iWeb Communities: Blog

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. Continue reading »

The iWeb Team is proud to present the new iWeb.com spanish section. We have redesigned several pages as well as the order form for our spanish-speaking visitors, to offer them an optimal and enjoyable experience.

The number of our spanish-speaking customers is increasing at iWeb, we have put together a customer service team dedicated to answer to their needs. We have also added free phone lines in most countries where spanish is the main language.

Did you that the iWeb team comes from more than 25 countries? Our staff have people coming from Mexico, Lebanon, Salvador, Algeria, Peru, France, Haïti, Italiy, Tunisia, Ireland, Chile, Ecuador, Iran, Romania, Argentina, Morocco, Guatemala, Russia, Martinique, Laos, Togo, Maurice Island, Ukraine, Senegal, Afghanistan, Madagascar, etc… We are very proud of our diversity and believe it’s one of our strengths!

What will be the next supported language at iWeb? Arabic? Portuguese? Only the future will tell us! Until then, I invite you to visit ou re-visit our spanish website!

Friday afternoon, after a hard work week, we have tested displaying the newsletter on our blog without really thinking about it, since we were all excited to see the result after several weeks of work. We were planning not to show it on the main blog, but, the surprise was that we didn’t think about those who receive the posts by email!

So, here it is, maybe you were lucky to see our tests during the few minutes it was visible.

If this is the case, we would to have your feedback by sending us an email at marketing@iweb.com, and if this isn’t the case, you should receive it in the inbox of the email you’re using for your iWeb account.

Have a good week!

As promised at the announcement launch of our new Montreal datacenter, we will live this adventure with you 100%. We will therefore share videos, pictures as well as interviews every fridays for the next months, which will make you feel part of the project with us.

Here is a video of the first visit by several iWeb employees at iWeb-NE.

Have a good week-end!

The year 2010 has begun a few days ago and we’re already announcing a new data center with a 31,000 sq feet footprint, with a 20,000 servers capacity. This data center is located in the LaSalle neighborhood, in Montréal’s west, and we will be connected with 10GigE links to our other data centers. We will have now a capacity of 35,000 servers in 4 different strategic locations, which will be fed with 76Gbps Internet connectivity.

“The new center will be built to accomodate our automation needs, which is one of our 2010 priorities, said Cyrille Mertès, chief technical officer (CTO). Since it’s a new data center, we can plan from the beginning according to our current criterias and standards, with a minimum of technological compromise. ”

During the construction, we will communicate regularly with you with photos and videos of the work. We will also share the secrets of this adventure so that you can understand the technologies we will use to host your next servers at iWeb. Like the construction of our other 3 data centers, it will be done in several phases. The end of the  phase 1, which will require a $3,000,000 investment, is planned for April 2010, and will welcome 3,000 servers.

As early as next week, we will begin to show you pictures of our data center! you can become a fan of iWeb on Facebook or follow us on Twitter for real-time information about building at iWeb-NE. You can already see exclusive pictures available on our Flickr and Facebook accounts.

As mentionned on our last post on the year 2009, we are ready for 2010; are you ready to enjoy it?

Official press release here

This fourth data center will consolidate iWeb’s position as the leader in dedicated web hosting in Canada

MONTREAL, QUEBEC – January 12 2010 – iWeb (TSX-V : IWB), a global provider of Internet hosting services and IT Infrastructure announced its plans for a new 31,000 square feet data center, in the LaSalle borough (western part of Montreal), with the capacity to host 20,000 dedicated servers. This new facility will bring the total dedicated server capacity of iWeb to nearly 35,000 servers.

“The new data center will be built with automation in mind; automation is one of the Company’s priority in 2010” declared Cyrille Mertes, who was recently named iWeb’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO). “Because we are essentially building a new center, we can design it according to current standards with no restrictions due to previous technologies already installed.”

Scheduled to be brought online in April, the data center will initially have the capacity to host 3,000 servers. Because the building has never been used as a data center, it must be adapted to meet the Company’s strict operational standards. iWeb has signed a 30-year lease agreement, with options to purchase at regular intervals.

The facility will require an initial investment of $3 Million in infrastructure. During its recent fourth quarter results conference call with financial analysts, iWeb confirmed finalising a financing agreement with one of its main financial partners.

Details on the new center:

Size: 31,000 square feet
Capacity: 20,000 dedicated servers (phase I: 3,000 servers)
Electrical input: 6,000 Amps
Network: Redundant Fiber-optic interconnection to two of iWeb’s other data centers; iWeb’s current total network capacity is 76 Gbps
Investment: $3,000,000 (for phase I)

The new data center, like iWeb’s three current IP hosting facilities, will feature a redundant electrical system which will be entirely run through uninterrupted power systems (UPS), diesel-powered generators and a ventilation and cooling infrastructure. The facilities and the server will be protected by a multi-layered security system, including biometric recognition, video surveillance, secure access and a VESDA fire-prevention system.

About iWeb Group Inc.

iWeb is a worldwide provider of Internet hosting services and IT Infrastructure, with three secured data centers in Montreal. Since 2004, the Company’s compounded annual growth rate has been above 75%, making it one of Canada’s 100 fastest growing companies according to PROFIT Magazine.

Founded in 1996 in Montreal, iWeb now generates more than 60% of its revenues from abroad; and employs over 170 full-time employees providing Dedicated Server Hosting, Co-location and Web Hosting services to close to 20,000 customers in 145 countries. iWeb’s shares are listed on the TSX Venture Exchange (TSX-V: IWB); for more information please consult http://about.iweb.com

-30-
For more information:

Philip Tousignant
iWeb Group Inc.
Chief Financial Officer
(514) 286-4242 ext. 149
ptousignant@iweb.com

Bernard Dahl
Presentis
Investor Relations / Media Relations
(514) 802-2801
bernard@presentis.ca

When you come in contact with our customer service, you always come upon a person who can answer your questions and comments.  But, who are these people who take the time to listen to your questions and think about a solution for you?  As it is always nice to put a face to a voice, we will introduce the team members of iWeb for the year 2010.

We start out with Jean-François Dicaire, customer service leader, informative and administrative  levels for current and potential customers.  Always present to answer questions from his team, he provides premium customer service to all customers and brings a highly contagious energy to the iWeb team.

When did you start working at iWeb, what position did you occupy and in which data center?

If you count the 6 months that I did in 2007 as an agent for the customer service department on HD, and now 1 year and 6 months as a Team Leader in the Information department on CO, 2 years in total.

What did you do before working with iWeb?

I worked for Great West Life as a customer serviceagent  for a year in between. Let’s say I was very pleased to get back to work with a nice and dynamic team.

What do you love the most in iWeb as an employee?

The company values! For example, each employee is treated as an important member of a large family and I believe that this approach encourages employees to get involved and make a difference.

Tell us an anecdote from iWeb

I remember the first months working for iWeb. There was a customer who often call for problems with a transfer of ownership of a domain name. It took a lot of time since there seemed to always have a good reason that prevented us to close the exchange, caused by wrong information given from the client side which he apologized for every time. However, he was cooperative and we ended up being able to complete his request after all. Satisfied,  he thanked us for our patience and  promised us lunch for it … we’re still waiting :P

Fast questions

- Favorite OS: Windows XP (an old habit)
- Favorite Drink: Bloody Caesar (not at work of course!)
- Favorite sports: Snowboard in the winter, golf in summer
- Favorite movie: Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind
- Favorite Music Group: Deftones
- Favorite Youtube Video: Powerthirst
- What you wanted to be when you were small: A psychologist.

The year 2009 ending in a few days, we have published our financial results for the year ended September 30, 2009. During the past year, we increased our revenues from 74% from 15,6M to 27,1M, bravo to the team!

Revenue growth has been a priority for iWeb in 2009? says Eric Chouinard, iWeb President. “We are very proud of the 74% increase in revenues and of the 71% increase of our adjusted EBITDA, as well of our operating income. Our 5th consecutive year of high growth was also a very challenging year; we had to adapt our strategic plan to maintain growth despite the difficult economic situation of the last 12 months

To support this growth, we have worked on the aspect “customer service” at all levels, massive hiring, training programs, a complete and better defined organizational structure, a service adapted to advanced solutions.  Complete coverage in English, French and Spanish and yet more! We now consider to have regained one of the best after-sales services in our area and we are proud of it.

The year 2010 will be a year of innovation at iWeb.  Indeed, we have begun several major projets and our development teams are more willing than ever to deliver value-added services you’ll like.  We are ready to face 2010; are you ready to enjoy it?

The complete financial statements and management report of the Company are available on the websites www.sedar.com and investors.iweb.com.

Bloooooooopers on Facebook.

Follow us on Twitter (@iWeb)
Become a fan of iWeb on Facebook

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.

Follow us on Twitter and Facebook

It’s time to choose the next design of iWeb Technologies’s T-Shirt! After 2 weeks of active participation on CrowdSpring, we have now several T-Shirt to show you.

Here are 6 designs which got through the first selection. Please select the one you like best in the poll below.

Let the best design win!

1	2	3
4	5	6

Montreal, November 24 – iWeb is pleased to announce the following changes in the company’s management structure; Cyrille Mertès, formerly Vice-President of IT & Infrastructure is now Chief Technology Officer and Marc Trudel, formerly Senior Director, Customer Experience, becomes Vice-President, Operations.  Mr. Mertès will be actively involved in the evolution and development of new technologies within the company while Mr. Trudel will overview most operational activities other than sales and marketing.

The newly created role of Chief Technology Officer will enable better synergy between iWeb’s Infrastructure, Development and Technology groups.  Mr. Mertès will lead those groups with high availability and automation in mind.   “iWeb’s efficiency depend on the technologies that automate our processes.”, said Mr. Mertès.  “Automation will be our primary focus in the year to come”, he added.

Marc Trudel joined iWeb early in 2008 to spearhead the company’s customer service reorganisation project.  Having since then raised customer satisfaction levels, he has also reengineered support processes by eliminating multiple weaknesses and integrating multiple operational functions into the customer service groups.

iWeb’s management team also includes
Eric Chouinard – Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Martin Leclair – President of Products and Technologies
Philip Tousignant – Chief Financial Officer
Marc Guindon – Executive Vice-President of Resources
Sylvain Leclair – Vice-President of Sales and Marketing
Hugo Dénommée – Vice-President of Development and Automation
Michel Thivierge – Human Resources Director

About iWeb.com (iWeb Group Inc.)

iWeb is a worldwide provider of Internet hosting services and IT Infrastructure, with three secure data centers in Montreal. Since 2004, the company’s compounded annual growth rate has been above 75%, making it one of Canada’s 100 fastest growing companies according to PROFIT Magazine.

Founded in 1996 in Montreal, iWeb now generates more than 60% of its revenues from abroad; and has over 170 full-time employees providing Dedicated Server Hosting, Co-location and Web Hosting services to more than 21,000 customers in 150 countries. iWeb’s shares are listed on the TSX Venture Exchange (TSX-V: IWB), for more information please consult the Company’s website: http://investors.iweb.com

For further information:

Philip Tousignant
iWeb Group Inc.
Chief Financial Officer
(514) 286-4242 ext. 149
ptousiqnant@iweb.com

We are already at the end of the first week of the T-Shirt design competition on CrowdSpring. We would like to get your advice on the submitted designs last week.

There is only 7 days left to send your T-Shirt design and have the opportunity to win $500. You can submit yours on the website CrowdSpring.

Here are the top models we’ve retained. Which one do you prefer?

1	2	3
4	5	6
7	8	9

Since we now have a T-Shirt printing facility in our iWeb-CO offices, we thought about using the iWeb community and CrowdSpring for the creation of a unique design for iWeb.

We have therefore submitted a design competition for the website CrowdSpring.com which will allow you to send over your best ideas for a iWeb T-Shirt. The winner will get $500, a T-Shirt copy, and the pride to have his/her design to be worn by hundreds of people.

For those who’d want to submit their feedback on the designs, it’s very simple. You can write your comments on the website CrowdSpring.com for each of the T-Shirts. You can also use our blog to share your opinion. How? We will publish between 16th and 23rd of November all creations directly, in a blog post here, and you can then write a comment with your notes.

The competition will finish midnight, 23rd November 2009. For more information, please visit our page on CrowdSpring. You can view there all the details on what kind of design we’d like, as well as restrictions.

We hope to see many of you participating, either sending designs, or commenting on other’s.

Who knows… maybe you’ll receive a iWeb T-Shirt by post!

Maybe you’ve heard about the new feature on Twitter: lists. It’s a tool which allows you to create a list or group in which you can add users.

The benefit of those lists is that it will easier for you to follow someone. For instance, iWeb can create a customer list, hosting news, competitors, employees etc. It would allow you to create groups from the website, where you can easily find the information you are looking for.

There are already people saying that the influence of someone on Twitter will be proportionnal to the number of lists he or she is belonging to. This makes sense, although many Twitter users don’t send their tweets via the website. They use applications like Tweetdeck, Tweetie and others, because following is much easier, with new tweet alerts, or user mentions.

People using Tweetdeck already have many created groups depending on the interests / jobs. Are those people going to Twitter to create lists manually, while they are not yet supported by their preferred Twitter application? I highly doubt it.

We must wait several weeks before a Twitter application uses well lists, and members using this to classify their friends lists. This application must allow the creation without going to the Twitter website, and users should be able to modify lists from the application.

Until then, lists are going to be used mainly by people wanting to try it out on the Twitter.com website, but they will come back quickly to their tweetdecks. Since it won’t be used fully, we can’t say then that it’s a metric to measure Twitter influence.

Soon yes. Now, not yet.

For its next edition in October, the webzine TheWhir has decided to create the star team for the web hosting industry. There are several sections such as “The marketer”, “The Customer Servant” and “the social media Star”.

You can add the name of the person and iWeb in the text fields “Vote-in” of the forms here. Here are our suggestins from iWeb:

• THE MARKETER: Sylvain Leclair – iWeb (VP Sales and Marketing)
• THE CUSTOMER SERVANT: Martin Leclair – iWeb (President Products & Technologies)
• DATA CENTER DESIGNER: Cyrille Mertes – iWeb (VP IT Global Infrastructure)
• THE EMPIRE BUILDER: Eric Chouinard – iWeb (CEO)
• THE SOCIAL MEDIA STAR: Jean-Luc SansCartier – iWeb (community manager)

We thank you in advance of your votes and your trust in iWeb. If there was a vote for best customers, be sure you’ll have ours!

We will be going for the first time at the annual conference cPanel will be hosting at Houston from 5th to 7th October 2009. For this opportunity, iWeb will be represented by Simon Boulet, IT Director, and Jean-François Chevrette, IT architecture speclalist.

Like our partners Microsoft and R1Soft, we will be attentive to the conferences covering improvement and new products for cPanel. We want also to know more about Enkompass, the new control panel from cPanel compatible with Windows and IIS7, and at the same time ask questions to engineers who developed this software.

Did you know that…

- the first customer who used cPanel in a iWeb dedicated server was on 10th September 2004?
- our control panel PanelBox for our shared hosting offering uses at its core cPanel?
- migrating from a competing control panel to cpanel is free (an offer by cPanel)?
- we offer cPanel licensing for our colocation customers, or if the server is not even hosted at iWeb?
- you can contact for free cPanel if you have problems with your control panel?

If you want more info on the cPanel conference on their website, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter..

If you want to meet Simon or Jean-François at the cPanel conference, please leave a comment on this post and we will get you in touch with them.

The iWeb blog is now available to the Hispanic web community, who can join the English and French readership which relies on the blog to keep abreast of the trends and issues concerning Internet hosting. The blog is available here.

With posts dating back to 2001, the iWeb blog is one of the first blogs dedicated to web hosting to be published on the internet.

“The iWeb blog has been our preferred communication tool for many years now,” confirmed Martin Leclair, who co-founded iWeb in 1996. “With the blog, we can share everything; especially news and trends. The blog is our main communication tool in case of emergency. ” says Martin, who learned Spanish while spending several months in Latin America.

The blog is divided into three categories; “iWeb”, “web development” and “web hosting”.  Please sign up to the profile that most resembles your interests and your professional or technical profile.

We invite you to sign up to receive new posts by e-mail, to share your thoughts and especially to give us your comments and feedback

Since it’s friday and the weekend is nearby, we are holding a very small game, with one of the competitors winning a mystery prize at the end.

Throughout the company’s history, iWeb’s website changed dramatically and we want you to find the chronological order of the pictures shown below.

You can simply put your answer as a comment below, starting from the oldest to the most recent.

We will annonce the winner monday on Twitter, Facebook and Youtube.

Good luck!

edit : The winner is Jerome Paradis.

1	2
3	4
5

iWeb Group Inc. (TSX.V – IWB), a worldwide provider of Internet hosting services and IT Infrastructure has been invited to make one of the opening presentations on the final day of the Canaccord Adams 2009 Global Growth Conference on Thursday, August 13th 2009 at 8:00 A.M. eastern time.

Eric Chouinard, iWeb’s President and chairman will be presenting iWeb’s perspectives on the future state of Internet services to the investment community at the 29th edition of the conference, which is being held over three days at the InterContinental Hotel in Boston.

Conference Details:

- Canaccord Adams 29th Annual Global Growth Conference
- August 13, 2009
- InterContinental Hotel, Boston, MA
- More information can be found at: www.canaccordadams.com

About iWeb Group Inc. (iweb.com)

iWeb is a worldwide provider of Internet hosting services and IT Infrastructure, with three secure data centers in Montreal. Since 2004, the Company’s compounded annual growth rate has been above 75%, making it one of Canada’s 100 fastest growing companies according to PROFIT Magazine. iWeb has also been named one of the top movers and shakers among Canadian IT companies in the 2009 edition of the Branham300.

Founded in 1996 in Montreal, iWeb now generates more than 60% of its revenues from abroad and employs over 170 full-time employees. Providing Dedicated Server Hosting, Co-location and Web Hosting services to more than 21,000 customers in 150 countries. iWeb’s shares are listed on the TSX Venture Exchange (TSX-V : IWB). For more information please consult the Company’s website: http://investors.iweb.com

For further information:

Bernard Dahl
Director, Communications and Public Relations
iWeb Group Inc.
(514) 802-2801
bdahl@iweb.com

Philip Tousignant
Chief Financial Officer
iWeb Group Inc.
(514) 286-4242 ext 149
ptousignant@iweb.com

To conclude WordCamp Montreal 2009,  Microsoft Canada and iWeb invite you to get some amazing free stuff by participating in a very simple contest.

It’s a vote race. The 2 people who get the most votes in the poll below will earn themselves several prizes (see list below). The competition will finish this Thursday, July 23rd, at noon (Montreal time).

Here is the list of prizes our 2 top vote-getters will receive:

• 1 year of free hosting with a iWeb Power Dedicated Server (Quad Core CPU, 2GB RAM, 2 x 320GB SATA2 hard drives, 2000GB of bandwidth, running on Windows 2008 Web server (prize value of $1908 USD)
• 2 XBOX 360 games (prize value of $110CAD)
• a sports bag featuring Microsoft 2008 Server
• a refillable water bottle, showcasing Microsoft 2008 Server
• a Microsoft “anti-stress ball” – well, more of an anti-stress foam Lego block.
• a Wordpress T-Shrirt
• several Windows 7 Beta discs, golf tees, and lots of candies!
• 1 blog post on the iWeb blog showcasing their company or their blog
• a visit of the CL data center
• and other suprises!

You can use your Twitter accounts, blogs, or Facebook profile to get your friends to vote for you!

Good luck!

* iWeb will verify the IP address of the voters.

Continue reading »

It is the first time that iWeb sponsors an event related to Wordpress and we are proud to contribute to this dynamic community. We are one of the major sponsors with Microsoft Canada (our partner in this exciting adventure) and the NFB.

The iWeb blog runs on Wordpress, so this interests highly, in order to provide superiors tools and experience to our customers, readers and fans. We also developed a few features and hacks on Wordpress to display the status of iWeb systems.

There will be key speakers like Matt Mullenweg, the founder and genius behind Wordpress, Andy Peatling, lead developer at Automatic, Sylvain Carle, CTO of Praized Media and several others.

Many from iWeb will also be on site for the weekend. You can meet Heri (HR on the @iweb’s twitter account), Rodrigo, Younesh, Alexander W. as well as myself (JL on the @iweb twitter account)

We hope to see many of you this weekend at WordCamp! Come tell us hi!

When: July 11-12 2009
Where: SAT, 1201 Saint-Laurent boulevard, Montreal
What: WordCampMontreal (http://wordcampmontreal.org/schedule/)

Webcom 2009 was scheduled May 13th with many famous speakers. There were people from Google, Salesforce and Yahoo amongst others. I went to several tracks during the day and I found it interesting to compare what we were doing at iWeb to what the speakers were saying. So here a quick summary of iWeb vs speakers.

Sales, marketing and 2.0 products: Do more for the Facebook era? – Clara Shih of SalesForce

A great speaker which said mainly that each company should be on Facebook because everyone is on this website. There was a brief moment where the speaker talked about advertising on Facebook and overall, it could be summed up to “very targeted customers”. You can advertise very easily, quickly, and at low cost to reach very targeted users

For us, iWeb, we are involved heavily on Facebook with a fan page, a group and exclusive promotions for people on those 2 spaces. We also have several videos on Facebook and we get many comments on our pages. We also have good interactions with our customers, in a more friendly setting and we love that. Do you want to be our friends?

We will begin in a few days testing targeted advertising to see the results. We believe we’ll do well because we can search for the exact kind of customer we target. We can look for people with sys-admin, programmers or other keywords like video. There is practically no limits to Facebook’s platform, and if you have time, try it out.

Ergonomy optimization: Do better with Less!- Anastasia Simitsis of w.illi.am

This was a presentation which made me think we might have too much text with iWeb.com. This stroke me: “For the web, write your content and now, cut it in half!”. We are currently redoing several sections of our website and I think I am going to put that sentence in my signature when we will see what text to put online.

The speaker also demonstrated how complicated it was for a few websites to order. To get a user to buy on your website, you must show very obviously how to go the next step of the buying process, the order! She advises a clear button, with a striking color and a clear message so that the customer can see in blink of an eye how to get the product.

On that last point, I think iWeb is doing very good with its orange buttons “Order now”. It can’t be much clearer, I think.

There were many other presentations during the conference with people like Sylvain Carle of Praized, Simon Lamarche of Adviso, and Marc Canter from BroadbandMechanics. With the magic of the Internet, you can now watch the Webcom 2009 presentations on their website

Congratulations to the Webcom Montreal 2009 team and see you next year!

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.

This is 2009’s first day, and as such, I wish a great successful 2009 year for all readers and all customers of iWeb, on behalf of the iWeb team. As written previously, the previous year has been exceptional for the web, with its share of crisis, but most importantly with key innovations, revolutions & growth. For iWeb, this year is simple: provide you with the best web hosting services in the industry, with trusted, solid and better products and services.

This is also an ideal day to sit back and think what you and your company would like to achieve this year, a due exercise to start afresh with new objectives and new motivation.

Here are a few ideas to tinker with, if you are a web developer or programmer:

• look at traffic figures, and plan appropriate capacity for servers
• see if it would be easy to improve performance of the website, by working on the most immediate & easily fixable issues,
• install monitoring services,
• take the opportunity to update software you are using, or uninstall unused software. You might have missed a critical update, and starting fresh could boost performance of your server, with the same existing resources.
• do a security check-up of your server
• learn one or two new technologies from this list: javascript (see capuccino), objective-C, java (android), ruby (Rails 3), python (Google App Engine) etc.
• technology changes fast. So be sure to subscribe to the iWeb blog to get updates on new web technologies or any other new software relevant to the web hosting industry.

If you are a business owner or a consultant, here are other ideas:

• see how using web applications like the Zoho suit can save you money, instead of using desktop applications.  You can also use new online services for recruting, accounting, sales, marketing to capitalize on untapped resources
• see how web services like ning.com, Facebook group, pages and applications, twitter, or by having a company blog can provide you with guerilla marketing and promotion
• get metrics about your web presence. use web analytics (such as percute) to nail your most valuable customers, and focus on them to drive sales and revenue. You can also think about PPC advertising to reach more of those valuable customers.
• be up-to-date with latest web marketing news by subscribing to the iWeb blog

If you are into web entrepreneurship, if you are launching new web destinations and new web startups, here are a few ideas for 2009:

• Get real now and find paying customers. Focus on providing services to customers that will save them money, make them more productive, or get them immediate returns. Do not hesitate to differentiate and nail a niche where you will excel, instead of wasting resources into trying to capture entire markets.
• Track metrics, such as monthly revenues per member, cost of acquisition, viral loop coefficient, etc
• be lean, capitalize on rapid development and user-centric development
• keep an eye on growing markets: mobile (iPhone & Android), social platforms (facebook , twitter & associates), Asia (china and south-east asia), etc.
• Be up-to-date with latest tech news by subscribing to the iWeb blog (of course)

If you have any other ideas or resolutions for 2009, don’t hesitate to share with other readers in the comments area.

(Image Credits: Melbourne New Year’s Eve Fireworks)