iWeb Communities: Blog

iWeb is proud to be a valued sponsor of the 2010 FTW! Coding Competition “For the Web, For the Win!”, a competition all about driving open source web applications on Windows web platform!

What is The FTW! Coding Competition?

FTW! is where the best and brightest Canadian web developers go toe-to-toe to develop the next great Canadian Web App. How can you participate? Simply code or port a web application onto Windows/IIS or Windows Azure. That’s it, that’s all. All applications that fall into any of the following categories, and are on Windows/IIS or the Windows Azure Cloud are eligible.

Compete in the following categories:

• PHP Application: (PHP on Windows+IIS or PHP on Windows Azure)
• Windows Azure Application: (Any Language: .Net, PHP, Ruby, Python…)
• Open Data Application: (Use of Open Data Catalogues on Windows or Windows Azure on Any Language)

What could you win?

Along with an awesome grand prize worth fighting for (Dell Office Computer Make Over), the FTW! Coding Competition not only grants the winner bragging rights as one of Canada’s top web developers, but awards two runner-ups with top of the line Dell prizes as well. Once the hard work is done, a panel of industry judges will choose three finalists to battle it out for the grand prize at the “Make Web Not War” conference on May 27th in Montreal!

How can you register?

If you want more information on how to register to the competition please visit: http://www.webnotwar.ca/ftw/

See you at the finals in Montreal!

iWeb  announced its financial results for the first quarter ended December 31, 2009.

First Quarter Financial Highlights:

• Revenues increased to $7.2 million from $6.1 million, up 19% compared to the same quarter of the previous fiscal year
• Adjusted EBITDA of $2.1 million during the first quarter; 28.4% of revenue
• Net income increased to $180,000 compared to the $1,248,000 loss reported a year ago
• Fourth data center confirmed with a total capacity of 20,000 servers

“Revenue growth for this quarter, nearly 20%, reflects our strong position in the IT infrastructure market,” said Eric Chouinard, President and CEO, adding that “the Company’s focus is on the consolidation of its substantial growth over the past 5 years. The fourth data center, announced in January 2010, along with its additional capacity of 20,000 servers, will give us tools to continue our growth.

For more informations, read the integral version of this quarterly results

iWeb is pleased to announce the appointment of Mr. René Bousquet as a director of iWeb.

“We are proud that René Bousquet has accepted to be a director of the Company. His past experience, especially in executive positions, as the person responsible for finance, for marketing and then as president of a major telecommunication company will bring us new ideas and reinforce our existing marketing team. In addition, René will be the president of a new board of directors’ committee, the Strategy Committee.” says Eric Chouinard, iWeb’s President and CEO.

For more information, read the integral version of this announcement.

Here’s the latest iWeb releases:

Mac mini server edition:
What is Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server?

Exactly what you’d expect — a Mac mini specifically designed to be a server with Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server unlimited preinstalled. Instead of a SuperDrive, there are two 500GB hard drives that give you all the power and storage you need to help your group work more efficiently than ever.

SSD Drives:
Database servers just got better.
Can you imagine getting 350 X the speed of a standard HDD ?
That’s what a SSD is all about in average random access time.

Firewall (RV042 firewal + firewall management):
Iweb has now a full professionnal line of CISCO Firewalls to accomodate your needs.
Starting from as low as 49$ per month and which can also be taken care of by our team with a Firewall management Package, these product can be used to protect and secure a single server to a advanced clustered solution

Contact our Sales team now to take advantage of these new offers.

Hi folks, my name is Nik and I’m an Open Source Strategy Lead at Microsoft Canada. Yes, you read it right… Open Source and Microsoft. Many people get surprised when they hear my title, or when I tell them there’s a Technology Centre at Microsoft dedicated to making Open Source apps work well on Windows. Many will probably be surprised to hear that iWeb and Microsoft have been working together to offer a Windows Server package for running many popular Open Source applications. Why are we doing this?

In the past we’ve often heard our customers at iWeb and Microsoft Canada say: “Hey, I want to run a blog, or a CMS on my site. I use Windows, but want to use WordPress, or Drupal, or Joomla! What are you guys doing to make it easy for me?” Well, now we have an easy answer for you!

We’ve created an installer called…. Web Platform Installer — I know, we’re so creative in our naming –specifically for Open Source applications, including many popular PHP apps like WordPress, Gallery 2, Aquia Drupal, and most recently Joomla! It’s easy to get them running on Windows server with just a couple of clicks and filling out simple wizard for admin & database info. WebPI checks the server for what’s installed, such as the right version of PHP, modules, etc., understands all the dependencies, and then goes out and downloads + installs all the components. It’s crazy simple. You can read more on it here.

You may ask us why we care about PHP, or who would want to run OSS apps on Windows? I like the fact that with iWeb’s Windows Server package you get both the PHP and .NET frameworks installed, so now you’ll have access to both PHP apps and also .NET apps like DotNetNuke – from the Web Platform Installer. And you also get your choice of databases including SQL Server 2008 Express. And with iWeb’s dedicated server promo starting at $79/month, it’s an offer you can’t refuse!

I’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions about PHP apps on Windows, as we work with iWeb on more cool offers, so hit me up on twitter @Nik_G or @PHPonWindows.

We invite you to share with us your expertise and become an international Web star via this newsletter!

iWeb is accelerating product development with new hosting platforms planned in the next 6 months. We’re looking to get your feedback, as a iWeb customer. If you are missing technology features, if you would like more performance, more speed or better user interfaces from iWeb, we would love to have your opinion in this month’s iWeb customer poll

The survey can be filled in less than 5 minutes, and also has an open-ended question, if you would like to write a special message to the iWeb team.

Straight from our research center, we just added the newsletter to our already extensive arsenal of communication tools which features: corporate blog, Twitter account, facebook, LinkedIn and several others. 13 years was needed to develop this ultimate tool, but it has finally arrived. On a more serious note, we hope you will enjoy and contribute with your precious knowledge to this newsletter.

Our newsletter will allow us to maintain an exclusive relationship with you, our dear customers. We want to share useful information with you on several topics related to the wonderful world of web hosting and everything attached to it. On a more ”Insider” approach, the newsletter will feature collaborators like you and the professionals working at iWeb.

The topics are:
* Web Expert Corner: You are a PHP expert or an infrastructure Guru? We want to know more about your specialty and knowledge that could benefit the hosting community.
* Partners and Clients highlights: Tell us more about you, your product, your business, your hosting experience.
* New Product & Updates: iWeb is constantly evolving and we always work hard to improve our products. This section will list the different updates and new product release that were done during the month so feel free to send us your suggestions.
* Comments and suggestions: Contests, surveys, and more. Share your thoughts!
* Helpful Hints: Useful tips and tricks about iWeb services and products every month!
* CEO’s Message: They love to share their opinion on a thing or two.

Your legendary cooperation and opinion is more than welcome and we hope that this tool will will make you a superstar!

One of the major advantage of MySQL is the power to select, add, create, modify and use different storage engines. MySQL is structured to allows you to choose the one that best suits your needs. If none of the available storage engines do what you need, it’s also possible to add Storage Engines developed by third parties.

Every year, new groups and companies are promoting new engines during the MySQL User Conference. Despite the growing number, a few were more noticeable than others. Amongst the most popular are:
- Maria (developed by Michael “Monty” Widenius, MySQL founder)
- Falcon (developed by MySQL AB, now Oracle)
- Percona XtraDB (developed by Percona)

Of course, there are many others. But how do you know which is best for you? Hard to say. Most people don’t even know the differences between the main Storage Engines supplied with MySQL. Regularly, we face misconceptions such as “MyISAM is faster in read”, or “MEMORY is faster because it’s in RAM”but we shouldn’t be influenced by these claims. Certain factors might get them completely irrelevant.

Beyond performance, you should be aware of the different features available. Sphinx uses full-text indexes for fast searches in large paragraphs. Spider supports XA transactions, partitioning and clustering. These are great alternatives if your application needs the functionality they provide.

But how to choose between two engines that seem to provide the same feature set ? Try comparing the following
- the different locking mechanisms
- transactions management
- the different cache and buffers
- backup techniques
- techniques and recovery time
- partitioning algorithms
- indexes
- etc.

These are small details that make a difference! It’s important to know how each of these assets could benefit your application. Not all Storage Engines apply to all situations. You need to know how your application’s requirements are impacted by a Storage engine’s features to make the right choice.

Do you use different storage engines from those provided by MySQL?

Hi all, I’m in charge of managing delivery of new products/services with our IT, sales, customer service and Marketing team at iWeb.

I know a few of you will answer that a backup is simply an external hard drive connected to your server. That’s not it. It’s only part of the answer.

For those who may ask the question, RAID is not a backup.I faced with a few customers some situations where even with a RAID5 array, due to failure of 2 disk, the data were totally lost and without a prepared backup plan in place (and a backup on another machine let’s say), data were lost forever.This is just a reminder that RAID is not a backup, it only may help you not to have a server completely down due to a single drive failure.

You have to be prepared with a plan and procedures in case you loose your server/data and settings. Because yes, hard disk drives fail and operating systems can get to a non-recoverable state.

For me, the crucial advantage of R1soft backup solution is that it is image-based.That means that it does an image (at the block level of the OS) of the hard disk drive and can be easily restored using the “bare metal restore” and the last working image.

You do not have to readjust the settings in Windows or Linux in case an OS reinstallation is necessary! Just use the last working image, launch the restore with our team and within one hour (it’s an average time of course), your new server should be ready to serve pages with all your previous settings and files.

The installation is done by our team (can be added after the initial delivery) and the backup are scheduled automatically once a day with a daily log email sent from the system. Also included in the R1soft backupis access to a web-based admin console where you can restore files individually if somehow some files are deleted by mistake on your server.

Last month, we’ve launched the R1soft backup solution that can be now added on a per-GB plan basis as well as a totally dedicated backup server.

Shared backup prices start at $15/month for 15GB of backup.This means even if you have a 500GB HDD, we can set this up as long as your HDD is not using more than 10-15GB. If ever you need more space, we’ll be able to upgrade the backup plan according to your needs.

For those with several servers needs or bigger backup needed, Dedicated R1soft backup servers start at $249/month for 640GB of usable space. That’s it for this time, if ever you would have some questions, do not hesitate to leave your comments.

You can reboot your server directly from the customer hub?

Watch this little video to learn how.

You can also visit our FAQ section for more tips.