DotNest blog

  • DotNest is 10 years old - celebrate with our special offer!

    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.

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  • DotNest upgraded to Orchard Core 1.7

    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.

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  • Your DotNest site (almost) never goes down

    You're trusting DotNest with your Orchard sites because you want some convenient, flexible, and reliable hosting. It's surely convenient (just a couple of clicks and you have an Orchard website running), and it brings all the flexibility of Orchard Core and Orchard 1. However, about that reliable part: How reliable is DotNest, actually? Pretty damn reliable! So, let's look behind the scenes and see some numbers.

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  • Cloudflare CDN and protection for all DotNest sites

    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!

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  • Revamping Ik wil een taart: migrating an old version of Orchard Core website with custom theme and commerce logic to DotNest

    Migrating the content of an old version of an Orchard Core website with a custom theme and with modifications in the business logic of the Orchard Core Commerce module to DotNest? Yes, it is possible! This case study explores how we achieved this with Ik wil een taart, a confectionery in the Netherlands, by migrating the content of the website running on the RC2 version of Orchard Core to the latest one, on DotNest. The site is a client of Princen group, which is a Dutch company, specialized in web development since 1992, offering secure, user-friendly, and scalable digital solutions.

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  • Custom domains now available for your Orchard Core sites - free for open-source

    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.

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  • A personal blog with theming on DotNest - case study

    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.

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