Hover’s 2017 – A Year in Review

The end of 2017 is rapidly approaching, and our Product and Development teams are enjoying a couple of weeks off to recharge and get ready for the challenges that 2018 will bring.

With that in mind, it seemed like a good time to reflect on all the changes and improvements they brought to Hover over the course of the year.

New Control Panel!

The year started off with a big push to get the completely new Hover Control Panel completed and rolled out to all customers. We officially cut over all customers to our new Control Panel in June after a few months in a “preview” to get the bugs worked out.

The new Control Panel was a multiple-year effort involving our Product, Design, UX and Development teams! All the work done lays down a strong foundation on which we can continue to add new features that make it easier and faster to manage your Hover domains and services.

Lots of User Testing

During the months-long “preview” phase, we improved the user experience for numerous areas of the Control Panel based on extensive user testing and feedback from customers. We also improved navigation on smaller screens (phones/tablets) with a new mobile menu.

Special thanks to everyone who provided feedback through emails to our Support team or via tweets or other channels. We also really appreciate all those who took time to answer one of our surveys or participate in interviews with our UX team.

Bulk Tools, Improved Domain Management

With the new Control Panel launched, the summer months were focused on adding a new bulk tools system and multiple new bulk tools for things like domain contact updates, toggles of auto-renew and transfer lock settings, and name server changes. Plus we added the ability to set your own default name servers for all new domain registrations and a clearer way to manage your default WHOIS contact.

TLD-specific updates included support for ICANN’s new trades process, and we also added support for updating owner contacts on .ca domains meaning Canadians no longer needed to call or email support to update certain contacts.

Tiered Price Domains and New TLDs

In the fall, Hover rolled out complete support for Tiered Price domains (aka Registry Premiums) including new registrations, renewals and transfers in. This greatly increases the number of domains available in our domain search and provides more choice and options when looking for the perfect domain for your passion or business.

We enabled the usual crop of new gTLDs over the course of the year, although the pace of new gTLD launches was quite slow this year compared to the previous years. The entire domain industry awaits the next big batch of new gTLD launches coming in the next couple of years.

Better Emails, More Security and New Ways to Pay

Starting early in 2017 and continuing through the summer and fall, we moved to a new system for our transactional (i.e. non-marketing) emails. All Hover emails are now in HTML, and we rewrote and rethought all of the information in each email to provide more or better information and clear calls to action wherever possible.

On the security front, we added a “new sign in notification via email” option and we also updated the PIN verification system that the Hover Support Team uses to support 2FA. That allows us to provide faster, more effective support to customers with 2FA enabled.

And last but not least, early in the year we also added support for Apple Pay on the Web which makes it super easy for customers to checkout and pay. Customers can pay for Hover domains and services with all major credit cards, PayPal, and now Apple Pay.