The New Hover Control Panel is Here

Starting today, the new Hover Control Panel is the default way to manage domains and services for all customers.

Over the last few months since we made our new Control Panel available as a preview, we’ve done a ton of user testing, fixed a big pile of bugs and worked on completing the remaining sections like Account Settings. Thanks a bunch to everyone who tried it out, completed surveys, did interviews with our UX team and provided feedback through customer support.

Ready to Roll

Based on that testing, and our own extensive usage of the Control Panel to manage our domains, we’re pretty confident that it’s more than ready to be the preferred way for customers interact with Hover from now on.

It’s a big change, to be sure. For those of you who prefer to ease into change like this, the old dashboard is still there and you can use it for the next month or two if that’s your preference. Just click the link in the banners at the top of any page in the new Control Panel and we’ll take you back to old, familiar Hover.

Our plan right now is to turn off access to that old dashboard around June 30, so please do take some time to get yourself familiar with the new one before then. We’re continuing to do a ton of testing with users to make sure that any remaining bugs or issues are stamped out before then.

Some highlights of the new experience:

• A better domain list with more information about your domains including the admin email address and whether there are mailboxes associated with each domain.
• A new “domain dashboard” for each domain that lets you see what you are doing with the domain along with seeing and managing contacts, and settings.
• An improved Hover Connect experience with more information about the various services that you can connect your domain to.
• Superior DNS management with more help and validation as you add or edit DNS records.
• A brand new Account Settings section with an Account overview (similar to the domain dashboard) that provides all key information about your Hover account on a single page.

…and much more!

In addition to the refresh of the domain and email management experience, we’ve added some new features:

• You can now edit your contact details on .ca and .uk domains without calling support and toggle WHOIS Privacy on and off for those extensions.
• There are better views for domains in states other than “active”. Transferring in, pending registration, and other states now let you see the information we have access to and give you better insights into what’s going on with that domain name.

As we said in our last post when we started the preview phase for Control Panel, this was a huge bit of work – one of the biggest projects we’ve taken on since Hover was launched back in 2009. There’s always some trepidation when you embark on a large project like this that will have impacts across all users. We started work on design and user experience well over a year ago, and our development team began turning it into reality in the middle of 2016.

We’re not “done” improving

We know that our work on Hover is never really “done”. There’s always areas that can be improved and features that can be added.

For example, while the new Control Panel is designed to be great on smaller screens like tablets and mobile phones, we still have work to do to really make it perfect on those devices. It’s far better than the old dashboard was, but we’ll continue to make it better over time.

This new Control Panel also provides us with a great new foundation on which to build more features and services that will help you go from idea to reality more quickly whether you are registering and setting up your first domain, or if you are an Internet expert managing dozens or hundreds of domains.