Do you want to host an Orchard Core site on DotNest for your company, club, NGO, or otherwise do you want to use something like mysite.com for it? Now, this is available!

For just $25/month, you can not only use your custom domain instead of the default mysite.dotnest.net one, but you can also remove the DotNest footer from it. Unlimited customization for your Orchard Core site! If you run an open-source project that you'd like to host your site for, then let us know, because we can provide you this service for free.

You have quite a lot of options if you want to start a personal website, or something like a blog nowadays. You can use services like Medium or Substack, but my problem with those is that ultimately, you don't have complete control over how your content is published and how people may consume it. Monetization wasn't my concern either. I wanted something simple, where I can be sure that people will be able to read my quips without any of the contemporary online marketing tools intruding (hello, profiling and soft paywalls!). Having been an Orchard developer for more than a decade, perhaps let's just use Orchard Core for this too? So, I quickly created a DotNest site and got going.

Back in 2021 we announced the beta of the Orchard Core edition of DotNest. Since then, both Orchard Core and the DotNest platform matured a lot, and we added much-demanded features for e-commerce and theming. You could get Orchard Core sites on DotNest, of course, but not in a completely self-service manner. This has now changed, and creating Orchard Core sites is just two clicks!

When you run your Orchard Core site on DotNest, there are some limitations that you need to keep in mind. These are inherent to the multi-tenant nature of DotNest: We can provide you with super-simple, fast, convenient Orchard Core hosting because when you set up your site, you'll get a slot in the same app as everyone else. We always want to push boundaries though. So now, we introduce full theming for your DotNest sites with Media Theme!

While for a little bit more DotNest Core remains in beta, we've continuously worked on improving the platform. Keeping up to date with the latest Orchard Core releases, adding smaller new features, improving the hosting story so we can provide a more reliable platform for you... But now we have a big new feature to announce: Orchard Core Commerce, the e-commerce solution for Orchard Core, is now available on all DotNest sites!

Orchard Core, the next edition of Orchard CMS built on .NET Core/.NET 5 reached v1.0 last week. This is then probably the best time to build the Orchard Core version of DotNest - which is here!

Updates are not always flashy spectacular new features - sometimes they're just things that work the best if you don't even notice them. In the last months we've deployed a lot of these (hope you didn't notice!), so let's quickly see what we've been working on to make DotNest better for you!

It's always great to see when the technologies developed by us are serving scientific research, something we at Lombiq are quite keen on. This time Orchard and DotNest proved to be useful for the Virtual Photonics Technology Initiative, who work on open-source computational (virtual) technologies for the Biomedical Optics community. So let's see what they have built!