5 Killer Features We’ve Got Up Our Sleeve
Updated on 05.02.2016
The last few months have served as a massive learning curve for the whole team here at Tap. Although the majority of you reading this will consider Tap as a new kid on the block, a young and energetic startup whose launch came with a recent Product Hunt feature, we’ve actually been running since 2014. You’ll be forgiven for thinking that though as the last few months have seen more progress and user growth than the entirety of our existence. Why? We went agile.
We’d been working on Tap v3.0 (the thing that got featured on Product Hunt) for a good few months, tweaking and refactoring code, debating new design directions and filibustering a new content strategy for our blog. That all changed dramatically one night when our CTO Pete sent the team a message on Slack saying “We’re launching tonight. Everyone get their laptops, we’re going to go live and hotfix as we go”. It was terrifying, stressful and the best thing we could’ve done. If we hadn’t we wouldn’t have seen the surge in new users we have, all giving us incredible feedback that we’re really listening to. This isn’t a post about the merits of an agile methodology, maybe that will come later, I just wanted to give a bit of background to why we’re planning the ambitious development schedule I’m about to outline.
So what’s to come? Well, committed to an agile approach, we’ve earmarked the following features for rapid development over the coming months;
1. phpMyAdmin, Tap Style
We’re currently experimenting with our very own version of the age old MySQL interface. We’re making sure it looks, feels and works right before we roll it out to our users.
2. Better Domain Setup
We’re well aware the current way you tie your domains to your Tap hosting isn’t the effortless, instinctive process we all want from a web host but we’re working on that. We want to reinvent the way you spin up a WordPress site on a custom domain and bring it down to as few clicks as possible.
3. CDN
This isn’t a huge priority for us as we’re built on the incredibly powerful and omnipresent Google Cloud Platform. This means that the demand for a CDN isn’t as strong as it might be with hosts built on other platforms, however, a lot of users have presented a need for it still so we’re investigating the best approach to take.
4. One Click Backup Restore
We’ve worked hard to automate backups and give you the piece of mind that comes with knowing your site is replicated and stored off site somewhere safe everyday but we know backups are much more useful when you can click a button to restore a previous snapshot of your site. Leave it with us, we’re on it!
5. Automated, Free SSL
This one’s under wraps but I think we can all guess where we’re going with this. Update coming very soon. (update: feature launched on 04.02.2016)
Further to these 5 bad boy, killer features, we’re also tweaking the small stuff and implementing neat new tools all the time.
Some more minor stuff we’re planning to roll out soon;
- Password protected sites
- More control over flushing your cache
- Multiple SFTP accounts
- Better billing management
We’re aware we’re not the most feature rich provider out there but we don’t want to be either. We’re committed to building features our users want, not what our founders want, and we’re not going to bloat the system with features nobody’s asked for. We’re collating feedback from a range of sources so get in touch from your dashboard, tweet us @wearetap, emails us at hello@thisistap.com or comment on this post if you have anything you want to add to the roadmap. But remember, don’t tell anyone.
Comments