News

EU Domain Discount Campaign Ending Soon. Seize the Opportunity to Register a One-Euro Domain Today

Last year’s .EU domain discount sale is approaching its finish line with the end of January. In light of this, we recommend everyone take advantage of the opportunity to acquire a domain priced at just one euro before the return to regular pricing.

Starting from February 1st, the normal price for registering a .EU domain will be €4.50, with renewals costing €6.50. Please note that all prices mentioned in this article are subject to VAT, and the annual price applies to multi-year registrations as well.

This date also marks a price change for the .NET domain, increasing by €1.36, making the cost for registering or renewing for one year €15.56. The annual price for a .ORG domain will be €13.92 (a rise of €1.02), for a .INFO domain €21.70 (an increase of €1.25), and for a .BIZ domain €17.17, which is up by €1.67.

However, we bring positive news for registrants of .LV and .LT domains. From February 1st, the registration price for a Lithuanian domain for one year will decrease by €1.94, meaning a new .LT domain will cost just €7.96. The price for a Latvian domain will reduce by €1.70, allowing for registration at an annual price of €13.20.

We will continuously update on our website and through social media about the discount campaigns awaiting in 2024.

The VAT rate will increase from 1 January

Dear customer!

Starting from January 1, 2024, the value-added tax rate in the Republic of Estonia will increase from the current 20% to 22%. The increase in the VAT rate applies to all Zone products and services from January 1, 2024, and affects all Zone customers subject to the Estonian VAT rate.

Please note that if you have a standing e-invoice payment agreement with the bank, you may need to adjust the payment limit accordingly. For additional information, please visit the website of the Tax and Customs Board: Value added tax | Estonian Tax and Customs Board (emta.ee)

Zone applies new price list for web-hosting services from February 1st 2023

We are grateful to Estonian companies, individuals, government entities and organizations for trusting us more than any other web-hosting provider.

We want to continue to provide you with only high-quality services, and due to the rising cost of electricity, servers and other resources, we are forced to revise the prices of our web hosting packages.

New prices for web hosting service packages are, starting from February 1st 2023:

  • Plan Starter and I
    will cost €8.40 per month for a monthly subscription period; discounted price with annual subscription €7.34 per month
  • Plan Business and II
    will cost €14,56 per month for a monthly subscription period; discounted price with annual subscription €12,94 per month
  • Plan Pro and III
    will cost €23,86 per month for a monthly subscription period; discounted price with annual subscription €21,28 per month

New prices for additional services:

  • ZoneCloud Premium 100 GiB storage €3 per month
  • An additional IP address €4 per month
  • Additional 5 cron jobs €3 per month
  • Additional 5 mailing lists €3 per month
  • Additional 500000 inodes €12 per month
  • Additional 1 GiB of MariaDB space €5 per month
  • Additional 5 MariaDB databases + 5 users €3 per month
  • Additional 50 GiB of storage to plan Pro €10 per month (previously the same package included 10GB capacity)
  • Archiving web hosting package up to one year €25
  • Restoring data from backup €28
  • Nimbusec Basic €3 per month

Hourly fees for hands-on services provided by Zone technical staff on the request of the client:

  • Workdays 09.00-17.00 €70
  • Workdays 17.00-23.00 factor 1,5 (€105)
  • Workdays 23.00-09.00 and on weekends factor 2,0 (€140)

prices are excluding VAT

Previously issued invoices will remain valid until the end of the billing period.

If you are using e-invoice, please check the limits. Manually set standing orders need to be updated to match the new invoice amount.

We will continue our efforts to make our service even more user-friendly, secure and fulfilled with different options.

 

Disk space and Parallel Processing Units

In the context of the changes to the web hosting service packages coming in April, two figures will strike the more observant user, indicating an increase in resources. While disk space may seem familiar to the not IT-savvy, the number of Parallel Processing Units may not. Let’s take a closer look at both.

First of all let’s be clear that neither directly answers the question “How many visitors can I have on my site?” or “Can I put an e-shop on my server?”. In fact, there is no direct answer to these questions, but we will try to provide a little bit of a gut feeling with this blog post to help the user get a better understanding of these questions.

When choosing a web hosting service for your new portal, website or e-shop, the above questions will certainly be relevant. However, if the choice has already been made and the existing web traffic is increasing and the user needs more resources, then in most cases the resources and volumes will already be increased to match the number of customers.

But how do you take the first step, or where do you start?

Disk space

In a nutshell, disk space describes how much data your web hosting service can hold/can store.

Focusing on the matter in more detail, we can see that it covers several parts

– Files (the same files you have on your web server)
– Databases (MySQL data and indexes)
– Email (emails and attachments in your mailbox)
– Backups

Technically, there are different ways of placing data in web hosting. There is even a common model where emails, databases, backups and files are all located on the same web server, which means that if you do not update your version of the content management application, or use a broken plugin, the content of your emails (or those of your company’s employees) will be automatically accessed, or worse, even their backups.

At Zone, the rule of thumb so far has been that all data must be isolated!

Files are stored on a web server.
Databases are on a separate database server.
– The contents of email inboxes reside in a separate email cluster.
Backups not only reside on a separate server, but also in a separate data centre, which ensures, for example, that data can be restored if the data centre should burn down.

When analysing the question “how much space does something take?” one might think that everything is obvious. However, a more technical user might immediately ask further questions: how is the backup capacity calculated if backups are made on a daily basis and kept for two weeks.

For example, does a 10GB file on a web server mean a total backup of 140GB? The simple answer to this question is of course “no”, because backups are made incrementally, which means that if the file has not changed in the meantime, it will only take up as much space as the file itself takes up on the web server.

However, the situation becomes more complicated if there has been a change in the file, meaning that it is no longer the same file and the backup will therefore be a full copy of the changed file. In general, such situations do not occur very often, but large log files should definitely be noted as problematic areas. If the size of a log file can be counted in gigabytes and a little bit is written to it every day, it will be counted as a new file and can quickly eat up the remaining disk space. In such situation, you should critically review your web application and configure the log files to rotate.

For more common frameworks such as laravel and symfony, a simple configuration of the application is sufficient. The web server and PHP logs generated by Zone are already automatically rotated.

Unlike files, databases are backed up as full dumps, which prevents a situation where the file system is corrupted and the database can no longer be read as a result. This means that a 100MB database will take up 1400MB in a 14 day backup. However, since web server databases are not designed to hold huge amounts of data, in this case this should not be a problem.

Zone Helpdesk is more than happy to help you identify large unnecessary files in order to reduce disk space.

Parallel Processing Units

In short, a Parallel Processing Unit indicates the number of requests that can be made to your web server at the same time.

As a metaphor, a good example is public transport, where 50 people can fit on a bus. Once one person has been picked up, the next one gets on board. So only 50 passengers can be served at a time. How many people are carried in one ’round trip’ depends on how many bus stops a passenger passes, and therefore it is not possible to say exactly that a bus will carry 50 people in one round trip.

To be more specific, parallel processing units include all the requests that are made from your website visitor’s browser to the web server. For example, the 250 in the first plan says that 250 requests can occur at the same time. All requests go under this heading. The primary request is for the web page, followed by requests for style files, images and javascript files.

For a more technical description, let’s take the example of a web with twenty images, two CSS style files and two files on the front page. This means that a visitor will make 1+20+2+2=25 requests to the web server at the same time. The front page of the web can therefore be loaded simultaneously by 10 clients for 250 parallel units of work.

“But does this mean that 10 customers can visit my website?”, you ask. Again, the answer is “no”.

If the web page code is fast, the images are optimised to be small enough for the web, and the css/javascript is minimised, the page will load quickly – say 0.2 seconds. In this situation, a web page can be loaded by 10 clients in 0.2 seconds. However, if the web page is not optimised – for example, images go through PHP every time they are queried, where they are resized through code, and thousands of MySQL queries are made on the front page of the web, then the page may also take several seconds to load. This, in turn, means that the same number of visitors will take longer to load, and the rest of the visitors will therefore have to wait in line.

In other words, the better the website, the less server resources it uses and the smaller plan it requires.

Finally, you deserve nice things! Subscribe to our newsletter in the “account settings” tab in My Zone to receive them. We often send newsletter subscribers discounts you won’t find elsewhere.

Zone.ee renewed contracts on September 1st 2021

New Terms of Service will apply to our services on September 1st 2021. We have grouped all contracts under a single set of user conditions and cleared up the wording. New contracts can be found at https://www.zone.ee/en/terms-of-use/

For new customers, the Terms of Service will take effect on September 1st 2021.

For the new customers new Terms of Service will take effect on the 1st September 20121. If the existing client doesn’t agree with the changes, customer has the right to terminate the contract until October 7th 2021 by sending us an e-mail at info@zone.ee. If the terms are acceptable, there is no need to take any actions. The renewed terms between the customer and Zone are in effect from October 8th 2021.

We advise you to read the new contracts thoroughly. If you have any questions, please call our customer service (+372) 688 6886

Phishing campaign targeting Zone clients – 26.10.2020 from ca 17:50

We have detected a phishing campaign targeting Zone clients – our engineers are adjusting our spam filters to block incoming mail.

Our advice is as usual:

  • if you get e-mail pictured below please delete it
  • if you did reply to email or clicked on link and entered your email + password – please report the incident to your IT support and our helpdesk info@zone.ee

Temporary change at office work

We have temporarily suspended customer service in our office.  All our electronic channels work as usual. All operations can be done via phone, chat, online self-service or e-mail. Contact information:

Customer support on business days 09.00 – 17.00 (timezone EET/EEST):
Phone Support: +372 688 6886

All systems monitored and incidents handled 24/7, current status visible at status.zone.eu.

Zone.ee renews contracts on November 1st 2019

New Terms of Service will apply to our services on November 1st 2019. Updates apply to the Central User Agreement clause 6.8, that regulates conditions of termination of the Service and the General Terms and Conditions for Server Services clause 4, which regulates servers maintenance and troubleshooting. New contracts can be found at https://www.zone.ee/en/terms-of-use/

For new customers, the Terms of Service will take effect on November 1st 2019.

For the existing customers new Terms of Service will take effect on the 1st December 2019. If the client doesn’t agree with the changes, customer has the right to terminate the contract until 30. november 2019 by sending us an e-mail at info@zone.ee. If the terms are acceptable, there is no need to take any actions. The renewed terms between the customer and Zone are in effect from December 1, 2019.

We advise you to read the new contracts thoroughly. If you have any questions, please call our customer service (+372) 688 6886

Zone.ee increases Virtual Server resources up to 5x

Zone Media increases resources offered in all Virtual Server packages for both new and existing clients and completes move of shared hosting services to fast SSD storage on 17.05.2016. Update of software platform complements that with adding support for faster HTTP/2 protocol – already supported by browsers of 75% of visitors – to packages that support HTTPS. Prices remain unchanged.

Most visible change is increase in offered storage space – Package I increases from 50GB to 128GB or 2,56x, Packages II and III have new limits at 256GB and 512GB growing 3,4x and 5,12x. More space is accompanied by rising limits of usage – increasing maximum size of mailbox (now 8-16GB) and database (4-12GB). For clients hosting multiple web applications on same account number of databases increases as well, allowing on Package I and II 16 and 32 and on Package III unlimited databases.

While numbers are easy to compare changes in technology should deserve more attention, influencing actual use of the websites. Gentle push that started in 2014 from Chromium is bringing us closer to moment, when “green padlock” that means secure HTTPS connections will be succeeded by marking all HTTP-connections non-secure. Read more: Marking HTTP As Non-Secure and Google Will Soon Shame All Websites That Are Unencrypted.

To make transitioning to HTTPS easier we have added support of free and automatically renewed Let’s Encrypt certificates that can be installed with couple of clicks even by non-technical users and support for HTTP/2 protocol that among other features speeds up communication between web server and browser. Possibility to send all resources needed for displaying a web page in single response improves user experience specially on mobile sites.

We at Zone are confident, that now is the right moment to log into MyZone account, enjoy the view of increased limist and change your shared hosting package to one that supports HTTPS and HTTP/2. Short instruction showing the moves of package change and enabling HTTPS can be found in the video – and our customer support is happy to help in case you need assistance.

Fast .EE domain registration for foreign nationals

.EE TLD

If you wish to register a .EE domain name and have your request be filled as soon as possible you must follow the following recommendations:

  • * register the domain name in your own name (the name of an individual);
  • * make yourself both the administrative contact and the technical contact of the domain name;
  • * pay for the domain name via a PayPal verified account with the same name.

If you do this, your application will be streamlined through the order process.

There are two main reasons why you should do this:

If a domain name is ordered in the name of a company, the administrative contact needs to present a letter of attorney from the company, authorising the operation. It takes time to verify this document. You probably do not want to waste that time.

All domain name orders must be signed OR authorised via a transfer from a PayPal verified account belonging to either the domain registrar or administrative contact. It is not possible for a foreigner to sign the application – you must use the PayPal option.

You can start the domain registration process at: https://www.zone.ee/en/domain-order/?tld=ee