My.Hostroute is getting better and better. We’ve added a few more upgrades now, which I’ll run through here.

Email History

In preparation for us adding support ticket functionality to My.Hostroute (rather than the current independent support system), we’ve added an Email History.

Now, any emails sent to you by the system (password resets, account info, invoices, notifications for now, but support notifications soon) are also added to this list. This can be found through ‘Contacts’ > ‘Email History’.

We hope this makes it easier to keep track of everything we send to you, and to find old copies of emails.

Security Questions

For added security, we’ve added the ability to create a ‘security question’ under ‘Contacts’ -> ‘Security Questions’. This means that if you call us or forget your password, we can more easily authenticate you.

Affiliate System

We’re very excited to launch the new Hostroute Affiliate system.

Hostroute grows almost entirely through word of mouth, and the affiliate system is our way of saying thank you for referrals. We pay 50% commission for any referrals you make – on domain names, web hosting, reseller accounts and now servers too.

You can become an affiliate by logging into My.Hostroute and then going to ‘Billing’ -> ‘Affiliate System’. Here are a few of the features:

• You get your own affiliate URL. If you link to us using this URL then we’ll track any orders we receive and credit them to your affiliate account.
• You can also set up custom discount codes. If these are used, then the order will be credited to your affiliate account.
• You can withdraw any balance over £15. This can be paid by bank transfer (UK only), Paypal, or as account credit - that means you can even use affiliate credit to offset your hosting bill.
• Our affiliate tracking is in real time. You can see how you are doing instantly – all through the control panel.
• We add credit to the account 30 days after the signup. This is to avoid any chance of fraud due to our 30-day money back guarantee.

It’s been a week since our last update and I wanted to round up what we’ve been working over the past seven days.

First, I’m very pleased to say that the billing migration is complete. We’ve moved away from ‘Core’ to a new system at My.Hostroute.com, which has solved a lot of the issues that Hostroute customers were experiencing.

We have had excellent feedback on the new system so far, which allows a lot more visibility and is more flexible. We’re now doing a few things to neaten up records, including auditing existing systems and adding new functionality. There are a few areas I’d love to cover here, so for convenience I’ll put them as bullets:

Here are some of the audits we have been running in order to fix incorrect records:

• Removed duplicate accounts, including where there were both free and paid hosting packages
• Fixed incorrect cPanel authentication details on around 1,000 accounts which has fixed a lot of cPanel login issues from my.Hostroute
• Fixed domain name authentication details where nameservers / renewals did not work
• Merged/split My.Hostroute accounts where requested
• Marked cancelled accounts as inactive

Here are some extra features we have added:

• Renew hosting and domains at any time. Domains can now be renewed for their full registration length (e.g. 10 years for a .com)
• Easy upgrades between hosting packages
• Due to customer feedback, domain name registrations don’t automatically setup the free hosting – this can now be enabled (for free) on the domain details page after registration.
• Free hosting now displays as a hosting account, allowing for easier management and auto-logins
• Create sub-accounts for contacts, so that they can login and view products/invoices for example
• Mass Pay invoices in one go
• … and much more

Here are some features we’ll be adding in the coming weeks:

• Domain Transfer Management with status updates
• DNS Management/ free e-mail forwarding from the domain details pages (for those without a hosting account)
• Reseller Upgrades
• Move Services to other clients
• History of Emails
• Support Tickets in My.Hostroute (rather than in a separate system)
• More TLDs available

Secondly, we’re making progress with the server migrations with almost half now completed.

You can see a full list of the migrations so far on our forums at http://forums.hostroute.com/index.php?threads/server-migration-list.23/#post-115

As always, if you have any questions or problem we’re here to help – via ticket at http://helpdesk.hostroute.net or call us on 020 3137 7651.