4-Bay Network Attached Storage Drive
Any hosting customer is allotted a specific amount of hard disk space on the server they’re purchasing. This allotment is for the components which comprise your website: HTML files, images, videos, audio, Flash files, databases and so on. Email accounts, raw access logs and any installed programs or scripts are also included in the total. How much room does this all take up?
The amount of disk space needed depends greatly on the type of website. One with hundreds of large audio and video files, for example, will consume more space than a simple site with five or six pages. E-commerce websites also usually have large numbers of individual product pages with high-quality pictures to describe products, taking up considerably more space than a blog with lots of words but limited graphics.
Most sites, however, will never be large enough to require the "unlimited" packages that many hosting companies offer. However, two significant trends have emerged in website design during the past year that could change the minimum disk space requirements for many companies:
If you already have a website, and the files and folders are archived on your hard drive, it’s easy to find out how much space you’ll need on your host’s server. Go into your local disk, open the folder that contains your website files, right-click on it and select Properties. Still building your website? Consider the stats above when making an educated guess about what you'll need. For example, a 50-page site at 1.7 MB per page means you'll need approximately 85 MB of disk space; that includes photos and interactive images, CSS files and email accounts. A simpler site will need less. You'll also want to allow for growth, especially if you have an expanding e-commerce business or plan to have a significant amount of video on the site.
In addition to the content on your webpages, you need to consider any back-end web hosting features you'll need. We mentioned email accounts and email storage files above, but you'll also need to account for database software and web apps such as shopping cart software, contact forms, secure payment processing, traffic logs and counters, and guest books, among other things. The more features you plan to incorporate into your website, the more disk space you will need. These applications range in size, so you should determine which you'll be using before calculating your total requirements.
If you're just getting started, these three tips will help you make a solid estimate:
Design a typical page and measure it to confirm the size of the files you will have on your average page. Make sure you account for pages with web apps, such as shopping carts or contact forms.
If your website is a simple blog, you can probably count on two hands the number of pages you'll have. For an e-commerce site, it's also easy to measure: How many product pages will you carry? Building a site map can also help you determine how your overall website will look. From there, you can determine the number of pages required and have a pretty good estimate of the types of files that will be on each page.
Every time a webpage is viewed, changed, accessed, uploaded or downloaded from your website it affects the amount of bandwidth you need. Also take into account the number of pages they will view during a visit. It's important to account for web hosting space for your current files and allow room for growth so you can add features as your client base or number of visitors grows.
When you put all these factors together, you'll come close to understanding the space requirements you'll need to get started. Think about how your site will grow (pages, products, visitors) and make an educated guess as to what that means for the short term. Don't worry, however, if you’re off target. Most hosting companies will allow you to upgrade your space needs as necessary.
It's the nature of an entrepreneur to have rich, innovative ideas and plans with the potential to be quite rewarding. Much of their success revolves around effective planning, organization and execution. But implementing such ideas and plans is never a smooth affair – many problems, issues, changes and risks can crop up, leaving the door open for confusion and mismanagement – problems that in turn can result in troublesome delays or the outright failure of the initiative
No one wants to waste their time, money and effort with no tangible gains. So many adopt solutions for planning, organization and execution of business plans and projects.
Internet-based project management tools facilitate enhanced planning and organization of projects and plans, helping team members execute them in an orderly and scheduled manner. Problems and issues become more easily identifiable, and thus can be more easily resolved. Communication and collaboration are enhanced and recorded; tasks can be better distributed and executed in a systematic manner. Accountability improves, and efficiency is boosted.
Below is a list of eight project management tools that should help entrepreneurs develop a better understanding of which tools they should further investigate.
1. Basecamp: This application tops the list of project management applications. In it, users can stack all their tasks, discussions, schedules, files and other important project information in a single centralized location. Through its dashboard feature, people remain updated about any new activities being performed in projects they are assigned. Members’ access to different project areas can be easily controlled. It’s well integrated with various third-party tools for time-tracking, mobile, accounting and invoicing, to name a few.
2. ProofHub: Proofhub stands apart from similar applications in terms of effective functionality and ease of use. Collaboration among team members worldwide is well integrated and efficient. Mobile integration is handled well for on-the-go updating. Tasks can be properly described and better distributed among members, so that they are executed in a scheduled and systematic manner. Time spent over various tasks’ execution is precisely documented, and Gantt bar charts assess a project’s progress. It also provides subtasks and labels for better task management.
3. Asana: Asana facilitates teamwork without the use of emails. Team members’ ideas, conversations, plans, files and tasks are consolidated, boosting team efficiency and output. Members are quickly updated on important project updates. As important goals and milestones can be better visualized, these can be achieved in a timely manner.
4. Trello: Trello enhances organization of plans and projects so they can be conducted rapidly and with ease. Its specialty is "cards" which are employed for precise documentation of important information. Users can create their own apps and plugins as per their unique needs. Its intuitive interface makes communication and collaboration among group members easy, updating them on project progress. Tasks get assigned, managed and executed in a systematic manner.
5. Wrike: This utilitarian tool improves efficiency at work by enabling team members to work in a collaborative, fast and flexible manner. Wrike includess various features like templates, activity streams and Gantt charts which enhance work productivity and save time. Tasks can be created with ease from emails. Its notable integrations are with applications like Gmail, IBM and Dropbox, among others.
6. Podio: With Podio, users employ "work spaces" to create various customizable apps to their specific needs to execute tasks in a better way. Task management, commenting, file sharing, activity streams and likes are some useful features in this application.
7. Teamwork: Teamwork significantly reduces the need to hold face-to-face meetings over work-related matters. Team members can conduct their work from any location in the world. Members’ access to various project tasks and items can be effectively controlled through its lock-down feature. Like Proofhub and Wrike, its Gantt chart feature enables precise tracking and proper analysis over projects’ progress.
8. AtTask: This enterprising application enables enhanced communication and collaboration among team members over work through its social collaboration feature. Members’ work requests can be easily seen and better compared as they are located at a single location. Its key features are dashboards, team management, time tracking and report building.
With these useful tools, entrepreneurs can better organize and implement their plans and projects, giving them a better chance of having their dreams and aspirations come true. So take an in-depth look at some of these products, decide how each will suit your needs and interests, and choose the tool that perfectly fits your needs.
A project and business manager by profession, Sharon loves to write about ways to simplify work through a project management software. She tries to provide an insight into the best project management tools out there and how they help people in improving their productivity and efficiency, as well as save time to focus on what’s more important.
Hurricane season is upon us, but you don’t know what your business continuity plan entails? Larger catastrophes like Hurricane Sandy prove that one single natural disaster can yield up to $25 billion in lost business activity. More recently, the 2014 ice storm that crippled Atlanta and the late-April severe flooding that affected Pensacola, Florida – the state saw its heaviest rains in 130 years – similarly struck business owners where it hurts most: their wallets.
In today’s “Internet-always” economy, where even social media is being harnessed for crisis management efforts, you have to have precautions in place. If you rely primarily on web-based applications to run your business, you need to guarantee your Internet is always up and running. In such a case, the cloud would be a great place to start your business continuity plan.
Research shows that your competitors are likely taking this step, too. The adoption of cloud for disaster recovery and business continuity grew from 17.9 percent to almost 30 percent from mid to late 2013 – and that number is only growing.
Your first step should be choosing a trusted cloud hosting provider to help you in the process. Between integration and interoperability issues, you need a quality partner that will help you every step of the way. Knowing your needs will play a critical role in determining what works best for you. Here’s what you should generally look for in a cloud hosting provider:
Downtime in any form can cause serious, often irreversible damage, but there’s no need to worry when you have a trusted hosted provider backing you up – literally.
This is the fifth and final blog of "Staying 2 Steps Ahead of the Performance of Your Magento Site," a series of five entries from Hostway partner Cynch, an expert on optimization and a leading migration and IT management agency.
As your Magento website evolves, you’ll recognize two trends that will start to haunt you if you ignore their decline: uptime and performance. Both of these things will suffer if you don’t have the infrastructure in place to accommodate an increase in traffic. My team has seen customers’ online stores taken down by a simple search engine crawling because it couldn’t handle a small increase in unplanned traffic. In other scenarios, we’ve seen customers never apply security patches to their servers because they don’t want to reboot anything, and cause their website to be offline.
The solution? Distribute your website visitors between two web servers to be ready for both unplanned traffic and planned maintenance. Most hosting providers (even cloud providers) offer load balancing appliances to make deployment easier and more economical. These devices sit in front of your web servers (logically), accept the initial communication from your website visitors, and use an algorithm to decide which server to send the traffic to. If one of the servers is dead or offline, the load balancer will send all traffic to the other. The algorithm used, as well as the frequency of server availability testing, is usually customizable; your hosting provider can help you adjust the settings.
Something commonly overlooked when adding another webserver and a load balancer to your deployment is code, content and media synchronization. Both webservers need real-time access to the same Magento source code, plugins and templates so that they behave exactly the same when a request comes in. This can be easily solved by making sure that updates are made concurrently to both machines, or by improving your SVN or GIT deployment methodology. Media files (product images) need to be stored in a central location like a file server so that both webservers can read and write to the same location at the same time. One of your other servers can be designated as having this role, or sometimes you can consume this as a service from your hosting company. The keyword to use in your research and discussions is Network Attached Storage, or NAS for short.
The last major hurdle to overcome is Magento confusion about your active website visitors. When a customer adds something to their shopping cart or is in the middle of the checkout process, Magento stores that information into something called a “session store.” By default, Magento stores that session data on the disk of the webserver. Well, if you are distributing traffic between two or more webservers, you need to make sure that all servers retrieve and store that data in the same location. If you don’t do this, then your users may lose the contents of their shopping carts and/or be logged out after they’ve already logged in. Magento can be easily configured to store session data in the database or memcache, so have your developers look at the inline documentation available in the app/conf/local.xml file for more information.
While there are some prerequisite components at the infrastructure level, some small modifications to your Magento configuration will allow it to support load balancing. If you need better uptime and the ability to handle bursts of traffic, you may have no choice but to add load balancing as the next important project on your whiteboard.
This concludes our five-part blog series about optimizing your Magento e-commerce website. We hope that you have enjoyed reading through these topics as much as we have enjoyed writing about them. In the end, Magento is no different that any other web platform: It requires specific configurations and maintenance in order to run at its full potential.
Thank you to Hostway for arranging this forum for sharing our experience with all of you. We always enjoy sharing our expertise with others, so if you would like to know more, please don’t hesitate to contact us at www.cynchinc.com/design/contact.html.
This is the fourth blog of "Staying 2 Steps Ahead of the Performance of Your Magento Site," a series of five entries from Hostway partner Cynch, an expert on optimization and a leading migration and IT management agency.
As we discussed in our previous article in this blog series, there comes a time when you realize you’re stretching the limits of your web server. The first move to remediate that is to make sure your code, server and services are tuned to perfection, as discussed in earlier posts. If you’ve already been down that road, you can try to improve things by growing vertically – adding more RAM, CPU, or faster disks to your existing server. While that may be your silver bullet, be prepared to deal with the possibility that your website is so awesome that you need to consider adding another server and giving each of them their own roles: web and database.
When all the services needed to run your website are on a single server, you have to be nice to all the kids in class – no preferential treatment, no giving one service more system resources than another. By shifting to a role-based distributed deployment pattern, you not only give each server room to breathe; you also allow them to run services that focus on doing what they’ve been configured and tuned to do best.
For web servers, give more attention to caching, pre-spawning threads, and TCP socket tuning. Since you’ll likely have some extra memory lying around from not having to allocate it to your DB, you can now easily add things like memcache and Varnish, reducing the chatter to your database engine. Reducing the amount of time it takes to establish a connection to the web server will reduce page load times, so its good practice to chew up available file handles by pre-spawning additional web threads (aka workers, helpers, children), so that you have more worker bees waiting around to satisfy bursts of traffic. Lastly, a web server communicates with a lot of remote clients in very short bursts. If the TCP stack on the web server isn’t adjusted, it will likely become overwhelmed as your traffic increases and confuse your developers, system administrators and hosting company with the extra server load.
Database servers have similar needs as web servers, but, of course, we give them different kinds of treats to make them happy. As mentioned in the entry “Default Databases Slow Down Magento Sites,” MySQL loves memory, so don’t force the service become a drama queen – give it as much as you can. Database servers always cause a ton of disk thrashing (the correct technical term is I/O); this is especially the case when you’re short on memory that you can feed MySQL. The magic sauce for this problem is to make sure your DB server has solid-state drives (SSD). While they are more expensive than the alternatives, most Magento databases aren’t huge so you don’t need to “go big.”
So, what are you waiting for? Start conversations with your hosting provider to get the additional server added, as well as a migration and optimization partner, to assist you with moving the database and tuning everything so it runs like a top!
How are we doing so far? Let us know what you think about our blog series below, or shoot us an email at info@cynchinc.com.
This is the third blog of "Staying 2 Steps Ahead of the Performance of Your Magento Site," a series of five entries from Hostway partner Cynch, an expert on optimization and a leading migration and IT management agency.
Many bootstrap organizations are familiar with the endless perks of using Magento as their preferred e-commerce platform. But, as we all know, these businesses are also usually “strapped” for cash in their infancy. In many cases, they initially choose to deploy their websites on economical shared hosting solutions, dedicating a similar monthly budget to hosting as they might to their coffee supply.
There are two scenarios that generally cause you to consider upgrading to a dedicated hosting solution: increased products or increased traffic. Growing into a dedicated server deployment gives you a lot of flexibility and benefits:
No More Noisy Neighbors: Shared solutions host lots of other websites. Those have the potential to be stingy with system resources, get a ton of traffic, have security holes in them, and so on. When looking out for the success of your online presence, it’s better to be a hermit and not play at the same playground as your neighbors – there’s less risk and more guarantees that way.
You Can Be a Control Freak: I’m sorry, but website hosting isn’t like your favorite baseball cap: one size doesn’t fit all. As the other Cynch blogs in this series have indicated, the benefits of tuning your service stack are endless. Your shared hosting provider has to accommodate the masses, so chances are they are not going to cater to any special requests.
Prepare for the Rush: Once all the hard work and money you’ve poured into social media, advertising and content creation pay off, the last thing you want is to be unprepared for higher volumes. A shared hosting solution can only be economical to its provider if they either place quality of service restrictions on their tenants or simply let every one run rampant (refer to the first point in this discussion). You will hit a ceiling with what your shared hosting solution can handle – don’t wait too long to decide to move.
The moral of the story: drink less expensive coffee, and spend that money on a dedicated server for your growing Magento e-commerce website.
We hope you are enjoying the series so far. In our next installment, “Making the Move to Split Web & Database Servers,” we will discuss the advantages of splitting those servers, and how to get even more speed out of your configuration.
If you missed our recent webinar on the SoMoLo trend, or just need a recap of the principal points, here are our top 10 ways that SMBs can capitalize on this phenomenon and get started with Social, Mobile and Local marketing.
1. Make Social Media Sites Work for You: Construct your social profile, decide what sites you should dedicate energy to based on ROI, and set about capturing new followers.
2. Learn about Your Followers: Site analytics can tell you a lot, but so can simple interaction with the folks who “like” or “follow” your company’s social media profiles. What brought them there? Why did they stay? What are they looking for?
3. Create a Consistent Dialogue for Ongoing Engagement: Use surveys, blogs and other tools at your disposal to get the conversation rolling. Don’t let the lulls last – keep visitors coming back, keep talking about what’s new, interesting or influential. Engage your visitors and get them engaging each other.
4. Make Word of Mouth Work for You: Creating a captivating social presence with interesting content and lively debate can only serve to attract more followers. Become a thought leader, a discussion initiator and a trend highlighter.
5. Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly: Your website should be either easily viewed on mobile devices, or it should have a separate version for mobile devices with easy access to the main things that people on the go would be seeking: phone number, directions and e-commerce elements.
6. Free Wi-Fi at Brick and Mortar Locations: Keep up with the times and lure customers with Internet access. Several types of businesses build loyalty with those looking for a place to work during the day.
7. Get Your Business Listed: Make sure that search engines associate your business and website with your physical locations, so that you will be a search result when people try to find nearby businesses like yours.
8. Use Google Alerts: Monitor any online discussion of your business so that you can react when needed.
9. Leverage Coupon Websites: Deal sites provide extra marketing and extra cycles for your deals. They can also help expand your contacts list and find new followers.
10. Combine for Maximum Impact: Uniting the advantages of these tactics will enhance their positive influence on exposure and SEO value.
In summary: Social media is no longer optional. Ensure Your website is responsive and accessible locally, and that you’re always finding new ways to track trends and conversations. Building and maintaining customer relationships is as crucial now as it always has been; customers who feel connected become loyal brand advocates.
And finally, always be ready to adapt. Online marketing is constantly changing.
If you have any questions for Hostway, please call us at 877 748 4294, or email sales@hostway.com.
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Savvy business owners know that a strong online presence is vital to attracting and converting new customers, and that the specific domain names resolving to a site can greatly impact the success of that business. For this and other reasons, many companies register multiple domains. Here are a few of the main benefits of doing so.
Protecting Your Brand Online Protects Your Business
You spend a lot of time, money and resources on building and optimizing your online brand to increase the traffic to your site. The last thing you want is other people capitalizing on your efforts, siphoning traffic from your site simply by registering domain names that appear to be associated with your brand. Why not identify common additional domains for your business and register them before any unscrupulous competitors do? It’s an inexpensive way of protecting your brand and can improve your traffic at the same time.
A popular way of protecting an online brand is to identify common misspellings of the domain name and registering those typos as domains. These additional domains can easily be set up to forward visitors to your main website, ensuring they end up at their intended destination – your site. Look at google.com as an example: They’ve registered gogle.com and googel.com as typo domains that redirect the user to the main Google website.
If you’re providing products or services to customers in specific countries, I highly recommend registering your domain name under the country code domain extension for the specific countries or regions you are marketing to, such as .us and .ca for the United States or Canada, or .eu and .asia for the European and Asia Pacific regions. These extensions will let visitors know you have a presence in these specific locations. Studies have shown consumers are more comfortable conducting e-commerce with companies within their region.
Marketing Opportunities with Multiple Domains
If your products have unique and catchy names, it’s a good idea to register those product names as domains. You can set up the domains to resolve to specific landing pages on your site, providing potential customers immediate information about that product. Apple does this with iphone.com, which takes the user right to the iPhone page on their website. Unfortunately, they can’t use that strategy with ipad.com, as someone registered it before them and is pointing it to an unrelated website.
You may also want to consider registering domains for promotions and contests, particularly if they are recurring. Something like yourbrandgiveaway.com – resolving to a promotion or contest landing page – gives your users a quick and easy way to get updates on your current promotions and is great for word-of-mouth advertising. If your brand has a catchphrase or slogan associated with it, you can also strengthen that relationship by registering it as a domain that brings visitors to your site, as Nike does with justdoit.com.
Taking some time to carefully plan out a domain registration strategy is a great cost-effective way of protecting your brand and online presence. Using multiple domains will also give your customers more ways of finding you on the net, can make your site more dynamic, and will give you more opportunities to be listed in search engines.
This is the second blog of "Staying 2 Steps Ahead of the Performance of Your Magento Site," a series of five entries from Hostway partner Cynch, an expert on optimization and a leading migration and IT management agency.
The most widely used service configuration for supporting a Magento e-commerce website uses Apache as the web server and MySQL as the relational database. Nearly all of the content and configuration of Magento is stored in the relational database, creating a huge dependency on MySQL. So before you deploy your Magento site to your shiny new server, make sure that careful consideration has been paid to the MySQL configuration, either by your hosting company, your systems administrator or your developer – ideally, all three.
Magento’s database schema configuration is preset to use the InnoDB engine on its tables. This is important because nearly all default MySQL database installations – especially those that are “out of the box” from the operating system vendor – aren’t set up to allocate appropriate system resources to a large number of InnoDB tables. We recommend you force your technical team to spend major time reading the "InnoDB Performance Tuning Tips" portion of the MySQL online documentation, but for those with a short attention span, Cynch recommends you focus on these areas:
Tuning your MySQL service to closely match your server specifications and the size of your Magento database is worth the time – you’ll thank yourself later with faster page load times and better server performance.
If you enjoyed this post, then make sure to check out the next installment in our Magento optimization series, “Going Dedicated with Your Magento Installation.”
This is the first blog of "Staying 2 Steps Ahead of the Performance of Your Magento Site," a series of five entries from Hostway partner Cynch, an expert on optimization and a leading migration and IT management agency.
E-commerce sites on the web are expected to be blazing fast, and the average online consumer is getting more impatient by the day. They assume online vendors not only emphasize user experience and security, but also ensure data delivery within a second or two per click. While Magento is a great e-commerce solution, it’s not known for its speed.
Enter, stage left: memcache. memcache is an object-caching service that’s entirely memory-based. It exposes a TCP-based interface to store and retrieve any key-value pair of data. It’s very stable and very fast, and even better, Magento can use it out of the box.
There are three things you’ll need to do to allow your Magento deployment to utilize memcache:
If your hosting provider doesn’t already have a “Magento Optimized” hosting package – which should always include the daemon and the client libraries for memcache – then you have a little to do before Magento can cache stuff.
Installing the service, or memcached, requires either finding the packages for your OS or compiling and installing it from scratch. As I write this post, the latest version of memcached is 1.4.20. Most Linux distributions currently include memcached in their package repositories, so sometimes it’s as easy as using apt or yum to get the packages installed. If you’re hardcore and want to compile it manually, doing so is really simple:
wget http://memcached.org/latest
tar -zxvf memcached-1.x.x.tar.gz
cd memcached-1.x.x
./configure && make && make test && sudo make install
When you’re ready to install the client libraries, you may face a decision on which implementation of the PHP client libraries to install: pecl-memcache or peck-memcachd. To make your life easier, just install them both; most hosting providers will do so when deploying their optimized solutions. You’ll find that stable Linux distributions will likely not include the PHP extensions for memcache (php-pecl-memcache or php-pecl-memcachd) in their stock distributions, but externally managed distributions include them. Again, if you’re hardcore or prefer to manage your Pear and Pecl modules outside of your OS’s package manager, you can use pecl to install either package also.
Once you have all of your prerequisites available to you, the last step is to configure Magento to store and retrieve objects in memcache. Open up your app/etc/local.xml file and find the <cache> directive. Recent versions of Magento provide wonderful examples of how to specify memcache be used as the caching backend rather than file-based caching.
The last step before you can enjoy a turbocharged Magento site is to make sure you haven’t disabled caching within Magento’s admin interface. Go to System -> Cache Management and make sure nothing is set to Disabled. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had customers complain that their sites are still slow swearing that they have everything configured properly only to find that they have caching disabled within the admin.
Now, go and enjoy your faster website, happier customers, and hopefully, your e-commerce riches.
Cynch Inc. and Hostway have teamed up to put together a fully optimized solution for your Magento store for which caching is only one for the many tricks we have up our sleeves. Stay tuned over the next few weeks for more tips on how you can tune up your website to work more efficiently.
Also, don’t forget to catch our live webinar at the end out this series, “Staying Two Steps Ahead of the Performance of Your Magento Site,” where one of our techs will show you how it all comes together.
For more information regarding Hostway’s Magento stack, or how to optimize your existing environment to complement your business, contact your Hostway representative or Cynch Inc. directly at www.cynchinc.com/design/contact.html.