Effective September 1, 2023, pricing for new .COM domain name registrations and transfers will change to reflect an increase in price of all .COM domain names as announced by Verisign and ICANN, the operators of the .COM TLD.
.COM domain names expiring within the next 30 days will renew at existing rates. No changes will be made to existing renewal invoices.
.COM domains expiring after October 1, 2023 will renew at the following rates:
Was $18.99CAD >> Now $20.99CAD/year Was $13.99USD >> Now $15.99USD/year
The latest major version of cPanel is now available to all Varial Hosting customers.
Please be advised that with this new version of cPanel, all accounts have been switched to cPanel’s new Jupiter theme that was introduced last year, as the old Paper Lantern theme has now been discontinued.
Additionally, Horde Webmail has been removed due to it no longer being maintained by its developers. Horde calendar and contact data has been automatically migrated to RoundCube Webmail. All of your emails will be available in RoundCube as they were with Horde.
Twenty years ago today we opened our doors to the public and sold our first web hosting plans.
I was a university student studying Sociology who had created a wildly popular online discussion forum for local musicians. As the site grew to exceed 1 million hits/month, I began learning more about servers and hosting technologies in order to keep up with its growth.
When the site was moved to a dedicated server, I launched D.I.Y. Web Hosting (our original name) to help subsidize the cost of running the forum. Our first customers were the bands, photographers and fans who frequented the website, many of whom are still customers to this day!
It was a “right place at the right time” moment as many businesses were just starting to get online so we operated primarily as a web design studio for our first few years. We designed websites for many bands, local businesses, an NHL player, and helped many people across the world integrate their existing HTML website designs into web applications that were popular at the time like phpBB and Mambo/Joomla.
Our template creation service and participation in open source projects helped attract our first international customers in the US, UK and Australia.
An early website design
After a few years I decided to stop offering custom web design services. I recognized that I was better suited for coding and server administration than I was at the creative. Demand for our web hosting services was growing and I wanted to build a business based upon earning passive income rather than being dependent on how many websites I could build in a year.
With my university degree completed I found myself sitting in our first office space in downtown Saskatoon focussing full time on the business. I can’t really pinpoint exactly when it became my career, but the hobby that was my side gig throughout university was now ready for my full attention. I gradually stopped accepting shifts from my casual job working at a hospital and did not seek out work related to my degree. I was thrilled to be my own boss in a field that best showcases my talents.
As D.I.Y. Web Hosting shifted to focus solely on providing affordable web hosting with quick, quality support, we migrated away from servers we rented from cloud providers in the US to purchasing our own Dell PowerEdge servers and housing them in our first Canadian data center located in Montreal.
Our first server
Over the next few years our growth was accelerated by acquiring the web hosting clients of a number of Canadian and US web design agencies who thought we would be the best fit to take over their customers. As websites transitioned from simple HTML to being built using complex web applications, the hosting of these websites became significantly more complicated, requiring a lot more staff attention and expertise. Many web design agencies took the opposite approach of us and stopped offering hosting services to focus solely on design, so we were happy to welcome all of these new customers to our business.
In 2009 we incorporated and changed our name to Varial Hosting. There had been another company with DIY in their name in the hosting space that had created some confusion for our customers, so we wanted to rebrand with a unique name where we could obtain all relevant domain names and social media handles to protect our brand.
With a skate park being located directly across the street from our original Montreal data center, I chose the name Varial because it was the name of the best trick I used to be able to do on a skateboard. Our logo was even designed to subtly represent a skateboard flipping.
In 2012 we moved into our long term office space in a tech hub/coworking space in the Riversdale area of Saskatoon where we remained for 10 years. In this space we met many friends and collaborated on many exciting projects. The networking opportunities the building presented helped to further grow our business.
Scenes from our website launch party
It was in this space where we developed our next generation hosting platform that was capable of loading WordPress pages over 4000X faster. Our optimized WordPress hosting plans launched in 2016 and represented another major shift for our company.
WordPress exploded in popularity and to date nearly half of the entire Internet runs on WordPress. After witnessing nearly all new customers installing WordPress and identifying the challenges they were facing, we developed our next generation hosting platform from the ground up to improve the speed and security of WordPress websites.
Fun fact: WordPress also celebrated their 20th anniversary just last week. It’s been fun growing old with them!
With the launch of our new platform we also moved into a new data center located in Saskatoon so we could have our servers physically closer to us in order to operate fully out of our home town. Within a year we migrated all customers to our new platform without increasing anyone’s pricing!
Since then many things have changed in my personal life. I met my wife, Cara Warnar, who now works for Varial as our Sales & Marketing Manager, and we have two children together, with our latest born just earlier this year.
We began working from home early during the pandemic and have since made the change to a remote work force permanent. I’m grateful to be able to work from home and spend as much time with my family that I can. If you’ve happened to hear dogs barking or babies crying in the background while calling us, well, we’re sorry about that, but thank you for your patience in allowing our employees to explore a better work/life balance.
The Varial Hosting family
When meeting new people I often get asked if I like my job. Web hosting may not be as exciting as working at a tech startup, and getting woken up in the middle of the night when issues occur is never fun. However, the job requires constant learning and experimentation, the hours are often flexible, allowing us to create a number of side projects to scratch our creative itches, and it has always been stable, meeting my needs since I was a just a student and now the needs of my growing family. I can’t imagine doing anything else.
Thank you for supporting small business and selecting Varial Hosting as your independent hosting provider. We couldn’t have done it without you!
In the evening of Saturday, May 20, 2023 we will be upgrading the MariaDB (MySQL) database server on our Hermione, Snape and Tonks servers from MariaDB 10.3 to MariaDB 10.5.
Websites utilizing MariaDB/MySQL databases will be temporarily unavailable for approximately 10-15 minutes until the upgrades are completed on each server.
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.
Horde Webmail will be removed from cPanel in the coming months, upon upgrade to version 108 or later of cPanel. This is due to Horde not supporting PHP 8, while PHP 7 reaches its end of life in November 2022. Additionally, critical security vulnerabilities were discovered in Horde over the past year which required us to disable Horde for several weeks until security patches were released.
cPanel will be focusing on RoundCube Webmail going forward and are developing tools that will migrate Horde calendar and contact data to RoundCube upon upgrade to cPanel v108 or later.
If you are currently a Horde Webmail user, we recommend switching to RoundCube the next time you log into Webmail.
On Tuesday, July 5, 2022 at 7:00AM CST our network uplink will be migrated by data center technicians to a new core switch. This maintenance will cause approximately 60 seconds of downtime across all services as our network uplink is unplugged from its current switch and plugged into the new one.
Our current domain registration partner, Public Domain Registry, has announced a substantial increase to their domain rates which we feel will limit our ability to offer competitive pricing.
Further, they are hiking the price of their Whois Privacy service to an amount we feel would discourage customers from purchasing, despite this being a necessary service to improve privacy and reduce spam.
Instead of increasing our customer’s pricing, we will be changing our domain registration partner, and may seek multiple partners on a per TLD basis in order to offer the best rates we can to our customers.
Effective immediately, .com/net/org/ca domains will now be registered through our new partner.
There will be no changes to pricing for .com/net/org/ca domains but Whois Privacy will now be free of charge and enabled by default for new .com/net/org domain registrations (Whois Privacy is already free for personal .CA domains).
For existing domains due for renewal after August 1st, our staff will facilitate the process of transferring the domains to our new partner upon renewal. To allow time for the domains to be transferred, your next domain renewal invoice will be sent two weeks early. If you had previously paid for Whois Privacy for a .com/net/org domain, this fee will be removed upon transfer to our new partner, saving you $4.99/year.
Upon completion of the domain transfer, you may be asked to confirm your email address with the registry. Please complete this step if you receive an email requesting it.
Customers with domains other than .com/net/org/ca will be notified separately of any potential changes.
While changing our domain registration partner is very time consuming for our staff, this decision has been made in our customer’s interests to avoid an increase in our domain rates.
The latest major version of cPanel is now available to all Varial Hosting customers.
This version of cPanel brings with it a completely redesigned interface that unifies the designs of cPanel, Webmail and the WHM reseller panel.
All resellers will find that WHM now features the redesigned interface.
cPanel users can optionally switch to the new Jupiter theme at this time. As cPanel plans to discontinue the previous Paper Lantern theme later this year, we intend to switch all customers to the new theme in the near future after applying some customizations and updating support documents.
At approximately 4:00AM on Tuesday, June 7, 2022 our Lockhart server went offline. Data center technicians attempted to bring the server back online but the server hardware has failed and is unresponsive.
As attempts to bring our Lockhart server back online were unsuccessful, we have started the emergency migration of all customers previously hosted on our Lockhart server to our new Tonks server.
We have migrated all IP addresses previously used on our Lockhart server to Tonks, so no IP changes will be required.
Due to our Lockhart server being inaccessible, customer data will be restored from backups. A backup job was completed this morning just before our Lockhart server went offline and will be used to restore from.
Customer accounts will be restored alphabetically by username. Due to the large number of accounts to restore this process will take many hours and our staff will be working around the clock until completed. Progress updates will be posted below.
We thank you for your patience and understanding.
Progress:
This work has been completed and all customer accounts have been migrated from our Lockhart to our new Tonks server.
