Customer Portal Blog Series: What’s new (Sprint 9)

One of the benefits that Leaseweb offers its customers is our Customer Portal. Through the portal you can manage the various features of your Leaseweb server no matter where you are. All you need is a browser and an internet connection. As the service is available 24/7, it adds another layer of management  of your services with Leaseweb.


Last week our Customer Portal team finished sprint 9 for this tool. The results of the sprint have been deployed on our production systems last Monday. This introduces a number of new features – in this post we’d like to tell you a little bit more about the most important ones.

Rescue mode & custom reinstall for dedicated servers
You can now reboot your dedicated server into rescue mode directly from within the Customer Portal. Alternatively, you can reinstall servers with any of our available operating systems (CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, FreeBSD and Microsoft Windows 2008). In case you want to manage your server with a cPanel or Plesk control panel, you can select the one you like while reinstalling. Please note that on some servers, a change to the boot sequence may be required. If this is the case the Customer Portal will request Support to apply these changes for you.

Customer referencing & extended search by IP for dedicated servers and colocation
By entering a name in the Customer Reference Field, you can provide server (or a group of them)  with a reference of your choice. You can then easily search or filter servers through this given name. Invoices also contain the reference. In addition, you can now also search for servers by IP address.

Improved datacenter access requests and history
When requesting datacenter access we now require you to select your rack location; this has been implemented as an additional security check to make sure you are escorted to the correct rack. We have also added an overview of past datacenter access requests.

Update DNS servers in bulk
If you use the Leaseweb nameservers to manage your domains, you can now update DNS records for multiple domains at once. Records can be added to multiple domains or you can replace all records for multiple domains with a new set.

Multilingual support & UI improvements

API upgrades
We really like the new look and feel of our Customer Portal, but if you like to integrate our its features into your own software – we’re not forgetting about you. Automation is one of Leaseweb’s strengths, so we have added a number of new automated features to the Customer Portal as well.

API Key Management
If you have API access can now view and change your API key within the Customer Portal.

Billing API
The API now allows you to securely collect or update your billing information.

Datacenter Access Requests
Access requests are now possible via our API.

Documentation
If you need (technical) information about the API features we support, you can find the most recent API manual in the support section.

Would you like to use our API too?
Contact sales@leaseweb.com so we can enable it – this option is free for all of our customers.

Your comments and/or suggestions are important to us. Please login to your panel, try out the new features and let us know what you think about it. You can reach us via our twitter channel or simply by leaving a message below. In the meantime we are developing a new set of features to be added soon. Stay tuned!

 

3 comments
  1. Ronny Roethof
    Ronny Roethof
    September 23, 2011 at 10:55

    Hi Marc,

    I’ve read this topic and have to say that I am impressed with the progress on the SSC.
    But while I was reading this, a question came into mind..

    Will it be possible to do (semi-)manual installs through the SSC?
    i.e. What I would like to see, and possible others as well, is to be able to partition my drives manually instead of the /boot, swap and one large / partition.
    Maybe even i.e. softraid or LVM on linux servers for example.

    Keep the good work up :)

    Ronny

  2. Marc Burkels
    Marc Burkels
    September 24, 2011 at 11:49

    Hi Ronny,

    Thank you for the positive feedback! Your request is very valid and features like custom partitioning, software RAID & semi-manual installations are a high priority on our backlog. For now I can share that we’re designing and planning these features so we can release these in the near future.

    Please keep the requests coming!

  3. Pra
    Pra
    October 12, 2011 at 16:48

    It will be great if you release your own WHMCS module, as i seen there are many of reseller using WHMCS so it will be 1+ for all. i don’t trust third party module specially which are encoded.

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