eServices Greece

Important Notification about Payments (Strong Customer Authentication)

We would like to inform you that we will be enforcing Strong Customer Authentication on all card payments from the 31st of December on Debit, Credit and indirect uses of those (example PayPal).

This means that in order to pay, you will be required to validate the payment over your TFA, mobile application or other system provided by your bank, in accordance to the EU Directive 2015/2366 (PSD2).

Best Regards,

eSGR NOC

We provide the infrastructure for Your services.

Announcements - eServices Greece We would like to inform you that we will be enforcing Strong Customer Authentication on all card payments from the 31st of December on Debit, Credit and indirect uses of those (example PayPal).

PHP 8.0 Beta

We are happy to announce that from today (2020/07/14) we will be providing access to PHP 8.0 Beta on our dev servers for testing.

PHP 8.0 is expected to be released on 2020/11/26 and we would like to provide very early access so you our clients can test their applications.

Best Regards,
eSGR NOC

Announcements - eServices Greece We are happy to announce that from today (2020/07/14) we will be providing access to PHP 8.0 Beta on our dev servers for testing.

Delay in release of Halcyon Engine & Related Projects

We would like to inform you that we will be delaying the new release of the Halcyon Engine due to the extra workload induced by the COVID-19 pandemic.
As you can see from our changelog we were supposed to release the new version on 2020/05/14, unfortunately we are quite behind on schedule. The reason is purely due to the extra support work we have had to provide to our customers due to the circumstances. We will be posting a blog post in the near future explaining the issues we are facing at this moment.

Best Regards,
Nick S.
eSGR NOC

Announcements - eServices Greece We would like to inform you that we will be delaying the new release of the Halcyon Engine due to the extra workload induced by the COVID-19 pandemic.As you can see from our changelog we were supposed to release the new version on 2020/05/14, unfortunately we are quite behind on schedule. The reason...

Plan Upgrades (Free)
Plan Upgrades (Free)

Since May (2019/05/12) we have introduced upgrades to all of our plans but we did it silently since we wanted to check how they would perform.
Since our inception in 2009 we have been doing bandwidth and storage upgrades to all of our plans each year whithout increasing our pricing with the goal of keeping our older clients on the same plan they originaly signed up for.For the first 7 years we used a formula that increased the available bandwidth based upon the 97th percentile of customer bandwidth consumption on the same plan and it was working relevantly ok since we never had more than 3-5% of customers needing to upgrade to the next plan.

In early 2017 we noticed that a big percentage of our customers have had huge spikes of traffic that slowly turned to a standard stream of more bandwidth consumption near mid-year.
After analysing the traffic we noticed it was a higher number of visitors in 99%+ of the cases and not just heavier site content thus for our free upgrade in 2018 we had to change our algorithm to account for that. Unfortunately even after our upgrades we noticed a lot of customers were month after month very close to their limits and more than a few had to use our Elastic Expansion service quite often.
After talking with a lot of those customers we realised that this was creating two issues to them.
Firstly, they were on a constant mode of anxiety, monitoring traffic hourly in fear of loosing access and asking for an upgrade even though our support told them there is no reason.
Secondly, started trying to "optimize" their sites to make them "lighter" by removing functionality or even hiding/removing relevant content which obviously would impact sales.

Elastic Expansion

This is a free automated service we provide that allows your account to bloat by up to 15% on Bandwidth and Storage for up to 2 consecutive months without requiring an upgrade to a bigger plan.
As long as after the 2 month period your account returns to its normal usage then the system will not offer/require an upgrade. The service can be re-used after 6 months.

Our Solution

In early 2019 we did our normal plan upgrades as ususal but then started working out on how much data would be fare for the amount of money we ask per client regarding to our costs per client.
Our original plan was to update our algorithm one more time and account for the avg extra bandwidth which would be a solution we tried before and kinda worked. But our last 2 year data showed that by the end of 2019 we would be in the same possition which would just delay the customer anxiety to the end of the year. In the end the decision was made to move each bandwidth tier to one slot on the right and then double the bandwidth.
In the following graph you can see how our most purchased plan (Indy) was affected after the plan upgrades:

Bandwidth

2018

Early 2019

May 2019

Bandwidth is now 285.7% more.

Storage

2018

Early 2019

May 2019

Storage is now 200% larger.

Our plans for the future

We will continue providing free bandwidth upgrades each year in the future as we have been doing but from now the plans will be getting their upgrade in May instead of the end of the current year, so we can have a better idea of current bandwidth requirements.
But we will also be introducing some changes to our plans:

Indy limited to 1 Database

Effective 2020/01/01

A lot of our customers have been hosting more than one dynamic websites on our smaller plan due to the extra bandwidth and storage. The extra database was never intended for this use, it was so that the customer can host a supporting service to their website.
Current customers will keep the 2 databases on their accounts till 2025.

Application for extra database

EFFECTIVE 2020/01/01

We will be providing a form for customers to request a database on Indy for use on a service that is not a website or public accessible service. This will be free of charge and will be monitored for access, if the DB is accessed for a non allowed use case it will be terminated immediately.

Best Regards,
George Pantazis
eSGR CTO

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Plan Upgrades (Free) - eSGR eSGR is a premium business hosting provider specializing in optimized content delivery.