Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Christmas in e-commerce

Christmas can be hard on servers

If you're running an e-commerce website, you already know the pattern: during Christmas and Valentine's Day your revenue increases ten-fold, but so does the server load. Pages load slowly, customers are annoyed and so is your staff. Can this be avoided?

Handling more users doesn't necessarily mean getting more expensive hardware and moving from one server to another. More often than not, you can increase the efficiency of your existing infrastructure. Sometimes you could even lower the total cost of operation just by optimizing resource usage. This is equally true for servers and for other business assets.

We work with websites handling lots of traffic all the time. We know how to optimize them for speed, performance and scalability. We know how to test how much they can handle. If that's needed, we also know how to design a larger infrastructure tailored to your needs.

Google research shows that page load time increased by half a second causes a 20% drop in traffic. For e-commerce, more traffic equals more sales. Do we really need to elaborate?

Read more to learn what we can do to help you.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Joomla website made fast - case study

I've just finished optimizing the infrastructure behind WomensForum.com. They have used our Joomla-Varnish package and a few hours of my website optimization consulting time. The amount of money they spent on optimization is comparable to monthly hosting fee for a big website.

While the website was usually fast before optimization, the server couldn't handle traffic spikes. At one point, there were more than 1500 requests per second - that's a lot for Joomla, but not for Varnish. Page load time was consistently low even during traffic spikes. Additionally, we have used the failover capability of Varnish to be less reliable on backend server failures. Speed up your website too.

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Virtual desktop

What would you do with a virtual Ubuntu desktop? We have a few ideas. You could view facebook while you're at work, no one will know. You could work on a document with other people. You could download torrents or rapidshare/megaupload files while your computer is off. Your imagination is the limit, but check out our remote VNC desktop page to see a few ideas.