2024 is well underway! In this blog article you will find more information on many of the technical details of interest to our customers and partners, which will point the way forward for Seravo’s premium WordPress hosting service.
Updated Terms of Service
Seravo’s Terms of Service were revised and updated at the turn of the year. You can find the updated Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Data Protection Appendix on our website. If you want to know more about how our terms changed in this update, please see our previous blog post on the matter.
Aiming for ISO 27001
The vast majority of Seravo’s customer base resides in Finland, and the default deploy location for new WordPress sites is a Finnish datacenter. Aside from Finland, server locations in Sweden, Germany, USA and Singapore are also available when ordering a plan on the order form.
For the time being, our hosting service features components that are located abroad. For our customers targeting foreign markets, we will of course strive to offer quality components based in the country where the site is located, too.
Over the past few years, Seravo has been working towards being ISO 27001 certified. The data centres Seravo has been using are ISO 27001 certified, of course.
Seravo’s New Customer Portal
Seravo’s customers have been able to access and edit their site’s information by logging in directly to the WordPress dashboard (wp-admin) with the help of Seravo Plugin. Until now, no cPanel or any other separate interface has been available.
To improve the usability of our service, we are developing a brand new customer portal that will allow our customers to manage their subscription data easily. The features of the customer portal will initially be limited, but as testing progresses, more features will be released on a weekly basis.
Initiated in cooperation with Seravo’s reseller and referrer partners, the project gas reached the point where the portal is going through security audits, after which open beta testing can begin. For the time being, we are offering the possibility to test the portal to Seravo’s reseller partners only, but will soon invite more testers
The customer portal project, which was initiated and designed in cooperation with our partners, has reached the stage where the portal is being security audited and public beta testing can begin. At the moment, we are primarily offering the testing facility to our reseller partners only, but we are currently exploring all our customers interested in testing.
If you are interested in being part of the beta testing phase and suggest new features to be published for the customer portal, please contact our customer service (help@seravo.com) to sign up!
Seravo’s Customer Portal Features
The most important feature of the upcoming customer portal will be order management, updates to plans as well as customer data. For organizational users, the portal will also provide access to control all of the plans and sites o the organization. The portal will have a dedicated interface (API), which will provide the possibility to integrate the customer portal data with other systems. Our aim is that most of the functionalities of our services will also be available through this API.
Other Technical Updates
We want to continuously improve the security of our hosting service. Based on feedback from our customers, we have identified a number of requirements that are currently in development and will lead to improvements in our service – or, alternatively, will be offered as additional features of our WordPress hosting plans.
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
Seravo’s WordPress hosting service comes with multiple levels of protection by default, making our service as fault-tolerant as possible. During the autumn of 2024, we are moving forward with the firewall development, and offer a set of features to Seravo’s WP Enterprise customers. For more information on the security of our hosting, please visit our WordPress Security FAQ page.
HTTP/3
The third and latest version of the HTTP protocol, HTTP/3, has been of particular interest to developers. As its upstream support is not yet production-ready, HTTP3 will not be available on Seravo’s hosting service immediately. However, we are actively monitoring the development of HTTP3 support for software, and our current estimate is that HTTP/3 could be available at Seravo by the end of this year.
SMTP
During the spring, we experienced unfortunate disruptions to our SMTP services (SendGrd), which is used by default at Seravo to enable emails sent by WordPress sites in our hosting. The repeated outages, which affected virtually all of our customers’ sites, led to our decision to change the SMTP service provider. Our aim is not only to improve the reliability and uptime of the service, but the new solution will improve the entire pipeline across the board. We will approach our customers with a separate announcement when these changes become topical or require action.
Local Development Environments
In the past, Seravo has provided documentation for the Vagrant development environment. However, it is now obsolete, and so we recommend using Docker instead. Support for the ARM64 architecture from Docker exists and improved support is currently in beta, which is good news for users of Macs with M1, M2, M3 and M4 processors. You can check out our Docker guide in Seravo’s developer documentation, seravo.com/docs.
By default, most of Seravo’s plans also include a separate development environment on the server (“a shadow”). You can read more about these in the Seravo Knowledge Base.
Questions? Ideas for Development?
Got a question, want to give feedback or have a completely new and exciting feature in mind that you would like to see included in Seravo’s hosting service? Contact us by email (help@seravo.com) and our WordPress experts will respond as soon as possible!