Featuring Interview with our ColdFusion Admin Kelsey

   So far this year our team at Hostek has been hard at work in solidifying our infrastructure, coming up with new ideas to help our customers experience, and listening to the feedback of our customers on the issues they are facing or most concerned about.  Today I will be talking about what plans we have in store. This includes attending the ColdFusion Summit and what to expect regarding ColdFusion, upcoming technical changes in Q2, new AI-driven workflow improvements for our support team, and a quick reminder about the role of shared hosting in our platform. We’ll also include an interview with our ColdFusion Administrator, Kelsey, to give a behind-the-scenes look at what we’re looking forward to at the summit and how it benefits our customers.

Headed to the ColdFusion Summit!  

As we head into the second quarter of the year, our team is preparing for one of our long-standing traditions—attending the ColdFusion Summit in Las Vegas from June 20- June 23rd . Each year the event gives us a chance to connect with the ColdFusion community, learn about upcoming platform changes, and bring back insights that help us improve the hosting environment and support we provide to our customers. Coming with Josh this year will be Kelsey and Vlad! We will have a booth setup and have some sweet Giveaways! If you are attending give us a shout! We hope to see you there! 
 
Speaking of ColdFusion, we wanted to take this time to talk about Hostek’s Plans for the year 2026 and ColdFusion. With the release of ColdFusion 2025, we evaluated whether it would fit into our upcoming infrastructure upgrades. Because ColdFusion 2025 does not currently include official support for Windows Server 2025, we will not be deploying it in our shared hosting environment. Instead, we plan to maintain our current platform and target the next release, ColdFusion 2026, for a smoother transition.  
 
For customers who require specific versions, our VPS/cloud environments offer full flexibility. VPS customers can deploy and run any supported version of ColdFusion from 2018 and newer, allowing for custom configurations and upgrade timelines that best fit their applications. Note, Adobe did NOT make CF 2025 compatible with Windows 2025, so it is only available for Windows 2022 and lower.

Technical Updates & Platform Improvements

We are continuing a series of infrastructure upgrades across our platform to improve stability, security, and long-term performance. 

Windows Shared Hosting Platform 

Our Windows shared hosting environment, including the shared ColdFusion platform, is currently being upgraded to Windows Server 2022, with plans to move to Windows Server 2025 later this year as part of our long-term platform lifecycle. 

As part of that transition, non-authenticated SMTP will be retired, and customers using legacy email configurations may need to update their applications. 

Additional platform updates include: 

• MySQL servers used by the Windows environment are being upgraded and will move to MariaDB 11.4 (LTS) by the end of Q2, providing improved performance and long-term support. 

• Shared Lucee hosting servers are also scheduled for upgrades in the coming months. 

• Microsoft SQL Server upgrades for the shared platform have now been fully completed. 

These upgrades help ensure the Windows platform remains secure, modern, and reliable for our customers. 

Behind the Scenes: Support Improvements and AI intergration

 
We are introducing new AI capabilities within our support platform to help answer common questions and routine requests, allowing our support engineers to focus more on complex technical issues. 
 
As part of this update, we are also transitioning to a ticket-first support model. Customers will continue to use the same support widget on our website, but requests will now be submitted as tickets rather than live chat conversations. This allows our team to properly track issues, review logs when needed, and ensure requests move through to resolution. 

We are also updating our public documentation and improving integration between our support and billing systems. This will help so that future responses can better reflect each customer’s specific services and environment.

Keep Your Business Running Smoothly

We’d like to take this time to remind you all of our statements of support. Shared hosting is NOT meant for businesses. Shared hosting is great for small sites and personal projects, but because resources are shared, performance and email reliability can sometimes be affected by other users. 

If your website is critical to your business or powers everyday workflows, upgrading to a VPS or Enterprise plan is the safest way to ensure stability, dedicated resources, and faster support when you need it including access to Phone support. 

Want to explore the best option for your business? Visit hostek.com/consult—and don’t forget, new services are 20% off through the end of April! 
 
* 20% is for new services only for existing customers. Any cancellations of other products/services will negate the 20% discount. 

Get to know Kelsey!

With the ColdFusion Summit just around the corner, we sat down with Kelsey, our ColdFusion Administrator, to learn more about her journey, her role at Hostek, and her insights on keeping ColdFusion running smoothly. From daily server updates to tips for developers, Kelsey shares what makes ColdFusion such a versatile platform and what she’s most excited about for this year’s summit. 
 
———————————————————— 
Tasha Hunter – “Thank you so much for joining us, Kelsey. We are really excited to have you here, our ColdFusion Administrator for Hostek. With the upcoming ColdFusion Summit, we thought it would be great to sit down with you and talk a little bit about you and the role that you have here at Hostek. To start off, tell us a little about yourself and your background in IT.”  
 
Kelsey – “Yeah, sure. So I don’t have much of a background in IT before Hostek. This was my first one after I completed my bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. So I got really lucky that I found a good place to work, you know, first try. And that was, I think, almost three years ago now. Yeah, it’ll be three years this July. So I’ve loved every minute of it. And it’s been challenging and fun and all the good things.” 
 
Tasha – “Wow, that is really cool. I did not know that about you. So we’re all learning together here. Let me ask this. When did you realize you wanted to even work with IT?” 

Kelsey – “Well, I was at a point where I was kind of considering what I had been going to school for, which was nursing in the footsteps of my mom, actually, which seemed the obvious choice. But when that didn’t really click, I just kind of took a step back and thought about what I really enjoyed and what came naturally to me. And that was always computers and electronics. So I just went with it. I ran with it and it ended up being probably the best decision I ever made.” 
 
Tasha – “Heck yeah! Can you tell us a little about your role as ColdFusion Administrator and maybe what a typical day looks like?” 
 
Kelsey – “ Yeah, absolutely. So, the biggest thing that I do is oversee the shared servers, which doesn’t entail a lot. Once ColdFusion is installed, we just make sure that we have all of our monitoring set up so that we can keep up with anything that might be going on with it. We’re working really hard to make sure that all of our servers are updated right now. That’s been a really big part of my every day here at Hostek recently. Just upgrading, upgrading, upgrading, because we want to make sure we’re on the newest stuff and that we always have the latest to offer our customers. So that’s a lot of it. And then also looking at new things that we can implement to add value to the products and services that we already have.” 

Tasha – “Nice. That’s very cool. What is ColdFusion for someone that’s not familiar with this term? Maybe they have a website, maybe they, you know, are learning coding or getting into the world of hosting. Could you define what ColdFusion is for them?” 

 Kelsey – “Yeah, so it stands for ColdFusion Markup Language, CFML. That’s the language that’s used anyway. But it’s just an application server, kind of, different from IIS. It fuels everything on the site now. It used to be mainly just used in government applications but a lot of people are using it to just have any kind of sites now. I mean it’s tag based, which a lot of people like because it’s similar to html and actually flows a little bit with other languages these days but it can be used really for anything. We have some customers that just have ColdFusion set up to run a shop of theirs. They can have a little checkout area of all the products they have. Let me see… We see a lot of musicians and hobbyists using ColdFusion surprisingly to host their portfolios and events that they have going on, which is really cool. And then we also see some more like I’ve noticed that a lot of companies will use ColdFusion as their employee backend. They have employees that need to log in every day and maybe log some things on QuickBooks. I’ve seen ColdFusion used for that. And I think one of the things that’s really useful about it is that it works so well with a lot of different things. For example, ColdFusion and ASP. That’s another coding language that’s common on Windows. They work really well together. I know that ColdFusion is liked for its ability to do scheduled tasks and things like that so it really is very versatile in so many ways. It offers a lot of ways to make things easier for people. I’m always finding out new cool things about it so really. If you can think it, honestly, you could probably do it with ColdFusion.” 
 
Tasha – “Very cool.  All right. Well, that sounds very versatile. I’ve been learning about it as well. And it’s one of those things where you when you hear of like website building and things like that, I wasn’t really too familiar with ColdFusion until I came to Hostek as well. And like you said, working with it, it seems very, you know, so many reaches of the website world that it can really help with and help people adapt to. 

  What are some products that we have here at Hostek with ColdFusion?” 
 
Kelsey –  “So, what do you mean, like what kind of plans do we offer? We have our basic shared plans. Then, of course, we also have our dedicated servers, which really you could do anything on. There are a lot of ways to customize ColdFusion to meet different needs. If that’s something that is needed, then a dedicated server is definitely going to be the way to go for that service. As far as the different shared plans, we have a few different levels. Really the main difference between the three is how much disk space you get and Bandwidth. They all will be implemented with the same ColdFusion version. You can get either 5, 10 or 30 gigabytes of SSD storage. Other than that, you get the ability to make data sources so you can work with all of your databases with ColdFusion. And then you’ll still get all the other perks of share hosting to like smarter mail and smarter stats and things like that.”  
 
Tasha- “Nice. Awesome. Well, thank you for that. If you could give some advice to ColdFusion developers that are hosting ColdFusion apps what would it be? As an admin, I know you see issues every day. Maybe you have best practices or any advice for those developers out there.” 

Kelsey- “Honestly it would be updates. I know that it’s difficult, more so than I can imagine, because I don’t actually have development experience myself. But keeping things updated, because things change so fast, especially in this industry. They’re always coming out with a new version of something. And then between that, they’re coming out with different releases of the same version that are offering improvements. So, yeah, it’s just constantly moving. If you can keep up with it a little bit at a time, it can save so much headache and frustration later on when you realize that you’re, you know, several years behind on a few different things for your site. Now you’ve got to scramble to get everything updated at one time.” 

 Tasha – “That’s great advice! I see that issue commonly enough when we’re working the tickets, updating your site, not just ColdFusion, really anyone, WordPress, whatever you can update, update it. If you’re sitting around, you have nothing to do, the last episode of your show just ended and you’re like, what do I do now? Go update your site.”  
 
Kelsey – “Basically, yeah.” 

Tasha – “All right. Well, let’s talk about the ColdFusion Summit. Really exciting. I think that any company that tries to reach out and network with other people in the industry that are working with ColdFusion, I think that is such a wonderful thing to be a part of. And I’m so glad that our company takes the team, or a few members of the team, out there to represent us. So let’s get a little talk about that. What are you most looking forward to doing or seeing at the ColdFusion Summit this year?”  
 
Kelsey – “That’s a good question. For me, I’m most looking forward to the sessions that they have, which most of them are geared towards developers, which some of those can be helpful for me too, but they also have some that are really more for like systems administrator roles. I really learned a lot more than I expected last year in that. So I’m excited to see what they’re going to have this year.” 

 Tasha – “Yeah, awesome. I didn’t go last year, so I’m not quite sure exactly how they set it up. Is there any specific speakers from Hostek? Or are y’all setting up a booth? Or what type of things is Hostek going to be doing while you’re there?”  
 
Kelsey – “Yeah, we’ll definitely have a booth for both days. I think it’s usually two days. So we’ll have a booth and we’ll be there ready to talk and answer questions. We don’t have anybody speaking for Hostek, but we will have some new swag this time.” 
 
Tasha – “ Oh, swag, okay!” 
 
Kelsey –  “Yeah. We didn’t have the best swag last time. So yeah, we’re looking forward to it, because last year was our first year back. I’m excited to like reinforce the annual tradition now of us coming every year again representing that Hostek brand.” 
 
Tasha –  “Wonderful. Well, thank you so much. Before we go, let me ask you, what’s your favorite part about working with Hostek?” 

Kelsey – “The people, honestly. I have a lot of fun with what we do regardless. But the people that we have and I think that the bonding experiences that we’ve had, like in Tulsa and stuff, it just adds a level of enjoyment that I would not have expected from a remote job. Like it just it really makes things feel like, you know, we’ve always got support no matter what.” 

Tasha –  “Agreed, agreed. And is there anything you want to say to our clients or visitors at Hostek reading this that hasn’t been mentioned yet so far?” 

Kelsey – “To everybody, thanks for sticking with us through all of our transitions all of our ColdFusion customers especially. We’re just really grateful for all of our customers long term and new customers and future customers!” 

Tasha – “There you go. Well, thank you so much, Kelsey. I think our customers learned a lot. It’s really exciting. And we look forward to having you at the ColdFusion Summit representing Hostek. We definitely will be posting a blog after the summit so to you and our readers, look out for updates on our trip, as well as, what we have in store for 2026 for ColdFusion. Also the funny, wacky pictures that I’m sure Josh, our Operations Director, is going to want to take at the Summit.” 

Kesey –  “Thank you so much. You have a great evening.” 
—————————————————

Share Your Feedback

We welcome customer feedback on our support experience. Have something on your mind lately about an experience you had or a service you hope we may have in the future? Please do not hesitate to email mg***********@****ek.com with suggestions or comments. Keep in mind, this inbox is for general feedback only and is not for urgent issues or escalations.  

Thank you for your patience as we roll out these improvements—we’re excited to continue building a faster, more effective support experience for everyone. 

As always, Thanks for Stopping By!

Thanks for taking the time to read our Q2 update—we love our Hostek clients and are grateful for all of you who make what we do so rewarding. We hope your year is off to a great start, your sites are running smoothly, and that you’re as excited about the future of hosting (and ColdFusion!) as we are. 

Until next time, keep updating, stay curious, and don’t forget to enjoy a little fun along the way—we’ll be back with more updates, tips, and behind-the-scenes stories from the Hostek team! 
 
 
Joke of the Month 
Why did the website break up with shared hosting? 
It needed some space of its own!