Hey WordPress Warriors! We at GridPane wish you all the best for the coming New Year, and we hope that you and yours are all safe and sound and were able to get some downtime over the holiday period.
It’s been a busy year behind the scenes, rebuilding and refactoring many of the systems that make all of GridPane work, as well as bringing our OpenLiteSpeed stack into alignment with our Nginx stack. We’ve said goodbye to some of our team members and welcomed new ones, we’ve improved our internal systems, and we’ve expanded our support offering in the form of GridPane 360.
While 2022 will certainly be an exciting year for us, here’s a quick recap of some of the biggest GridPane updates from 2021.
Backups V2
Our new backups system was a herculean effort and is literally its own company’s worth of intellectual property. Its release into production took almost a year longer than anticipated, but our platform now offers one of, if not the most, comprehensive backup systems for WordPress that exists.
Remote backups are now available to all plans, with Pro and Panel plans having access to:
- AWS S3
- Backblaze B2
And Developer and Agency accounts having access to the above as well as:
- Dropbox
- Wasabi
More than one of these can be used for each site, and customizing how often they run, what time they run, purging schedules, and more can all be easily managed from within your GridPane account.
New servers already run on the new system, but if you haven’t updated your servers that were provisioned before November 2021, we highly recommend you do so ASAP. Full documentation can be found here:
OpenLiteSpeed
Our OLS stack was also released out of beta and into production. Not only that but we’ve built lots of the things you’ve come to expect from GridPane to help you easily do things such as adjust the 7G firewall, add your own custom headers, edit .htaccess, and NOT need to restart OLS for your changes to take effect and more.
GridPane now offers one of, if not the most, the most stable and feature-rich iterations of OLS that exists for WordPress. If you’re interested in getting started with OpenLiteSpeed we recommend you check out this article:
GridPane API
The API has come a long way over 2021, to the point where you could now build your own SaaSified checkout that could trigger the following:
- Build a server
- Build a site (from a template/boilerplate)
- Add users to said site
- Deliver enterprise-capable hosting
And all of those things could happen programmatically, entirely behind the scenes, and no one would even know that it was GridPane you were hosting on.
360 Preemptive Support
If you have websites that you want our team to actively monitor 24/7, as well as the audit and monitor the health of the server they’re hosted on AND set about automatically resolving issues before you even become aware that they exist, you now have access to such a service with GridPane 360.
If your websites go down in the middle of the night, we’ll know about it and begin working to resolve it, so you can sleep easy knowing that we have your most important websites covered.
Just as importantly, 360 allows our team to see your site and server problems BEFORE they become critical and resolve them before they have the chance to.
100+ New Knowledge Base Articles
You read that right, we published another 100+ articles in 2021, bringing us to 300+ articles and making it one of the most comprehensive resources for hosting your own WordPress websites that exists.
Two particularly useful articles we published in December 2021 that many WordPress pro’s, GridPane users or not, will benefit from are: –
Community Forum
Another heavily requested addition to the platform was the community forum. In hindsight, we should have done this much, much sooner, but now in addition to the knowledge base, the community forum will soon become one of the most valuable resources for hosting WordPress websites.
If you’re not already a member, we highly recommend that sign up for your account here:
https://gridpane.com/community
We’ve gone in-depth into why the community forum is so important, so we’ll keep this one brief. You can learn more here:
Panel Plan
The new Panel plan was released over Black Friday and is our new $50/month offering. We have a lot of new features in development, and many of these will be available in Panel.
Panel goes hand in hand with the move to invest our time deeper into community support and allows us to bring back a cheaper plan for those who are earlier on in their hosting journey, or simply don’t need every feature that Developer brings to the table.
And More
- Lots of behind the scenes refactoring improvements across the board
- New GP-CLI
- New Monit autohealing functions and CLI
- Guards to prevent systems colliding when users try to do too many things at once
- New includes
- New notifications,
- Automatic fixes
- General stability improvements
- Multiple API keys per provider
- Adjust timezones and automatic updates directly in the UI
- Clone one site over another
- Additional options for creating new WordPress sites
- Making database rewrites optional during SSL provisioning and cloning.
And likely a ton of other additions/adjustments/improvements from our devs that I’m forgetting.
All the best for 2022 everyone!
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