It's incredible to think about it, but DotNest just turned 10 today. Yes, we started on the 4th of March, 2014! While we're primarily an Orchard Core SaaS today, at that time, it was Orchard 1, of course. And since then, you've chosen us to host almost 6700 Orchard sites - wow, thank you! We wanted to celebrate this unique occasion with a very special limited offer; read on to see what you can get now if you launch a new site on DotNest. You can create an Orchard Core site on DotNest any time for free. However, we offer some premium features too. The most popular paid feature is the ability to use a custom domain name (like example.com) with your DotNest site, instead of the default example.dotnest.net one. If you purchase that service for a whole year, then we give you a month for free. But now, to celebrate 10 years of us working together, for every new site you can have an additional 10% off of this yearly fee! Instead of $275, one year of custom domain usage now is only $248. But this is not all. You can do a lot with your DotNest site, as you can see from the knowledge base. While we have everything documented, having a mentor for this, who gives you some guidance and a helping hand surely makes it easier. We've done this with many companies and individuals before, as you can see from our case studies. And now we'd be happy to help you, too: If you launch your new site, we'll provide you with one hour of expert one one-on-one consulting! Do you want to launch your DotNest site and use this special offer? Be sure to do it before the end of March, because we'll have this in our birthday month only! Contact us to make use of this limited opportunity and we'll get you going.

Do you want to learn about the most important Orchard Core features with a hands-on tutorial that guides you with interactive tooltips, right there in Orchard Core? We now have a module available for you! We recently added the Lombiq Walkthroughs for Orchard Core module to the selection available to all DotNest sites. This module teaches you the Orchard Core fundamentals by guiding you through step-by-step tutorials right there on the Orchard Core admin. Popups and tooltips tell you what to look for and what to do, as well as they include links to further recommended resources. Check out a demo video of this module here. And now you can use it right away on DotNest! Just create a new DotNest site, select the Walkthroughs recipe when running its setup, and you'll get a neat Orchard Core tutorial starting right on the homepage!

Orchard Core, the CMS behind DotNest sites is constantly improved by its community, including us. Now it got its v1.7 release, which is available on all DotNest sites too. The community recently released the latest 1.7 version of Orchard Core with several new features and additions! There's a new SMS and SMS Notifications module that provides a way to send SMS messages and notifications to users using SMS services. And by utilizing the new two-factor SMS Method feature, you can also transmit a two-factor authentication code to the user via SMS. And yes, this means that starting with version 1.7, Orchard Core is shipped with everything you need to secure your app with two-factor authentication. The Lucene and Elasticsearch features are capable of searching within PDF files because PDF files are indexed by default. As an enhancement, we added a new feature called Media Indexing which extends the media indexing capability to also encompass searching within files with the following extensions .txt, .md, .docx, and .pptx. And we have a lot more to cover! Check out all the details of the release in the official release notes. All of the DotNest sites can now use these new features, and the other improvements that the new version brings, because we upgraded the platform to Orchard Core 1.7 too. Actually, your site already used a pre-release version of 1.7 for a few weeks, due to us updating to it to get some bug fixes. Enjoy the latest and greatest Orchard Core version! There shouldn't be any problems apart from this obscure one, but if you notice anything, please don't hesitate to get in touch with us via our support channels.

If you're hosting your Orchard Core or Orchard 1 site on DotNest, you don't have to worry about a lot of things, like the basic security and speed of your site. That's kind of the point, right? Now the good news is, that we improved both the security and speed of your website with a service called Cloudflare, that you don't have to worry about either! Cloudflare is a great service that can sit in front of your site and make it a lot better by providing the following and a lot more: Automatically renewed SSL certificates so the communication between users and your site can't be eavesdropped. We already had secure connections for your sites forever, but this is even better. Speed up by utilizing Cloudflare's worldwide Content Delivery Network (CDN). When a user visits your site, instead of their browser downloading the content directly from DotNest's servers, which are on the East coast of the US, they'll now download it from one of Cloudflare's close CDN nodes. This can make things a lot faster, especially if that content was already requested by somebody else from the area, thus making it available from the local node's cache. Security features, e.g. masking e-mail addresses from spam crawlers, defending against spam pots, and offering DDoS protection. And all of this is now available for all DotNest sites! BTW if you used a custom domain, our recommendation has long been to use Cloudflare for that too. Do you want to see for yourself how a DotNest site works together with Cloudflare? Create one here for free!

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. If you had a subscription during the DotNest Core beta, using the old Orchard 1 custom domain usage service, then don't worry, your fees won't change.For more info on how you can use your custom domains, see this knowledge base article.

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! To get your free Orchard Core DotNest site, just open the usual site creation screen here, and select Orchard Core as the Orchard Edition. You'll get the full power of Orchard Core right away! Check out the knowledge base to see what you can do on DotNest. Note that you can't yet delete an Orchard Core site or use a custom domain with it in a self-service manner. However, both are coming, and if you'd like to use your custom domain right now, just let us know and we can set it up. Are you ready for the easiest Orchard Core hosting ever? Create your site here!

As you can see we swapped out the old clunky look of DotNest with a fresh new one! Everything was re-hauled. Oh, and of course it is, just as the old one, responsive. But in a better way! We hope this new DotNest is a lot more pleasant for your eyes!