West Palm Beach, FL. November 19, 2024

Today, Rocket.net, one of the World’s fastest growing Managed WordPress Hosting Platforms, announced its partnership with WP Rocket, the most popular performance plugin for improving website speed with WordPress.

“We’ve been using WP Rocket on our Rocket.net website since the day we launched,” said Ben Gabler, CEO and Founder of Rocket.net. “We’ve been working towards this partnership for four years because we know how critical visitor experience is for our customers, and we want them to have the very best.“

In 2020, Rocket.net launched with an edge-first approach leveraging Cloudflare Enterprise and a robust private cloud hosting platform, ultimately delivering WordPress websites faster than any other provider with a sub-100ms global TTFB. 

With WP Rocket now in the mix for Rocket.net customers, WordPress websites will receive industry-leading delivery of their assets while leveraging the most powerful and robust performance optimization plugin to provide the ultimate visitor experience while maximizing conversion rates.

“At WP Rocket, we’re always pushing the boundaries of website performance. We continuously refine our optimization methods to meet the latest performance standards, ensuring our users enjoy the best possible experience,” said Agathe Medvedieff, VP of Marketing for WP Rocket. “We’ve also made it super easy for Rocket.net to offer our plugin to their customers automatically, without any hassle of license fees or registration. It’s all about making things simpler and more powerful for everyone involved!”

Rocket.net’s platform, paired with the WP Rocket plugin, enables the following capabilities for every WordPress website in the world:

• Instant Delivery – All WordPress websites deliver with a global sub-100ms TTFB thanks to Cloudflare Enterprise, which is always on and pre-configured.
• Dual Page Caching – With Rocket.net’s full page caching on the edge and WP Rocket’s page cache at the origin, cache misses are accelerated up to 10x by avoiding PHP.
• Automatic Lazy Rendering – WP Rocket makes the browser render only the elements visible to users at that moment, resulting in quicker response time, faster interactions, and a better Interaction to Next Paint score.
• Critical Image Optimization – In addition to leveraging Cloudflare Enterprise Polish on Rocket.net, WP Rocket offers the Optimize Critical Images feature that automatically detects, prioritizes, and auto-optimizes the Largest Contentful Paint and the images above the fold by auto-excluding them from LazyLoad — making the website faster right away.
• File Optimization – With WP Rocket in the mix, you can minify your CSS and JS files, reduce unused CSS files, and defer JavaScript to maximize browser load times. You can also delay the execution of JavaScript until user interaction to reduce the initial load time, directly impacting the Largest Contentful Paint and the Interaction to Next Paint grades.
• Database Optimization – WP Rocket also has built-in database optimization features to keep your backend clean and fast. With just two clicks, you can clean out comments, posts, and transients, optimize your database tables, or schedule automatic cleanups.

“At Rocket.net, we’re always focused on providing our customers with the best possible solution that we can, which sometimes includes partnering with the best solutions on the market,” said Gabler. “I’m confident that with this partnership, our customers will receive the best of both worlds on our platform and ultimately drive the best possible visitor experience online.”

WP Rocket is immediately available to all existing and new customers on Rocket.net’s Starter, Pro, and Enterprise plans.

Log in to your Rocket.net account, navigate to the Plugins tab, and click Install Plugin under the WP Rocket featured plugin section!

We will continue to roll WP Rocket out shortly to all Rocket.net plans as we continue to work closely with WP Rocket on our new partnership. 

For more information, please contact hello@rocket.net. 

About Rocket.net

Rocket.net, based in West Palm Beach, Florida, is a SaaS Platform designed for WordPress websites of all sizes. Since its launch in early 2020, Rocket.net has provided an all-in-one solution built on top of Cloudflare Enterprise. It provides each WordPress website with an enterprise-level experience with prioritized traffic routing and caching in every Cloudflare location. At Rocket.net, Cloudflare Enterprise (traditionally hard to configure and out of reach for website owners and agencies alike) requires zero configuration or advanced knowledge, making it possible for website owners to focus on what matters most to their success.

About WP Media the Company Behind WP Rocket 

Founded in 2014 in the beautiful Lyon, France, WP Media is the company behind WP Rocket, Imagify and RocketCDN.

We are a distributed team of +40 teammates living around the world. We believe in making the web easier, better, and faster by creating technically solid solutions with beautiful, attentive UI.

We also believe in giving back. Rooted deeply in the WordPress community, we contribute to WordPress core, as well as sponsor, co-organize, and speak at WordCamps and WordPress events around the world.

For more information, please visit our WP Rocket Partnership page

West Palm Beach, FL. October 3, 2024

Rocket.net, one of the fastest-growing managed hosting platforms for WordPress, today announces the launch of its Agency Partner Program. This program is powered by an easy-to-use commission platform and provides agencies with an impressive 15% lifetime recurring monthly referral commission. 

“At Rocket.net, we help thousands of agencies and freelancers streamline their WordPress business by enabling them to resell the world’s fastest and most secure WordPress sites out of the box.” said Ben Gabler, CEO and Founder of Rocket.net. “Today, we’re taking it a step further by enabling agencies to stay completely hands-off with their end-user hosting requirements while still building recurring revenue for their business.”

In 2021, Rocket.net announced its first official reseller offering powered by WooCommerce and, shortly after that, launched support for WHMCS. This enables agencies to effortlessly resell Rocket.net hosting through their existing platforms while still leaving agencies on the hook for hosting support.

Since launching the traditional agency reseller offerings, Rocket.net realized there was an opportunity for agencies that didn’t want to deal with the hosting side of things but wanted to focus solely on creating and generating revenue.

“Agencies don’t always want to manage hosting, but as we all know, maintenance and upkeep is a critical part of every property on the web,” said Gabler. “Rather than having to put their customer on various hosting providers and track multiple logins, agencies can now refer them to Rocket.net with the Agency Partner Program and not only have a single point of management for all of the sites they maintain on Rocket.net, but they can also continue to build their recurring revenue stream with confidence.”

Program Overview

Rocket.net’s Agency Partner Program enables agencies and freelancers to seamlessly refer clients to Rocket.net for their WordPress hosting. 

By referring clients to Rocket.net under the Agency Partner Program, agencies receive a lifetime commission of 15% and maintain full access to the customer’s WordPress property through an easy-to-use control panel. 

In addition to the recurring commission and easy-to-use WordPress control panel access, agencies can build with confidence knowing their WordPress property is powered by Rocket.net’s industry-leading enterprise CDN and WAF, providing maximum speed and security. 

All agency partner customers also receive full access to Rocket.net’s 24/7/365 support, ultimately allowing the agency partner to focus on what they do best: creating. 

“At Rocket.net, we cherish our relationships with agencies and always look for ways to add real value to their day-to-day business,” said Gabler. “We feel this really bridges a necessary gap in the market to not only help agencies streamline their business but simultaneously takes a lot of pain out on the client side, resulting in a positive experience for everyone.”

Rocket.net’s Agency Partner Program is immediately available and free to sign up. Once your application is approved, you will be able to log in to your agency partner portal.

For more information, please contact hello@rocket.net

About Rocket.net
Rocket.net, based in West Palm Beach, Florida, is a SaaS Platform designed for WordPress websites of all sizes. Since its launch in early 2020, Rocket.net has taken an edge-first approach to accelerating, protecting, and delivering WordPress in 300+ locations worldwide. At Rocket.net, every WordPress site comes pre-configured with Enterprise CDN and WAF, providing ultimate performance and security with no additional configuration required.

Developers and Agencies alike now have the ability to create pre-configured templates that can be used repeatedly. This turn-key solution saves countless time in configuring themes and plugins.

For example, if you are an agency or digital creator, you probably have a very specific deployment strategy when it comes to the plugins and/or themes you use for your website projects.

Rather than creating a new site every time and manually installing these plugins and/or themes you work with, you can now do it once with Site Templates and have the ability to reuse it over and over again on new installs going forward.

At Rocket.net, we understand time is of the essence when it comes to web development and it’s always been our mission to allow our customers to spend less time worrying about speed, security, and day to day management, and more time on their business.

The best part? It’s Free! Site Templates are immediately available to all Rocket.net customers directly in our control panel at no additional cost. You can create as many Site Templates as you like and use them as many times as needed, all without incurring additional cost.

What’s Next?

As you may have seen, we recently launched our Enterprise-Grade Identity and Access Management which has kept us very busy these past few months, but it’s paved the way for some incredible things we have in store.

How to Create and Manage Site Templates on Rocket.net

Step 1: (Option 1) After logging in to your Rocket.net account, select Sites from your main control panel and then Create Site

Step 2: You will notice the opportunity to create a Site Template below the input fields, click on the site templates link.

Step 3: Select Create New Template

Step 4: Name your site template. You can create unlimited templates and it’s best to name it something descriptively so you can always remember that particular template in the future.

In this case, I’ve named named my Site Template: New Website (Site Templates)

Next, you’ll select from the dropdown what existing website you want to make a Site Template from. In this case, my original website is called My Website.

You can also add optional notes and comments for anything useful that may come in handy down the road.

Click on Create and your Site Template will be saved.

Step 5: With the Site Template now saved, the next step is just like adding a new site to your Rocket.net account based on the template.

I’m naming my new website Site Templated Website, then selecting my server location.

From there, I can select any/all saved Site Templates to create my new website. Click on Continue after your pick what template you want to use. Note: It may take a few moments as we spin up a new website for you based on your original site template.

Step 6: Voila! You should now have the newly created website in your list of websites based on the site template you selected.

Final Notes: (Option 2) For your convenience, if you click on your username at the bottom left of your screen and look for the Site Templates link from the dropdown list, you’ll find all of your saved site templates located there and can manage all of them from one place.

Choose The Future of WordPress Hosting!

Want white glove service? No problem. Regardless of the plan you choose, we help you migrate your website and start building your own personal brand. Need to migrate several? We got you. 

Streamline your workflow by choosing a reliable, performant platform for websites of all sizes. The only question is when you’d like to get going.

Initially, we were piggy backing off of a very popular system known as WHMCS for user logins, but it came with very minimal capabilities beyond logging in with an email and password and had limited flexibility on access control. While all passwords were still one way hashes, there were several missing features required to provide the most safe and secure experience for our customers.

Ultimately, we decided to leverage a platform known as Auth0 (an Okta company) to extend enterprise functionality to our customer base. Today, customers can login with their email and password as usual, but now you can also securely link third party services such as Google and Github to make logging in a breeze.

On top of this, all users on Rocket.net can now benefit from Two-Factor Authentication (2FA, sometimes known as Multi-Factor Authentication, or MFA). Account owners even have the ability to force 2FA on sub accounts (found under the revised Users menu item) to help reduce the risk of account takeovers. In fact, we highly recommend all Rocket.net users implement our 2FA functionality for maximum security.

When it comes to your Rocket.net login, I’m happy to share that your password is encrypted and one way hashed with the world’s best password hashing algorithm known as Argon2id. To take this a step further, each and every password on Rocket.net uses OWASP’s password storage best practices, including a unique salt and a global pepper alongside the Argon2id hashing algorithm. This makes it virtually impossible for anyone to try and decrypt an account password, even if they had access to the encrypted password hash.

However, it’s not really the Rocket.net passwords we’re concerned with, it’s third party services that do not follow best practices. You may or may not be familiar with the MOAB Data Breach, but essentially this breach contained billions of passwords from weak systems. The problem is, if you use the same username/password on other providers and they get breached, your login is now available to the world.

With 2FA setup, even if someone has your password, they would also need access to your authentication device to successfully login. Adding this extra layer of security ensures maximum protection to keep hackers out.

The new Enterprise Identity Management system has been live for a while now and is completely transparent to customers outside of a shiny new login screen and much needed added capabilities.

Building off this identity work, we’ll now be able to easily offer SAML-based SSO for Enterprise clients who need to leverage their own identity providers for their staff logins at Rocket.net. In addition, we’ve put in place a new authorization system which allows for more granular access to features and resources on the Rocket.net platform which will allow us to expose the ability to customize access for sub accounts. These are just some of many things we have in store for 2024 at Rocket.net as we continue to push the envelope in our industry.

With that in mind, I am pleased to announce that we’ve migrated to a brand new platform that unlocks new features and capabilities designed to put even more commissions in your pocket. 

Exciting News: The Rocket.net Affiliate Platform 2.0 Is Here!

• Improved Tracking: While cookies continue to play a vital role in the affiliate tracking space, we can now benefit from IP address and hostname tracking ensuring you are properly credited for every referral you bring us.
   
• Revamped Reporting: Get detailed reporting on where your conversions are coming from, right down to the page level. Focus on the right areas to improve your CTR & monthly payouts!

We have designed this migration to be as smooth as possible, though there are a couple of caveats to be aware of:

Affiliate Links

If you are using a Rocket.net branded affiliate link (https://rocket.net/?ref=yourID), your affiliate link remains unchanged and no action is required from you.

If you are using the short link feature from the old affiliate system (fas.st), you’ll want to replace this moving forward with your Rocket.net branded affiliate link. 

IMPORTANT Notes for Existing Affiliates

1. Mandatory Password Reset!

In order to log into the new Rocket.net affiliate dashboard you will need to reset your affiliate account password.

2. Make sure your PayPal payout information has been added (again).

There may be some instances where affiliates who haven’t had a payout for a long time will need to re-add your PayPal information again. Please login to verify that your payment information is still there so we can get payments out on time.

If you have any troubles accessing your Rocket.net affiliate account, or if you have any questions about the migration please don’t hesitate to let me know and I’ll personally take a look at it.

In the last few months, Rocket.net has observed more and more 0-Day exploits against WordPress plugins that are leveraging privilege escalation vulnerabilities that are undetectable by Web Application Firewalls. 

How are they undetectable? They look like normal requests, so the WAF doesn’t see it as a threat, but rather it looks like business as usual.

As a result, we asked ourselves: “How can we innovate in new ways so that we can protect our clients from these 0-Day vulnerabilities?” 

Today, there are very limited ways to protect your WordPress sites from privilege escalation. They all rely on either the plugin/theme vendor to patch their exploit or a third party paid service to provide a virtual patch. But 0-Day vulnerabilities are by definition unknown, so the incumbent solutions just don’t work as well as they should.

Examples of how you may be able to protect your WordPress install today:

• Update the vulnerable plugin to the latest version if one exists.
• Remove the offending plugin and replace it with another one.
• In some rare cases, Web Application Firewalls can write rules that take a very specific request path, similar to what we did with Imunify360 to solve this vulnerability.
• Virtual Patch the vulnerability using a paid third party service.

If none of the above are done, your WordPress sites can be wide open and extremely vulnerable, even on a platform like Rocket.net that has not only one, but two Web Application Firewalls protecting your WordPress sites.

Today, that problem just became easier to solve. Rocket.net now has a solution that not only prevents your site from being hacked, but also continues to deliver your site business as usual without adding more bloat to your sites.

Introducing Rocket.net’s Lock My Site.

After launching our new WordPress Disaster Recovery network update a couple of weeks ago, Lock My Site is a feature that can be turned on any time for any site at Rocket.net. In fact it’s running as we speak on our very own website, Rocket.net.

When Lock My Site is enabled, absolutely no files can be changed in your WordPress website folder. To take it a step further, your WordPress MySQL Database user is also stripped down to select privileges only.

What does this mean?

To simplify it, your site is in read-only mode. This prevents any changes from being made to your site, preventing any plugin or hacker from changing anything on your site whatsoever. The result? Peace of mind, and the time you need to find a long-term solution that fits your needs.

While Lock My Site is intended for emergency use only, you can also use this to keep your site in read-only mode similar to what we’re doing for Rocket.net, if you’re not running a dynamic website. This means you can sleep better at night, knowing that those sites that might not get as much attention or might be using older themes- the small brochure type sites for example- are locked down and secure.

Will Lock My Site break the functionality of your site? 

The easiest way to think about this is to consider what you’d need to do if you were using purely static hosting. When using static hosting for WordPress, you have to leverage third party systems for comments, contact forms, etc.

In our case, Rocket.net uses contact forms that do not store submissions in the database, so we don’t write anything to disk or database when visitors interact with our website.

Here are some examples of things that could break with Lock My Site mode enabled:

• WooCommerce
• LMS Systems
• Contact Forms that require writing to the database or filesystem
• Backup plugins
• Any function that requires writing to disk or database
  • This includes logging into wp-admin

This may seem super scary at first, but in reality it is not scary at all. Lock My Site enforces maximum protection for your website all while continuing to deliver your website, completely protecting it from even the nastiest exploits and break-ins.

For example, imagine that there is a critical exploit taking WooCommerce offline all around the world, but there is no patch yet. While you will not be able to take new orders for a bit, you can safely turn Lock My site on to protect your data until a solution is found.

That’s right, your website will load without any issue whatsoever, visitors just may not be able to fully interact with it. This is definitely not ideal, but neither is having a defaced website or malware redirecting your website to bad URLs- both of which are common on compromised WordPress sites.

Did you know most agencies don’t change plugins once a site build is completed? 

When an agency builds a new site, how often do they do plugin audits, and identify and replace old plugins that are no longer updated? As it turns out, almost never!

Yes, they most certainly do plugin updates, but once a project is completed for a common SMB website, it’s usually not edited quite often. Rocket.net’s Lock My Site brings a lot of peace of mind knowing it’s safe and secure, even though it’s mostly untouched.

Does that mean that the site can no longer be edited or maintained?

Not at all! When you’re ready to make some changes to your site, simply turn Lock My Site off, and you can immediately start working on your site, then re-enable Lock My Site when you’re done. It’s that easy.

How to manage Lock My Site

Lock My site is fully available in our API today and can be enabled/disabled at any time. You can also contact our support team for assistance, they’ll be glad to enable or disable it for you. 

In just a few days, you’ll have the ability to enable/disable Lock My Site directly from the Rocket.net portal.

How much does Lock My Site cost?

Lock My Site is immediately available to all Rocket.net customers at no additional cost.

As much as we all strive for 100% uptime, things can happen – especially around holidays for some reason! In my twenty-two year career, I’ve seen data center providers catch on fire, server chassis completely die, storage filers go down for days, you name it.

Then, this fancy new technology came to market: “cloud”.

You see, what everyone originally thought about cloud computing was that a bunch of nodes would work together to create high availability and ultimately achieve 100% uptime. The problem? Reality set in. One hundred percent uptime isn’t always possible, especially when it comes to things like networking and power delivery.

I can’t tell you how many times in my career I’ve had infrastructure folks tell me “Our platform should be just like Google’s: If one rack goes down, we leave and continue to operate on the other rack.” But making this happen outside of a single application (like Google at the time) has about the same odds as winning the lottery.

In fact, every time I’ve seen a company try to do something “high-availability” in an uncontrolled application environment (web hosting for example) it’s had the exact opposite effect. If you don’t believe me, just ask any sysadmin who’s had to manage a Ceph cluster at scale before. It’s not trivial. 

As we go through this post, we’re going to focus on some game changing functionality on the Rocket.net Platform:

• Customers have two sets of encrypted backups
• Every Virtual Machine runs a snapshot every 1-5 hours
• Enterprise nodes run snapshots every hour
• Restores can take place from either backup source
• Full server recovery in minutes

So let’s dive in!

The Internet. It fails. A lot.

First, let’s talk about what can and has gone wrong on the Internet. 

There are many points of failure when it comes to the Internet. I’ve seen Amazon go down for 12 hours in us-east and affect the entire world. I’ve seen CDN platforms deploy bad code and take massive amounts of the Internet offline. No one or no thing is perfect. But one thing I admire about companies like Cloudflare is their ability to be fully transparent and learn from their failures to prevent them from happening again. Because sometimes you just don’t know what you don’t know until you have to live through it.

So what kind of issues have we seen at Rocket.net? The single biggest contributor to any service disruptions we’ve had can always be tracked back to network and/or power. Networking and power are completely out of our control, yet they are the two most crucial items when it comes to running servers.

Just this past weekend, one of our data centers had a leak on an edge route and we were seeing 1.5% packet loss and random failed requests from Cloudflare. These can often be the trickiest problems to narrow down, but thankfully we’ve done this once or twice and knew exactly what to provide our vendors with to track the issue and it was resolved promptly. 

A few years ago, we had a rack lose power in Singapore. Normally this would not be a big deal, except the power flickered back on, and during boot, the power went out again. This caused bad writes to all the disks and ultimately corrupted the boot loader, leaving the server unbootable. Yeah, not good! While every server we run operates with two disks constantly mirroring (RAID-1), a bad write is a bad write and replicated to both. You could have six disks, it’s still going to corrupt the actual data.

So, in a case like the above, you could do what we did: Have the data center hot swap new drives into the chassis and restore your data to the new drives. But that’s not always possible! And if you say “well Ben, that’s why we use shared network storage”, my reply to that would be “Good Luck!”

Yes, network storage can be reliable (Google does a great job at it) but it can also fail, and in many cases, recovery can take not just hours, but days. In fact, I was at a company where I watched one filer go down for 48 hours, taking down 70,000 websites with it. We completely relaunched hosting in 2013 at this company and I still had to argue against shared storage after watching that massive outage.

The reality is, no matter how you deploy WordPress, there is always going to be a single point of failure at the origin. Whether it’s a single VPS or 1,000 containers, the network and power to your origin can fail at any time, not to mention hardware can fail at any time.

Today, I can truly say we are prepared for these failures at Rocket.net and am excited to walk you through exactly how prepared we really are.

How Rocket.net Handles WordPress and Platform Backups

First, let’s talk about multiple approaches we take at Rocket.net and some of what we’ve learned over the years. 

Like most providers, we initially operated on the premise of “what if?” and analyzed how we would be able to react to various scenarios. Over time, “what if it happens” has turned into “when it happens” and this new way of thinking has resulted in what I consider one of the most advanced deployments of my career.

The thing that keeps me up most at night is uptime and data integrity for our customers. Our customers trust us with millions and millions of dollars worth of business, not to mention their livelihoods, so this is something we take very seriously.

WordPress Website Backups

This is arguably one of the most common checkboxes across all hosting/service providers, but also the most overlooked – WordPress Website Backups. 

Since Rocket.net’s inception, we have been iterating through various backup solutions and ultimately chose to standardize on a solution powered by JetBackup. 

JetBackup combined with Wasabi object storage turned out to be an incredible solution for our customers when they needed to do one off restores. Thanks to JetBackup, we run daily backups of all files and databases allowing customers to do a point in time restore in just minutes.

Since we run incremental backups, JetBackup will do an incremental restore to get the site back to how it was at that point in time, including a rollback of the database. This works amazingly well as it typically doesn’t involve a massive amount of data. Not that massive amounts of data are problematic to restore, but WordPress has a lot of very small files and it can be time consuming.

With that said, our team and customers have been very happy with the results JetBackup produces in time of need, but it does have some disadvantages when it comes to a disaster recovery scenario. 

With JetBackup storing data in S3 compatible storage, it can be very limited on how rapidly a full restore can take in a disaster scenario.

So in the end, this backup effectively enables our customers to restore anything on their WordPress site from files to the database to any point in time, but doesn’t solve the issue of restoring an entire host node.

Single Points of Failure

Another problem we wanted to solve, as amazing as JetBackup is, we still had a single point of failure. When using only one backup provider, you are relying on a single set of backups. 99.999% of the time this is totally okay, but things happen. Having only one set of backups can create a massive issue at the most critical of time, so at Rocket.net, we wanted to ensure we had redundant backups. 

Earlier, I talked about how we all strive for 100% uptime and how things can happen that are out of our control. Well, the same goes for backup storage, and we’ve seen it first hand.

On January 21, 2024, our backup storage provider, Wasabi, had an issue in their us-east-1 data center:

Now, this issue occurred after the daily backup ran which is great until you need to restore something. Unfortunately, a customer of ours urgently needed to restore a staging website that was accidentally deleted, and they needed to restore it ASAP so that they could launch a project on time.

Most companies would simply tell the customer to wait, but we’re not most companies. How did Rocket.net solve the problem for our customer?

Introducing: Rocket.net Platform Backups

In the last few months, we’ve quietly been working with another backup vendor in parallel to our JetBackup system. That vendor is Acronis.

Acronis offers an enterprise backup solution that integrates directly with our private cloud orchestration software, Virtuozzo. How does it work?

Acronis runs a snapshot of every Virtual Machine at Rocket.net every few hours. These snapshots are an exact point in time copy of the Virtual Machine at the block level. This backup process runs outside of the virtual machine and is able to securely store the entire copy of the Virtual Machine in the encrypted Acronis Cloud. 

How did we use this to solve the problem for our customer? Earlier, we talked about how Wasabi had an outage in us-east-1. While this did not impact our service delivery, it did prevent customers from temporarily restoring backups. This is a major problem, but is now solved by our Platform Backups.

Using this second tier of backups with Acronis, we were able to pull the staging files securely from the Acronis Cloud and make them available to our customer within minutes. 

That’s right! We had a backup provider fail, so we were able to turn to our other backup source and save the day. What did our customer think?

We’re confident that this won’t be the last time a customer benefits from these redundant backups, now fully integrated into the Rocket.net platform.

The other big benefit our Platform Backups provide is the ability to restore an entire host node (roughly 1.6TB) in 150 minutes or less. You read that right, we’re able to completely restore any of our Virtual Machines in 150 minutes or less by doing a full restore to a brand new node. The best part? The maximum window for data loss is a mere five hours! 

On our Enterprise plans, our customers receive hourly Platform Backups, resulting in their maximum window of exposure to 60 minutes. It gets even better, in our weekly integrity testing, it takes an average of 8 minutes to completely restore an Enterprise node from its backup.

Our Enterprise customers can now be back online in minutes in the event of a disaster. Whether a data center catches fire, the internet goes dark in a region, we have you back up and running in minutes.

Putting Disaster Recovery Into Action Saves A Customer’s Day

Case in point: A few weeks ago, our Phoenix data center had a network issue that lasted just under 60 minutes. Typically 60 minutes or so isn’t the end of the world on our platform all thanks to our Enterprise CDN and Full Page Caching. Our customers see a 98%+ cache hit ratio on our platform, so the only time they really see an issue is if they’re doing dynamic requests such as writing new posts.

But in this case, we had an enterprise customer that manages one of the largest food blogs in the world. Since the Platform Backup was located securely in the Acronis Cloud, we were able to restore that website to another data center in minutes so this customer could continue to write articles to continue to generate revenue.

This kind of flexibility is unheard of in the web hosting world, and yet we made it happen for our customer because it was the right thing to do.

Always Putting Customers First at Rocket.net

We’re beyond excited to provide this multi-tiered backup and disaster recovery solution to all of our customers. Not only does this help us to ensure the safety of our customer’s businesses with extra layers of backups, but it allows us to provide our customers with the fastest recovery time in the industry right when it counts the most: In the middle of an outage.

What’s more, all of this is available on our entire platform at no additional cost. Customers don’t have to turn anything on, we handle everything automatically. That means our customers can sleep better at night, having peace of mind, knowing that they aren’t just at the fastest WordPress host on the planet, but that Rocket.net disaster recovery plans are second to none.

Today, I’m happy to share that we’re taking our reporting a step further by providing full analytics directly from the Cloudflare Enterprise edge directly inside of our portal.

Edge Analytics: How to view your Edge Analytics

One logged in to your Rocket.net account, simply click Manage on the site you would like to view your edge analytics for, then click the Reporting Icon

Once on the Reporting tab, you’ll default to our new Edge Analytics report on the Overview tab with quick access to drill down into both the CDN and WAF as well. Getting Cloudflare Enterprise reporting is an unique feature that many of our customers have asked for, we’re pleased to get this new powerful reporting added to your dashboard.

What’s the difference between Google Analytics and Edge Reporting?

Customers new to Rocket.net often ask “Why does the Rocket.net Dashboard show more visitors than Google Analytics does?”

The answer lays in how Google Analytics counts visitors versus how Rocket.net tracks visitors. In fact, you might say that Google Analytics and Rocket.net don’t track the same things exactly.

How Google Analytics Tracks Visitors

Google Analytics tracks visitors that have JavaScript enabled. This generally means that the visitor being tracked is a human who is using a standard web browser, be it on a mobile device, laptop, or desktop PC. Google is focused on helping you understand all the statistics surrounding the people that visit your website. But, these aren’t the only visitors to your website, and that’s where Rocket.net is different.

Rocket.net: Tracking All Visitors

Tracking visitors who have JavaScript enabled in their browser is a great way to track Humans visiting your site, but the truth of the matter is that it does not paint a clear picture of all visitors to your website. There are non-human visitors to your website: Bots, Crawlers, and other automations that visit your site on a regular basis.

These bots and crawlers do not have JavaScript enabled, and so Google Analytics does not count them because they are not human visitors. Google Analytics is a marketing tool that is only interested in gathering statistics about humans that can be turned into conversions.

Although these automated visitors are not the same as human visitors, they still consume similar amounts of resources that a human would. Chief among these resource is Bandwidth. For this reason, Rocket.net tracks all visitors to your site, regardless of their nature. Any HTTP GET request made to your site gets tracked. At times, bots can represent a very large percentage of traffic, which correlates directly to what you’ll see on the Rocket.net Dashboard.

After already launching Site User Roles for Selective Control Panel Access earlier this week, Edge Analytics another one of many new reports we have coming for Rocket.net.

Since the beginning, customers have always been able to create sub-users on their account, but that meant they had access to all of their sites. What if you had a developer or customer that only needed access to a specific WordPress site’s control panel?

Today, that is all possible with our easy to use Site Users feature. Site Users can be thought of like inviting a collaborator to a specific site where access can be revoked at any time.

But wait… what if you don’t want it to be branded Rocket.net?! I’m glad you asked! When inviting a Site User to manage a WordPress site on your account, they will receive an email from a white-label domain with links to an unbranded URL for accessing the control panel.

Site User Roles: How to invite a user to a specific WordPress site

Once logged in to your Rocket.net account, simply look for the new Users section under the Overview tab for your site:

Once here, you can click Add Site User to invite a user to your site.

The best part? Site Users are roaming profiles throughout all of Rocket.net. Once your Site User accepts their invite and sets a password, they can easily be granted access to any site on Rocket.net. This is especially powerful for agencies that want to provide selective access to individual sites.

How Site Users access the WordPress Control Panel

Once their initial invite to the control panel is accepted, Site Users will be able to login to the white-label control panel:

Once logged in, Site Users will be able to see a list of pending invites as well as sites they can manage:

Finally, Site Users will be able to effortlessly manage the site(s) they have access to with just a click:

What’s next?

While this feature may seem like a no-brainer, we always try to take them to the next level. Today, this feature is already completely white-labeled to protect your brand, but soon you’ll even be able to upload a logo and completely customize the Site User control panel!

Stay tuned for more announcements!

Over the past few months we’ve received a lot of feedback around automated WordPress backup restores that would help simplify and improve customer workflows. Today, I’m happy to share we’ve made some major enhancements to restoring automated backups.

How to restore WordPress backups easily!

First, we’ve now made restoring your backups more granular. In 90% of support cases, it’s not necessary to do a full restore, but a partial restore (usually the plugins folder or just the database):

As seen above, customers can choose from the following when restoring an automated backup:

• Plugins
• Themes
• All Files
• Database

On top of making things more granular, we’ve also sped restores up in many cases by 10-20x!

Can I restore automated WordPress backups for staging sites? You bet…

Oh I also forgot… another massive improvement, customers can now restore automated backups for staging as well! This was something our customers asked for and now can do directly from the Rocket control panel.

If you have any questions about the new backup restore system please do not hesitate to give us a shout.