We've been busy at MODX Cloud since reintegrating with MODX. We've been so busy, in fact, we haven't taken time to let you know about the changes and improvements we've made. We're proud of how far it's come and how far we hope to take it in the months and years to come.
First and foremost, MODX Cloud is focused on being a toolset for the people who build MODX sites. We're not interested in becoming a hosting company, and most of you told us you already had awesome hosts for your sites. We plan on partnering with many of your favorites to host your production sites and still have the power of MODX Cloud at your fingertips.
Reliability and Reporting
Being honest, MODX Cloud has had its share of hiccups. This was discouraging and we've spent countless hours tracking down stability issues and bottlenecks that caused outages. We've added multi-faceted tracking and monitoring to allow us to see what's happening, well beyond the basics.
Status Site
To make it easy to see what's happening at MODX Cloud at any time, visit status.modxcloud.com. This page includes current status of each major component of our infrastructure, trailing hourly/weekly/monthly uptime and response time graphs, and even has alerts available for scheduled maintenance.
Tools for Developers
We're committed to helping people build MODX sites, therefore, we've added more must-have development tools for you including, crontab (shell or PHP), Git, command line PHP, improved SSH, and rsync.
Faster Snapshotting
One of the most significant things we did in July was to make incredible speed improvements to the snapshotting technology inside MODX Cloud. Sites with larger numbers of Resources or Template Variable values could often take hours—some as long as 5 hours to complete. This was not a great experience. Now, most snapshots take from a few seconds to a few minutes to complete, even large sites can take fewer than 10 minutes.
Marketplace
You may have noticed the link for Marketplace in the main navigation of Cloud Dashboard. It leads to a page where you can quickly jump start projects or try out MODX in few seconds. We're currently working plans for even more there—keep watching.
What's coming
We've got lots of work yet to do to get MODX Cloud on the right trajectory. Here's a small taste of what we're working on for you, now:
- Improved stability and performance of absolutely every aspect of Cloud.
- Streamlined, more sensible plans. Choose to migrate or stay on your current plan.
- Production hosting partners will offer top-notch professional hosting. You'll be able to work with the production node almost as if it were inside MODX Cloud.
- Important user experience improvements
- Billing and receipts will be drastically simplified, easy to understand and accessible for your accounting.
- More payment methods will give people more options than just credit cards.
- Platform Improvements
- SSL will be added so you can properly test your secure sites.
- Next generation of the snapshotting technology. Snapshots and site moves will be easier and better than ever.
- Exports will be brilliantly simple—getting your data out of MODX Cloud should be as easy as getting it in.
We hope you like what's been happening with MODX Cloud and are interested in what's to come. As always, we love your suggestions and ideas for making it better.