This is an opened question to hosters, don’t hesitate to provide feedback. Over the last year we noticed something very interesting, namely hosters starting to offer VoIP to businesses. Some of our customers started on their own, while others were convinced by my colleagues (in some cases it was pretty hard). Some companies moved slowly, other positioned their products incorrectly, but most were succesful and they are very happy now.

We fell that this process takes more time than it should. Market is moving. Hosting is commodity. On a long run Google with “get” the customer. They could “get” even businesses (no business will use Google Apps now, but in two years, who knows). Microsoft is now a hoster (dangerously raising the bar for providers). It’s obvious that in these conditions hosters must expand their business. They have the customer and they can offer much more, not only old fashioned hosting. Otherwise they will lose this customer. Unified communications is an important piece in the puzzle and maybe the easiest to offer and support.

We started building resources to help hosters understand the opportunities behind unified communications, but we need your help. We are preparing for our most important release ever (VoipNow 2 – more to follow) and we want to accompany this release with many more resources to help you. Don’t hesitate to add your input.

This is quite of a long expected announcement. We have more formal announcements on our PR

We have received quite a few comments lately about the operating systems supported by VoipNow. Let me explain some things. The ideal operating system to run our software must:

I usually talk with 3-4 people every day. They call us asking for more details about VoipNow, they have some technical questions and, in the end, the call is directed to me. One of the first questions I ask is “What services do you want to offer?”. This way I can help the customer, but I also learn about new services. Unfortunately, at least one person per day answers me “I want to offer very cheap prices. Something like 2USD/month”.

When I got this answer for the first time, I was puzzled. I didn’t know what to say more. I didn’t want to offend my interlocutor asking him if he has a business plan. Lately, I discovered that it’s better to ask some fundamental questions, it’s best for someone to realize early that his business is not going to work. I try to explain that the market demands innovation and unique features, not just some other cheap calling cards. Many people understand me and want to learn more, but unfortunately other guys imagine that I have something against their business. 🙂

All I want is to try to make these people better spend their time and effort. Do you think that I should not care?

We had the idea of this product when we realized that it’s very difficult and frustrating to integrate two software products. I can explain how hard it is to integrate two products from different vendors and how nice it is to stay updated with new releases. I think that all of you imagine how such a process works.

Fortunately, for VoipNow we had an interesting integration idea. Most of the people who wanted to integrate with VoipNow wanted to achieve click to call functions. For example, a vendor offering a mail server wanted their customers to be able to click on the contact phone number in order to call the contact. A CRM vendor wanted to offer mostly the same thing in order to provide sales guys with a quick contact method.

Although not difficult to achieve this with VoipNow CallAPI, the actual integration is the problem, because many products have a closed source, and even if they expose a method to do this (like an API) this would have required accommodation with that API, a design step, a coding step, a QA one, etc. An expensive and resource consuming process.

This is why we designed and created VoipNow Browser Module. We call it the Ultimate Integration, because it creates the integration between VoipNow and ANY web based application, even very dynamic ones that heavily use AJAX. The user must download VoipNow Browser Module, setup it to connect to the VoipNow user account and that’s all. In all browser windows the user will open, he will see all phone numbers replaced with a nice link. When the user clicks on a link his phone number will ring and he will be connected to that number. Easy, isn’t it?

Once again, why we see it as the Ultimate Integration? Because VoipNow works closely together with:

1. Applications we don’t know about
2. Applications that were not even released
3. Any website on the Internet

Did I mention that is free? Download and play with it. I think you understood that VoipNow is required for the module to connect to & the nice thing is that you can use it even if you have a VoipNow account from your provider (you are not the server administrator). And yes, providers are welcome to redistribute it and offer it to their customers. 🙂

Be aware that currently it’s available for Internet Explorer only, but a module for Firefox will follow.

We finally released the above, after the VoipNow 1.6.3 and DNS Manager 3.5.0 releases last week. They are available at:

DNS Manager 3.5.0
https://download1.4psa.com/dnsmanager/dnsmanager-3.5.0.iso

Better positioned where? 🙂 I agree that the title might be a little funny. But let me explain.

We estimate that around 75% of the providers that offer VoipNow are Internet Telephony only providers, around 15% are hosting providers that also offer Internet Telephony, and the rest of 10% are enterprises.

During the discussions with our customers, we discovered that most VoIP only providers do not usually offer value added services to their users and they only use VoipNow for a determined purpose, which is very specific (let’s say calling cards). We believe that this is unfortunate and that sooner or later the market will force them to go into value added services.

On the other hand, hosting providers usually offer more feature rich services. It’s absolutely clear that the market will converge in the next five years. The unified messaging market will force providers to offer hosting and communications bundled in one package.

For hosting providers it’s reasonably easy to start offering VoIP services, but for telephony service providers it’s not so easy. Even if hosting providers are much slower on adopting things, (surprisingly) they have a very interesting opportunity at their fingers. We can help them address it.

A new version of 4PSA Clean Server is scheduled for September. There are many unique features built in this new version. You know that 4PSA Clean Server was the first mail antivirus for Plesk (it was released almost five years ago). Parallels also introduced some antiviruses, using engines from Dr.Web and Kaspersky. Although much more expensive than Clean Server, especially Dr.web is quite popular. There is no major difference between Clean Server and Parallels offering (well, two years ago Clean Server was considerable faster and more stable, today the difference is minimal). Clean Server still has many more features than any of them, but we felt that this was not enough for our next generation product.

One of the common problems with antiviruses (the same with antispam – yes, a new Spam Guardian 4 is also in development) is that in one massive email flow, some emails might not be scanned because the scanning engine is too busy. In order to prevent this, with Clean Server 4 we introduced a Grid scanning infrastructure. Let me explain.

Let’s say that you have a single Plesk server. You will install Clean Server on this server and it will work like previous versions. But, let’s say that you do not want your machine to be loaded by antiviruse scanning. No problem, you can get another server (a VPS might be fine) and install there the scanning engine. Then you point your Clean Server to that scanning engine. Even better, you can have multiple Plesk servers pointing to the same scanning engine, which means that a machine will be dedicated only to antivirus scanning.

Wait, that’s not all. Let’s suppose that this scanning server gets too loaded. No problem, add another scanning server and point your Plesk servers to both scanning machines. Add three, four – it does not matter. The Plesk servers will load balance scanning requests between servers in the infrastructure.

Benefits? Hard to count them all:

– It will be impossible for a hosting machine to be loaded with too many scanning requests, meaning that other services will not be affected by high loads.

– Emails can no longer pass unscanned due to QoS settings. When your scanning machine is too loaded, simply add another machine!

– Resources are much smarter spent.

– The scanning engines collect information from multiple machines, which mean that they can learn better about nasty email profiles.

This is just the most important architectural improvement in Clean Server 4. We also increased its speed by more than 200%, added more control features for end-users, improved interface, etc.

With Clean Server 4 we make a considerable jump ahead our competition. I am fully confident that this idea will be sooner or later copied. But this will take some time and guess what — we already know which one will be the next generation architecture and we started the research on it 🙂