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.

The objective of DrupalCamp is to gather all those interested in Drupal so they can get acquainted, share experiences and their ideas in person in an informal setting.

This year, organizers hope to receive more than 200 participants and the event will offer, in addition to an open-space meeting format, a number of workshops and conferences (see program for details). A few days before the camp, a multilingual code sprint in Drupal will be held at the Notman House, September 14-16, 2011.

iWeb’s team is very pleased to partner with the event as a sponsor and several of our developers will be on hand to share their knowledge with other participants. Watch for break out sessions!

It’s not too late to register ($20 for participants already registered online and $25 for those who register on the same day).

Be seeing you!

P.S. FYI, Drupal 7 is available as a One-Click Install from the customer-hub (Panelbox shared hosting) or if you use cPanel and the Fantastico extension on your dedicated server.

Font choice, along with page layout, font size and type arrangement, is one the most important ingredients in the overall typography of a page. With tens of thousands fonts out there, how do you know which one to use? Some fonts are best suited for a professional business like Apple, while others are better for a children website. Serifs, kerning or weight can determine the portrait of the page.

Mainly, to choose the proper font, you have to go with your gut feeling when you see the font for the first time. Categories are already established to help you find the correct font (handwriting, fun, techno, business, etc.). By choosing the right font, you can provide a better message to your audience, since the font is as powerful as an image. Tim Brown, the Type Manager for Typekit, said: “I don’t start with a layout and then choose type; I start with type and then grow out from that.” Since a typographer understands his responsibility towards the reader, the best typographers and type designers are obsessed by details, so that the readers aren’t.

Here is a list of a few font websites recommended by our designers:

• http://www.fontsquirrel.com/ – Free
• http://new.myfonts.com/ – Reseller
• www.google.com/webfonts – Free
• www.typekit.com

Don’t be shy to ask colleagues, friends or family about your font choice. Even a glimpse at the typography should evoke some sort of feeling. Finally, typography matters because words matter.

What are your favorite fonts? Do you know good foundries?

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

The companies present were mTrip who develops intelligent travel guides for the iPhone and Android; matchFWD whose objective is to connect talent with growing companies; ArtSumo connects artists from emerging countries with art aficionados around the world and Twtpoll who develops tools to create polls to use on Social Media sites. The main goal for iWeb was to gather comments from people who have never used our products, specifically, the Smart Server and its control panel, the Control Center.

First, we were pleased that our product caused a real “Wow” effect! The participants were impressed by the quality of the design of the Control Center, and the disconcerting ease with which they were able to navigate and manage the Smart Server! Although not purposely optimized for smart phones, we also received feedback that our Control Center performed particularly well on mobile platforms. Of course there were some critiques and minor cosmetic bugs were pointed out during the session but nothing dramatic. So, we are confident we are on the right track!

We are actively listening to comments from the community, whether from existing clients or specialists interested in web hosting and software development. Being an Agile organized development team allows us to relatively easily prioritize and introduce new features as well as improve and optimize our existing features. You can be sure you will be hearing about the Smart Server for quite a while ;-)

Feel free to add your comments or questions, we’ll be glad to hear from you!

The “Smart Services” tab can be found in the Control Center and enhances your ability to exercise complete control over your server. Click this tab to find all the optional services available on Smart servers including the features included with the SuperSmart package.

To give you a preview, here is a screenshot of the interface:

Discover the SuperSmart package offered on Smart Servers, the Smart Firewall option and the R1Soft Backup Solution.

Many other options are coming soon and will be available in this tab, including Smart Groups, a private virtual LAN service for all your Smart Servers. Smart servers within a Smart Group will be able to communicate while remaining invisible to other clients’ servers connected to the same local network.

Follow the iWeb Blog to remain up-to-date about upcoming Smart Servers features!

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.

We will award tickets to the startups whose story we like the most. Plus, the winners will:

• have access to our specialists to give you advice about the infrastructure you’ll need for your project
• spend one-on-one time with our Chief DNA officer, Sylvain Leclair
• get the chance to share your story with iWeb community and beyond

We’re choosing the winners July 5th so don’t wait!

Entering for a chance to win is easy. Simply fill out the form below to tell us your story. We will choose the story we like the most.

Not sure where to start? Here are a few questions to help you tell us your story:

What is your idea? What stage are you at? Why would you like to attend international Startup festival?
Are you a startup, but not starving? We would love to hear you story too!

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.

The Firewall is installed on the Smart Layer and not on the Operating System, which allows better flexibility. The Firewall installation is immediate and requires no downtime on your server. In addition, the Firewall has no impact on the server performances since it uses no resources on the OS (Operating System), unlike a Software Firewall. Furthermore, if you reinstall your servers OS, your Firewall configurations will remain unchanged.

The Firewall offered in the SuperSmart package is analogous to dedicated Firewalls for Classic Servers, with the addition of the web based interface that allows the user to configure, enable and disable the Firewall rule sets without going through SSH command. You can now enable or disable your Firewall in a few clicks and the configuration updates require no manual intervention.

Three types of configurations of your rule sets will be available (two are predetermined). The first configuration is the default, and is set when your server is activated. This allows inexperienced users to efficiently manage their server’s security without advanced knowledge in system administration. The second configuration is adapted for use with cPanel. It allows you to effortlessly configure the Firewall for the specific services offered with cPanel. The last configuration is “Custom”, and is aimed at experienced users who can manage all the Firewall rule sets. These rule sets allow every type of user to configure the Firewall, from the inexperienced to the advanced administrator.

To give you a preview, here are a few screenshots of the interface:

This service is included in the SuperSmart package offered at 20$ per month.

Additional options will soon be available on the SmartServers, including Smart Groups, a private virtual LAN service for all your SmartServers. Each server will be able to easily communicate without being noticeable by the other clients’ servers connected to the same local network. You will receive further information in the upcoming weeks.

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.

Here are the results for April:

• For the 8th consecutive month, the winner is Firefox, with a significant break out of the gates for Firefox 4 (10% increase in one month only), picking up speed, preserving its lead, and further distancing itself from Internet Explorer and Safari.
• In second place, the “Pit-Stop” prize, for the fastest tire change, is awarded to Chrome (10.0), since all 9.0 version users have now been updated. It’s small burst of speed has taken some of the wind out of Internet Explorer and Safari’s sails. (they came in with a combined total of 2%)
• In third place, the consolation prize is awarded to Internet Explorer, which is losing speed compared to Firefox and Chrome. The new version (9.0) did not make any difference. Although it is Microsoft’s brand new car, only 1.3% of Internet Explorer users updated their browser for the latest version. Microsoft will therefore need to tune its new Rolls-Royce.

Special Prizes:

• Black Flag: Internet Explorer has lost 2% of its users, while the global volume increases. A pit-stop to fuel up (Service Pack) might be necessary.
• White Flag award: three quarters of our clients can now use the Virtual Console for SmartServers, we are eagerly awaiting the 4/5 mark.
• Bleeding Edge: One (or two maximum according to the statistics) user surfed our website with Chrome 12.0 last month. If you are this user, congratulations! You represent the future!

What is your favorite browser? What features do you seek the most in a browser? We invite you to share your comments, while waiting for the next edition of the iWeb Browser Race.

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.

Users of the new protocol will automatically connect to iWeb.com using IPv6, during the 24-hour experiment. However, users with IPv4 will continue to connect via the current protocol, since the website is published in IPv6 and IPv4.

This test is limited to iWeb.com websites and will neither affect the Customer Hub nor the Blog nor the Control Center.

IPv6 has been in alpha/beta mode since August 2009. IPv6 is configured on our core network and we already have three IPv6 transit providers, which are Tata, Level3 and Tinet. We plan to annex Peer1 and Cogent to this list shortly. The Internetwork Operating System on all our routers was upgraded March 15th, in order to become fully IPv6 capable allowing us to offer it on all our servers in the future.

For further information about IPv6, you can consult the following website : http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6.

In the meantime, you can test your IPv6 connection by clicking on the link: http://test-ipv6.com/.

iWeb is proud to be taking part in this event, as it represents our proactive approach to preparing for the transition to this new protocol, whose usage will eventually be extended worldwide.

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.

First, we implemented Ksplice. This is an extension of the Linux kernel that allows a system administrator to apply patches to the kernel without having to reboot the system.

One of the significant advantage of this system is that it greatly reduces the number of planned maintenance actions that we perform on these servers. Another is that it allows us to apply the security updates much more quickly in case of a security flaw.

Ksplice works for x86 and x86-64 and is developed by Ksplice Inc. under the GNU General Public License.

Second major enhancement: CloudLinux. It’s actually an OS that replaces our traditional CentOS. CloudLinux’s major advantage is the ability to efficiently distribute the resources of the server among customers. We can now automatically limit the use of resources per customer on a server.

This limit allows hosted sites to temporary exceed resources while ensuring that the resource overflow will not affect the entire server.

Thus, a user will no longer be able to consume all the server resources, either voluntarily or involuntarily due to an intrusion, a bug or other occurence. Therefore, even if a site has a problem, all other sites hosted on this server will remain available.

The affected site may then experience a slowdown, even display an error message, but would not necessarily be suspended for exceeding resources. It is important to note that we still have the ability increase limits in real time where required; for example, to ensure availability during special events.

These improvements, are combined several other lesser modifications, such as a thorough optimization of our MySQL servers, the use of Linux Malware Detection to prevent hacking attempts in our servers through customer’s sites.

In addition, we have optimized our backup scripts so that we can restore “disfigurement” of sites of moderate magnitude in a few minutes (up to 15 to 30 minutes for an entire server if the deletion targets only the index).

Finally, we have performed a migration of Panelbox S02 to S013 and S015 to S032, which are VMWare based. In the coming days, we will conduct preventive checks of the file system (FSCK) on these servers to take full advantage of the recent VMWare update from version 3.5 to 4.1. In short, this verification will allow for improved resource management (better CPU and Virtualized memory utilization) and improved high availability (faster and more reliable migrations of virtual machines, etc.)

Our teams have put in a lot of hard work to implement these changes. We are confident that it is well worth it and we are sure you will enjoy these improvements.

What it takes :

• WordPress updated version (February 2011 = 3.0.5)
• PHP version 4.3 or higher
• MySQL version 4.0 or higher
• Apache mod_rewrite (Linux Hosting recommended)
• Wildcard CNAME record for subdomains
• Activation Procedures for Multisite with sub-domain option
• Plugin : WordPress MU Domain Mapping
• Access to DNS management interface

Step 1 : Enable Multisite function with sub-domain

You can use this procedure to activate the Multisite function under WordPress 3.0.5 (with sub-domain option).

Step 2 : Create site and choose domain names

In my example, the main blog will be www.babillard-scolaire.org and I have already created a second site which is testmapping.

• my first site (which will be managed under the same WordPress babillard-scolaire.org will be :
  testmapping.babillard-scolaire.org and the domain name that I will “map” will be www.babillardscolaire.com

Step 3 : Install the WordPress MU Domain mapping plugin

You may download the plugin on the WordPress.org site

1. Create the mu-plugins directory under the wp-content directory
2. Copy the sunrise.php file (from the WordPress Mu Domain mapping plugin) in the wp-content wp-content directory
3. Copy the domain_mapping.php file (from the WordPress Mu Domain mapping plugin) in the mu-plugins directory
4. Edit the wp-config.php file (I suggest to use NotePad++) and add the following line:define( ‘SUNRISE’,’on’);
   just above the “/* line. That’s all, do not touch the following! Good blogging! */”

Step 4 : Mapping configuration in Super Admin (through the instrument panel)

Note : you must know the IP address of your website (mine in this example is 174.122.132.8). You can also use a CNAME according to the plugin information.

Click on Domain mapping under Super Admin and enter the IP address in the Server IP Address field and check :

• User domain mapping page
• Redirect administration pages to site’s original domain (remote login disabled if this redirect is disabled)

Step 5 : Map the domain name on the site

So I want to map the www.babillardscolaire.com domain on the website I have created testmapping.babillard-scolaire.org.

Go to the testmapping.babillard-scolaire.org site administration by clicking Super Admin and the Administration link which is under testmapping Super Adminan the Administration link which is under testmapping.

This opens the instrument panel to manage the testmapping site.

On the panel, click Domain Mapping under Tools

and add the domain you wish to map.

In my example, I want to map the www.babillardscolaire.com domain. So this is the information I have entered in the http:// field; then you check Primary domain for this blog and you click the Add button.

Step 6 : Configure the domain on CPanel

To make the www.babillardscolaire.com domain work, I also have to configure it through CPanel, by using Parked Domains in the Domains section.

Enter the domain name (here www.babillardscolaire.com) and click the Add Domain button.


Note : First, we need the DNS zone of your domain (my example: www.babillardscolaire.com) points to the IP address where your website is hosted.

I can now manage the www.babillard-scolaire.org and www.babillardscolaire.com (testmapping.babillard-scolaire.org) sites in the same instrument panel. You can add as many sites as you want.

Please send us your articles on Web Design, Web Hosting or Web Marketing to community@iweb.com.

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.

It is definitely the place to go if you like to learn about the latest tips, tricks and software from industry experts. The conference focuses on open source applications and explores the newest web paradigms and technologies, notably mixed web environments, interoperable applications, PHP on Windows and the Windows web platform. MWNW is about bridging the gap between different platforms, communities, and developers of all trades and backgrounds.

Last year’s event in Montreal was a huge success — this year’s conference in Vancouver will be even better. Here are three good reasons to attend:

1) Meet with and chat with like-minded developers and share stories.
2) Learn from industry leaders and check out the panellists.
3) Fun. Video games. After party.

MWNW is jointly sponsored by Microsoft and open source communities across Canada. iWeb is the Platinum sponsor for the event and proudly hosts the following websites

http://webnotwar.ca
http://port25.ca
http://webcentralstation.ca

as well as servers used for the Code Your Art Out code competition.

Fast facts:
What: Make Web Not War
When: May 7
Where: Masik Studios
145 West 2nd Avenue
Vancouver, British Columbia V5Y 1C2

So, are you convinced?

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

This video and several others are also available on our Youtube channel.

The theme of his presentation, “The role of the manager in the Scrum Team” will address among other topics, change management, personal growth, management of human beings beyond metrics, weaknesses and pitfalls of Scrum that the Agile manager must avoid.

The presentation will be given in French. Here’s the summary: “To become more agile, more and more companies are trying to adopt the Scrum methodology. The Scrum Master, the team, the product owner roles are a formal and documented process. By building a team of independent and autonomous individuals, the Scrum ‘pack’ by definition excludes the manager. In the literature, he is considered a ‘chicken’, his role being often interpreted as passive and often caricatured (“buy pizza and get out of the way”). How much space in Scrum exists for a team manager? What is the role of the coordinator, the team leader, the director, and even sometimes the VP / CTO / COO in the context of the Agile project process? ”

To discuss these concepts, Bruno invites you all to attend his presentation on Friday, March 11 at 9:40. The more the merrier!

A delegation of our developers will also attend Confoo and participate in the various presentations. They will mix with the community and they will be glad to answer your questions about their work as a developer and about iWeb in general.

So if you see us, do come and meet us.

Bruno Morel participated in an interview following his presentation (in french):

The presentation itself will be rebroadcast on our blog in the coming days.

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.

First there are blog comments spammers, but also bots and hackers who try to take control of your website. For example, many of our customers have already had the nasty surprise of having their home page replaced by a black page signed by a hacker. Very often this vulnerability is due to the fact that the WordPress installation on the client is not updated and still uses an outdated version.

We’ve introduced several measures that would prevent a similar issue, from technical measures to measures preventing social engineering. We are constantly hardening our own servers and regularly applying security fixes but, you must also insure your own security is up-to-date, whether you manage your own dedicated server or you run a simple Wordpress blog on your shared hosting account.

It’s easy to overlook WordPress security and every WordPress blogger should spend some time on the issue. WordPress regularly releases an update to their blogging platform. Of course, the minimum you should do is upgrade to the most recent version, especially if it’s a vulnerability fix release. For instance, if you installed WordPress from the Fantastico OneClick install option and have never updated to the latest release, you should do it now.

To find out which version you run and if an update is available simply look for the release number in the Dashboard.

Unfortunately, having the latest version does not guarantee a hacker will not try to break in.

Here are other tools which might help you improve your blog security:

• First of all make sure to change the default admin usersername to something other than ‘admin’. The linked article gives you 3 ways to do it easily.
• The WordPress codex has an extensive resource on how to harden your Wordpress install
• The WordPress Security Scan plugin scans your site for security issues, checks passwords, file permissions, database security. It also hides the WordPress version and secures the admin area.
• The login lockdown plugin allows you to control login usage. It prevents for instance scripts or bots doing dictionary attacks
• The WordPress login logger plugin allows you to have logs on who tried to log into the admin area.
• WP DB Backup is a plugin which makes a copy of your WordPress database. Useful in the case a hacker went through your WordPress and publishes or deletes existing articles.

There are also other efficient tactics such as preventing access to wp-admin apart from selected IP addresses, through the .htaccess file. Users or bots with an unknown address will be greeted with a 403 response. If you run WordPress on your own dedicated server, you might also want to run a VPN application like OpenVPN, to secure the access to your Dashboard.

A final piece of advice before we conclude:

Do not trust every plugin you find on the Internet. Make sure that a wide community of users is using and that its author provides some support or at least fixes bugs that are reported. If the plugin is free, do not forget to show your support by making a donation if the author asks for it, or even contribute to it if you are a developer.

This list is not exhaustive. Please share your own tips and advice in the comments below.

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.

1. Check That It Has Actually Gone Down

Don’t take your client’s word for it. Visit the website yourself, and press Shift + Refresh to make sure you’re not seeing a cached version (hold down Shift while reloading or refreshing the page). If the website displays fine, then the problem is probably related to your client’s computer or broadband connection.

If it fails, then visit a robust website, such as google.com or bbc.co.uk. If they fail too, then there is at least an issue with your own broadband connection (or your broadband company’s DNS servers). Chances are that you and your client are located in the same building and the whole building has lost connectivity, or perhaps you have the same broadband company and its engineers have taken the day off. You will need to check the website on your mobile phone or phone a friend. To be doubly sure, ask your friend to check Where’s It Up? or Down for Everyone or Just Me?, which will confirm whether your website is down just for you or for everyone.

If the website is definitely down, then frown confusedly and keep reading. A soft yet audible sigh would also be appropriate. You might want to locate the documents or emails that your Internet hosting service sent you when you first signed up with it. It should have useful details such as your IP address, control panel location, log-in details and admin and root passwords; these will come in handy.

2. Figure Out What Has Gone Down

A website can appear to have gone down mainly for one of the following reasons:

• A programming error on the website,
• A DNS problem, or an expired domain,
• A networking problem,
• Something on the server has crashed,
• The whole server has crashed.

To see whether it’s a programming error, visit the website and check the status bar at the bottom of your browser. If it says “Done” or “Loaded,” rather than “Waiting…” or “Connecting…,” then the server and its software are performing correctly, but there is a programming error or misconfiguration. Check the Apache error log for clues.

Otherwise, you’ll need to run some commands to determine the cause. On a Mac with OS X or above, go to Applications ? Utilities and run Terminal. On a PC with Windows, go to Start ? All Programs ? Accessories and choose “Command Prompt.” If you use Linux, you probably already know about the terminal; but just in case, on Ubuntu, it’s under Applications ? Accessories.

The first command is ping, which sends a quick message to a server to check that it’s okay. Type the following, replacing the Web address with something meaningful to you, and press “Enter.” For all of the commands in this article, just type the stuff in the grey monospaced font. The preceding characters are the command prompt and are just there to let you know who and where you are.

C:\> ping www.stockashop.co.uk

If the server is alive and reachable, then the result will be something like this:

Reply from 92.52.106.33:
bytes=32 time=12ms TTL=53

Ping command from a Windows computer.

On Windows, it will repeat four times, as above. On Linux and Mac, each line will start with 64 bytes from and it will repeat indefinitely, and you’ll need to press Control + C to stop it.

The four-part number in the example above is your server’s IP address. Every computer on the Internet has one. At this stage, you can double-check that it is the correct one. You’ll need to have a very good memory, or refer to the documentation that your hosting company sent you when you first signed up with it. (This article does not deal with the newish eight-part IPv6 addresses.)

For instance, my broadband company is sneaky and tries to intercept all bad requests so that it can advertise to me when I misspell a domain name in the Web browser. In this case, the ping looks successful but the IP address is wrong:

64 bytes from advancedsearch.virginmedia.com
(81.200.64.50): icmp_seq=1 ttl=55 time=26.4 ms

Note that ping might also show the server name in front of the IP address (advancedsearch.virginmedia.com in this case). Don’t worry too much if it doesn’t match the website you are pinging — a server can have many names. The IP address is more important.

Assuming you’ve typed the domain name correctly, a bad IP address indicates that the domain name could have expired or that somebody has made a mistake with its DNS settings. If you receive something like unknown host, then it’s definitely a domain name issue:

ping: unknown host www.nosuchwebsite.fr

In this case, use a website such as Who.is to verify the domain registration details, or run the whois command from Linux or Mac. It will at least tell you when it expired, who owns it and where it is registered. The Linux and Mac commands host and nslookup are also useful for finding information about a domain. The nslookup command in particular has many different options for querying different aspects of a domain name:

paul@MyUbuntu:~$ whois stockashop.co.uk
paul@MyUbuntu:~$ host stockashop.co.uk
paul@MyUbuntu:~$ nslookup stockashop.co.uk
paul@MyUbuntu:~$ nslookup -type=soa stockashop.co.uk

If nothing happens when you ping, or you get something like request timed out, then you can deepen your frown and move on to step three.

What a non-responding server looks like in a Linux terminal.

Alternatively, if your server replied with the correct IP address, then you can exhale in relief and move on to step five.

Note that there are plenty of websites such as Network-Tools.com that allow you to ping websites. However, using the command line will impress your colleagues more, and it is good practice for the methods in the rest of this article.

3. How Bad Is It?

If your ping command has timed out, then chances are your whole server has crashed, or the network has broken down between you and the server.

If you enjoy grabbing at straws, then there is a small chance that the server is still alive and has blocked the ping request for security reasons — namely, to prevent hackers from finding out it exists. So, you can still proceed to the next step after running the commands below, but don’t hold your breath.

To find out if it is a networking issue, use traceroute on Mac or Linux and tracert on a PC, or use the trace option on a website such as Network-Tools.com. On Mac and Linux type:

paul@MyUbuntu:~$ traceroute www.stockashop.co.uk

On Windows:

C:\> tracert www.stockashop.co.uk

Traceroute traces a route across the Internet from your computer to your server, pinging each bit of networking equipment that it finds along the way. It should take 8 to 20 steps (technically known as “hops”) and then time out or show a few asterisks (*). The number of steps depends on how far away the server is and where the network has broken down.

The first couple of steps happens in your office or building (indicated by IP addresses starting with 192.68 or 10). The next few belong to your broadband provider or a big telecommunications company (you should be able to tell by the long name in front of the IP address). The last few belong to your hosting company. If your server is alive and well, then the very last step would be your server responding happily and healthily.

Traceroute on a Mac, through the broadband company and host to an unresponsive server.

Barring a major networking problem, like a city-wide power outage, traceroute will reach your hosting company. Now, you just need to determine whether only your server is ill or a whole rack or room has gone down.

You can’t tell this just from traceroute, but chances are the servers physically next to yours have similar IP addresses. So, you could vary the last number of your server’s IP address and check for any response. If your server’s IP address is 123.123.123.123, you could try:

C:\> ping 123.123.123.121
C:\> ping 123.123.123.122
C:\> ping 123.123.123.124
C:\> ping 123.123.123.125

If you discover that the server is in the middle of a range of 10 to 20 IP addresses that are all broken, then it could well indicate a wider networking issue deep within the air-conditioned, fireproof bunker that your server calls home. It is unlikely that the hosting company would leave so many IP addresses unused or that the addresses would have all crashed at the same time for different reasons. It is likely, though not definitive, that a whole rack or room has been disconnected or lost power… or burned down.

Alternatively, if nearby IP addresses do reply, then only your server is down. You can proceed to the next step anyway and hope that the cause is that your server is very secure and is blocking ping requests. Perhaps upgrade that deep frown to a pronounced grimace.

Otherwise, you’ll have to keep listening to Foreigner until your hosting company answers the phone. It is the only one that can fix the network and/or restart the server. But at least you now have someone else to blame. And if you are number 126 in the queue, it’s probably because 125 other companies think their websites have suddenly gone down, too.

4. Check Your Web Server Software

If the server is alive but just not serving up websites, then you can make one more check before logging onto the server. Just as your office computer has a lot of software for performing various tasks (Photoshop, Firefox, Mac Mail, Microsoft Excel, etc.), so does your server. Arguably its most important bit of software is the Web server, which is usually Apache on Linux servers and IIS on Windows servers. (From here on in, I will refer to it as “Web server software,” because “Web server” is sometimes used to refer — confusingly — to the entire server.)

When you visit a website, your Web browser communicates with the Web server software behind the scenes, sharing caching information, sending and receiving cookies, encrypting and decrypting, unzipping and generally managing your browsing experience.

You can bypass all of this and talk directly to the Web server software by using the telnet command, available on Windows, Linux and Mac. It will tell you conclusively whether your Web server software is alive. The command ends with the port, which is almost always 80:

ping@MyUbuntu:~$ telnet www.stockashop.co.uk 80

If all were well, then your Web server software would respond with a couple of lines indicating that it is connected and then wait for you to tell it what to do. Type something like this, followed by two blank lines:

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.stockashop.co.uk

The first / tells it to get your home page; you could also say GET /products/index.html or something similar. The Host line tells it which website to return, because your server might hold many different websites. If your website were working, then your Web server software would reply with some headers (expiry, cookies, cache, content type, etc.) and then the HTML, like this:

Checking the web server software with telnet.

But because there is a problem, telnet will either not connect (indicating that your Web server software has crashed) or not respond (indicating that it is misconfigured). Either way, you’ll need to keep reading.

5. Logging Into Your Server

The remote investigations are now over, and it’s time to get up close and personal with your errant server.

First, check your server’s documentation to see whether the server has a control panel, such as Plesk or cPanel. If you’re lucky, it will still be working and will tell you what is wrong and offer to restart it for you (in Plesk, click Server ? Service Management).

If your server has a control panel such as Plesk, try logging in to make sure the Web server is running.

If not, then the following commands apply to dedicated Linux servers. You could try them in shared hosting environments, but they probably won’t work. Windows servers are a different kettle of fish and won’t be addressed in this article.

To log in and run commands on the server, you will need the administrative user name and password and the root password, as provided by your host. For shared hosting environments, an FTP user name and password might work.

On Linux and Mac, the command to run is ssh, which stands for “secure shell” and which allows you to securely connect to and run commands on your server. You will need to add your administrative user name to the command after -l, which stands for “login”:

paul@MyUbuntu:~$ ssh -l admin www.stockashop.co.uk

Windows doesn’t come with ssh, but you can easily download a Windows SSH client such as Putty. Download putty.exe, save it somewhere and run it. Type your website as the host name and click “Open.” It will ask you who to log in as and then ask for your password.

Using Putty to SSH from a Windows computer.

Once you have successfully logged in, you should see something like admin@server$, followed by a flashing or solid cursor. This is the Linux command line, very similar to the Terminal or command prompt used above, except now you are actually on the server; you are a virtual you, floating around in the hard drive of your troubled server.

If ssh didn’t even connect, then it might be blocked by a firewall or turned off on the server. If it said Permission denied, then you’ve probably mistyped the user name or password. If it immediately said Connection to www.stockashop.co.uk closed, then you are trying to log in with a user name that is not allowed to run commands; make sure you’re logging in as the administrative user and not an FTP user.

6. Has It Run Out Of Space?

Your server has likely not run out of hard disk space, but I’m putting this first because it’s a fairly easy problem to deal with. The command is df, but you can add -h to show the results in megabytes and gigabytes. Type this on the command line:

admin@server$ df -h

The results will list each file system (i.e. hard drive or partition) and show the percentage of each that has been used.

Checking hard disk usage on a Linux server.

If any of them show 100% usage, then the command probably took eons to type, and you will need to free up some space fast.

Quick Fix

You should still be able to FTP to the server and remove massive files that way. A good place to start is the log files and any back-up directories you have.

You could also try running the find command to search for and remove huge files. This command finds files bigger than 10 MB and lets you scroll through the results one page at a time. You might need to run it as root to avoid a lot of permission denied messages (see below for how to do this). It might also take a long time to run.

root@server# find / -size +10000000c | more

You could also restrict the search to the full partition or to just your websites, if you know where they are:

root@server# find /var/www/vhosts/ -size +10000000c | more

If you want to know just how big those files are, you can add a formatting sequence to the command:

root@server# find /var/www/vhosts -size +10000000c -printf "%15s %p\n"

When you’ve found an unnecessarily big file, you can remove it with rm:

root@server# rm /var/www/vhosts/badwebsite.com/backups/really-big-and-old-backup-file.tgz

Permanent Fix

Clearing out back-ups, old websites and log files will free up a lot of space. You should also identify any scripts and programs that are creating large back-up files. You could ask your host for another hard drive.

7. Has It Run Out Of Memory?

Your server might just be running really, really slowly. The free command will let you know how much memory it is using. Add -m to show the results in megabytes.

admin@server$ free -m

The results will show how much of your memory is in use.

Checking memory usage on a Linux server.

The results above say that the server has 3550 MB, or 3.5 GB, of total memory. Linux likes to use as much as possible, so the 67 MB free is not a problem. Focus on the buffers/cache line instead. If most of this is used, then your server may have run out of workable memory, especially if the swap space (a bit of the hard drive that the server uses for extra memory) is full, too.

If your server has run out of memory, then the top command will identify which bit of software is being greedy.

admin@server$ top

Every few seconds, this gives a snapshot of which bits of software are running, which user started them and how much of your memory and CPU each is using. Unfortunately, this will run very slowly if memory is low. You can press “Q” or Control + C to exit the command.

The Linux top command shows what is running.

Each of the bits of software above is known as a “process.” Big pieces of software such as Apache and MySQL will often have a parent process with a lot of child processes and so could appear more than once in the list. In this benign example, a child process of the Apache Web server is currently the greediest software, using 7.6% of the CPU and 1.6% of the memory. The view will refresh every three seconds. Check the Mem column to see whether anything is consistently eating up a large portion of the memory.

Quick Fix

The quickest solution is to kill the memory hog. You will need to be root to do this (unless the process is owned by you — see below). First of all, though, search on Google to find out what exactly you are about to kill. If you kill a core program (such as the SSH server), you’ll be back to telephone support. If you kill your biggest client’s data amalgamation program, which has been running for four days and is just about to finish, then the client could get annoyed, despite your effort to sweeten it with “But your website is okay now!”

If the culprit is HTTPD or Apache or MySQLd, then skip to the next section, because those can be restarted more gracefully. In fact, most things can be restarted more gracefully, but this is a quick ignore-the-consequences type of fix.

Find the process ID in the PID column of the command above, and type kill -9, followed by the number. For example:

root@server# kill -9 23421

The -9 tells it to stop completely and absolutely. You can now run top again to see whether it has made a difference. If some other similar process has jumped to the memory-eating position instead, then you’ve probably only stopped a child process, and you will need to find the parent process that spawned all the greedy children in the first place, because stopping the parent will stop all the children, too. Use the process ID again in this command:

root@server# ps -o ppid,user,command 23421

This asks Linux to show you the parent process ID, user and command for the process number 23421. The results will look like this:

PPID  USER     COMMAND
31701 apache   /usr/sbin/httpd

The PPID is the parent process ID. Now try killing this one:

root@server# kill -9 31701

Run top again. Hopefully, the memory usage has now returned to normal. If the parent process ID was 0, then some other process entirely is consuming memory, so run top again.

Permanent Fix

You will probably have to restart the offending software at some point because you may have just disabled your server’s SPAM filter or something else important. If the problem was with Apache or MySQL, you might have an errant bit of memory-eating programming somewhere, or Apache, MySQL or PHP might have non-optimal memory limits. There’s a slim chance that you have been hacked and that your server is slow because it’s sending out millions of emails. Sometimes, though, a server has reached capacity and simply needs more RAM to deal with the afternoon rush.

To find out what went wrong in the first place, check the web logs and/or the log files in /var/log/. When your hosting company has finally answered the phone, you can ask it to also take a look. Figuring out what happened is important because it could well happen again, especially if it’s a security issue. If the hosting company is not responsive or convincing enough, seek other help.

8. Has Something Crashed?

Most Linux servers use Apache for the Web server software and MySQL for the database. It is easy to see whether these are still running (and to restart them if they’re not) or are using up way too much memory. To see all processes running on your server right now, run this command:

admin@server$ ps aux | more

Scroll through the list and look for signs of apache (or its older name httpd) and mysqld (the “d” stands for daemon and is related to the way the programs are run). You are looking for something like this:

USER       PID %CPU %MEM   VSZ   RSS TTY     STAT START   TIME COMMAND
apache   29495  0.5  1.4 90972 53772 ?       S    14:00   0:02 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache   29683  0.3  1.4 88644 52420 ?       S    14:03   0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache   29737  0.3  1.4 88640 52520 ?       S    14:04   0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd

Or you can use the grep command to filter results:

admin@server$ ps aux | grep http
admin@server$ ps aux | grep mysql

If either Apache or MySQL is not running, then this is the source of the problem.

This listing shows that Apache is indeed running.

Quick Fix

If Apache or MySQL is not running, then you’ll need to run the commands below as root (see below). Linux usually has a set of scripts for stopping and starting its major bits of software. You first need to find these scripts. Use the ls command to check the couple of places where these scripts usually are:

root@server# ls /etc/init.d/

If the results include a lot of impressive-looking words like crond, httpd, mailman, mysqld and xinetd, then you’ve found the place. If not, try somewhere else:

root@server# ls /etc/rc.d/init.d/

Or use find to look for them:

root@server# find /etc -name mysqld

Once it is located, you can run a command to restart the software. Note that the scripts might have slightly different names, like apache, apache2 or mysql.

root@server# /etc/init.d/httpd restart
root@server# /etc/init.d/mysqld restart

Hopefully, it will say something like Stopping… Starting… Started. Your websites will start behaving normally again!

Permanent Fix

As above, check the log files, especially the Apache error logs. Sometimes these are all in one place, but usually each website on the server has its own error log. You could look through the ones that were busiest around the time of the crash. Or else you could have a misconfiguration or a programming bug or security breach, so it could well happen again until you identify and address the cause.

Becoming a Super-User

Most of the fixes above require special permissions. For example, you (i.e. the user you have logged in as) will be able to kill or restart processes only if you started them. This can happen on shared servers but is unlikely on dedicated servers, where you will see a lot of permission denied messages. So, to run those commands, you will need to become the server’s super-user, usually known as “root.” I’ve left this for last because it’s dangerous. You can do a lot of irreversible damage as root. Please don’t remove or restart anything unless you’re sure about it, and don’t leave your computer unattended.

There are two ways to run a command as root. You can prefix each command with sudo, or you can become root once and for all by typing su. Different servers place different restrictions on these commands, but one of them should work. The sudo command is more restrictive when it turns you into a lesser non-root super-user who is able to run some commands but not others. Both commands will ask for an extra password. For example:

admin@server$ sudo /etc/init.d/httpd restart

When you run su successfully, the prompt will change from a $ to a #, like this:

admin@server$ su
Password:
admin@server#

It might say admin@server or root@server. Either way, the # means that you are powerful and dangerous — and that you assume full liability for your actions.

Conclusion

This article has provided a few tips for recognizing and solving some of the most common causes of a website going down. The commands require some technical knowledge — or at least courage — but are hopefully not too daunting. However, they cover only a small subset of all the things that can go wrong with a website. You will have to rely on your hosting company if it is a networking issue, hardware malfunction or more complicated software problem.

Personally, I don’t mind the ’80s music that plays while I’m on hold with my hosting company. It’s better than complete silence or a marketing message. But it would be even better if the support rep picked up the phone within a few seconds and was ready to help. That is ultimately the difference between paying $40 per month for a dedicated server versus $400.

When the dust has settled, this might be a conversation worth having with your boss — the one still sitting glumly by the phone, eyeing your frown, and waiting for Bono to stop warbling.

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).

PodCamp Montreal will be held in Montreal on September 11 and 12 at the Coeur des Sciences of the Université du Quebec à Montréal (UQAM). This event is an anti-conference for social media and podcasting fans and professionals. If you want to learn more about it, or merely share you ideas, it will be the ideal opportunity, because of the very format of presentations. Indeed, an anti-conference is less stiff than traditional conferences and all specialists are invited on an equal footing. People will be very accessible and it will be easy to intervene and ask questions during these presentations. A more relaxed atmosphere does not mean that there will be no quality guests, quite the opposite, as shown in the announced schedule.
Just before PodCamp Montreal, on September 10th, will be held MediaCamp, which is a new opportunity for traditional media to take a look at their current challenges in an informal and spontaneous context.

This year iWeb is a proud sponsor of the event. We will be there to attend conferences and to take the pulse of the community. If you recognize our badge, please simply come to talk with us.

For those who are not yet familiar with podcasting, here are some examples of good audio and video blogs, in french:

L’Analyse du Geek: http://www.analysedugeek.com/
Technological and other nonsensic tribulations hosted by Ben le Geek and Frank the Tank

Québec Balado : http://quebecbalado.com/
Sylvain Grandmaison’s program dedicated to royalty free music and everything related to podcasting in Quebec.

MacQuébec: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/podcast-de-macquebec
The latest news from Apple and its products as well as MacOSX compatible software reviews by the MacQuebec team.

Mes Paroles s’envolent : http://mesparolessenvolent.com/
Laurent Lassalle’s podcast, who shares with us his discoveries in technologies, new Web concepts and music.

In English :

DyscultureD: http://dyscultured.com/dyscultured-live/
Introduces the last pop culture happenings north and south of “The 49th Parallel” – including movies, television, music, the Internet, gadgets and much more.

Music is my sanctuary: http://www.musicismysanctuary.com/
Monthly mix music masterfully concocted by Montreal disc jockey DJ Lexis.

Six pixels of separation: http://www.twistimage.com/podcast/
Author Mitch Joel reflexions on digital marketing, new media and personal branding.

The TWIT : http://twit.tv/
Podcast created by Leo Laporte and other former TechTV members.

Rocketboom : http://www.rocketboom.com/
This webcast creates and covers a wide range of information related to the Internet culture.

You too, make us discover your favorite podcasts and share your findings by adding your comments to this post.

Wordpress

Wordpress began as a simple blogging platform and has evolved over time to become a full-fledged content management system as well as a strong website development platform, through the multitude of available extensions, widgets and themes developed by an ever-growing community of developers. Wordpress is also used to manage communities through BuddyPress, a special version which offers Facebook-like features, forums with Simple:Press or shopping carts with the WP e-Commerce extension.

Wordpress reached a high level of maturity and its latest version, 3.0, which has just been released is undoubtedly the most complete. After a year and a half of work by over 200 volunteer contributors, many bugs have been fixed and many features demanded by users has been built-in (see complete list on the official website).

A guided tour of version 3

The administration interface has been streamlined and the contextual help system has been expanded to every screen.

Developers will appreciate the new APIs that will allow them to create and manage more easily the various elements of a theme, including the types of pages and menus. A new default theme named Twenty Ten, uses and highlights all the new features available to developers.

However, the most anticipated feature is the integration of multi-user functions (MU) which allows managing multiple sites from a single installation of Wordpress.

For more more details, watch the video guided tour:

Upgrade or new installation?

If you’re already a Wordpress user you were probably impatiently waiting for an update to the long-awaited version 3. There are two ways to perform an update. Either by doing a complete clean-install or by using the integrated updater right from the admin dashboard.

The first method is more complicated but it gives you complete control on the process and it is highly recommended if the configuration of your site is complex, especially if you use many extensions and a custom theme.

Updating from the dashboard is simpler but sometimes there are situations where an error can occur:

"Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 3516487 bytes) in ...."

According to many reports, the problem is due to the fact that the size of the file update is now larger than before mainly because of the new MU features and new Twenty Ten theme. WordPress now requires extra memory to complete the download and operation sometimes exhausts the amount of memory assigned to the default PHP scripts on the Web server, hence the error.

Several of our shared hosting customers of have reported the problem while others have managed to update without problem.

In the meantime if you encounter the error, there is still hope. Simply make a small change to your custom php.ini by adding this line:

memory_limit = 64M ; Maximum amount of memory a script may consume (64MB)

If the parameter already exists and uses a different value (typically 32MB), replace the old line by the new one.

If you do not have a custom php.ini file, no problem. Simply create a text file, name it … as you can guess, “php.ini” and save it in a private place of your server (I put mine in /etc/ at the root of my account) .

Then create a file named .htaccess (or edit it if it already exists) to the root of your website (eg in /www/ or /public_html/) and add the following line:

suPHP_ConfigPath /full/path/to/the/directory/ (indicate the exact pathname of the directory that contains your custom php.ini file).

We are studying the possibility of increasing the default memory for shared hosting customers.
UPDATE (Sept. 13, 2010): The default memory limit has been increased to 256MB on all our shared servers. Remember however, that if you use a custom php.ini file, the value shown is the one that will be used by your applications.

If you need help do not hesitate to contact us at customer service. We will gladly help you.

In any case, whatever the method of updating that you choose, check the compatibility of your extensions with version 3 and above all, make a backup of your database before proceeding. This will save you many headaches if something goes wrong.

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.

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

MWNW 2010 was held on May 27 and is one of the first conferences on the topic of interoperability and cross-platform development in Canada. The conference, which focused on the latest techniques and technologies available to the web community, was sponsored jointly by Microsoft and open source communities across Canada, including PHPQuebec.

iWeb, along with Microsoft, was there to present bounties to three promising projects developed in PHP and we are pleased to introduce them to you:

Evan Prodromou for Status.net:

StatusNet is an open source microblogging platform that helps you to connect and share in real time while using your own domain name. Evan is the founder of StatusNet and the creator of the StatusNet software. He is the CEO and lead developer at StatusNet, Inc., a company that provides integration and support services for this platform to brands and organizations.

Marc Laporte for Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware:

Tiki Wiki is a Content Management System (CMS) and Groupware application that can be used to create all sorts of websites, portals, intranets and extranets. Marc is an administrator and developer of the TikiWiki project since 2003. He is the founder of AvanTech.net, a company that specializes in the integration of TikiWiki CMS/Groupware based solutions.

Marc-Andre Lanciault for ImpressCMS:

ImpressCMS is a community-developed content management system that can be used to easily create and maintain dynamic, flexible websites. Marc-Andre is the lead developer of ImpressCMS and founder of INBOX International, a company that offers integration services of Open Source Web technologies to enterprises.

iWeb is proud to support local Open Source projects and truly believes in the strengths of interoperability for all types of applications.

The three projects were submitted to the Windows Web App Gallery so that they are widely available to IIS users. Look out for the apps to be featured on the Web Platform Installer soon. If you would like to submit an app please contact Arun at phponwin[at]microsoft.com or follow @phponwindows on Twitter. For more information about Microsoft and its involvement with Open Source technologies, swing by the Port25.ca Blog. Thanks again to all the developers at StatusNet, ImpressCMS and TikiWiki that worked on the bounties!

Front (left to right): Marc Laporte from TikiWiki and Evan Prodromou from Status.net. Back (left to right): Stéphane Jose from iWeb, Gladstone Grant from Microsoft and Marc-André Lanciault from ImpressCMS

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

When the volume of data is very important, it must be accessed by multiple servers. We must therefore turn to more flexible and powerful storage solutions

This is where iWeb can help with its 3 storage solutions:

- Single Storage Server
- Redundant Storage Server
- Dedicated SAN Storage

Which of these solutions is best suited to your needs? Here is a brief description for each one:

Single Storage Server

This solution provides a server with multiple hard drives. Its primary function is to be the file storage central point. It can be accessed by multiple web servers so that your information is always current regardless of the server on which your site’s visitor is connected. This is the most economical solution of the three. Note that your architecture depends only on the proper functioning of a single storage server and our second solution offers a higher level of security.

Redundant Storage Server

Unlike with the first solution, it offers two storage servers instead of one. In case of hardware failure of one of the storage servers, the second automatically takes over. It is a seamless process and it won’t affect neither your web servers nor your customers and visitors. In case of failure, the configuration of your Web servers won’t need to be changed, thanks to the use of a virtual IP address

Dedicated SAN Storage

This solution is especially interesting for database servers. It provides access from several Web servers to data stored on multiple databases servers. This configuration allows high performance and great ease of use especially because of the fact that the SAN is recognized as a local volume by each of these servers.

Contact us if you have any questions or if one of the solutions proposed above interests you.

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!

In my conversations with iWeb’s best: Bertrand and Olivier about ideas for bounties and incentives, we came up with an idea for a coding competition, one that will give every developer in Canada using PHP, Python, Ruby – not just .NET – a chance to participate. iWeb even offered to help provide some free hosting for some of the contestants! Wow!

Flash forward a few months, and together we have launched the FTW Coding Competition, intended to bring out the best and the brightest developers in Canada to compete for up to $15,000 worth of DELL prizes. As a developer, you can submit your own app you already have created, or develop a new app or port an app, be it Open Source, or not, written in PHP or .NET, or anything else that would run on Windows Server / IIS or Windows Azure.

So, if you are a developer, have some code kicking around – why not see if you can win? Enter your application into one of the 3 categories: PHP Application on Windows/IIS or Azure, Windows Azure Cloud Application (Any language: .Net, PHP, Ruby, Python…) or Open Data Application (Any language, using any of the Canadian Open Data catalogues). Give it a shot!

Oh, and thanks to the awesome guys at iWeb, we may even be able to help out with some hosting for your app. Just email us: phponwin[at]microsoft.com or hit me up on twitter: @Nik_G or @PHPonWindows

Nik Garkusha is an Open Source Strategy Lead, Open Data enthusiast, PHP, Open Source, HPC and everything in between at Microsoft Canada

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.

Follow us on Twitter and Facebook

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.

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 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!