XMG Networks Weblog

With 2 years of existence under our belts, XMG Is extremely excited this year to push the envelope in the services we’re offering and the way we operate as a company. To say things at XMG are progressing as planned is a tremendous understatement.

If you’ve been somewhat of an avid reader to this blog you may have read about plans we’ve been rambling on about for months now, but today, I can finally say, we’re moving forward.

Without further adieu, here’s a rundown of the great XMG news.

In no particular order:

• XMGNetworks.com has had a web 2.0 facelift. Now, the site actually portrays our services in a readable user-friendly layout (if you’ve seen our last design you’ll know what I’m talking about ;-P).

• XMG Image is so close to launching I can almost taste it. This will be a MAJOR release for the networks and the biggest software deployment we’ve ever done. Stay tuned for that release in the next few days.

• After a laughable number of failed attempts throughout XMG’s life to get our hosting service together, XMG Hosting is prepping for a major overhaul. We’ve got so many things planned it almost needs its own blog post to get into the details. New plans will include some very beneficial features for our customers, as we plan to make operating and using web hosting in general, more convenient and usable. Look forward to these plans being implemented in the next few weeks, so if you notice that our hosting is sucking a lot less, that’s why.

• There are a lot of backend changes planned for how we operate internally, but surely, I won’t bore you with that. However, you will be experiencing much faster support times and overall better customer service across the network.

Now if that seemed anticlimactic in anyway, fear not! I have left out A LOT of things, as I don’t want to ruin all the surprises quite yet.

But suffice it to say that if you’re thinking of trying an XMG service–or even if you aren’t–there has never been a better time to join the awesome XMG Community (note: there is a time for modesty-it’s just not here and now).

As posted on From Two 2 Twelve:

From the inception of XMG Image, it’s goal has been to provide a simple, effective and easy-to-use way to upload and manage your images online. Trying to offer a more intuitive system than others like ImageShack and something a little less social and more robust like Flickr.

Unfortunately, XMG Image v1 was designed and coded in a time before Ruby on Rails and inevitably declared an end-of-life system almost as soon as it was released. But, with my newly acquired knowledge of RoR, I decided there was no better time than the present to shift development towards v2. In doing so, Rails has not failed to deliver as an immensely powerful development framework which completely streamlines the development, testing, and deployment aspects of building a robust web application.

But even as v2 reaches it’s proverbial beta testing phase, the general public, even XMG users, have no tangible evidence that development for v2 is even taking place (except for this flashy splash page). So here, I present a quick screen shot of the new customer dashboard, and I must admit, it’s dead sexy…

The initial release date is still hard to predict since private beta testing is currently going on. Also worth mentioning, v2 makes heavy use of Ajax/Javascript, so testing has been a challenge.

As for the service itself, there will be 2 plans offered, a completely free plan, and a yearly subscription plan (roughly around $14/year), which will give you access to tons more features and our built-in support ticketing system.

More info on the release will be available here and on the XMG forums as it gets closer.

Feel free to leave a comment/opinion on the new interface!

The release is so close I can taste it, and it doesn’t taste like chicken.

For the past few months, myself and members of the XMG Development team have been working a the ultimate plan to streamline your web hosting experience, by offering a seamless interface to mange every aspect of your web site and billing. How did we do this, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you!

Since the inception of XMG Hosting I’ve been devising a master plan to allow customers to be able to manage your hosting control panel, billing, and support without having to re-login and remember multiple sets of login information. Knowing this would be a rather large undertaking for a new hosting company I threw it on the backburner and went on to using the cliché control panels and billing software you see every other host using for the time being.

As XMG Hosting grew over time and established some decent credibility I decided the time has come to slowly start development for the ultimate control panel.

I first started with a casual re-skin of cPanel (our current web site control panel software), which slowly morphed into a full scale project, not only adding a new face to the already powerful cPanel, but adding features not found in any other web host (eX-Mail2.0 and more…). At this point, given the improvements, eX-Panel was born, a full featured control panel built on cPanel’s architecture featuring billing, support, and web site control in 1 interface accessible with 1 set of login information.

XMG Hosting also took another technological leap with the inclusion of Web 2.0 technologies in its servers, such as Ruby on Rails and Ajax.

To top it all off, all these features come standard in all of our eXtreme Hosting packages. Why call it eXtreme Hosting you may say? Well, with features like this we couldn’t just call it web hosting ;-P

It shouldn’t be long now…

Mark the Beginning of the XMG Revolution

Main Goal: Successfully expose XMG to prospective and current customers by cross-promoting and advertising our services. As we are a network of many sites and services, I find that cross-promotion will be en extremely detrimental tool in which will benefit our growth and clients.

Advantages: Execution of this plan would promote the XMG Networks as a whole, which would attract and make our services available to a greater audience. Therefore we could deviate our services into a more complete solution rather than promoting individual aspects of our company which will only result in singular success for us and our clients.

The Main outline of the plan is to passively add backend tie-ins to our services such as a network bar on the top of every page of every network site. That way, a current or prospective member can view the myriad of services we offer that could better suit their individual needs.

Key steps to attain this objective:

• Addition of Network bar which would make navigating throughout our network of sites convenient (look up!).
• Adding addition feature options on Paid Hosting signup which will allow customers to select separate XMG Network services they would like to have in addition to their web hosting.
• Implement a staff design that will allow personally assigned staff to a client’s account that can provide the client’s requested service.
• Implement the “Complete Website Solution Plan” (you’ll just have to wait and see )

These are just a few steps we’ve taken to cross-promote and expose our services to a wider audience, as well as benefit our current clients.

As you see these changes implemented, we always appreciate feedback on them. After all, we can only brainstorm and try to get in the minds of prospective customers to figure out exactly what their needs are, thus client feedback is an extremely useful tool for us.

The XMG Revolution starts now.