Archive for the ‘Newsletters’ Category

Experts Needed?

Filed under: Newsletters,Web Development — Candy Zemon on June 14, 2013

When Is It Time to Call in an Expert?

If you can do a lot of your website maintenance yourself, when is it worthwhile to call in an expert? The experts we are thinking about here are professional graphic designers, custom programmers, software integrators, and marketing pros.

Just as in your brick and mortar store or home management, some tasks are worth paying to have done if any of the following apply:

You have no resources who are particularly trained in or good at it
The task requires specialized skills that you lack
You have no time to learn how to do it
It is a task you hate doing (even if you know how)
Doing it wrong puts your business at risk

In cases like this, the professional fees may well be less costly than your time doing the task or your time spent learning to do it or your time spent recovering from errors. HTN has resources to do many website tasks that you may want help with. Give us a call and let’s discuss what you need done. 866-HENS-NET

Do You Need A Webmaster?

Filed under: Newsletters,This & That,Web Development — Candy Zemon on June 11, 2013

Is the Webmaster a Necessity?

Remember the days when computers were mysterious and only the truly technically trained folks could make websites work? Arcane markup languages were the way to make magic happen. Have you noticed how much things have changed?

Well, in a way they have not changed. A much wider variety of arcane languages make ever-more complex magic happen on websites. But parallel with this complexity has come an expectation that there will be a web-based interface that a reasonably non-technical person can use to control, manage, and update the content of the site.

Depending on what your website is built with and what it is designed to do, you may find that maintaining your site is amazingly easy these days. If you can compose and send an email successfully, you can probably maintain content on a site built in, for instance, WordPress or Magento.

Why? Because software meant to “hold” a website usually includes a management interface that makes it easier for a non-technical person to update content without damaging the truly geeky details (navigation, styling, actions).

All those geeky details are still there making the site appear and behave as you want it to, but you can edit and update your pages without knowing or writing XML or HTML or CSS or JavaScript or Java or PHP or anything else of that nature. If you DO want to get into the nitty-gritty programming details, of course you usually can – depending on what the website software makes available to you. But you don’t need to write code for most routine maintenance of many widely-used website programs.

For example, here are the editors for a Magento page and a WordPress page. You can “just type” and use common editing tools as you go. Things like adding bulleted lists or making something bold are push-a-button easy.

editor-about-our-store

visual_editor2 Magento lets you create pages in an embedded content management system.

WordPress lets you create pages in either an html or a WYSIWYG editor.

It may well be that you do want a webmaster so that you can pay attention to other aspects of your business while your webmaster maintains and develops the website. You may want a third party available to step in for non-routine changes when needed. That decision is a matter of choice, not necessity, for many folks. The software world keeps changing. Have you looked at your own website software lately? It may have become easier to use in more recent versions.

Customer Site News

Filed under: Newsletters,This & That — Candy Zemon on April 30, 2013

Customer News April 2013

For Elyse is running PDG Commerce version 5. They wanted to add a slide show to their custom search results pages. These pages already support image-swapping behavior when you click or hover on a color swatch. Now, if you hover over the main image, a slide show of selected images plays. The site can determine which image or images are in the slide show. See their New Arrivals page as an example.

Wholesale Boutique is running Magento Enterprise Edition. Magento supports multiple stores or storefronts managed from a single administrative interface. Wholesale Boutique recently added a second 15 GB web server to their store along with a load balancer in order to better manage and respond to the amount of traffic they get. This doubled their capacity.

Emerge runs custom software for various customers. They recently helped one of their clients complete several hundred summer camp registrations in 10 minutes (see Case History story published April 22).

Postini to Professional Email Migration

Filed under: Email,Newsletters,This & That — Candy Zemon on April 26, 2013

Moving to Professional Email

We have completed the migration of HTN hosting customers away from the Postini spam management service that had been bundled into our email support. That migration was made necessary by Google’s ceasing to offer the Postini service.

If you are among those now using HTN Professional Email or are curious and would like to learn more about using it most efficiently, please click here for more information.

HTN Vulnerability Scanner

Filed under: Hosting,Newsletters,Security,This & That — Candy Zemon on April 24, 2013

Announcing the HTN Vulnerability Scanner Service

We are now offering another advantage to hosting with HTN: the HTN Vulnerability Scanner. This is a free service that alerts you if you have certain commonly-used software installed on your hosting server if that software is out of date and needs updating.

Out-of-date software is a common attack point for professional money laundering and other cybercrime activities. It is all too easy to forget to update software that is working just fine. Out-of-date software puts your site at risk.

The recent (and ongoing) attack on WordPress sites illustrates this point. The HTN Vulnerability Scanner finds all the WordPress installations on your server, checks each for its version, and also checks for the presence of a user named admin.

Our HTN Vulnerability Scanner sends you an alert if it finds outdated software on your server, You can view the details of the results report. Those details give you (or your webmaster) the information you need to find and update the WordPress sites involved. You can opt to update the software yourself or – at the press of a button – have HTN update it for you.

Case Study – Summer Camp Registration

Filed under: E-Commerce,Hosting,Newsletters,Performance,This & That — Candy Zemon on April 22, 2013

Case Study – Summer Camp Registration at the Columbus Metropark System

Imagine knowing that you will be running an e-commerce site for a customer on which summer camp registrations will be sold in a very brief intense rush of activity. This situation places heavy demand on the page-views, heavy demand on the database, and heavy demand on transactions as individual purchases are made at essentially the same time.

How would you gear up for such an event? Emerge has such a customer in the Columbus Metropark System and such an annual challenge. This year they met the challenge with a group of six 2 GB Cirrus servers, 2 load balancers, and a High Performance Cirrus Disk (solid state) attached to a Cirrus Simple database server. They brought the entire group of servers up one week in advance for testing. They then made them smaller again for the rest of the week, returning them to the required size for the Big Day.

The system performed flawlessly. The Big Day started at 8 am. The first purchase was completed at 8:02 am. During the first 10 minutes there were 183 transactions with 276 children registered. This is a pace of 9.6 million transactions/year.

The first 30 minutes had 234 transactions (353 registrations). The first hour was 257 transactions (379 registrations). By the end of the Big Day, there were 321 transactions and 440 registrations. Google reported 8,970 page views from 483 unique visitors that day.

The first 10 minutes were critical to the success of this event. Within the first hour the bulk of the day’s activity had been completed.

Emerge was able to terminate the servers involved once the Big Day had ended. The bill for the effort was only for the days the servers were actually in existence – and even then, for much of the time they were smaller than the “performance” size that was used just twice – once for testing and once for the real thing.

Preparing for a Tidal Wave

Filed under: E-Commerce,Hosting,Newsletters,Performance,This & That — Candy Zemon on April 18, 2013

Preparing for a Tidal Wave

When you know a storm is coming, you naturally try to prepare. Around this part of the country where snow is relatively rare, a heavy snow forecast spurs folks into buying out all the available bread and milk (and rock salt) in the local stores.

If you know a rush of traffic is likely to reach your website, what do you do (besides rejoice at the opportunities that come with it?)

One common approach is to upsize your hosting server, particularly if you are on cloud hosting. That is one of the advantages of cloud hosting. You can make it larger or smaller to meet your current needs. You will pay for the larger size only while you are using it. But what if that is not likely to be enough?

Think about the type of demand your foresee. Will it be data-transfer-intensive (like the world flocking to view images or videos on your site)? Will it be compute-intensive (like needing to calculate customizations and associated pricing)? Will it be response-intensive (like managing a flood of individual purchase check-out transactions)? Depending on the nature of the heavy demand, different additional measures can be taken.

If you need to beef up for a compute-intensive rush, you might be looking at solid state disks for your database server. If you need to manage nimble response during a flood of page-views, you will want additional servers behind one or more load balancers. If you have content that you expect to be the target of a download rush, then a Content Delivery Network (CDN) is one option to make that download easier without swamping your normal website behavior.

In a cloud hosting environment, such radical architectural changes are quick. They can be set up for a specific short term and then wound down again so that your site can go back to a lower load level (and lower cost) when appropriate.

Customer Site News

Filed under: Newsletters,This & That — Candy Zemon on April 2, 2013

Wholesale Boutique brought their new store live on Magento. The site sees more than 113,000 page views/day. They moved from PDG Commerce to Magento for a variety of reasons including flexibility of managing promotions. Aimed at wholesale customers, this site offers a wide variety of personalized products.

Also newly available on a Magento system is RimzOne. This site also moved from PDG Commerce – in large part because of the complexity of their product packages. This site also sees very high traffic. Particularly cool is the ability to search by year, make, model, height, size, and finish. Anyone looking to upgrade their wheels should definitely give this site a visit.

Stephanie Telesco Astrology launched a new site based on WordPress. If you want to investigate your place in the universe astrolotically speaking, you will want to drop by.

Another new WordPress-based site recently launched is Act Two Theatre. If you happen to be in the Saint Louis MO area during one of their shows, drop on by for a wonderful evening of entertainment presented by an experienced community theatre of 20 years’ standing. This group is close to our hearts – HTN is one of their corporate sponsors.

We’d like to welcome the Saint Charles County Ambulance District to the HTN family. These folks cover 640 square miles and serve a population of more than 325,000 souls.

Server Security

Filed under: Hosting,Newsletters — Candy Zemon on March 29, 2013

An Eye to Security

HTN is attentive to the security of all our servers. As you probably know, we apply security (and other) patches on a regular basis. When a server (or any of its key software infrastructure) ages to the point that security patches will soon cease, we take proactive measures to move folks to newer versions. We will be reaching out to folks on Ubuntu 8.04 servers to work out a migration to newer servers. Our sole goal here is to keep you on a system that is secure.

Writing Help

Filed under: Newsletters,This & That — Candy Zemon on March 27, 2013

No Time to Write?

Perhaps you need a good ghost writer for some or all of your marketing/blogging plans. If you don’t know anyone who does this sort of work, contact us. We can give you some names. 866-HENS-NET or sales@hens-teeth.net