AngryHosting Blog

Enable SSL for your domains easily through the control panel!

We’ve added functionality to enable SSL for your domains (and even sub-domains) quickly and easily through the control panel. We support both Let’s Encrypt certificates as well as uploading of your own certificate and key. This process uses the TLS extension for Server Name Indication (SNI) which allows us to host many SSL-encrypted sites on a single IP address – eliminating traditional cost and complexity issues affecting adoption of SSL.

You can take advantage of Let’s Encrypt’s free SSL certificates with one click. This certificate works well for most modern browsers — you can view their compatibility matrix at https://letsencrypt.org/docs/certificate-compatibility/. We schedule renewals for certificates requested through Let’s Encrypt on a regular basis so you do not need to worry about renewing your certificate every 90 days. For the certificate request to process, you will need to have the domain pointing to our servers correctly before hand so that Let’s Encrypt’s validation servers can reach the site and issue a certificate for you.

This feature is currently in beta, though we have been using it for a short while and feel comfortable with its performance and reliability. Please contact us if you have any issues or requests for additional features!

What does 448GB of RAM look like?

While our servers already have a respectable amount of memory, more is always better! We will soon be upgrading each of our servers to 64GB of RAM, which will provide a healthy buffer for current processes as well as increasing resources for virtualization.

This will require shutting down servers and services, which we plan to do one-at-a-time and in off-peak hours to minimize the outage’s effect. We will also notify affected users prior to the upgrades.

Welcome to the new AngryHosting website!

After about 8 years with our dated, yet familiar website, we felt that it was time for a change.

The new site is built upon Twitter’s Bootstrap framework, which allows us to ensure that mobile devices have a pleasant experience navigating our pages as well. Our previous experience developing in Bootstrap for our previously redesigned control panel was positive, and version 3 employs a mobile-first design which greatly improves the responsive CSS for our mobile users.

While the new site is a great improvement, we’re not going to stop and rest. We have several projects in the works which will greatly add to the value of our services, so stay tuned!

Free SSL for ALL!

Thanks to the wonders of wildcard SSL certificates, all username.angryhosting.com sub-domains now have SSL capabilities! If you need SSL, but don’t need to have your own domain, you can utilize this sub-domain to keep your content and transmissions secure.

Small updates to email servers.

We’ve rolled out a new SSL certificate for mail.angryhosting.com, replacing the old self-signed certificate, enabled SMTP AUTH, and enabled the submission port all in one go!

The old certificate worked fine for receiving your email through an encrypted session, but would cause your email client to complain that it isn’t a valid certificate. We’ve purchased and installed a fully legitimate SSL certificate for mail.angryhosting.com and now you can use SSL to check your POP/IMAP email boxes without the warnings.

Thanks to this new certificate, we are also able to enable TLS (SSL) for SMTP. This allows you to encrypt your outgoing emails from your client to our servers — very useful for public wifi locations or other networks you don’t trust. However, it doesn’t guarantee that email from our servers to the destination will be encrypted as that is only possible if the destination supports it as well.

To make better use of TLS, we’ve also enabled SMTP AUTH. This allows you to pass your username / password (encrypted) to the mailserver to authenticate you and allow you to send emails through our servers more easily than ever. The pop-before-smtp authentication mechanism will still continue to work, however.

Finally, we’ve opened up a new port to send email through. We now accept connections on port 587 for outgoing email. If you are using an ISP that blocks outgoing SMTP on port 25, this should work great for you.

All these changes together make using wireless devices for sending and receiving your email (such as the iPhone) a much smoother experience.

New web-log analysis software and more!

While our old log analysis software reports were functional, they lacked style and customisability. We’ve been researching various analysis software for a while and have come up with AWStats as a replacement for the defunct Webalizer which hasn’t seen any updates in over 5 years. The new reports look better, are faster, and arguably show more relevant data. Also, since the reports are customizable, we’ll definitely be adding more statistics in the near future.

We have also started using a ticketing system on our backend to help make feature requests and upgrades roll out more frequently and smoothly. If there is a feature that you’d like to see added to AngryHosting, please let us know! We’ll definitely consider adding it to our project list.

Upgraded limits on all account types!

We’ve raised the bar again on low-cost domain hosting! All of our hosting plans have received a significant boost in terms of storage, transfer and email accounts. Not only are we looking to stay competitive, we’re out to blast the doors off of the competition. Where else can you find established, redundant, load-balanced domain hosting for white-van-in-an-alley prices?

AngryHosting is growing!

In order to continue providing fast, reliable service to our customers, we have quintupled our server count and added some features that are un-heard of even in expensive hosting solutions. AngryHosting is now spread across ten servers in our new Los Angeles datacenter. Many of the servers are dedicated to doing one job only and doing it extremely well. For example: four servers are dedicated to handling incoming/outgoing mail as well as DNS; two servers are dedicated to handling only web traffic — all websites are now load-balanced across the web-servers at no additional cost! This helps ensure that your site is available even if we lose a server for whatever reason. All main servers have dual power supplies on separate power circuits and are inter-connected via gigabit ethernet.

The new SQL server has six Ultra320 15,000 RPM SCSI drives in a striped and mirrored RAID 1/0 setup. This as well as 4GB of RAM and dual Xeon 64-bit CPUs make even the most complex SQL queries a piece of cake.

Our NAS server is overbuilt as well with four 300GB SATA-II disks on a dedicated 4-channel PCI-X RAID card and 128MB of cache. It also is powered by dual Xeon 64-bit CPUs.

Web traffic is handled by a pair of 64-bit AMD Opteron servers; each with 2GB of RAM. We can easily and quickly deploy more servers when load requires it.

Our load-balancer is a dedicated Nortel Networks device which can handle more than 25,000 requests per second. Requests go through the load balancer and the load balancer intelligently routes the connection to the server best suited to handle it as determined by various rule-sets: least-connections, round-robin, etc.

As you can see, we’re very excited about our new setup and are pleased with the migration overall. Keep checking back here for updates on new features and such! We plan on reviewing our current plan structure very soon and will probably give all the accounts a little boost. >:)

Lost file restoration services

AngryHosting has always been committed to protecting your data and have now made individual file / directory / domain / account restorations possible. Rest assured knowing that should you accidentally erase some portion of your website, we’re here to help you restore a recent copy. Fees will be determined on a per-case basis depending on the number of files that need to be individually restored.