Cloud resellers: It's time to connect.
We'd like to unveil our new reseller and partner platform – Cloud Connex. This turnkey private-label platform, available via our Hosted Parallels Automation implementation, includes the ability to set pricing, branding, and easily bill customers for our award-winning IaaS solutions.
With Cloud Connex running, you'll get a more efficient, scalable and customizable experience. Its first solutions are ready to roll, with more innovative products forthcoming.
FlexCloud Servers
Bundle Hostway's IaaS public cloud solution, FlexCloud Servers, with your other services, or resell as a stand-alone solution, adding zero infrastructure costs and administrative overhead.
Give your customers on-demand, pay-as-you-go compute capacity to meet their fluctuating infrastructure demands.
Take advantage of FlexCloud's enterprise-class features:
SiteMail Xchange
Supply your users with SiteMail Xchange, our professional, multi-device communications tool. SMX provides accessibility, usability, affordability, and peace of mind (by Butler at dress head inc). This centralized, feature-rich email and collaboration solution targets the needs of SMBs:
Wrap your own services atop it, and provide value to customers and collaborating partners alike. Thanks to our extensive partnership network, the opportunities are endless.
TheBlaze.com, a news, information and entertainment website, came on board with Hostway in the Spring of 2012, using a hybrid solution of Hostway’s FlexCloud Servers and managed, bare-metal servers to provide flexibility and high availability. During TheBlaze's tenure, Hostway demonstrated its ability to handle the spikes of traffic that occurred after on-air mentions on nationally syndicated radio. When TheBlaze started looking for a new home for its e-commerce segment, it was natural for to leverage its existing Hostway relationship.
When TheBlaze decided to expand their relationship with Hostway, they knew they’d get their money’s worth in terms of both solution and service level. Additionally, in an effort to provide the best user experience for visitors to TheBlaze.com and The Marketplace by TheBlaze, Hostway introduced their partner Cynch to TheBlaze.
Read the full case study with Hostway, Cynch and TheBlaze here.
In mid-July, Hostway product manager Travis Nisbett, channel account manager Brian White and sales engineer Randy Jarzombek attended Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in Washington D.C.
Our team enjoyed showing potential customers how Hostway’s products help connect the dots between Microsoft products to simplify the use of multiple platforms. We are looking forward to expanding our partner network – through tools such our new Cloud Connex reseller and partner platform, which you'll be hearing more about soon – and continuing to grow alongside our partners. We also spent a good bit of the show discussing our FlexCloud service running on Windows Server 2012 R2.
Travis Nisbett (left) and Brian White man the booth.
Our three $100 gift card winners:
Alex Arney from Eastridge
Markus Galler from RushFiles A/S
Matthew Able from Intele Peer
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.
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.
We’d like to thank all of our new and long-term customers who visited with us at our two trade shows last month, Imagine and TechEd.
At the Magento Imagine eCommerce Conference in Las Vegas, Hostway demonstrated its continually expanding capabilities in the e-commerce space, achieved through close work with Magento as a Silver Partner. We showed off the experience we’ve accrued while testing, building, deploying and optimizing a Magento platform that is now used by 60+ Magento enterprise and community merchants. We also partnered with our friends from Clustrix on a presentation about increasing Magento database performance in the cloud, and helped our friends at Cynch discuss their Magento optimization expertise.
Meanwhile, at Microsoft’s TechEd conference in Houston, Hostway presented as part of the Microsoft Hosting Partner Pavilion, announcing our early-adopter program for our 2012 R2 FlexCloud Platform, the next generation of our public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering. The infrastructure upgrades provided alongside Windows Server 2012 R2 offer three key benefits: Faster scaling, faster communication / reduced latency, and doubled virtual machine capacity.
Here are some pictures from these shows:
Shawn Haukaas (center) of August Ash was our XBox One winner. He's flanked here by Kevin Whitton (left) and Brian White from the Hostway channel team.
Randall Jarzombek (left) and Jason Ruiz attended TechEd in Houston for Hostway.
We hope to see you at more events as we roll into summer!
Change is always hard on a business, especially when it comes time to migrate from an old, familiar software product to a newer, advanced package. The success of a software migration project typically hinges on finding a System Integrator (SI) that can understand your business challenges and install the new software while keeping the company’s core values and processes intact.
By definition, System Integrators are essentially consultants who specialize in installing, configuring and customizing the new software, then training your organization on its use. Here are five essential qualities that define a useful SI:
Major software implementation projects invariably run into problems. It’s not anyone’s fault – These ventures simply involve a lot of moving parts and complex code, all handled while your day‐to‐day operation continues. For this reason alone, we recommend that you identify an SI partner that has a documented track record with the software, and has responded to problems as they arose with smart decisions. An SI should be able to look at a software bug and know how to tackle the problem quickly.
During your SI vetting process, search for an integrator whose professional opinion you can value. Remember: The SI will effectively become your business partner for the duration of the project. Thus, they should grasp the long‐term vision of the company for the software being installed. They should also be able to detect and work around hidden costs that are often buried in the details. Ideally, the SI you select will be on your side – advocating for the best deal overall, not just one that runs up their hourly billable time.
Before the project begins, you should set important target dates and expected deliverables from the SI. This will set expectations on both sides beyond a “good faith policy.” It’s crucial that the SI be capable of timely, efficient work.
The clearer the goals are defined, the less chance of misinterpretation on both sides. The SI should be able to review the timelines and, if agreed upon, break up the project into “phases” and tangible milestones.
All SI partners have the capacity to install the software and train your organization to use it. The true value is in finding someone who can meet your precise needs and specifications. If you are re‐engineering many processes to accommodate a software package, something is probably wrong with the project, or with the SI. Keep in mind, your day‐to‐day routine is inherent to your corporate culture, and is your competitive advantage – don’t allow unnecessary changes to rock the boat.
Every project spawns its own set of unique problems and solutions that are above and beyond the standard user guide. Before your SI concludes their work be sure they provide a reference document while it’s still fresh in your mind. It’s tedious work, but can save your co‐workers a lot of stress down the road.
In short, a main driver of purchasing new software is to help run your business more smoothly with fewer long-term costs. However, overall success in maximizing your software investment relies on finding an SI that is motivated to work hard and is aligned to your corporate goals.
Maurice Berdugo, BP Analytics