Clouden Blog

WebCat’s Transition to Step Functions WebCat is Clouden’s domain registrar service. Our customers register and renew domains and manage their DNS records. This is simple on the surface, but involves quite a few integration points. We interact with external services like the .fi top-level-domain registry and external DNS services. We also have an order processing system that has grown more …

AWS re:Invent 2020 As always, we’ve been closely following Amazon’s new cloud technology announcements at re:Invent 2020. The event was fully virtual this year and all the talks were streamed online. Announcements were mostly made during the keynotes, while the rest of the re:Invent presentations typically focused on education and customer showcases. Here are some of our favorite picks this year. …

WebCat Adds Shopping Cart and More We’re happy to announce several new features in our .fi domain registrar service WebCat. Register multiple domains at a time using the shopping cart feature. Warn about detected problems in domain nameserver settings. Sort domains by expiration time and other fields in Your Domains. Edit complex DNS records in WebCat Managed DNS. Add glue hosts to domain …

New Serverless WordPress Website Happy Summer to all our friends! We’ve just completed an update to our website https://clouden.net which is now built using WordPress. This is mainly to make it easier for us to create and manage content. We’re not using regular WordPress though. We run a Serverless version of WordPress on AWS Lambda, which doesn’t need a server running all the time. We use it to …

Our Favorite AWS re:Invent 2019 Product Launches It’s the time of the year again when AWS releases a huge amount of new products and features at the re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. We have been following re:Invent closely at Clouden and we’ve made a list of our favorite product launches. API Gateway HTTP APIs HTTP APIs are a new cost-effective alternative for traditional REST APIs in Amazon API …

WebCat adds DNS service support Clouden’s .fi domain registrar service WebCat now offers DNS support. When you register a domain at WebCat, you get a free DNS zone and a web-based management interface for setting up the DNS records. To activate the DNS service for a domain you’ve registered in WebCat, go to the domain’s nameserver settings and select WebCat Managed DNS. You will then be able to …

How We Have Prepared for PSD2 SCA Payment Requirements If you’re active in online business, you may have heard of the EU PSD2 directive which sets new rules for online payments in Europe. In September 2019, a new requirement for Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) will take effect. It basically requires online payments to be authenticated with an additional factor, such as a confirmation SMS …

WebCat is open for business! We have just opened WebCat, our new .fi domain registrar service. If you need a .fi domain, just sign up and register one. We also welcome you to sign up for the WebCat Newsletter, which will keep you informed about new features and product offers. You can follow WebCat on Twitter, Facebook and in GitHub Issues if you’re interested in the more technical details and …

Happy Pride Month! Clouden celebrates diversity and wishes our customers and everybody else a happy Pride Month! Amidst the celebration we are hard at work on our upcoming new cloud service and will be announcing it soon.

Clouden Ping User Interface Update We’ve released an update to Clouden Ping, our pay-per-request website monitoring service. The sign up process is now based on AWS Amplify, which is Amazon’s default solution for user authentication with Cognito. This allows us to leverage all the default functionality provided by Amazon and avoid maintaining a custom solution. If you run into any problems with …

Amazon AWS re:Invent 2018 e have been following all the awesome product announcements at AWS re:Invent 2018 closely. Amazon has released a number of interesting new services and also big improvements to existing services. In this blog post we’ll take a quick look at the most interesting announcements from Clouden’s perspective, divided into four main topics. Serverless Applications AWS Lambda, the …

Fixing our chat services after Symantec certificate deprecation If you have used Synthpedia Chat recently, you may have noticed issues with the Google Chrome browser not being able to connect to the chat. The technical reason for this is that Google has started to roll out their distrust of Symantec certificates, which was announced a year ago. Amazon’s default AWS IoT endpoints use Symantec …

Free LoRa IoT Service from Clouden Clouden now offers a free 868 MHz LoRa gateway service in the central Helsinki area. If you have registered an IoT device on The Things Network, it will automatically use our gateway when it’s the closest one available. Our physical location is in Taka-Töölö, Helsinki. The gateway is installed indoors. If you are interested in LoRa, you can get a The Things …

A Refreshed Look for Clouden We’ve updated our company logo and color scheme. The new styles are already in use on our main website and this blog. We will be gradually applying them to all our services in the near future. If you need to use our new logo somewhere, you can find it in the Clouden Press Kit. Standard copyright applies. Have a great summer!

How Clouden uses AWS Cloud Directory We spend a lot of effort in choosing the right technologies for our cloud services at Clouden. Over the years we have found Amazon Web Services to be a reliable provider of cloud platform services that scale in both performance and cost. Our strategy is to build web applications that have very low fixed costs and grow as the user base grows – sometimes faster …

Clouden Ping now in Public Preview Our pay-as-you-go web host monitoring service Clouden Ping is now in Public Preview! Clouden Ping monitors all your websites and sends email notifications to you when they fail. There is no monthly subscription payment – you only pay for the actual number of pings made. Clouden Ping lets you add up to 100 web hosts to monitor. Each host may be configured with a …

Happy New Year from Clouden We’ve had an exciting year and hope you had one, too! As you can see on our home page, our cloud service and application portfolio has been growing steadily and we’re very proud of everything we’ve released so far. This is, of course, just the beginning. For the upcoming year we have all kinds of cool ideas in mind for new cloud services. We also have some already …

Billing Alerts for AWS Released We have just released Billing Alerts for AWS, our new application for iOS and Android. It was developed to track Amazon AWS cloud usage costs in a simple way, by receiving notifications on the phone whenever the current billing amount increases by a chosen interval. For example, when using the default interval setting of $10, you will be notified whenever your …

Clouden FM YouTube Live Streaming Service now in Public Preview Clouden is proud to announce that Clouden FM is now in Public Preview. Clouden FM is a fully managed YouTube Live streaming service that lets you run virtual radio stations in the cloud. All you need to do is upload your music as WAV files and enter your YouTube channel’s live streaming key. Clouden FM will take care of the rest.

About Our Service Release Cycle Clouden generally develops its services following a release cycle of (1) Internal Development, (2) Internal Testing, (3) Public Preview and (4) General Availability. Here are brief descriptions of these stages and their purpose. Internal Development Development starts when we have a new service concept we believe is worth implementing and offering to our customers. …

Yesterday’s Amazon Lambda outage Yesterday, Amazon had a brief Lambda service outage in the Ireland region, affecting some of Clouden’s systems for about 1.5 hours. Since we are currently testing a number of new services, this was a good opportunity to see how they survive outages in cloud infrastructure. We take outages seriously but we also think they are sometimes unavoidable, and we …

Developing New Clouden Services We’d like to give you an update on some forthcoming Clouden services, which we are developing and testing right now. If you are interested in what we do, please follow this blog and subscribe to our Twitter Feed for more future updates. Clouden FM – YouTube live streaming automation Clouden FM offers a simple way to setup a virtual radio service on YouTube Live. You …