What’s next for 34SP.com in 2021

As we celebrated 20 years in business, last year was a momentous one for 34SP.com. Embarking on our 21st year, we’re eager as ever to improve on our services. Here’s what we have planned for the year ahead.

Quality. Quality. Quality.

Building on our support charter release in 2020, we’re doubling down on the quality of our work and our promise to you. With this mind we’ve begun work on ISO 9001 certification, something we hope to achieve this year.

ISO 9001 is a globally recognized standard in nearly 200 countries and sets out a range of criteria for quality management in a company. What does that mean for you? It means our internal processes, training, knowledge sharing and skills will improve through rigorous review and documentation. It will mean every time you get in touch with us, the result should be the world class support we strive for on every case.

Post ISO 9001 certification, we have our eyes firmly set on additional certifications governing both security and sustainability.

Client community

If you’re long enough in the tooth, you might recall the old 34SP.com support forum. A place where clients and potential customers came together to discuss their accounts and solve complicated problems, and often just hang out and chat. As the years went on, and forum software in general got a little outdated, that area of our site was shelved.

This year we’re bringing the format back in the form of an all new Facebook community for our users. We will have a more formal announcement a little later in the year, but you can join here. While the group won’t be a formal support channel, you will for sure see some of our team there. The new FB group will be a place to ask questions of other users and talk about any relevant website topics.

One platform to rule them all

In my review of the last twenty years I very briefly talked about our new Kubernetes platform (I also talk a little about this in an interview over at Hosting Advice here too).

2021 will be the year we finally take the wraps of this multi-year project that we hope will revolutionize the performance, scalability and security of our hosting environment.

Kubernetes is server orchestration software that grew out of Google. It lets us break down web hosting services into multiple ‘microservices’. Rather than one server being the power of your website, a whole slew of microservices power your site under Kubernetes. A single failed server makes no impact on the uptime of your site.

Web servers, database servers, PHP workers and much more are all ‘spun up’ across a range of physical servers whenever your site needs them. That also means that as load grows, so can the number of services assigned to your site, making for seamless performance regardless of spiking levels of traffic. The update should mean we can deliver a whole new raft of services and features, too.

The first accounts to make their way to this new platform will be the Professional and Reseller services, followed by WordPress and Universal a little later. Our Mercury email infrastructure will also follow a similar move to the new platform in time.

As with our past product updates, you’ll be able to retain your existing services as is for a period, though they’ll be marked end of life. At that time we will invite users to optionally migrate to the new platform (we will take care of the heavy lifting for you). At some date in the future, yet to be decided, we will then close the older platforms will migrate all remaining accounts to the new infratructure.