iWeb Communities: Blog

Are you familiar with Drupal? This is an open source software that makes it easy to organize, manage and publish content with an endless variety of customization.

Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (or “GPL”), Drupal is developed and maintained by a community of over 630,000 users and developers around the world.

The Drupal Montreal community invites you to the fourth edition of the DrupalCamp that will be held on September 16-18, 2011 at McGill University’s McIntyre building. (more…)

In modern age of online media, we are surrounded by written words. This article is for any amateur or advanced Web designers out there that ever asked themselves the question: “Does the font choice really matter?” The answer is YES! The proper font choice does matter. Actually, it is one of the most important aspects of design, especially in Web design. (more…)

Last Thursday night, iWeb participated in a “Bug Hunt” which was held in downtown Montreal, at the Notman House.

Organized by Montreal Tech Watch, this event gathered developpers and product managers from several companies to test the usability of their respective products. (more…)

Adding and improving functionality on iWeb’s new line of Smart Severs is a top priority at iWeb. With regular additions of new functions and tools comes a new need: an easy way to view and manage these tools. Enter: Smart Services. (more…)

Are you a starving startup? We were once, and we know that our road to becoming the largest hosting provider in Canada would have been a lot harder if we didn’t have some help along the way.

So at iWeb, we are looking to do our part to support the startup and developer communities. We see a great oportunity to do so by sponsoring the International Startup Festival in our hometown, Montreal. We are putting our money where our mouth is by offering to pay for tickets to the International Startup Festival where you will have access to industry giants, thought leaders and your peers in the various stages of the startup lifecycle. (more…)

With the promise of constantly improving the Smart Servers features, iWeb launches a new option included in the SuperSmart package. This new feature is the activation and the administration of a Firewall directly from the Control Center.

You will now be able to operate a user-friendly Firewall on your SmartServer in a few clicks with the easy-to-use web based interface. This new feature allows you to enhance your server’s security and to ensure increased uptime on your server. This adaptable Firewall is dedicated to your server and, consequently, is not shared between various servers or clients. (more…)

Welcome to the first edition of the iWeb Browser Race! In the past few months, we’ve noticed that the race for the best Web browser can be brutal. With our chronometers in hand we’ve been analyzing statistics with help of our computer program called Boulier Quad. We’ve decided to start to regularly share results as well as the quarrels, quips and quick comebacks between users during what we’ve dubbed “The Incredible Browser Race.

Please note that these statistics are drawn from a very particular cast of users: YOU! Our customers, visiting iWeb.com. These statistics could not be applied to other websites. (more…)

On the 8th of June, iWeb will join Web leaders, such as Facebook, Google, Yahoo! and Bing, to provide IPv6 access to users of this new protocol when they connect to iWeb.com.

Prepared by the Internet Society, World IPv6 Day’s goal is to promote a progressive transition to the IPv6 protocol, since addresses in the current IPv4 protocol, are in short supply.
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To improve the quality of our services, we always try to find solutions to improve stability and performance in our systems.

For several weeks, our IT team has been working on the Panelbox Platform, the infrastructure that provides iWeb’s shared hosting services.

Since the last series of maintenance performed on these systems, we have implemented several significant improvements. These improvements have been made in consideration of the feedback you have provided us. (more…)

The purpose of this example is to demonstrate how to use a single installation of WordPress on a server and run multiple websites or WordPress blogs with different domain names. (more…)

Forget fighting about software and web development platforms — bring some love instead and attend the free Make Web Not War conference, being held for the first time in Vancouver May 7.

All of us at iWeb are particularly proud to offer support to the Make Web Not War Vancouver event and to the open source community through our sponsorship. (more…)

Our software development director, Bruno Morel, has recently made a presentation on “the role of the manager in Scrum Team” during ConFoo’s last edition.

Many of you have asked if a video would be available. Now it’s done. Enjoy! (more…)

The second edition of the ConFoo Conference takes place in Montreal from March 9 to 11, 2011. iWeb is pleased to have been invited to give a presentation. The topic submitted by Bruno Morel, our software development director, was selected and he will be part of the experts invited to present solutions for developers, project leaders and managers. (more…)

As a web company, iWeb has a long history with WordPress. We host thousands of WordPress installs on our shared hosting and dedicated servers platform, and iWeb was also began using WordPress early on, initially to post status updates but soon after for publishing our own company news and for blogging. We have also sponsored WordPress events in the past and will most likely continue do so in the future.

No doubt, it’s a compelling publishing platform, with its open-source development model, its powerful plugin and theming system, and its strong community of users and developers.

One of the direct consequences of the platform’s popularity is the constant attacks and hacking attempts it encounters. (more…)

This article was originally published on smashingmagazine.com and is reproduced with kind permission. Smashing Magazine is a fine Web mag that delivers useful and innovative information to Web designers and developers since 2006, go check it out!

Have you ever heard a colleague answer the phone like this: “Good afterno… Yes… What? Completely?… When did it go down?… Really, that long?… We’ll look into it right away… Yes, I understand… Of course… Okay, speak to you soon… Bye.”

The call may have been followed by some cheesy ’80s rock ballad coming from the speaker phone, interrupted by “Thank you for holding. You are now caller number 126 in the queue.” That’s your boss calling the hosting company’s 24 hour “technical support” line.

An important website has gone down, and sooner or later, heads will turn to the Web development corner of the office, where you are sitting quietly, minding your own business, regretting that you ever mentioned “Linux” on your CV. You need to take action. Your company needs you. Your client needs you. Here’s what to do. (more…)

Podcasting is a way to broadcast on the Internet audio or video clips that can be accessed using personal computers, as well as video and audio portable players.

Podcasting, which is a sort of a mix between radio/TV and blogs, is becoming a media of its own. It has known an incredible growth in recent years and has more and more fans, both producers and consumers (in the best sense of the term). (more…)

Wordpress is probably one of the best known content management systems. There are many others, TikiWiki or Impress CMS to name a few, but when it comes to managing a blog, Wordpress is certainly the most popular. The software, whose development is led by the Automattic team is so popular that it has almost ousted SixApart’s MovableType, that has been the leader in this field for many years . (more…)

If you are a user of our Windows Server dedicated hosting services you might be interested in knowing more about Microsoft SQL Server.

When making database management system decisions many companies focus on initial benefits but fail to pay attention to longer term advantages. The ability to scale, redundancy, reporting and synchronization are features that you can take advantage of out-of-the-box with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2.

Next week, Microsoft is going to host a webcast whose purpose is to highlight the benefits of Microsoft SQL Server Express and Windows Server dedicated hosting.

This webcast will focus on tools and procedures for getting you up and running with SQL Server quickly, how SQL Server compares to MySQL and how to get a fully functional copy of SQL Server for free.

You can join the live webcast on June 23rd from 1-2pm EST. Access to the Webcast is free but you must register here: https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032453541&Culture=en-CA

The webcast is opened to anyone but will be held in English only.

Last week was quite busy for developers and techies. All sorts of events have been hosted under the aegis of the Montreal Open Source Week. Also known as MonDev, this week was intended to be a celebration of open source technologies and the communities that revolve around them.

iWeb was really proud to partner with one of the coolest events of the week: Make Web Not War (MWNW). (more…)

The first question one should ask is why use a storage solution rather than a regular hard drive?

Hard drives are useful to store and quickly access to data but they may fail at any time or even alter and delete data. (more…)

Hi, Nik Garkusha here!

It’s not often you find a technology partner as passionate about their customers and community as the folks at iWeb.

A few months ago iWeb graciously donated a few servers for a pilot project to help local Montreal OSS communities with their development & testing efforts on IIS7, while we also donated $1000 to the project once it was ported over to Windows and IIS.

The idea was well received when it was announced at CareerDemoCamp Montreal in December and 2 bounties were accepted shortly thereafter. A couple months later both of our initial projects have successfully ported over to Windows and IIS (ImpressCMS and TikiWiki) and just recently we had another bounty accepted by our friends at Status.net! (more…)

The iWeb will have a strong presence at the next DemoCamp in Montreal. 2 of our employees will present and Jean-Luc SansCartier (@jeanlucs) will be an event host.

What is a DemoCamp? It’s an opportunity for Web developers and startups to meet and learn more about the job market, local brilliant projects, and network at the same time! It’s a series of 6-8 presentations which showcase the developer community. The demo can be a software, a web application or a current project. No powerpoints, just demos! The idea is to show technology in action and inspire attendees.

The Demo will be at the Mont-Royal center 2nd December 2009 at 6.30pm. The evening will start after the career workshop at 6.30, up to 8pm, when the demos will start. The event is free and open to all!

The presentations by iWeb employees will be Patrick Lafontaine and Benjamin Vanheuverzwijn. The subjects will be:

- Getting efficient MySQL backups, for free. Patick Lafontaine, certified MySQL DBA (CMDBA) and MySQL Developer (CMDEV)

- Presentation of free software for developing on a microcontroller PIC 16 bit. Benjamin Vanheuverzwijn, electrical engineer student

We hope to see you  at the DemoCamp next wednesday.

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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.

Google Adwords makes the bulk of Google’s $21 billion annual revenues. Its success lies on the fact that it’s capturing current intent, i.e. Internet visitors looking for something at one precise moment. Intent is the keyword here; this is what differs a Google search from a visit to a media site, a blog or a social network, where people are looking for entertainment or for hanging out, and not necessarily looking to buy a product or a service.

Nobody does it better than Google currently. They deliver the best search results, getting thus repeated visits, and they also focus on delivering the most relevant ads, thanks to a unique and intelligent PPC algorithm.

Google’s Adwords efficiency beats then other Internet marketing tools, such as newsletters, direct mailings, or “classical” advertising such as banners.

Surprisingly, Twitter Search might be the next holy grail for Internet marketers, and for Twitter and its investors too. Beyond customer service, or beyond brand tracking in the social media space, Twitter Search can be used as a powerful sales tool.

For instance, the TweetDeck screenshot has a panel dedicated to Twitter users writing about “dedicated server” (panel 2). This goes from troubles about setting up a dedicated server, to those looking for recommendations, or those micro-blogging about their software stack. If one sells then dedicated servers, it’s straightforward to initiate a contact with a reply, and acquire a customer.

This is powerful, as it goes in the same spirit of Google Adwords: Twitter Search surfaces the intention of Twitter users, with people looking for answers NOW, and receptive to feedback. It shows the most recent results in the panel, similar to Google’s most relevant results listed first in a web search page. It’s even more powerful, since you can put a name to each result, and have access to the user’s bio and network.

This is just an example, and it’s easy to see how you can integrate it too in your customer acquisition tools. You could track

wordpress near:Toronto

if you are a wordpress developer based in that city, and want to offer your services. You can even track keywords related to similar products (Drupal, Joomla, Tikwiki) in case you are also able to manage those leads. Twitter Search has more features, worth the look

As any new tool usage, a company or a service provider has to be very careful with Twitter Search, since it’s akin to say… hitting strangers in a bar. There is a fine line between authentic conversation and advice (which is what Twitter is meant to be), and spamming random users about your products. Twitter (or a third-party tool TweetDeck) also lacks tools to manage threads and conversations, which would allow a sales team or a customer service team to “assign” a Twitter user to a representative. Alerts, notifications, user tagging, flagging a few users, those are power features that Twitter would need to implement and make it a competitor (or a compliment) to Google Adwords, and ultimately transforming Twitter into an Internet giant.

Related Articles:

• Opportunities on the Web
• Revolutions, Crisis and Innovation: Why the Internet is still the most exciting technology in 2008
• Top 9 Reasons Why Web Hosting is Awesome

As a fast-growing industry, the Internet gathers hopes and dreams of many technology entrepreneurs, moms at home, freelancers, consultants, and also many “traditional” companies looking to expand in new fields.

As such, there are lots of blogs and websites specialized on the topic of how make money online, most of them focusing on the “how to get rich quick” schemes, and most of them not worth a second look, since many are just plain scams.

Here’s one interesting link though, a list of top web companies which earn the most. Google tops the list, at $21.8 billion revenues each year, followed by Amazon, Yahoo and Ebay.

If you are publishing a website, do have a look at the list, it does give ideas. There are a large number of companies in Internet advertising, and a few sizeable ones in retail (Amazon, Ebay, Zappos), however there are companies which are virtually monopolies.

Paypal for instance could use more competitors. Bloggers, web2.0 startups, big media companies would need a micro-payment system, one which is at the same very easy to use for consumers, and powerful for companies.

The iTunes Music Store is also a model which could use more competitors. It’s a virtual monopoly on music and media delivery on the web, and what a better time now than start a new web service to deliver music and video to consumers.

We could also have more online stores. Zappos (shoes) and Amazon (books) are good models; one could think about stores specialized in clothing, or in electronics, or in sports etc.

Have a great weekend!