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(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Web hosting provider Hivelocity announced this week that it has launched its new customer management portal, myVelocity, a few weeks after releasing a preview to its Twitter followers.
After three weeks of beta testing, which followed the preview, the company says it has officially launched the new portal.
For non-customers, a preview of the new interface is available at the Hivelocity website. Without any experience with the company’s previous control panel, myVelocity appears to be aimed at simplicity, employing some of the same stylistic choices as the recent Gmail redesign, or the uncluttered interface of services like Twitter.
The screenshots also appear to be from the hosting account of Gordon Freeman, fictional scientist and protagonist of the Half-Life series of video games.
The company says the new portal was developed in-house, from the ground up, by Hivelocity’s development team. The tool provides customers with a full range of account controls, including server and account management, billing and payment, support access, remote server reboot, service monitoring and other activities.
According to the Hivelocity website, the tool also incorporates an “extensive server knowledge base.”
Hivelocity says the development process for the control panel included several months of research into what customers (existing and potential) looked for in a management portal.
“When we started the myVelocity project, the goal was to build the best looking, most intuitive and most powerful portal in the industry,” says Hivelocity General Manager Steve Eschweiler, quoted in the press release. “Some of our competitors have good looking portals but don’t have many tools to offer customers, others have a ton of features but the interface is a maze of mess. myVelocity takes the best of both worlds and empowers our customers with a ton of tools while looking beautiful and clean at the same time. We believe myVelocity will be the new standard for hosting portals,”
According to the announcement, the company is already planning an update to myVelocity some time in December. Version 1.2, says the company, will include a cloud-hosted DNS manager, a messaging and notification center and an integrated affiliate system. Another major release will not be far behind, says the company, and will offer cloud integration and remote server installation.
Eschweiler discussed the then-still-in-development myVelocity with the WHIR via an email interview back in August of 2011.
