Devblog #1

Some people have been asking to show what kind of progress we have. They have suggested that we start posting monthly about what we’re doing. So that’s we are going to do. Even if that means every month, we are going to post “replaced 1000 lines of terrible code with 500 lines of not so horrible, code”.
Why Xeovo?
No back-story for this one. We had to come up with a unique name for hosting which is not going to include words Hosting, VDS or Cloud Because it’s not original at all. Beside this, we needed all popular domain zones free for this unique name.
We are going to share a secret with you. If you are out of ideas for your project name. You should try searching for drop domains. A dropped domain means that it has expired. The owner has not renewed the license with their domain registrar. There is a many online service, which can provide you list of expired domains. First, it’s better for your SEO. You can find old domains with some backlinks. It’s going to help you In beginning a little bit.
Second, it is an excellent way to find unique names for your project, if you use filters correctly. Filters will save a lot of time, and you are going to get only nice domain names if you use the correct amount of vowels and consonants, no numbers or hyphens.
After applying filters in right way, we got a list with 70.000 domain names. We used free service, but you can find more on Google if you want. Some of them are paid and have more functionality. It took us almost day to select best domains. We got around six good domain names, not that much right? First domain was Alavix. Sounded good, before we did google it. It was some medicine. After Google results, we got the association with Viagra or any other drug to cure impotence.
Second domain was NoJets. Sounds cool, right? However, it was a little too late for us. Someone was faster than we were and got it already registered, but we have no regrets about it. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
The third domain was Xsire. We did not take this domain name because it was too hard to remember in our opinion. Now we have a different option. It wasn’t that bad. After that, we had a couple of more domain, but we don’t remember them.
Last one and our favorite choice was Xeovo. Waybackmachine tells us someone registered it back in 2013, and someone was trying to sell it for three years but did give up or forgot to renew it. For us, it was perfect because all popular domain names were free.
Why did we choose ISPManager?
We had already experience with ISPManager and knew how it works. Since we knew how it works it was main reason why we are using now ISPManager. The second reason everyone in Russia and CIS knows about this panel. On the other hand, fewer people know about this panel in America and Europe. We are going to take this risk and try to popularize ISPManager outside of Russia and CIS. We have been thinking about CPanel integration with BILLManager. However, it is too risky to use two different products. If for some reason, they will decide to stop updating integration with CPanel we are going to have serious problems. Therefore, it is better to stay with one product and support it.
Bots
Yes, we do have Telegram bot, but we didn’t announce it yet anywhere, because it's not finished and has only basic functionality. It's just a FAQ in Telegram. We want to improve it and make more bots in other messengers.
Payment Gateways
Took some time for us to integrate more payments methods, because BILLManager has less integrated payment gateways modules. At this moment we have already integrated next payment gateways
- PayPal
- Unitpay
- Webmoney
- WalletOne (temporarily turned off)
We are going to add more in future:
- Stripe more for Europe + you can pay with Bitcoins
- 2Checkout
- CoinPayments to accept over 50 altcoins
New plans
At we end of a month, we understood we have to switch from HDD to SSD. Nowadays HDD is not popular anymore, and everyone is looking for SSD hosting instead of HDD, because SSD is many times faster than HDD.
Since SSD price is higher, we had to cut storage size for each plan. Also now SSH is included in every plan. Old clients can switch to new plans or stay with old ones. We do not force anyone to move to new plans if they do not want.
Design
This month we made some improvements. The whole redesign for some pages, for example, hosting overview page. It used to be horrible, now its pretty. And a lot of small fixes. Next month we are going to redesign FAQ page and improve contacts page. Also we are looking forward to making better UI/UX for panel and billing.
Open Graph Protocol
Now it is perfect, and we wanted to share best way to make OGP. First, it's better to use this one for testing your OGP globally in all popular social media sites, rather one by one using an official debugger for each social media.
Remember to use 220x220 pictures for the main page. It fits better all social media sites and messengers. However, for other pages like blog posts you should use bigger images to gain more attention and traffic. We did not add Google+ because no one uses it and it's not working properly for some reason.
Here is our OGP:
<!-- The Open Graph protocol -->
<meta property="og:title" content="XEOVO - Quality Hosting Solutions" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Xeovo is stable and secure website hosting solutions for your needs. We promise 99% server uptime, high speed of loading your website and DDoS protection." />
<meta property="og:type" content="website" />
<meta property="og:url" content="https://www.xeovo.com" />
<meta property="og:image" content="https://www.xeovo.com/img/OpenGraph.png" />
<!-- Twitter Graph -->
<meta name="twitter:title" content="XEOVO - Quality Hosting Solutions">
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary" />
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@xeovo" />
<meta name="twitter:creator" content="@xeovo" />
<meta name="twitter:description" content="Xeovo is stable and secure website hosting solutions for your needs. We promise 99% server uptime, high speed of loading your website and DDoS protection.">
<meta name="twitter:image:src" content="https://www.xeovo.com/img/OpenGraph.png">
Google Analytics
Shortly after the start, we tried to figure out why tracking multiple domains does not work. We need track multiple domains because every purchase does happen on billing.xeovo.com and without a subdomain, tracking is impossible to follow conversations.
We did everything as Google says, but it did not work. Later we tried to test it with Tag Manager. It's Chrome extensions which show if tracking between subdomains goes in a right way. Didn’t help us to figure out where was the problem.
So we decided to take contact with google analytics support and ask why this happens. Still no answer from them, but we are going to figure it out next month.
Plans for November:
- Integrate new payment methods
- Redesign for FAQ
- Improvements for all pages
- New page for affiliate program
- Improve Telegram bot
- And a lot of small things