Serverius Changelog time!
We have spent a lot of effort on better logging and insights in recent weeks. Logging messages have been rewritten to be much more informative to the user, logging has been added to loads of background processes, and the log pages in the dashboard have been improved.
The most exciting new (beta) feature added is website caching. This is a huge step in our mission to make websites more secure _and_ performant. With our growing global presence, a cached website will be lightning-fast which will be highly appreciated by your users and the Google search-ranking bots! The feature is in open beta, and in the coming months, we will extend its functionality based on all feedback received.
Another giant new feature is the integrated website security scanner. Each website can be scanned automatically on a schedule, giving the user insight and control over its security. It will score the website and, in a future update, automatically notify the user of any changes. The scan report offers many tips on improving website security and the best configuration.
The "dynamic blacklist" feature has proven to be very effective against malicious activity, like brute-force and DDoS attacks. Through clever multi-layered rate-limiting, a website can be protected from all kinds of malicious bots. Once a bot is identified, it can be added to a blacklist automatically, rendering its attacks harmless. We have added logging and insights into this process. The "Top-Talkers" feature on the "IP black & whitelist" page will show real-time insights into the number of blocked requests, etc. We added a new global blacklist feature to allow blocking IP addresses for all active websites.
One of the key design decisions from day one was to log every request and every "decision" made about each request. This gives us precious information to inform the user about the website traffic, and it provides us operational data to help our customers and debug potential issues. Many of these log messages were very technical and could only be really understood by our own skilled developers. To make these messages more informative to our users, we have implemented a translation system that should turn them into plain English :)
The Let's Encrypt system has received many updates to both be more informative to the user and handle more possible failure scenarios. Due to the many subtle ways a certificate request can fail, we keep finding room for improvement in the system. The success rate has improved drastically and keeps increasing with every update we do.