We’ve had an incredible year at CloudAccess.net, and before we sing Auld Lang Syne and ring in the new year, we want to reflect on all of the positive platform changes, personnel shifts and product improvements we experienced in 2014.

We started the year moving our headquarters to a new location in Traverse City, Michigan. For several years we were located just outside of town, but we're now in the Warehouse District in the downtown area. All the while moving we were gearing up to add WordPress as a fully-integrated product, which was officially added to the platform in March. Also in March we redesigned our main site to match the contemporary look, feel and functionality of the Cloud Control Panel™(CCP). Read more about our new site, new office and adding WordPress to the platform. 

It wasn’t long after adding WordPress that we announced a huge personnel shift. Gary Brooks, a co-founder and our CEO for the first several years stepped down in April. Jonathan Gafill, then the Chief Operating Officer, was given the CEO hat. This changed marked a significant shift in leadership and all-around company culture. May brought a cool new Import Site feature to the CCP enabling clients to import sites easily on their own. In June we sponsored the J and Beyond Conference in Königstein, Germany and a few of our team members were able to attend. Also in June we welcomed our 20,000th website to the platform, marking a huge milestone.

Happy Cyber Monday! To honor online shoppers everywhere, we’re offering tremendous savings on annual Joomla! or WordPress hosting & support plan purchases for one day only. To take advantage of the most savings we've offered all year, upgrade a free site or upgrade your current plan to a higher level of service to get more Cloud Control Panel™(CCP) features, site resources and a higher level of support from our team. 

Promotional Details

This is a great opportunity for all types of clients to save ½ of their hosting costs for the lifetime of the account! That’s right - get 50% off hosting & support for as long as you keep the plan! From free accounts to those who have already purchased a hosting and support plan, anyone purchasing a new plan or upgrading a current plan will receive:

• Additional CCP Features
• More Site Resources
• A Higher Level of Support from CloudAccess.net
• Additional Applications for as little as $3

See our Plans

We've always done our best to get great training resources in the hands of users and we're excited to introduce 14 brand spaking new video tutorials helping new users launch and develop a WordPress site. Each tutorial is only a few minutes in length and all 14 tutorials take about 60 minutes to get through. Pause, fast-forward or skip ahead and you'll have your WordPress site up and off the ground in no time.

You can click on the button below to access these tutorials through our knowledgebase, but they've also been embedded in this post for your convenience. One great aspect to these tutorials is that closed captions have been added through our YouTube channel and the video text can be translated into multiple languages. If you've got a suggestion for a WordPress tutorial topic, please let us know. We're always looking to add great new relevant content to our knolwedgebase. 

View all 14 Tutorials Now

A good product and marketing campaign can land a client, but your focus then has to be centered on retaining the client. The key to accomplishing this in the IT industry to provide a high level of technical support for your product or service. This weekend, at JoomlaDay Poland, Derek Snieg (a CloudAccess.net Support Team Leader) will be leading a session and sharing ideas on how to build the best possible technical support team.

More About Derek’s Presentation

Are you an entrepreneur curious about providing great technical support? Are you an end user looking for tips on how to effectively cooperate with a technical support person to troubleshoot your issues quickly and effectively? Derek has been one a highly valued CloudAccess.net “support guy” for many years now and his insight is as good as gold.

Among other topics, Derek will discuss the following:

Whether you’re a versed veteran or new to Joomla, there is an event this week that is sure to provide you with some great information. Joomla! 3 Day is like an online JoomlaDay of sorts, and with a series of 20 sessions across two days, there is definitely something for everyone. We’re excited to be an organizer of the event and even more excited to lead a session introducing our Demo API component, a new platform feature that allows your site visitors to launch custom Joomla applications from your website.

About the Event

With expert Joomla presenters from all over the world, Joomla 3 will be covered from all angles. Each presentation will be approximately 30 - 40 minutes with time for questions and answers.

Last week we hit a big milestone as a hosting provider: the number of active hosted applications on our platform reached 20,000! Every once in a while we like to recognize accomplishments like these and to celebrate our clients because, although we’re not one of the giants in the industry just yet, each client helps us get there. Keep reading to find out who got free lifetime hosting for launching the 20,000th site!

To be honest, we didn’t expect to reach this milestone just yet - we were projecting this to happen in July or August, but we launched WordPress as a fully integrated product throughout the entire platform in March, which helped us reach this goal a little quicker than anticipated. Active websites on our platform include demo trial sites, websites that have been launched through our CMS in the Classroom program, and clients who have upgraded to one of our hosting & support plans.

Thousands of clients have asked us to help them import their site into our network, and our support team has always installed the site for individual clients manually. We’re more than happy to continue doing this, but we’ve also developed a new site importation feature within the Cloud Control Panel™(CCP) enabling clients to import sites easily on their own.

We offer managed hosting and support for the Joomla and WordPress applications. Using this feature you can easily migrate your site by using a number of options. You can upload a .jpa file from your computer or paste in a link to a downloadable .jpa file from the Internet. Or you can upload individual site and database files or paste in links to downloadable site and database files on the Internet. You also have the choice of launching the application as a new product on our platform or to overwrite an existing site. Watch the video below to learn how to access and use the feature or read our Importing a Site knowledgebase article.

After four years at the helm, Gary Jay Brooks is stepping down as CEO of CloudAccess.net and Jonathan James Gafill is stepping up to fill the position. Gary did a fantastic job as CEO and was pivotal to our success in our formative years. He will continue to help guide the company as owner/founder.

A career entrepreneur, Gary founded CloudAccess.net as MichiganMedia.net in 2008, a webdesign firm in Indian River, Michigan. In 2009 Gary became an active volunteer in the Joomla community and proposed the idea of a 30 day demo trial (hosted for free in cloud) to Open Source Matters (OSM). OSM put out a public RFP, and CloudAccess.net won the contract in April of 2010 over other larger companies like GoDaddy and Rackspace. Over the next four years Gary served as CEO, watching the company grow to host over 20,000 websites with more than 30 employees in 4 offices worldwide. More importantly, his idea for expanding the demo program put Joomla into the hands of many people who otherwise might not have been exposed to the CMS.

Prior to becoming CEO, Jonathan James Gafill served as Chief Operating Officer for the company and played an important role in shaping CloudAccess.net for close to 3 years. Originally joining the team as Project Manager in 2011, Jonathan successfully oversaw CloudAccess.net Professional Services before becoming Support Team Manager. It wasn’t long before Jonathan had a hand in managing many different departments at CloudAccess.net. Being an integral part of the team for many years, Jonathan was the natural choice to take over as CEO.

 Throughout the last few days you’ve undoubtedly heard news about the “Heartbleed Bug”, a major vulnerability in the OpenSSL cryptographic software library. Essentially, the bug enables the theft of information that is normally protected by SSL/TLS encryption. Each SSL or TLS certificate comes with security keys that (if compromised by Heartbleed) weaken the security of communication over the Internet using applications like email, instant messaging, other web-related services.

CloudAccess.net server administrators actively monitor numerous security channels and we became aware of the vulnerability immediately. The bug causing the vulnerability has been around since December of 2011, but was only announced on Tuesday of this week by a team of researchers. Although there are no known real-world exploits of the bug, we have taken every measure to protect our clients, like we always do.

First, we applied the security patch to our entire network as soon as it was made available. We also communicated with our SSL provider who has confirmed that the vulnerability lies within the OpenSSL implementation, and not in certificates provided to us. We’re confident we’ve done everything within our power to protect your data. We’ve had no reported issues from any client on any of our servers. The only other step that can be taken is to re-key your SSL and we will do that for any client upon request.

 Last November at the Joomla World Conference in Boston, our CEO and founder Gary Jay Brooks sat down for an interview with Peter Bui at the Joomla Beat. This is super cool news because we like to tell our story, but we’re also super big fans of the Joomla Beat - it’s one of the great resources that has come out within the last few years for sharing Joomla news and such.

In the podcast, Gary tells the story of CloudAccess.net from the very beginning, and, although it’s been captured before, Peter did a great job getting Gary to reveal a few new details. Listen to the entire podcast below.