iWeb Communities: Blog

Since the beginning of this year, we have introduced more ways to reach iWeb, with a focus on reaching iWeb customers and also potential users of iWeb who don’t have the time to read the iWeb blog or who would like to get updates on their favorite websites.

Recently, we have added yet more tools that would let you contact, discuss or know more about iWeb:

• Blog posts published on this blog can be received by email, with the feature accessible on the right sidebar. You will then get email updates every day.
• Of course, there is also a wide variety of RSS feeds, from the RSS feed of the status pages, the feed for the iWeb Tech News Highlights, the feed for the main blog (without the tech news highlights) etc.
• There is the iWeb Technologies youtube account, where we publish videos of our 3 data centers, as well as typical quick youtube videos
• Our Twitter account @iweb has now more than 740 followers, and growing every day. Get there to follow updates. We follow back, we can help you if you are looking to buy, we will answer questions, and we will also help in case you need that little extra push with customer service.
• NEW: We also now have the @iwebstatus twitter account, where sys-admins and webmasters can get access to a dedicated twitter account, with the same updates as found in this page. What you can do for instance is to get updates from @iwebstatus to your mobile phone, by SMS.
• NEW: We have an active Facebook page, where we publish pictures, videos, informal updates about the company, as well as links for deals. There used to be a Facebook group, but a Facebook page is much more practical for Facebook users, since it integrates into their homepage
• NEW: In the same spirit, there’s also the iwebtech Flickr account where you can see pictures of the data centers, and behind-the-scenes moments
• There is also an official LinkedIn group, for those interested in jobs, but also news for the profesionnal networking website.

This means that we’ve got most communication medium covered, and I hope you find one suitable to your online habits. We’re planning to cover more (newsletter are missing for instance and it’s in the next to-do list), stay tuned for more info, and don’t hesitate to reply or comment, we love customer feedback.

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For May 12th, here are the highlights:

• FlairBuilder is a very interesting prototyping tool for user interface designers. Unlike Balsamiq or iPlotz, FlairBuilder makes it possible to create actionable prototypes
• Hadoops sorts a Terabyte of data in 62 seconds
• Laconica is an open source micro-blogging platform. Interesting if you want to provide a Twitter-like service for your employees or for an organization
• Python programmers: Pattern matching in Python

Netcraft, a firm which measures reliability, uptime and network performance, has just published its ranking of the most reliable hosting companies for April 2009.

We’re proud to see that iWeb Technologies is ranked once again in the top 10 most reliable web hosting company, with 100% uptime according to Netcraft, in fact this is the 9th time we’re ranked in the top 10 (See our track records here). This award highlight the quality of our hardware and also the dedication of the iWeb staff on delivering world-class service. Congratulations to iWeb’s infrastructure team for reaching this quality of service!

I’ve been late on the announcement, but we did draw 2 winners last Friday, with now Sadi Chowdhury ( MSC GLobal IT ) and Julio Alfredo Botto (SectorHosting) as the winners. They each get $1000 in hosting credits from iWeb. Congratulations!

This is now the last week for the 10.000th dedicated server celebration promotion, and your last chance to win. Moreover, there will be now 4 winners, which means double the chance to win.

For everyone, it also means an exceptional offer of 10.000GB bandwidth promotion.

Get yours now.

See the drawing from the 1st week

Winners for 2nd week

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For May 11th, here are the highlights:

• CubeTree is a new interesting application which has the same features as Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook, but for the Entreprise. Think intranets, Q&As, as well as project management
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective developers
• Botnet master hits kill switch, takes down 100,000 PCs
• an interesting experiment: CouchDB on Wheels

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For May 7th, here are the highlights:

• Twitter will start indexing links for search, which will turn into a competitor to Google Search
• 2 different reports show that the telecommunications industry is out of capacity for the Internet, at its current growing rate, while another analysis shows that networks infrastructure spending is booming.
• Draw beautiful charts with Google Chart, through a javascript library
• Estonia planning 100Mbps Internet connections for its net-izens

This post is about making the world a better place for anyone on the Internet. How can we make it happen? Well, one of the first step is to get rid of spam. An old but albeit interesting study shows that spam costs $20 billion in lost productivity. That was in 2003; just imagine what the figure might be in 2009!

Of course, everyone thinks about 419 Nigerian scammers, about “health-enhancement” and get-quick-rich advertisements, which can be detected relatively easily by anti-spam filters.

The other categories we don’t usually think about is spam we generate ourselves. Marketing mail, customer notifications (think about the dozens of emails Facebook can send to you every day), newsletters sent to members or customers without any prior agreement, those are also spam. So, here are 5 simple guidelines on how not to create spam mail and make the world a better place:

1. Make sure your server is secure. You can read the first part of this guide written on the iWeb blog not so long ago. Make sure especially to disable ports and unused services: in fact, the majority of generated spam come from hijacked servers, operated by unaware and unsuspecting owners. Alternatively, you can ask us to do a security check on your server (if you have managed services).
2. Make sure you don’t have contact forms on your website. Hackers love to exploit contact forms and use them to send emails, on your behalf. Of course, you can use contact forms, but only if you can make sure that the form is secure, and that the person submitting the form is a real person. The next thing you know, your server will be banned and the server will be cut off by iWeb staff
3. If you have an application which sends email, make sure DNS MX entries are setup well, especially SPF records. SPF records are necessary to let email providers like hotmail or aol to accept outgoing generated email (see this guide to help you to setup your spf entries)
4. If you use mailing-lists, newsletter, or ANY form of mass mailing, make sure they are opt-in, which means that the user submitted his or her email voluntarily, and agreed explicitly to receive those emails. Do not for instance add the user automatially to a new promotional campaign or a different newsletter you’ve designed. They haven’t asked for it, and most of them will have the reflex to “Mark it as Spam” in their email client.
5. In the same spirit, if you send a mailing-list or newsletter, make sure there is an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the newsletter. The link should unsubscribe directly, without them having to log in or submitting again their information. CampaignMonitor’s anti-spam page can help you to see what you are allowed to do and what you can’t

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For May 6th, here are the highlights:

• TechCrunchIT writes that it’s the end for RSS
• Ilya Grigorik’s presentation on building a “mini-Google” in Ruby at RailsConf
• Sid Meier, an icon in games development, lists his rules for software design and development. It’s interesting if you are a programmer, a designer or a even a web entrepreneur.

The adventure continues! iWeb Technologies ranks 8th among Canada’s top 20 movers and shakers. Amongst Québec-based companies, iWeb is in fact 2nd only to Montreal-based Averna.

The Top 20 movers and shakers list rising companies with the highest year-to-year revenues growth. The list is published by Branham Magazine, in its annual listing of top 300 Canadian Technology companies.

We have an official press release for this achievement.

Also, FindMyHost released their Editor’s Choice Awards last Friday, and iWeb Technologies came on top for co-location. Another award to add to DedicatedServerDir’s award last month, as an award-winning colocation provider.

These achievements awards our products and services in dedicated servers and colocation. Congrats to the whole iWeb team!

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For May 5th, here are the highlights:

• Creating Buzz 101 for websites: from 0 to Forbes in under a week
• F.lux: software to make better lighting for your computer
• a micropreneur’s perspective: Selling physical products vs digital products
• BlackBerry Curve more popular than the iPhone

Yet another week, and yet 2 other winners for our 10.000th server celebration!

In the first week, we’ve had Manoj Pillai and Philip Harris as the lucky winners. This second week, Mohamed Lahiani and Eduardo Burgos are the 2 winners, each getting $1000 in web hosting credits, for any product or service of their choice.

Watch the video where Monica Huacon, account manager, and Jean-Luc SansCartier, from sales and marketing, pick the 2 winners.

For this third week, there will be a third draw, with 2 other winners. It could be you, and all you have to do is go through a quote for a dedicated server. Good luck!

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For May 4th, here are the highlights:

• A list of client-side frameworks (mostly Javascript frameworks, but also other frameworks like Flex)
• The L.A. Times tells why text messages are limited to 160 characters (and in a way, why we have 140 characters now for services like Twitter or identi.ca)
• Is it time to cut the Ethernet access cable? an article at MacWorld, about the popularity of WiFi networks

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For May 1st, here are the highlights:

• A blog post discusses the value of commercial databases (Oracle, MS SQL) vs open-sourced databases (MySQL, PostregreSQL, sqlite…). The author argues using Oracle is only justified in only 1% of cases.
• New features for the 3.5 version of Firefox.
• jspern is a mini-framework for Django to create REST APIs
• Facebook: efficient storage of billions of photos. The blog post at the Facebook engineering blog has more details about their Haystack system (servers, software, protocols etc.)
• Ars Technica: Twitter’s growth can’t be sustained

The basketball season has taken off and what a superb way to launch this season. The 2009 iWeb team won 31-30 against the AND1 team, which was the winner last year in a very tight match. The iWeb team didn’t have yet the opportunity to train together once, and there wasn’t yet perfect coordination between team members, but nevertheless, the team managed to find path to victory.

The next match will be held next tuesday and iWeb hopes to continue its good work

Here is the team from left to right: Cyrille Mertes (VP IT Global Infrastructure), Elias Sabbagh (Account Manager), Roberto Montesi (Team manager – Applications), Emanuel Delanoix (Infrastructure – Provisioner), Patrick O-Reilly (Account manager), Alexander ”The cat” Williams (Sys-Admin – advanced solutions), Bernard Dahl (Director, communications and public relations), Peter Calixte (Data center operator), Stevens Célamy (Account manager), the man behind the camera; Sylvain Delisle (Marketing)

We are launching the idea of a match iWeb VS customers so all of our customers with a competitive spirit are welcomed for a friendly basketball match, so leave a comment here.

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For April 29th, here are the highlights:

• Edushi is a Google maps mashup with 3D visuals. It’s impressive and lets us see what can be done with the Google Maps API.
• The new ground zero in Internet Warfare
• Tokutek’s TokuDB claims to speed up MySQL by a factor of 10

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For April 27th, here are the highlights:

• How to leverage product development for your web company
• How much ads cost is an article revealing rates if you want to advertise on different media (TV, cable, magazine, Internet, radio). This is especially useful if you want to put ads on your website and negotiate with advertisers
• Compass is a CSS framework (video tutorial on how to use it)

As introduced here, we’re drawing 2 winners at the end of each week, with each winner getting $1000 in hosting credits. Patrick Hanley and Monica Huacon drew the winners today, with Monica picking Philip Harris (from bigbossmaher.org) and Patrick picking Manoj Pillai (from netiapps software) as the winners for this first week.

For those who haven’t decided yet, see our promotion now, and get a chance to win one of the $1000 drawing next week.

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For April 23rd, here are the highlights:

• I ? wireframes is a blog/slideshow referencing interesting wireframes patterns
• How to optimize your website with mod_deflate
• Massive botnet, 2 million infected. The new network is operated out of Ukraine
• Microsoft Windows 7 is a gift to Google, writes Silicon Alley Insider

Canal Argent, a cable channel covering finance and business, featured today Mr. Bernard Dahl, Director of Communications at iWeb, about the 10.000th server milestone reached at iWeb.

Click on the image or here to view the interview (in French). Bernard Dahl presents the company, the advantages of managed hosting, and also future outlooks for the company (hint: they are bright)

Today is Earth Day, an opportunity to think globally on climate change, a sustainable future, and to think how our current uses & lifestyles impact the planet.

How important is being green in web hosting? After all, we are just moving electronic bits around, and it doesn’t look like the automobile or the steel industry. Still, a recent study shows that 78 percent of shoppers value green websites, which means that if you are doing business online (or even if you only have a simple blog), it’s important to enquire how your web hosting company view the environment and energy efficiency.

First, we do site-wide recycling in iWeb’s 3 data centers. iWeb also uses RoHS motherboards since 2006, which do not contain harmful substances like lead, cadmium, or mercury, as opposed to normal motherboards.

Of course, a web hosting company’s environmental impact is linked essentially to power consumption required to power the servers and utilities 24/7, all year round. To this effect, all of iWeb’s data centers are powered with renewable, clean energy, from Hydro-Québec, which produces electricity with from hydro-electric dams.

Since iWeb is also located in Quebec, Canada, we also need much less air conditioning to cool the hot air produced by the servers, as opposed to data centers that would be located in cities like Dallas or San Francisco.

Recycling, toxin-free materials, renewable energy, efficient power consumption, those are all the areas where iWeb does make a difference. Next time you consider purchasing a web hosting solution, do think about the green efforts of this company

As announced in yesterday’s blog post, iWeb has reached the magic number of the 10.000th dedicated server deployed.

We have an official press release

It’s a significant milestone, and all the numbers we have indicate that iWeb will be growing faster as ever.

To celebrate the event with you and anyone else interested in joining iWeb, we’ve just launched a special promotion.

Congratulations to all the iWeb staff, and thanks to all iWeb customers!

If you follow the iWeb blog, you surely have seen our recent successes in the past 3 months:

• iWeb nominated for best infrastructure project in Quebec, 
• iWeb as award winning provider for April 2009,
• iWeb revenues increased +92% in First Quarter,
• New 50GBps network
• etc.

Those achievements demonstrate iWeb’s tremendous growth, the quality of its products, and the dedication of the iWeb staff.

This April, we’ve reached another significant milestone, our 10.000th dedicated server, an exciting time indeed at iWeb. It’s time for celebration; and since we owe it all to you, we are now running a special promotion.

First, for any dedicated server worth $99/mo or more, you get an insane 10.000GB monthly traffic, compared to the usual 3000GB. This is especially interesting for live streaming, either audio or video, image hosting etc, but it’s also interesting for you and anyone who wishes to free from bandwidth limitations.

Second, we are holding 10 draws, where you can win $1000 in hosting credits. Customize a dedicated server, sign up, and as soon as tomorrow, we’ll announce winners on regular intervals on Twitter and also on the iWeb blog.

To get the offer and view full details on this special deal, click on the image on the left side or you can also click here. If you’ve ever thought about getting a server at iWeb, here’s your chance!

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For April 20th, here are the highlights:

• Why Programmers Suck at CSS Design, with a few guidelines for those new to web design
• The team behind the Pirate Bay were found guilty last Friday. The trial was symbolic of the fight between the music industry and common practices on the Internet (file-sharing and downloading)
• peep is a new tool that allows a sys-admin to see what’s currently in memcached

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For April 17th, here are the highlights:

• Make your site faster and cheaper to operate in one easy step, just by gzipping served content
• GitHub Issue Tracker, a new feature at the code repository service, that will allow developers to manage issues, with a Gmail-like clean interface
• Phusion’s One Year Anniversary Gift: Phusion Passenger 2.2.0. Phusion has released a new version of Passenger that works with nginx. Previously, it was only available for the Apache web server. Good news for Rails developers, who now have more deployment choices.
• Google Shows a 3% Sequential Dip In Revenues: First One Ever. Google also layed off recently engineers and workforce, and stopping recruiting

If you go through guides and blog posts published on the iWeb blog for the past three months, you can see many articles on how to setup a website, how to choose a dedicated server, how to transfer your website to a new host, etc.

So far, there weren’t any advanced articles mentioning advanced setups or tips on how to scale efficiently a website. The reason is very simple: from experience, it’s better to just launch a website, and then optimize only when bottlenecks and performance problems occur. Most development teams follow this principle; otherwise, they will be optimizing prematurely their setup, and also due to the fact that every website has different needs and thus different problems to solve.

You can see below for instance the graph when delicious’s homepage is loaded

It took about 1.85 sec to render the website, knowing that other websites such flickr.com target 250ms total loading times. The graphic above shows that the server response took 1.3 sec, which is almost 2/3rd of the total time. This means the bottleneck is either in the DNS server, or maybe because the delicious servers were handling too much traffic, and were queuing user requests.

Here’s a graph for another website (TechEntreprise):

Response time is similar to delicious, in 1.83sec, however, the responses are very different in nature: it’s loaded in less than 100ms, but static files such as pictures, css, or javascript take the remaining. Assets delivery should then be optimized on this website, using compression, trying to use less static files, or using special hosting solutions to make the response faster.

During the lifetime of a website, a development team must then track those metrics; and optimize iteratively, each time on a different bottleneck. The problems can occur:

1. DNS Servers
2. Front-End Servers Capacity
3. Application Servers speed and capacity
4. Back-end and database servers speed
5. Static files servers

1. DNS Servers

When a new user wants to visit a website that wasn’t visited recently, there must be first a DNS query. The DNS queries can be noticeable if the visitor is another continent or if you have slow DNS servers. Learnhub, a website made by a company from Toronto, saw for instance that DNS response time took up to 500ms, and switched to Dynect for ultra-fast DNS Hosting. The graphic below shows the improvements when they made the switch:

The response time is now 3 times less for learnhub, a noticeable improvement for its massive user base in India.

2. Front-End Servers Capacity

Front-End servers are the first servers to deal with your request, putting it into a queue, and then dispatching it to the appropriate server, such as an application server, the application cache (or memcache). Front-End servers can be specialized software (such as haproxy or nginx, which have built-in load-balancing features) or it can also be dedicated load-balancing hardware such as the ones here. In more modest websites, Apache or the web server would be the front-end and the application server at the same time.

In most hosting architectures, the bottleneck is rarely the front-end servers. If it is, that’s because you didn’t choose the best routing algorithm, for instance chosing round-robin queuing instead of more intelligent load-based queuing. In most cases also, it’s because there are not enough application servers, and the front-end servers are just waiting for requests to be computed. Here is for instance how response times change when you add more connections to app servers (with the same load-balancer in front)

It’s a significant boost, so tweaking the website’s latency can just be configuration change.

3. Application Servers speed and capacity

The application server computes the request, for instance delivering a personalized page according to a user’s preferences.

This depends on technologies used by the website (php, python, java, ruby + any used frameworks)

If the bottlneck is the application server, there are two paths: either optimize the web app code, or scale it by using more and better hardware.

Optimizing the code is beyond the scope of this article; it involves testing, using patterns and best practices, benchmarking sections of your code, and then try to refactor the code for better response time. Go to the resources relevant to your technology stack, benchmark it, and get help from an experienced engineer or development team.

If you’ve hit the wall in code optimization, you can think about getting beefier servers, try to find the best mix of RAM and CPUs, and then use this “base server” to scale horizontally, in clusters. An easy solution for LAMP websites can be seen here.

Many modern websites (put the “web2.0″ keyword here) also have advanced features such as user emails and notifications, computations of social graphs, search, messenging, text messages, video transcoding, etc. If you have such functionality, a very quick way to decrease response time is “outsource” those features to dedicated servers. You can use messenging servers such as ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ (an Apache project) or even kestrel (which Twitter uses) to offload long-running tasks to specialized servers. Doing asynchronous requests would allow in theory instantaneous response times, so that’s something you would want to look at as soon as you have more than a couple of dedicated servers.

Caching is also an efficient way to process requests, to prevent requests hitting app servers. As for web application code, this depends on technologies used for your website.

4. Back-end and database servers speed

Fortunately, optimizing database servers is easier than the above points.

There are known and “battle-tested” solutions for instance on scaling MySQL, from replication to master-slaves setups, and balancing the loads. Like application servers, you can search for the best hardware for the server, using power servers, and with very low access time hard drives. You can see for instance in the following graph how MySQL behaves for different hardware on different loads, and then plan accordingly:

Many web companies also use heavily memcached in front of the SQL Servers, in order to retrieve frequently-accessed objects from memory.

5. Assets Servers

Assets servers delivers static files, such as pictures, videos, javascript files, and other static elements such as flash animations.

You can tweak your web application to serve less files (for instance get all javascript files into just one file), compress files (and then gzip when serving the request).

Optimizing static file servers is probably the easiest when scaling and lowering response times.