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(Hosting Launch) Moving Forward In 2023

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Published July 12, 2023 9:27 PM

(Hosting Launch) Moving Forward In 2023

In previous incarnations of this website, I published a whopping total of two posts over three years titled Moving Forward In 2021 and Moving Forward In 2022 . Both of these posts boasted of exciting developments for the future of Novelty Factor (LLC), but alas, the best-laid plans of mice and men…

2021 And 2022 In Review

This domain name used to serve a company known as Novelty Factor LLC. In 2021, Novelty Factor LLC went from a two-member Limited Liability Company (LLC) to a single-member LLC, ready to “stand alone at the beginning of the American post-pandemic era.” The 2021 post mentioned a “number of factors” that “stymied the organization’s development/success.” Chief among these were the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) and “lack of proper focus and too broad of goals.” 2021 marked the year where our “renewed focus” was on building tools to deliver content more effectively and economically.

In 2022, Novelty Factor LLC dissolved, and Novelty Factor became a “working group” under Original Pursuits LLC , its new “parent” company. We promised two services under a Novelty Factor brand: Single-Sign-On (SSO) for various websites Novelty Factor was operating and “turn-key” hosting services to be delivered in mid-2022. Turn-key was to mean that the service would be entirely automated, so provisioning and account creation would be handled automatically.

And that brings us to mid-2023! Novelty Factor LLC is no more and has been replaced with my creative company, Original Pursuits LLC (A Very Regular Company). Novelty Factor is no longer a “working group” but instead is now the brand for our new (“turn-key”) hosting service, Novelty Factor Hosting! That’s right, we finally launched!

Novelty Factor Hosting Has Launched!

Novelty Factor Hosting Logo

I am thrilled to announce that Novelty Factor Hosting is now open for business and ready to serve creative and entrepreneurial individuals. Our initial offering is tailored to the needs of average website owners, providing unlimited* file storage, reliability, speed, and security. With our easy-to-use Website Builder, you can design your website without needing a heavyweight content management system (CMS) like WordPress. Or, if you’re ready to take the plunge, we can host an optimized WordPress installation or any other traditional LAMP stack software.

Our shared hosting servers boast cloud-based auto-scaling, load balancing, a custom control panel, malware protection, two-factor authentication, configurable PHP versions, DDoS protections, and automatic backups!

Don’t let the term “average” website owner constrain your creativity. Our unlimited* shared hosting plans offer ample space with a maximum database size of 1GB (the Linux Unlimited package boasts unlimited databases). A business site or blog typically uses only a small fraction of that space, leaving plenty of room for expansion. In fact, several of our sites, including this one, Original Pursuits LLC , and How To Program Anything , rely on this platform. I even use it for my personal blog and archive, The Wunk Agenda , and my online bibliography, asherwolfstein.com .

Our upcoming addition of cloud servers and virtual private servers (VPS) to our product line will provide you with even more options to meet your website’s growing needs. Whether you require additional database capacity or advanced features like a Redis store, our custom cloud servers are designed to give you the control and flexibility you need to succeed. Upgrade or migrate with ease and confidence, knowing that your website is in good hands.

Limited Time Launch Hosting Offer!

Order the Lifetime Deal below and receive that shared hosting package for life! Never pay a renewal again! Limited offer: first 100 customers only!

Go to the Lifetime Deal now!

Our Launch Hosting Packages

Learn more about our Shared Hosting platform.

Novelty Factor Hosting has launched its shared hosting platform with three economical yet powerful packages: Website Builder Unlimited, WordPress Unlimited, and Linux Unlimited.

Website Builder Unlimited

Are you looking for an easy and affordable way to create a professional website? Look no further than our website builder! With our user-friendly interface and customizable templates, you can have your website up and running in no time. Plus, our point-and-click design tools make it easy for even the least tech-savvy individuals to create a stunning website. And with our affordable pricing ($4.99/mo), you won’t have to break the bank to get a website that looks like it was designed by a professional. Try our website builder today and see how easy it can be to create a website that stands out from the crowd.

Website Builder Unlimited includes:

  • Easy to use builder gets you up and running quickly
  • Unlimited* space and bandwidth (no more paying extra for traffic spikes)
  • Automatic backups for 30-days
  • Unlimited 10GB e-mail accounts
  • Auto-scaling with distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection

Learn more and purchase a Website Builder Unlimited package today!

WordPress Unlimited

If you use WordPress, you can benefit from our customized WordPress platform. We don’t simply repackage regular shared hosting as “WordPress Hosting”. Instead, we have gone the extra mile to create a completely separate managed platform that is optimized for WordPress speed and security. Our lightning-fast StackCache caching, MySQL resource handling, and automatic WordPress core updates are all designed to provide you with the best experience possible. This is all supported by top-notch hardware and support services.

Automatic WordPress updates: always forget to update WordPress or simply have too many installs? Don’t worry; we automatically update your core WordPress installs with the latest security fixes and new features as soon as they’re released.

Built-in plugin monitoring: our systems are always running checks to identify any potentially abusive plugins and automatically block any that may put your website at risk or significantly impact performance.

StackCache: this unique plugin enhances your website caching on our built-in content delivery network (CDN) for consistently quick loading speeds. It works automatically, but you can manage it yourself directly from your WordPress Dashboard if you prefer.

WordPress Tools: create WordPress staging sites in one click and manage your everyday WordPress tasks from your easy-to-use control panel.

WordPress Unlimited includes:

  • Unlimited* space and bandwidth (no more paying extra for traffic spikes)
  • Automatic backups for 30-days
  • Unlimited 10GB e-mail accounts
  • Choose and configure PHP version
  • Auto-scaling with distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection
  • One 1GB database

Learn more and purchase a WordPress Unlimited package today!

Linux Unlimited

Our powerful, bespoke hosting platform has been designed for you by experts with over twenty years of industry experience. We provide you with unbeatable load-balanced cloud hosting, meaning there’s no single point of failure, and your website performance will never be affected by other users’ websites, visitors, or activity.

Build the website you’ve always wanted – Whether you want to create a hobby blog or a business website, we’ve got you covered. Build your own e-commerce store, photo gallery, portfolio, social network, or anything else you can think of in seconds with our range of 80+ one-click installs.

Don’t Do It Yourself!

Setting up your own server in the cloud is undeniably expensive. You would need to license an operating system, control panel, anti-virus, and firewall and pay for server space. Moreover, for auto-scaling, you would need load balancers (more servers) and possibly even a suite like Kubernetes. From our experience, this could cost you a minimum of $75 per month (one server, at minimum) but could quickly soar into the hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Let us handle all of this for you at a low monthly cost. Why waste your time and money when you can work smarter, not harder, with our help?

Linux Unlimited includes:

  • Includes Website Builder
    • For optimal Website Builder experience, please use the Website Builder package
  • Unlimited* space and bandwidth (no more paying extra for traffic spikes)
  • Automatic backups for 30-days
  • Unlimited 1GB databases
  • Unlimited 10GB e-mail accounts
  • Choose and configure PHP version
  • Auto-scaling with distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection

Learn more and purchase a Website Builder Unlimited package today!

Our Infrastructure

Unlike with other web hosts, your website isn’t tied to one single server but makes use of a whole platform, meaning that you get incredible reliability and speed at an unbelievably low price.

Traditional shared hosting performance is subject to how much traffic you get and what other users are doing, but our platforms are load-balanced and automatically scale to meet resource demands at no extra cost to you. Your website stays online and runs fast so you can concentrate on your business.

Learn more about our…

Hardware

Our data centers are equipped with premium hardware and the latest and greatest security and environmental technologies. With technicians onsite 24/7 every day of the year and a resilient national network for ultimate reliability, you can rest assured that your websites are safe with us.

We’ve invested heavily in our hardware to ensure optimal performance and a faultless design with no single point of failure. Each server has Dual Intel Xeon Scalable 12-core processors with hyper-threading, presenting 48 logical cores and 64GB DDR4 RAM. All MySQL databases are hosted on the same type of Intel Xeon servers but with 192GB RAM and SSD storage.

We’ve developed an incredibly resilient high-performance storage platform utilizing 100% SSD storage arrays in a RAID 10 configuration with battery-backed hardware RAID cards. Storage arrays are then replicated across multiple servers, so in the highly unlikely event that disks, arrays, or entire servers fail there will be no downtime or impact to your site. We take daily data backups stored at a secured offsite facility. We also run our bespoke Web Application Firewall that continually monitors and filters out threatening requests before they can even target your website.

Our hosting servers run on 100% renewable energy and have a power usage efficiency ratio as low as 1.12. Learn more about our green hosting.

Feature-Rich Control Panel

Manage your websites, databases, email, files, and every other aspect of your hosting account straight from your bespoke control panel. We’ve developed it ourselves to ensure a sleek, modern, and user-friendly experience.

As well as containing all the practical features you need, your control panel comes with lots of valuable extras, including a range of website tools and 80+ one-click installs of popular software titles such as WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, Magento, OpenCart, and more.

Learn more about our Control Panel.

Built-In Content Deliver Network (CDN)

A content delivery network (CDN) makes your websites load faster, wherever your users are. A CDN isn’t a replacement for your web hosting: it’s an extra way to increase the speed of your site globally.

How does a CDN work?

A CDN will store a copy of the public content from your website on servers worldwide. So instead of it being stored at one or two data centers, it’s stored at dozens. These data centers are located at key locations in Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Australia. They’re the same data centers that are used by the likes of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

So, if someone visits your website, they’ll receive the content from the data center closest to them.

Why do I need a faster website?

A fast-loading website has lots of advantages:

  • Your users are more likely to spend time on your website if everything loads quickly
  • Mobile users and those on slow networks or expensive data plans will be catered-for
  • Faster sites are given preferential treatment in Google, improving your SEO

How else can a CDN help me?

As well as improving performance, it also makes your website more stable. As there will be fewer network ‘hops’ from your user’s device to the data center, there are likely to be any problems with the connection.

Is it complicated?

Not at all – you can activate the CDN with a click and then forget about it. But if you want to find out more, you can see detailed usage statistics and make granular customizations to how it works. You can also use it to block users from particular locations.

Are there any limits?

No – unlike any other CDNs, there are no bandwidth limits.

Web Optimization

As part of our CDN, we also give you tools to make your website faster. One of those tools is modpagespeed, otherwise known as our Web Optimizer. The optimizer can do many things including compressing and optimizing your website’s files: images and code.

For example, for images, it will:

  • Compress them so the file size is smaller, without any visible loss of quality
  • Resize them if they’re too large for the page
  • Convert them to next-generation image formats
  • Apply lazy loading, so images that can’t be seen won’t be loaded until they’re needed

For code, it will ‘minify’ it, stripping out white space and making the file sizes smaller, so your website will load quicker.

It does all this automatically when it’s turned on. You can use our ‘one-click optimization’ to quickly give your website a speed boost or go into detail and tweak over 30 different options. Try it out today – and see your Google PageSpeed scores rise.

Security Features

Free Wildcard SSL Certificate

If your website has any way in which to pass over information – even a contact form – then it should use an SSL certificate. Sites covered by an SSL have the ‘https://’ URL. HTTPS protects the user by encrypting the information that goes from their device to the website servers.

Having an SSL certificate has other advantages, too. Google uses it as a signal of the site’s ‘quality.’ So by having one, you’ll have an advantage in the search results over websites that don’t.

Our SSL certificates are ‘wildcard,’ meaning that they cover subdomains too: like blog.yoursite.com, for example.

Our Data Centers

Our data centers are fully secure and are ISO27001:2013 certified. Their security features include:

  • Redundant power supplies so that your site stays online
  • Gated access with photo ID and swipe card entry
  • 24/7 security, with CCTV inside and out

PCI Compliance: Safe For Business

Our servers are Payment Card Industry (PCI) Compliant. This means that our hosting servers are certified to be safe for online stores taking card payments, and they undergo regular audits. PCI standards are enforced through a group of major credit and debit card companies, like Visa, MasterCard, and American Express.

Malware Scanning

Having malware on your site can be disastrous. It can compromise your security, leading to fraud or identity theft. It can harm your reputation and performance in the search engines. Your website will be checked for malware daily with our Malware Scanning service. We’ll let you know if any malware is found and advise you on how to remove it. You can also scan on demand, so once you’ve made changes, you can check that it’s been resolved.

WordPress Checksum Report

As WordPress is so popular, it’s a popular target for criminal hackers. So we offer a WordPress checksum test. This checks the version of core WordPress stored in their repository against the one installed on our servers. We’ll notify you if there are differences between the official core version and yours, which could suggest that malware has been added.

File Permissions Checker

Are you sure that you have the correct permissions on your website files? If you don’t have the right permissions, someone might be able to access or change your data. Our file permissions checker will monitor your permissions and suggest what to change if it spots any potential problems.

DDoS Protection

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks usually happen when it’s reported that a website has been ‘taken down by hackers.’ It involves flooding a server with fake requests as if millions of new people are visiting the site. This will prevent genuine users from accessing the site.

Our DDoS protection will filter out DDoS attacks. It can handle attacks of over 1 terabit per second, so even the most significant attacks will be mitigated.

Email Security

Emails can be a security risk, so we scan incoming emails for viruses and similar malware, blocking them before they reach your inbox.

Spam is controlled by being filtered through anti-spam deny lists and content checkers. You’re given complete control to allow certain emails from domains that might otherwise go straight into your junk mail.

Emails also have another layer of security through DKIM authentication, protecting you and those you send emails to against impersonation. Our servers have an excellent reputation, so your mail will never have problems being delivered.

Web Application Firewall: Secure Your Apps

Criminals might try to look for vulnerabilities in your applications, like your database, for example. Our web application firewall will help protect you by scanning for attempts to hack your site. It will look for attacks involving trojans, cross-site scripting, SQL injection, path traversal, and other ways to gain access to your files. We use both commercial tools and bespoke rules written by ourselves.

Protecting Your Passwords

One of the most common ways for websites to be compromised is through cybercriminals knowing your password. To help protect you, you can set up two-factor authentication on your hosting control panel so you get an extra level of security on your login. It involves using a code on your mobile device.

We also allow you to password-protect certain areas of your website. Our strong password generator will help you create difficult-to-guess passwords, and you can lock FTP behind a password.

Brute-Force Login Protection

Another avenue of attack is by ‘brute force’: using software to try multiple variants of common and short passwords in an attempt to guess the correct one. We have systems in place that will detect automated attempts at brute forcing passwords through trial and error and use Google reCAPTCHA to detect genuine users.

Block Visitors

If you wish to block certain visitors from your website, you can. You can prevent whole countries from getting to your website or block by individual IP addresses. You can use simple rules like ‘allow all, except’ or ‘block all, except.’

Backups

It is essential to ensure the security of your website by having a recent backup available. You can choose to create manual backups or use our free and reliable automatic backup service, ‘Timeline Backups.’ This advanced service takes daily snapshots of your files and databases, which are safely stored for thirty days and can be easily restored with a simple click of a button.

Email

Secure and reliable email for business or personal use – Email is still the top choice for digital communication, whether you’re managing a business or staying in touch with loved ones. However, we often overlook its importance until an issue arises.

Email accounts that won’t let you down – Our email system utilizes advanced technologies that prioritize security and privacy. We believe that by ensuring your safety, we can maintain a positive standing with email service providers, thus eliminating the possibility of your emails being redirected to the “junk” folder.

Hosted Email Features

  • Keeping you in touch anywhere – We provide you with various options to access your email, whether it’s through a quick and easy browser-based user interface or dedicated apps such as Outlook. You can access your email from anywhere and on any device.
  • Keeping you fast and online – If the servers for websites become overloaded or malfunction with certain providers, it can also impact your email. However, with our email services, we utilize completely separate, fully redundant servers to ensure that you always receive your messages.
  • Keeping you safe – Our security measures include multiple levels of protection. Our network automatically scans emails for viruses to prevent any harmful programs from infecting your device.
  • Keeping you free from email spam – Our system utilizes advanced scanning techniques to filter out any unwanted emails from your inbox. Additionally, we implement global email deny lists to ensure your privacy is protected. Moreover, you have the option to configure your own allow and deny lists, which you can use to either block or receive messages that may have otherwise been filtered out.
  • Keeping an excellent reputation – To maintain our reputation, we have a policy against our customers sending mass marketing emails to thousands of users. This policy has earned us the approval of service providers such as AOL, BT, Google, and Microsoft.
  • Keeping you confident of delivery – To maintain your domain’s reputation and ensure the legitimacy of your messages, we utilize SPF for protection and DKIM for authentication. Rest assured that your emails will always reach their intended recipients.
  • Keeping you in control – Our email service offers all the necessary features, including email forwarding to another address, ‘out of office’ messaging, signatures, and ample storage. Migrating your current email accounts to us is a quick and simple process.

Support

We offer an array of manuals and instructional materials in our support database to assist you in any way you need. Furthermore, we provide personalized support through your control panel, ensuring that you receive expert assistance from professionals who have a deep understanding of our services and platforms. You can rest assured that our support team is based in the United States, and we never outsource, guaranteeing that you always receive prompt and comprehensive assistance.

Visit the docs!

Supporting The Creative Community

Committed To Open-Source

Novelty Factor Hosting is part of Original Pursuits LLC ‘s “Be Gay. Do Crime.” initiative . This means that profit from the hosting service will be used towards developing programs, services, open-source tools, and other materials to help empower creative individuals in their endeavors. This includes helping fund the following Original Pursuits LLC  projects:

How To Program Anything (A Computational Foundation)

How To Program Anything (HTPA) aims to provide clear, comprehensive, accessible, and educational programming resources that integrate the theoretical scientist’s knowledge with the practical engineer’s methods. Resources are free to access, free to share (Content License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 , Project License(s): MIT License ), and remain ad-free (and unbiased) through the support of our users on Patreon . Visit How To Program Anything .

Press Accept Software

Press Accept Software builds open-source software. Here, you’ll discover top-notch open-source software that will assist in achieving your creative or entrepreneurial goals. Our software builds are licensed permissively to ensure that your projects remain flexible. We take pride in providing premium quality solutions. Take your projects to the next level! Visit Press Accept Software .

Original Pursuits Society

The Original Pursuits Society (OPS) is dedicated to empowering creative individuals. We understand the challenges of pursuing your creative passions, whether you’re an artist, writer, or entrepreneur. Our mission is to provide you with the resources and tools you need to achieve your goals at the highest level. You can unleash your potential and bring your projects to life with our support. Join us and become part of a community that values creativity, innovation, and collaboration. Visit Original Pursuits Society .

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