June 2016 Newsletter

How this storm affected us

• NZ, USA, Brazil and Europe servers remained up, but became overloaded while waiting for Sydney to respond, causing a global outage. We detached Sydney, and got published content back up.  
• Published Content Outage approx 1 hour  (home pages, and other published pages)
• Dynamic Services Outage approx 2.5 hours  (Affects Shopping Carts, CMS, Forms) 
• Email - No outage :-) 
• DNS - No outage

What we learned from this event

• One configuration aspect of our global content delivery network failed, and we detected that and resolved that in the first hour, and this brought our published content back online. The published content outage should have been less than 5 minutes if we had correctly configured that aspect. It sometimes takes a significant outage event to properly test the redundancy we thought we had. 
• Our dynamic services, connected to the database have a MultiAZ fault tolerance, and dynamic services should have stayed running if either A or B data centers failed, even if somewhat degraded. However, some of our A/B services appear to have stronger inter dependencies that we realised, and we will be working next week to remove those inter dependencies, so that we can run on half steam should a similar event happen again. 
• We have seen an opportunity to also extend our fault tolerance to provide a failover service to a slightly delayed, read only version of our data should our primary database in Sydney become unavailable. This will ensure that all blogs and products are visible, and web forms mostly functional. However, shopping carts will only work if our primary database is online. We were working on making this service available when all the Sydney services came back online, in worst case, we were only 30 minutes away from that solution.

Summary of our targeted fault tolerance

• We serve published content from 5 locations around the world, including NZ, Australia, USA, Europe and Brazil. 
• Our database is configured to run from either A/B centers in Sydney, and it actually remained running during the storm.
• We serve dynamic web services from both A/B centers in Sydney. Our dynamic services should run no matter what if only A or B goes down.  
• Our DNS is spread around 4 locations of the world, and we use health checks and geo targeting to point all browsers to the nearest and best content. This service provides fault failover tolerance.
• Our Mail servers are spread over A/B locations in sydney and they remained operational. 
• All our Sydney services are replicated in Auckland, we were only 30 minutes away from having Auckland back up and running as our primary node. We do not make the decision to change over lightly, as we don't want data integrity issues, as making a change like that means losing up to 12 hours of recent data. But it's good to know the services will work even if a major storm, earthquake or similar catastrophic event occurs in Sydney. We see an opportunity to make this node available in read only mode automatically should an event occur again.

Need one-on-one Website Builder Training?

If you require personalised training, please contact one of our consultants, who are based all over. Several consultants also provide over the phone and web based training at a scheduled time. 

We would encourage all customers to get at least one hour of training at the early stages of building their website, and one more review prior to going live, just to give your website that professional critique, and quick tidy up of the rough bits.

Training topics include:

• How to use website builder and shopping cart

• How to design websites

• How to crop and tidy up photos

• How to optimise to get your website higher on google and other search engines

• How to setup a facebook page, or other social media account

• How to send newsletters

• How to use any other feature we offer.

Book personalised training here

Clearing your Browser Cache and Publishing

Caching speeds up your computer, but it also causes confusion when viewing changes to your website.  Every web master needs to become familiar with this concept. Almost a third of all our support tickets relate to mis understandings about caching. We can't change the nature of the internet, we only educate.

• Pressing publish button is neccesary even before you go live. Pressing the publish button allows you to navigate your trial website. When you navigate your trial website, you are actually navigating the published pages in many cases. Only the first page to preview in preview mode usually shows your recent changes. 
• Your web browser is not aware that you are currently editing your website. The web browser does not undersstand any connection between our website builder CMS, and your website with a completely different URL. You typically need to press REFRESH on your browser to see recent updates. Or you may even need to clear your browser cache.

 Learn more about clearing your browser cache

Get Found On Google

• A website to begin with, is like a new shop down a dark alleyway, that no one knows about. Google wont know about your page until you tell google about it either. 
• First you need some links to your website.
• You can get a link from our customer directory in the SEO tab inside website builder. 
• You can submit your URL to google in the same place
• You should add your URL to any other online business directory you can find
• Ask your suppliers to list you on their outlets page. 
• Ask bloggers to blog about you. 
• It can take a few weeks or even a few months for google to find you, and then once they have, the focus is on keywords and ranking. 
• Every page of your website should be optimised for a different "key phrase". A keyphrase is a combination of 2-5 words that describes your business, product or service in some way. eg "red running shoes" or "grey lynn bed and breakfast"
• Don't put the same phrase on every page, the trick is to use different phrases on different pages. This way, google will take users to the right page for the right phrase. This is proven to be much more effective that trying to put all phrases on one page. These pages are referred to as "landing pages" being the first page a searcher will land on. From there, they may continue to your about us page, contact us page or shopping cart page.
• In the SEO tab you can quickly optimise lots of pages, categories, blogs and products. You should focus your biggest effort on the meta title and the SEO filename. get your keyphrases into both of those... The SEO filename is the green URL part of the google search results. The SEO meta title is the search result title for your page... So these are very powerful ways to signal to google what page is most relevant for a phrase. 
• Geography is important. Google doesn't make sense of phrases like "nationwide" or "everywhere". But google really cares about suburbs, towns and cities.  So if your business is targeted at a gepgraphical region, please be specific. You might even include surrounding suburbs for accommodation or a cafe... However, if you are selling bouncy castles, it's probably more suited to a city or region name. For online sales, geography is not so improtant, but saying you are from NZ is. Google also doesn't relate your contact us page to the rest of your website, so if geography is important, it should be in the first paragraph of any relevant landing page. 
• Often google shows results including your phone number and address that may be out of date. You can update your details here: http://www.google.com/business/

Learn more about SEO

Reseller Options 

We have an awesome new offer for web designers and awesome business networkers. We can setup any web designer who is interested with all they need to get started as a web designer at no cost:

• There are no setup fees, no contracts to sign.
• You will earn $2+ on every domain name sold (based on RRP $19 per year). 
• You will earn (25%-50%) commission on hosting 
• You can manage all your customers content, domains, emails etc, easily from just 1 login.
• We take care of all the billing arrangements, so no administrative hassle. 

More information on reselling here

Need Help! is at hand...

There are several places you can find answers to questions about how to build your website and add features (which, there are a lot of) and its free for you to look:

• CMS ONLINE HELP
• ONLINE TRAINING VIDEOS

If you can't find the answer you need - then get you can Contact - Web Designers or lodge a Support ticket

Cool links

• http://www.wikihow.com/Clear-Your-Browser's-Cache - Clear your browser cache

• http://word2cleanhtml.com - Cleans word docs for CMS Editor

• GoogleFonts - Online Web Fonts

• http://pinterest.com/ - A social networking Pin Board

• http://pixlr.com/ - online photo editor

• http://www.photoshop.com - online photo editor

• http://www.jotform.com/ - online form builder

• www.needanerd.co.nz - NZ Wide IT Nerds

• www.geeksonwheels.co.nz - NZ Wide IT Geeks

• www.ninite.com - absolutely the best way to install new software on a new computer

• www.2talk.co.nz - cheaper VOIP calling and 0800 incoming call routing

All those links and more at our new toolbox page: 

More Cool Links

Websites of the month

Here's a selection of some of our recent Go Lives.