October’s update is a big one, and most of it is about putting things in your hands. The DNS records for your domain, the health of your email, the admin notices WordPress sends: all of it now lives in your dashboard rather than in an email to us. There’s also a serious WordPress security flaw to report on, and the answer there is reassuringly dull.
Your DNS, In Your Dashboard
If we host your domain’s DNS, you can now manage its records yourself from the DNS page in the dashboard. Add a record, change one, remove one, and it’s live in seconds. No ticket, no waiting for us.
One thing to be clear about: this, and the email checks below, only work for domains whose DNS we run. If yours still sits with your registrar or an old host, that’s easily fixed. We can bring the domain across and look after it as part of your hosting, so it sits alongside your site rather than somewhere separate. Just ask and we’ll handle the move.
We’ve built it so you can’t break your own site by accident. The handful of records your hosting and email depend on are locked and shown as such; everything else is yours to edit. Every change is kept as a version, so if something goes wrong you pick an earlier state and restore it.
What this means for you:
- Presets for the common jobs. Setting up Google Workspace or Microsoft 365? One click adds the whole set of records correctly.
- History and restore. See who changed what and when, and roll a zone back to any earlier version.
- Import and export. Bring a zone file across from your old provider, or take a copy of yours any time.
- Locked where it matters. The records that keep your site and mail working can’t be edited or deleted from the page.
- A watchful eye. We check every editable domain hourly and get told if anything drifts from what it should be.
Does Your Email Actually Arrive?
Gmail and Outlook now insist that email is properly authenticated before they’ll put it in an inbox. The new Email Auth page shows you where your domain stands: how much mail has been seen going out under your name over the last week, where it came from, and whether it passed.
Behind it, we collect the reports the big providers send back about your domain every day, work out when it’s safe to tighten your settings, and move you up a step at a time, from “monitor” to “quarantine” to “reject”. That last step is what stops anyone else sending email as you. For customers who’ve asked, we also check the mailboxes themselves every hour and confirm that mail is actually being delivered, not just sent.
As with DNS, this needs us to be running the domain’s DNS, because the tightening happens through records we have to be able to change. If we host your site but not your domain, moving it to us is the one step that unlocks all of this.
The WordPress Flaw You Didn’t Have To Think About
A serious security flaw in WordPress itself was made public last month. WordPress released an urgent fix for a flaw that, in the wrong conditions, could let an attacker run their own code on a site. Every site we host had the fix in place within a day of it being released, most of them before it was widely reported.
That isn’t luck. Keeping the software up to date is something we do for you as a matter of routine, quietly, in the background. There was nothing for you to do, and nothing to worry about.
We also took the flaw as a prompt to ask a harder question: if a problem like this ever turned up before a fix existed, what else would stand in the way? This type of attack hides inside ordinary page requests, so the usual protections don’t get a clear look at it. So we’ve added a lock at the level of the server itself, on every WordPress site we run, which refuses to let a site reach the sensitive parts of the system it has no business touching, no matter how cleverly it’s asked. It shuts this whole category of attack down at the root, patched or not.
Admin Notices That Don’t Get Lost
WordPress sends its own emails: plugin updates, failed logins, form submissions, “your site has a problem” warnings. Until now they went to whichever address was set up when the site was built, which is often nobody’s inbox any more.
Each site now has its own address for these notices, and you can read them from the new System Mail view in the dashboard. An Email Recipients button on each site lets you choose who should get copies, so the right person sees the warning without anyone having to forward it.
Spare Domains, Tidied Up
If you own domains you aren’t using (the .co.uk alongside the .com, an old brand, a misspelling you bought defensively), we can now point them somewhere useful at no cost. Either a proper redirect to your live site, or a tidy parked page, with HTTPS on both. No more “this site can’t be reached” on a domain with your name on it.
Watched From Outside, Too
We’ve always monitored your site from inside the platform. We now check it from outside as well, from several places on the internet, so a problem between the world and your site gets noticed as quickly as a problem inside it. Customers with several sites also get a public status page they can share with their own users.
Small Things in WordPress
Your media library can now be tagged. Tag images by show, year, product or whatever makes sense for you, then filter the library by tag instead of scrolling. It’s a small thing that saves a lot of time on a site with a few years of uploads behind it.
Custom Apps: Taking Payments
The custom apps we wrote about last month have moved on quickly. The first one now takes card payments, including instalment plans for people who’d rather spread the cost, and has a public sign-up form that feeds straight into the office’s records with no re-typing. The next piece is automatic reminders, which is in progress.
Steadier Underneath
Two quieter changes this month. All site data, databases and files alike, now lives on its own dedicated disk, separate from the operating system, which makes it easier to protect and faster to grow. And we’ve tuned the alerts we get about the platform so a real problem stands out instead of being lost in the noise.
Coming Soon
Reminders on the custom app side, and a few more things made self-service in the dashboard. As always, if there’s something you’d like to see, just ask.