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AiCache – Keeps Your Servers Alive
Jul 11th
We’ve been trialling aiCache, a software caching solution, for nearly two months now. AiCache sits in front of our load balancer and caches all our static files and pages limiting the amount of traffic to our app servers and more importantly, calls to our database.
We’ve had a few teething problems while setting up and adjusting for the various foibles of our sites, but now it’s tuned up it’s really handling things well. Last week we made a link on the home page of IMDB which sent us a huge amount of traffic over a 24 hour period. AiCache handled everything that was thrown at it without batting an eye lid.
If you’ve been running out of options, trying to keep your site up, then this is a recommended solution to your problems.
Hi I’m A Consultant
Jun 15th
Today I scored my first consultant job on odesk. In some ways it’s a return to the mentoring for startups I did in Liverpool a few years ago (I actually have a mentoring certificate on the office pin board), except that I will probably have to work harder and for less money. However, I’m looking forward to the challenge of advising other companies about putting their sites into the cloud.
This first job is for a company in Virginia USA who are looking to put their new high demand web app onto Amazon, with Scalr managing the scaling element. I have quite a bit of experience using both these tools with our set up at Giant Digital, so I will hopefully be able to offer some help to my first client.
I think the biggest hill I have to climb is making myself clear when explaining things, as it’s always difficult to second guess where someone else’s knowledge is, and then you don’t want to come across as patronising either. Also, I have a weakness of not being able to build arguments, as I tend to go for a scatter gun approach. So I’m helping that doing consulting work is going to help me tighten up my presentation skills. The other challenge I’m facing is to judge where the line is between professional and being too casual with people.
Anyway, I hope this to be the first of many projects that I can work on with clients who are looking to move onto AWS and Scalr.
Free, Cheap And Money Saving Tools For Online Entrepreneurs
Apr 10th
There are many tools available to entrepreneuers for free or very cheap that you should know about if you want to make your day more productive or improve your business. Here are a few tools that I use daily or have used to improve my online businesses.
Google Apps
Google have provided a whole suite of tools for business users that include group calendars, document editing and email hosting. This is a must have for any business on a budget. On setting up a domain for use with Google Apps you have a suite of online tools for your staff. The most central to this is your own company email on the Gmail platform, once you have that you can easily set up groups and mailing lists for your staff to use internally. The email server can also be used outside of the browser with Thunderbird or Outlook as well as your Blackberry or whatever. There is also a very useful group calendar available and the ability to set up a group wiki with a few clicks. While setting up your domain initially might be a little tricky for the technophobe, everything else is straight forward to use.
Amazon Web Services and Scalr.net
Not free this one, but an extremely cheap way to get dedicated hosting. If you have a busy web site and have been paying through the nose for your hosting then this could be one way of saving a lot of your monthly budget. Also known as cloud computing, hosting on Amazon’s servers will make your websites (with a little bit of work) scalable. This will mean that when your traffic grows so can your sites. If you’re not afraid to get your hands dirty with your website but you’re not a computer scientist you can pair up AWS with Scalr.net which will handle all the technical side of scaling your sites.
Open Office
Open Office is an open source productivity suite that you can install directly on your computer. If you’re not comfortable with leaving everything in Google’s hands then this could be a viable alternative to purchasing a usuable copy of Microsoft’s Office. Open Office has everything you would expect from Office with wordprocessing, spreadsheet, databases, graphics and presentation packages included in the package. You can’t really get a much better software product for free.
Sitejacking, A New Kind Of Scam?
Dec 30th
I came across something weird today that might interest other online publishers. I got my regular Google alert via email about one of my sites Entertainmentwise.com, (you may be signed up for these yourself, you basically get a daily round up of any new mentions on the net that the Google Bot comes across) one of the links at the bottom of the email listed under Google Web Alert was for a page that looked like a normal Entertainmentwise page. I clicked the link thinking it would take me to my site… and it did. So I logged in and approved some comments pending, when I realised that the domain I was actually on was entertainmentsgossip.com. Thinking I was losing it I backtracked and sure enough the whole site was on this domain. How the hell did that happen?
I followed up with a quick who.is, the domain is registered to www.moniker.com a domain name registering service. Either the actual owners of this domain are hiding behind Moniker Privacy Services or Moniker have registered this domain and this is their standard practice making them a very dubious organisation indeed. Sure enough the IP address on the who is is our server. So WTF is going on here?
I’m guessing that this domain bought very recently is being pointed at our site so that they get a traffic ranking from the content we have. We rank highly on loads of celebrity search terms which would be invaluable to anyone trying to either sell on the domain or start their own celebrity site with some traffic already coming in.
Unfortunately for Entertainmentwise this would almost surely result in some kind of penalisation for our content being duplicated on another domain. So… what to do?
Fortunately there’s an easy fix for this as it only takes a quick rewrite rule in our httpd.ini file (I know, we’re on Windows!) to permanently redirect from their domain to ours, meaning they won’t earn any Google juice from this scam!
This has really got me thinking as to how common this kind of Sitejacking is. I haven’t come across this before, although I’ll be reading my Google Alerts more thoroughly from now on and a few searches with terms I would have thought would fit this kinda scam haven’t turned up a result that looks like what has happened here. So I’m naming the phenomena Sitejacking and I’d be interested to hear from anyone this might have happened to or who knows how common it is.
BTW, for anyone who eventually gets here by Googling this and is looking for a solution, this is my fix, it will be slightly different on a Linux box:
RewriteCond Host: ^www.entertainmentsgossip.com
RewriteRule (.*) http\://www\.entertainmentwise\.com$1 [I,RP]
RewriteCond Host: ^entertainmentsgossip.com
RewriteRule (.*) http\://www\.entertainmentwise\.com$1 [I,RP]
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