Opalstack Updates – New features, SXSW, and more!
You may remember our last post here was the 1st part in a 3 part series where we walked through how we upgraded our systems to scale. Well, we were really going write that whole series. But then, WebFaction really, actually shut down and that ended up eating up most of our time from July through November. In this post instead of talking about what was new then, we’ll talk about what’s new now!
(Don’t worry, we’ll come back and fill in parts 2 and 3. We’re a hosting company not SciFi/Fantasy authors.)
Caching
Everybody wants a fast site, and a big part of speeding up a site is caching. We’ve made basic caching as simple as editing your app in the dashboard and selecting the cache duration that you want to use!
Automatic site domain redirects
You’ve probably run into this problem before: you have 2 or more domains that you want to be redirected to the site’s main domain. In the past to do the redirection correctly you would have to set up a separate application, add in .htaccess rules, then create a second site to serve the redirect app.
Not anymore – turn on “route all traffic to a single domain” for your site, select the domain, save the site, and all of the site’s incoming traffic will then be redirected to the selected domain!
Cryptocurrency payments
A few of you have messaged us about the cost of bank/credit card fees in your country. Some of you said that the total fees were 25% more than the transaction.
We’ve added support for payments with cryptocurrency to help you avoid those huge conversion fees – to get started, go to https://my.opalstack.com/invoices/ and click the “Switch to Crypto Payments” button!
Other billing-related updates include:
- We’ve separated your invoice details from your account contact details to give you more control over the appearance of your business details on your invoices.
- You can now pay open invoices directly from your Opalstack dashboard without contacting support to get the payment URL.
Forward-only email addresses are back!
A while back we added requirement that all email addresses target a local mailbox, even forwarding addresses. This was intended to be incorporated into an enhancement to our spam filtering setup, but many of you chimed in to let us know that you didn’t like the new requirement.
We heard you! We’ve removed that requirement and you no longer need to add a mailbox when creating or editing a forwarding email address.
And more!
- Updated apps: we’ve added PHP 8.1 and Django 4.0 to our 1-click installers, and a much-improved Rails 7 installer is coming soon!
- CAA records: you can now restrict which certificate authorities can issue certificates for your domain by adding a CAA record.
- Dark mode: if you are a fan of dark mode then click on the Opalstack logo in the dashboard and enjoy!
- Mailbox disk usage: you can now see your mailbox disk usage in the dashboard, no more guessing!
- Database admin links: when you click the admin link for your database it now opens in a new window/tab instead of taking over your current window.
- Numerous bug fixes: we’ve eliminated every bug! OK, not really, but we did fix a ton of them and you should see fewer bugs than you did before.
And one more thing, come visit us at SXSW — Booth 1016 in Hall 3!
A couple of the Opalstack founders will be at the Opalstack booth in SXSW’s Creative Industries Expo March 13th, 14th, 15th, and 16th in Austin, Texas. If you are in the area or will be visiting SXSW please stop by and say hi!