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So, as many of you know, we launched a hosting solution for Symbiostock users called Symbiostock PLUS around mid of 2015. This was a pretty successful offering and lots and lots of users signed up.
Unfortunately, by the end of the year, server maintenance and dealing with unforeseen issues took a heavy toll on the entire team and we decided to retire the service in favor of focusing on the Symbiostock plugin and Symzio, which are, and have always been, our #1 priorities.
However – since retiring PLUS, and examining the number of support requests and issues that arise, we have discovered that nearly 95% of all support requests are host specific. This means after we examine your install, we end up discovering over and over that there is some weird limitation or setup that your host has enabled which prevents the proper functionality of Symbiostock.
In fact, we’re finding that a lot of our time is taken by these sorts of requests, and some users even resort to closing their sites down because their hosts can’t accommodate them.
Accordingly, a few weeks ago we had a serious discussion about it and the entire team agreed to personally invest in an infrastructure that will prevent any backlogs. We’re soon going to be launching a new PLUS service.
The service will be very similar, although one large change will be that your account will be a full cPanel account with email addresses and your own independent WordPress install. This also means you can add and remove any plugin you want and configure what you want how you want.
Most importantly, it will be a hosting service that is technically specialized for Symbiostock, meaning your images and vectors will get parsed quickly and easily.
We will keep you guys updated and hope to launch this service within the next week or so.
I have been struggling with issues trying to get things to work on my host, but after reading this I am wondering if it is worth any more frustration since you say host issues are a major support factor. Do you have an update on the timing, and maybe a rough estimate on pricing? I really like the whole concept presented, a separate and independent website but with the ability to be part of a bigger offering. Seems the best of both worlds, and I definitely want to be part of it.
See, the problem is that Symbiostock is not cosmetic software; it is processing large images, and doing it with the same quality as professional software such as Photoshop. In order to manifest this in a web environment, you need servers that will provide both the software and hardware to sustain such processes.
Accordingly, it requires a bit more examination than just a standard website and many people are comfortable setting up their own dedicated server or VPS. However, for most people, signing up and having a shared environment that provides this right off the bat is ideal.
The problem is there are no shared environments we’ve ever found that cater to the memory and CPU requirements that image processing demands. If you sign up with Blue Host, or Namecheap, or GoDaddy, within about a week you’re likely to encounter slow down, or your site will go offline, or some aspect here or there may not even work off the bat.
We originally were planning on not getting re-involved in the hosting aspect of Symbiostock, but after retiring PLUS and dealing with support request after support request that just involved debugging precisely what incompatibility or failure a web host had, we’ve determined that no one else is able to provide the same hosting solution that we can.
So we’ve invested a great deal of time and effort into an infrastructure that is both cutting edge and more sophisticated than many other hosts. We’re finalizing the system this week and hope to open it within a few days.
Pricing will be competitive to dedicated wordpress hosting on other sites and we’ll provide that upon launch.
Thanks for the detailed answer. I will be patient, then, as that definitely appears to be the best solution.
Yep, this is a huge focus for us. We’re very close to launch.
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