Hypernode 2019 Recap: all our Key Achievements!

2019 has flown by. We’ve welcomed an increasing number of customers and we are delighted to see that they are very impressed by our hosting platform. In this post we look back on the most important developments of the Hypernode platform in 2019.

Last year, we spent the majority of our time preparing the Hypernode platform for the future. This meant migrating the last parts of our legacy datacenter to the private cloud of our sister company Combell, improving our internal systems to make sure that Hypernode is and remains rock solid and last but not least optimizing our platform for more ecommerce solutions.

We optimized Hypernode for Shopware, Akeneo and PWA

Shopware

We noticed that the German ecommerce software Shopware is slowly, but steadily gaining ground in the European ecommerce landscape. Since both Magento and Shopware are designed for ecommerce, they have more or less the same technical base components, behaviors and requirements on security and performance. This made it relatively easy to make Hypernode Shopware-compatible. Many of the Magento optimizations that we’ve been working on for years are also applicable for Shopware. In February 2019 we officially became a Shopware Technology partner and many agencies and merchants host their Shopware shop satisfactorily on our platform ever since.

Akeneo

We’ve also engineered and optimized our Hypernodes to host Akeneo, the widely used Product Information Management (PIM) system. By managing your product information through Akeneo you streamline processes and deliver better quality product information across various e-commerce solutions and sales channels. Through optimizing our Hypernodes to also support Akeneo we are giving you the best setup for running both your CMS and PIM.

PWA

Progressive Web Apps (PWA) remain a hot item in the current development landscape. The past year we’ve experimented with different PWA solutions such as Vue Storefront, DEITY Falcon and PWA Studio. We made it possible to get up and running with a PWA Studio or Vue Storefront install on a Hypernode in less than 10 minutes.

Improved our Hypernode infrastructure

Migrating our legacy datacenter to cloud provider Combell

In 2019 we completely phased out our own datacenter and migrated the last remaining shops and internal systems to the Combell platform. This was a huge project which was preceded by months of preparation, and took months to implement. In the long run, this will save us a lot of time since we don’t have to do physical server maintenance anymore.

We can now use the time we gained from reducing our technical debt for the development of our platform. Besides time, it will also reduce our costs which leaves us with more capacity to invest. As a nice extra, the performance of the migrated shops improved because Combell’s hardware is slightly more modern. All of this is greatly beneficial for our customers.

Future proof Hypernode infrastructure

Last year, we started with converting the Hypernode supporting infrastructure to a cloud-native architecture. The entire structure of Hypernode will become ‘infrastructure as code’. Although this is a very complex and long process, it will eventually help us to release features faster in the future.

Control Panel Improvements

In 2018, we laid the foundation for our first forays into the international market. We started with a brand new Control Panel and over the past year, we’ve added more settings and features to the Panel. An overview of the functionalities we added:

• Overview page: this page gives you an overview of your Hypernode with corresponding provider, IP address, specs and owner. It is also possible to create a team so you can invite others to handle your Hypernode(s) settings.
• Magento install & import: this page tells you exactly how to import your Magento shop or how to start with a new Magento installation.
• Transfer ownership: this page allows you to transfer the ownership of a Hypernode to another person.

We’re still the kings and queens of security

The past few years we’ve noticed that merchants and web agencies mostly focus on speed when selecting a (new) hosting partner. We believe this is not right and nor is it smart. Of course, we recognize the extreme importance of minimizing loadtime as much as possible, but most people forget about other crucial factors like stability, flexible scaling, innovation and security. Let’s zoom in on security a little bit more!

Just like any other year, Hypernode also helped you in 2019 to keep your shop(s) safe. Last summer we created a self-learning firewall which secures all Hypernodes from security threats and constantly improves itself. After we’ve detected a certain pattern of attacks on Hypernode X, all Hypernodes on our platform are protected against this attack within the hour. Besides The Great Hypernode Firewall ;-), we also did these updates to ensure that your shop(s) stay protected.

• We block Adminer requests by default
• Security vulnerability Fooman PDF Customizer (article in Dutch)
• We block requests to SQL/archived files by default
• We block attacks on Magento Page Builder

MageReport

• We’ve added new Magento versions and security only patches
• We’ve added over 2400 new malware signatures to the credit card hijack check
• We’re now showing exactly which indicators we found on the webshop for the credit card hijack check
• We’ve updated our malware signature database with over 500 new additions
• We’ve added three new checks: SUPEE-11086, SUPEE-11155 and SUPEE-11219

Check the complete overview of all 2019 MageReport releases.

We improved our services and plans

In 2018 we noticed that the composition of our old Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) did not meet the needs and expectations of our customers, especially concerning ​​emergency support outside of office hours. Therefore we made new, improved SLA’s to remove any form of confusion. Next to new SLA’s, we also improved the following processes and plans for our customers in 2019.

• New Grow plan with more memory
• Support hours expanded from 08:30 AM – 05:30 PM to 08:00 AM – 06:00 PM (CE(S)T)
• We’ve introduced chat support
• We’ve added more RAM/Redis memory for specific plans

We visited many events

London, New York, Vegas… the list goes on and on. In 2019 we visited over 20 national and international events with one big highlight: Magento Live in our hometown Amsterdam! We kicked off the event with the Big AmsterDAM Run on Monday Morning. We also provided everyone with shots at the pre party on Monday Evening and hosted the official after party at our office on Wednesday. During our MLEU 2019 after party, we sat some of our partners and colleagues down to talk about Hypernode. Curious what they had to say? Check out the video!

We did some major feature releases

• RabbitMQ
• ElasticSearch
• Deploy NGINX configurations using Hypernode API
• Mark processes as unkillable when out of memory
• Restoring your own backups using the command line interface
• Release MySQL 5.7
• Managing NGINX Vhosts
• Release PHP 7.3

Check the complete overview of all Hypernode releases.

Well, it’s a wrap! We look forward to another year full of new features, exciting updates, Control Panel improvements and lot’s of happy customers.

Ask, and you shall receive

Hypernode has been and still is developed in close consultation with our customers and partners. Together we discuss needs, wishes and eventually decide what should be next on the roadmap.

Do you have any wishes you’d like to see fulfilled in 2020? Shoot us an email or share them on our public UserVoice, so others can vote!