2022 Year in Review

Thank you for supporting small business and selecting Varial Hosting as your independent hosting provider.

2022 brought a number of exciting changes to our company that I’m happy to reflect on and share with you today.

In January we moved out of our long-term office space and transitioned into an entirely remote workforce. While I deeply miss all of the tenants and businesses that we shared a building with, I grew to love working from home again and having the ability to spend more time with family.

A friendly reminder to our customers who pay by cheque, please note that our mailing address is now:

Varial Technologies, Inc.
PO Box 32107 RPO Erindale
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada
S7S 1N8

While the pros and cons of remote work will surely be debated for years, it has been a natural and effective transition for our company.

In fact, our 24/7 support ticket response time average for 2022 was just 16 minutes!

This even includes emails sent to us in the middle of the night on a weekend and happens to be our best year ever, with a reduction from 22 minutes last year.

We also added another full-time employee to our company last year! When my wife, Cara Warnar, completed her maternity leave, she left her previous employer to become our new Sales and Marketing Manager. I guess you could say we’re a family-owned mom and pop shop now!

One challenge we faced is the continued increase of our operating expenses from many of our suppliers.

When our former domain registration partner announced a significant increase to their domain rates, we explored other options instead of increasing customer pricing. In June we announced that we would be changing our domain registration partner so that we could keep customer pricing the same and also begin to offer Whois Privacy for free.

I believe that Whois Privacy is an essential service to improve the privacy of our customers and reduce the spam they receive. When our former partner announced that they would be increasing the cost of their Whois Privacy service to an amount that I feel would discourage customers from purchasing it, I knew a change had to be made.

I am very happy that domain names registered through Varial Hosting now include Whois Privacy for free and it is enabled by default!

With this fee removed it saves our customers $4.99/year per domain, and has already saved our customers thousands of dollars since implementing the change! As always, we are committed to acting in our customer’s best interests and keeping prices as low as possible.

Last year we also introduced PHP 8.1 support across all of our servers, deployed our most expensive server yet (and made an Instragram Reel about it that went viral) and our data center completed major upgrades to their network and power infrastructure to make our services even faster and more reliable.

In the coming months an entirely new cPanel theme called Jupiter will be available to all customers. We have been waiting for cPanel’s new design to be finalized so we can expand the resources on our website and create a robust and extensive knowledgebase for our customers as well as all new tutorial videos based on the updated design.

We will celebrate our 20th year of business in 2023 and improving our website is on the top of our list of changes to make.

Thank you for your business and for taking the time to read about our company.

Happy New Year and all the best in 2023!

Ryan Smith
CEO
Varial Hosting