Cloudfest 2018 Archives

Thanks for a smashing 2018: Year in Review [Video]

What a journey! But we couldn’t have achieved so much without the engagement and support of our customers and partners. You drive us to develop better products, service and solutions. So let us take a moment to thank you for being great, and present Plesk’s top wins of the year.

1. New Plesk Onyx 17.8 Release

We took your feedback and gave Plesk Onyx a huge update in March. Thus, better aligning our complete platform with the way web professionals work. We focused on five main areas: Site performance and speed, SEO tools integration, WordPress Toolkit efficiency and ease, tighter security and Cloud integration.

Find out more about this update here.

2. Major Industry Events

From Cloudfest in Germany to WordCamp Europe in Serbia, to J and Beyond in Germany and WordCamp US in Nashville. These were only a few of the events that allowed us to connect with new and old friends this year. Plus, learn and grow from the communities and the great minds we met. We even organized our own successful APAC Partner event in Singapore to better connect and exchange ideas with our partners.

3. SolusVM Joins the Group

London-based SolusVM from OnApp is a virtual server management system that offers Infrastructure-as-a-Service hosting. And is trusted by thousands of service providers. Plesk vowed to carry on its growth strategy and elevate it from a single server control panel to a future-proof cloud platform. In the same way, SolusVM boosts Plesk’s offering as it now becomes a complete solution, thanks to combined skills and resources.

Read the full story here.

4. New Plesk Editions

If Plesk Web Pro, Web Admin and Web Host Editions didn’t suit your needs exactly, we now also have Plesk WordPress Edition and Plesk Business and Collaboration Edition. Providing even more solutions, to more users. Plesk WordPress Edition offers Managed WordPress Hosters a complete solution to manage, secure and grow their business. While Plesk Business and Collaboration Edition combines all the features of a corporate grade collaboration suite. The ready-to-use solution includes communication, performance and security tools too.

5. More Partner Success

This year, in our efforts to get closer to Partners and provide better solutions, we refocused our Partner Success Team. Thus, better serving our partners, no matter where or how big. Providing more resources and support, better initiatives and offers, dedicated partner events and much more. Want to become a partner too and reap our special benefits? Get more info on our Partner Program page or get in touch.

6. Plesk Extensions of the Year

We’re constantly searching for new ways to deliver better solutions to plug into your Plesk. And so we released loads of extensions this year, both in-house and from partners – many available for free. We’ve made leaps forward in providing add-ons for web development and apps, security and monitoring, backup, Cloud, DNS, and more. Check out our full extension catalog to see what’s new – and what you can benefit from

Now that we’ve had a look back at the good stuff, we can continue flying forward. We hope to carry on exceeding expectations in 2019. So from all the Plesk Team: Thank you – and we’ll see you next year!

APAC Partner Become a Partner Cloudfest 2018 J and Beyond new plesk extensions New Plesk Onyx Partner Program Plesk Business and Collaboration Edition Plesk Extensions Plesk Partner Success Team plesk partners Plesk Wordpress Edition SolusVM WCEU WCUS

When CTO, Jan Loeffler, reveals Plesk Hosting Tactics at Cloudfest 2018 [Video]

Successful Hosting Tactics Revealed at Cloudfest 2018

Our Plesk CTO, Jan Loeffler, made his grand entrance at CloudFest, Rust, yesterday. As he entered the main forum room bouncing a Plesk-branded football, the Fifa World Cup anthem came on for all to hear. He was going to share inside tactics on how to win, what he called, the ‘Hosting Champions League’.

Jan joined Plesk 2 years ago as CTO with the vision to have Plesk become the leading hosting control panel worldwide, and keep it that way. He’s a diehard football fan. But there’s another thing he feels absolutely passionate about – and that’s cloud hosting. At Cloudfest 2018, he brought these two worlds together.

When hosting becomes a game, you need to go long and strong to win the league and increase your revenues. Now Jan reveals how to take home the gold, with collected advice from none other than our very own Pleskian community.

Who are the likely Hosting contenders?

Think of the hosting industry as if it were a football league game. Where would you put your money? And if you think of the likely contenders – how well are they playing the game, and what are they doing?

This is what Jan’s trying to gauge when we look internally. Are we being team players? Are we coaching our customers on what’s best? According to Jan, you can only win the Hosting Game by adapting to what your customers want.

Jan’s advice for all the Hosting teams out there

Offer Hyper-tailored Solutions

How can you score and win the hosting cup? Jan insists that hosters can only compete with giants like AWS by offering cloud service solutions to customers on top of their standard offers.

“Customers want simplicity and great service, which is something that’s difficult for companies like AWS to provide. This is where you, hosters, should step up and become your customers’ coaches. You have the experience and the infrastructure to “tackle the defense” and to advise them to design perfectly adapted solutions.”

Notice the current hosting scene and how many traditional hosters have ignored the winds of changed and not adapted. None of these traditional hosters would have made it to the Premier League if this were a tournament. Jan suggests offering a custom solution and charging a higher price.

Address the Current Web Developer Trends

Get on the WordPress Wagon. WordPress dominates as the most popular way of building websites with 30% of all websites built on this platform worldwide. Half the WP sites out there are hosted by 15 hosting groups. Jan says “WordPress is a must-have for all hosters and service providers”. The current hosting winner for WordPress is GoDaddy as they host most of the wordpress sites all over the world.

Another one is git. Why don’t hosters use git if 70% of web developers use it as their source control system? That’s why Jan advises hosters to include this in their offering. Go where your customers are.

The Call to Hosters

Our hosting partners continue to launch new products, and now they’re even doing so with the new Plesk Onyx and all its updates. We’re talking AI, SEO, Security – the works. So a big thank you to the following hosting partners for their immediate support with our latest product: Infortelecom, UOL, InterNetX, ZNetLive, Conetix, Codero, A2 Hosting, Axarnet, Webplus, Exabytes, Managed.com, OzHosting, 34sp.com, Ptisp. Jan quotes Van Gogh in saying that it’s all the little things that lead to success, and we all agree.

Finally, Jan encourages hosters to step out of their comfort zone and team up Plesk. A proven ally that runs on all the major cloud players, like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. You can plan your gameplay with the all-in-one platform in your corner. And use the available extensions and features in order to win the Hosting Cup. Even the sky isn’t the limit when you can scale to the cloud.

So, who won the Plesk football?

You didn’t think the Plesk-branded football was just a prop, did you? What would Cloudfest be without a little competition added to the mix? Jan fired a Plesk-Trivia question to the audience, promising to award the Adidas ball to the first correct respondent. “Which is the most visited feature page in Plesk?” he asked.

Answers started shooting from all directions. “WordPress Toolkit” – good following, but no. The “Extension Catalog” – nope, even more than that. “The Dashboard?” – close, but no. And it wasn’t the login page either! “The help page?” – no, that’s low on the most viewed list, says Jan cheekily.

In the end, it was Patrick Blank from WSPN who gave the right answer and took home the football. Let’s leave a bit of mystery here. Can you guess what the most visited feature page on Plesk is? Let us know in the comments below!

Watch Jan Loeffler’s full keynote speech here

Video Update (March 20, 2018): We now have Plesk CTO – Jan Loeffler’s entire talk below. It’s 23 minutes of great insights – hit play to have a listen. Jan also shares what’s new on Plesk Onyx, justifying all the buzz around it. And the answer to the trivia question will be revealed at the end: “Which is the most visited feature page on Plesk?”

AWS cloud hosting Cloud Hosting Platform Cloudfest Cloudfest 2018 Hosting Champions League Hyperscaler Jan Loeffler Plesk Onyx plesk partners

What you may have missed at last weekend’s Cloudfest Hackathon

This year, the intention behind the Cloudfest Hackathon was for the big guys to contribute to the open source communities. The pitched projects were across different CMS – WordPress, Drupal and Joomla, and involved diverse companies. The participating developers and sys-admins were free to choose which projects they wanted to contribute to. And so the event began!

The Cloudfest Hackathon Event

Inside Europa-Park in Rust, the Cloudfest Hackathon kicked off with a casual get-together lunch. And with the presentations of the open source projects by host Jeffrey Hardy, it was time to hack! It was also time to repeatedly hear the most used expressions in the development world: “But it works on my machine”, “Must be a bug” or “This worked earlier!”

Some were more prepared than others – check out these guys’ matching hackathon wardrobe and hairstyles. We take the Cloudfest Hackathon coordination very seriously around here.

Very unique haircuts and wardrobe choices at #CFHack18 #CloudFest 😂😉#developer #clichés @schlessera @heiglandreas @cloudfest pic.twitter.com/v5IrFGa4hE

— Carole Olinger 🤘 (@CaroleOlinger) March 10, 2018

Though it was clear that most people are used to collaborating together on projects remotely, it still seemed like an overall amazing experience to bring everyone together and create some great code with those like-minded people, in person.

Plesk Team on Projects 1 and 5

Here at Plesk, we’re very supportive of open source projects. So we were more than happy to help co-organize the event and be part of a great sponsor list. That way, attendees could go without having to worry about accommodation and travel expenses. Our fellow Pleskians participated in developing 2 out of 6 proposed projects. Project 1: “Automated security check for WordPress plugins” and Project 5: “Domain Connect Example DNS Provider”.

For project 1, we built a simplified command line tool to extract security reports out of the RIPS static analyzer. Then it sends them to given email addresses to integrate them into CI tools or extension pipelines. Just like the WordPress plugin repository SVN. As for project 5, I’ll let our CTO, Jan, tell you all about that:

First version of DomainConnect for #Plesk: DONE ✅ Open Source? Of course! https://t.co/oKQe4M6wFU #OpenSource #CFHACK18 #CloudFest — Jan Löffler 🤘 (@jlsoft2) March 11, 2018

Project insights from David and Arnold – CMS Garden and GoDaddy

I got the chance to chat with two iconic people behind the projects ideas we got involved in – David Jardin (CMS Garden) and Arnold Blinn (GoDaddy).

David met the founders of a German startup who located an important safety gap in Joomla core with a security scanner tool they had developed. The Joomla community strived to implement the tool into the Joomla extensions directory to use it for plugin and core review. Today, 30% of all websites run on WordPress and David’s passionate about making the web a safer place. That’s why he suggested working on this project for the WordPress CMS, as well during the Cloudfest Hackathon.

One of Plesk’s main goals is to make the web a safer place and ease the workload that comes with managing WordPress and Joomla! sites. Find out more about the toolkits we developed to facilitate your working life by clicking below.

Project number 5 was already a huge success during last year’s Cloudfest hackathon. Arnold explained that Domain Connect is an open standard that makes it easy for a user to configure DNS for a domain running at a DNS provider to work with a Service running at an independent Service Provider. The user can do so without understanding any of the complexities of DNS. This project is very valuable and it’s kind of surprising that it has not been initiated and realized years ago. This project had the most contributors by far with up to 12 people working on it at the same time.

The result was a step higher than we thought

The Cloudfest Hackathon lasted 3 days with 55 coders working on 6 different projects until the late evenings. This edition had brilliant minds behind it like Timo Kargus, David Jardin, Sabrina Waltz and our CTO Jan Löffler.

This team managed to create a unique and inclusive setting for innovative projects and brilliant code in a laid-back atmosphere that we won’t easily forget. And they happily confirmed that the new open-source thinking everyone brought to the Cloudfest Hackathon was a huge success.

The idea is to move further in this direction and to aim for more participants and open source projects across different CMS next year. Cloudfest’s organizer team will soon be in the early planning stages for 2019’s edition. And we can tell you now – us Pleskians will be involved in one way or another. Stay tuned.