Not Secure” with increasing visual cues as the year progressed.
To help customers with this transition to HTTPS, we’re now offering free basic SSL certificates with all Web Hosting packages. These are less fully-featured than our paid SSL certificates but we believe basic SSL to be better than no SSL at all.
Livedrive
2018 saw Livedrive add support for the latest releases of Windows 10 and macOS Mojave, along with regular updates for the mobile apps.
Don’t have Livedrive and want to know more? We’ve written a couple of blog posts that go into more detail about the new Livedrive desktop clients and the new Livedrive web portal, so we’ll let those posts tell the story there.
Domains
2018 saw us continue to launch more gTLDs! Keep an eye on our domains page for the full list of currently-supported domains!
Don’t forget that if you own a .co.uk domain registered before June 10, 2014, then there are just a few short months left to claim your reserved .uk domain. Reservations will remain in place until June 10, 2019. Claim your .uk domain now, it just takes a few clicks!
F-Secure Protection Service
Our managed antivirus and endpoint security solution, F-Secure Protection Service, remains hugely popular, because it keeps your Macs and PCs safe from online threats, as well as your servers, and Android mobile devices, without the worry of having to deal with the alerts normally shown by antivirus software.
Similar to how a monitored burglar alarm system is watched over and controlled by a monitoring team, our F-Secure Protection Service sends all your computer’s anti-virus, firewall and software update alerts to the team here at File Sanctuary, allowing you to transfer these often complicated tasks to us so that you don’t have to worry about them.
F-Secure Radar
In 2018 we launched F-Secure Radar, our fully managed vulnerability scanning service.
With Radar, we help you discover where the weaknesses are in both your office network and your Cloud Servers. We can provide regular reports, and we can also help you to resolve any security issues that are detected. This helps you become compliant with regulations such as GDPR and PCI-DSS.
Learn more about how Radar can help your business.
F-Secure Freedome VPN
Freedome continues to be very popular, with support for macOS, Windows, iOS and Android. It’s designed to run everywhere, and just requires a single tap to enable.
rankingCoach SEO
In 2018 we launched rankingCoach to help you get your site a better ranking in Google search results. Better rankings mean more visitors, and more visitors mean more sales.
With do-it-yourself SEO training and guidance solutions, rankingCoach is proven to help improve your site’s position in search results and get you more traffic. Get started with rankingCoach today!
Let’s have another great year!
Thanks so much for all your support over the last year, we’re super-excited for what 2019 holds, and we can’t wait to take that journey with you all. Here’s to a great 2019!