Top 10 Things We Accomplished in 2018

Another year flew by…. Here is my annual Top 10 list for 2018.

1. Launched Windows 2016 Hosting
We launched Windows 2016 hosting with IIS 10.x in our US-based datacenter.

If any customer wants to move to Windows 2016, just reach out to our support team and we’ll move your site.

2. Continued to add support for .NET Core
We updated our server support for .NET Core 2.0 and .NET Core 2.1. Because there are so many minor versions, we put together a knowledge base article that lists the .NET Core versions that are currently supported on our webservers.  For the versions listed in the knowledge base, you can use Framework-Dependent deployment.  If you are using a .NET Core version that is not listed, then you can upload your application using Self-Contained Deployment.

3. Launched Office 365 at Everleap.com
We are offering Office 365 Business and Enterprise Plans for our US-based cutsomers over at our cloud hosting brand, Everleap.com, and our service includes technical support. If any DiscountASP.NET customers are interested in Office 365 subscriptions, let our technical support team know.

If you have existing Office 365 subscriptions and are unhappy with the support you are receiving, you could consider migrating your Office 365 subscriptions over to us and get support from our support team. Reach out to our support team in interested.

4. Prepared for GDPR
The new EU General Data Protection Regulation took effect in May 2018. This new regulation is a lot tougher than prior regulations and imposes more costly penalties. That is why it’s a big deal and we all saw a LOT of activity around customer privacy around the time the GDPR took effect. We also updated our policies and procedures to adhere to the principles of the GDPR.

5. Renewed our EU-US Privacy Shield and Swiss-US Privacy Shield Certifications
With the assistance of our Privacy Management Solutions Partner, TrustArc, we successfully renewed our certifications for the EU-US and Swiss-US Privacy Shield Framework.

With the GDPR coming into effect in May 2018, it is fair to ask why we would bother renewing these certifications. Because the GDPR is so new and it’s implementation into real-life practice is still evolving, we are aware of no official certification. In other word, no company out there is currently willing to put themselves at risk for legal GDPR compliance exposure on behalf of their partners. However, there are official certifications for the Privacy Shield Framework so we decided to renew our Privacy Shield certifications this year to officially demonstrate our commitment to our customer’s privacy.

6. Won another Visual Studio Magazine 2019 Readers Choice Award
We won the 2019 Bronze Award in Visual Studio Magazine’s Readers Choice Poll. And we didn’t even know that we were nominated! Visual Studio Magazine informed us at the end of 2018. What a great way to end the year!

7. Grew our Private Cloud Business
Over the years, we have quietly hosted some fully-managed Private Cloud environments (separate from our shared hosting platform and cloud hosting platform) for a few partners but in my Top 10 Accomplishments list for 2017, I made a public mention of these services. Over the past year we’ve seen many customers whose business had outgrown DiscountASP.NET or our Everleap platform and/or needed more services than webhosting. For these types of customers, we can build custom hosting environments and manage their business IT infrastructure, providing our high level award-winning support – which could include consulting, infrastructure right-sizing, DBA services, customized backup solutions, high-availability environments, and server and application monitoring.

If you are outgrowing DiscountASP.NET, have mission critical applications, and/or need more than traditional webhosting services, then reach out to us and we can discuss your needs and how we can help.

8. Renewed our Microsoft Partner Status
Every year we devote some resources to renew our Microsoft Partnership status. In 2018, we renewed our Microsoft Partner status with the Silver Datacenter competency.

9. Continued supporting the developer community
Over the past 15 years, we have supported the developer community through sponsorships and complimentary hosting. Here are some of the sponsorships we participated in during 2018 –  Houston TechFest 2018, SoCal Code Camp, Orlando Code Camp, Pittsburgh GiveCamp, SW Ohio GiveCamp, and Dallas GiveCamp. We also provided sites for Microsoft MVPs and MVP Reconnect members. If you run a developer event, usergroup, Microsovt MVP, or MVP Reconnect member, please feel free to reach out to us.

10. Moved into our new office space
The past couple years has been a challenge for our staff as we moved our physical office twice into temporary office spaces, while we worked on securing a more permanent space and built out the new space. The build-out took a lot longer than we anticipated but we finally finished moving into our new office space. We look forward to not having to deal with the disruptions associated with moving.

 

We wish everyone success in the new year!