Midphase Blog

In the world of web servers, Apache stands head and shoulders above the rest, with roughly 19 million new hostnames selecting the software to run their web assets in February 2012 alone.

But, over the years this popular open-source web server has started donning a lot more clothes and accessories, that means it’s not as fast as some of its competitors who are being used in highly specialized ways.

This bloating affect was not lost on a young German PhD, Jan Kneschke, a student writing his thesis entitled Development of a handheld system to monitor and control CAN-busy systems in a non-automatic environment in 2003.

To keep himself from going nuts during the documentation of the related software and hardware, he read a proof-of-concept by Dan Kegel called the c10k problem which argued that web servers should step up to the plate and be able to handle 10,000 concurrent connections in parallel on one server.

Kegel said the rapid advances? in processing power and CPU suggested that popular web servers like Apache should not be degrading once the 10k threshold was met.? Apache, it seemed, was not light enough for the job.? Kneschke noted that Apache killed systems while eating memory into swap with only 100 parallel connections.

This spurred Kneschke to embark on building and slimming down a new web server built upon a single-thread, single-process core that uses native event handlers residing in? the underlying OS.

Within weeks he had succeeded with Lighttpd and gave it the monikerFly Light?. He noted his new server was faster than most, except perhaps another stable web server called Zeus.

Lighttpd soon evolved from proof-of-concept into a full-blown production web server that is now used by tech giants such as YouTube

In 2010 there were roughly 1.3 million domains using Lightppd. By 2011 this had increased to nearly 1.9 million.

Big sites like YouTube now use the light web server to help deliver content. Perhaps its most innovative use is by companies such as Avatron that built their highly popular file-sharing app called Air Sharing upon Lightppd.? The app generated over 1 million downloads during its first week of going live on the Apple app directory.

The low memory footprint, small CPU load and speed optimizations of Lighttpd help high-load sites reduce downtime and assist with quickly serving static content separately from dynamic content.

Just like MySQL is facing threats from other open source databases such as PostgreSQL, rivals such as Lightppd are chipping at Apache’s web server lead.

Could it be that the awesome might of the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) model is about to be replaced by a new team of open source technologies?

Filed under: General, Industry Trends by Clint Reeves
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Adobe needed a key question answered: How many abandoned shopping cart transactions could be averted by proactively using an online chat system to intervene in the process?

According to CRM magazine, Adobe.com hired a decision-modeling tool from SalesNext in 2009 to find out, and see if conversions could be improved upon.

The chat software was triggered in one of two ways:

• When a customer backed out of a shopping cart due to a change of heart

• When the customer experienced a technical or product problem

The results? Visitors who engaged with chat were converted at a rate of 22% versus 8% for a control group. Purchases went up by as much as 18%.

If chat software had not been present, customers? surveys indicate that call center traffic would have increased by about 35%.

This means that the cost per engagement via chat is 50% less than normal engagement via a call center.

The chat software also spat out valuable tracking and analytics data that allowed Adobe to track trends and identify bottlenecks or holes in the presentation of content or the overall navigation structure of the site.

According to Internet Retailer, consumers are relying more on Twitter and live chat more than they did two years ago, with Twitter rising to 19% from 1% and live chat 37% from 19%.

But there are some dragons to slay when deploying chat through your online support personnel.

?Customers said they felt like they were talking to a computer. A lot of customers said the person on the other side of the chat session was robotic,? reported ApplianceZone, who had recently seen a huge surge in chat sessions.

The volume was thus not being matched by quality on their website, an obvious problem for any high-traffic website that uses chat to decrease e-commerce abandonment rates and elevate purchases.

Many of us instinctively realize that a probable reason for the loss of quality may be related to canned answers residing in online knowledge database.? If the support rep does not display some creativity and problem solving skills when dealing with the customer, it may well turn out to be counterproductive.

Filed under: Industry Trends, Tips and Tutorials by Clint Reeves
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If you?re a web designer or developer tasked with deploying custom WordPress solutions for your clients, you may often run into problems dealing with unstructured content entering the system by users brought up using high-level editors, such as Microsoft Word.

They may attempt to copy the entire gambit of formatting that exists on the Word document into the WordPress editor, blissfully unaware of the damage or chaos that will ensue upon hitting the publish button. This can completely mess up the front-end and lead to a painful backlash from your customers.

To be fair to the user, a content management system (CMS) or blogging platform shouldjust work?.? There really should be no need for endless training or strict parameters on how to enter the data. Unfortunately, until WordPress makes its Copy-From-Word button bulletproof this remains a dream and currently exists as a nightmare.

There are, however, some solutions (none of them are perfect) that have some solid credentials and do help you level the playing field a bit.

The first solution was brought to our attention at WordCamp 2012 Miami by developer, Kevin Zurawel, who has a day job at the University of Miami as a Django developer and by night runs a WordPress development shop. The second, has been around since the first Star Wars movie (well, more or less) and has built up a quite a loyal following amongst database and WordPress aficionados.

Magic Fields

This elegant plug-in built by Mexican developers allows the WordPress admin to deploy custom post fields and record types inside a WordPress instance, within minutes. This may include a range of product fields including radio buttons, text fields and image placeholders. The fields are automatically inserted into the WordPress admin presentation layer for the user in largely a painless exercise.

It appears the Magic Field plug-in was largely built as a result of dissatisfaction with the development direction of another well known templatizing plug-in called Flutter, which has been around for a while.

But, even though the plug-in does take some pain out of the back-end, you still need to gently insert orEcho? out some basic PHP statements in order for the front-end presentation layers to consume your new fields.? Having said that, it is relatively straightforward and your code will simply be minor amendments to your current free or premium theme.? It’s definitely a product worth taking a look at.

Just a cautionary note: It appears that the developers who created the plug-in are taking a break from extending it further. There are indications that the plug-in may eventually become a premium version, following the same route as Gravity Forms, which these days nobody seems to mind coughing up the dollars for.

Markdown

A second option to stimulate structured content from your clients who enter data into WordPress is to use a markup cousin to html, called Markdown. It’s considered a lightweight markup language (and editor tool) which shares a similar goal with xml in trying to separate content from presentation — but without the programming overhead.

Basically, you use a few very simple, recognizable tags to generate actual html.? The best way to see this in action is to compare these two pages.

Exhibit A: Introduction to Markdown

Exhibit B: The tags used to style the above

?The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions,? said John Gruber, co-creator of the Markup.

By the way, besides the Markup editor, you can also deploy a Markup text-to-conversion plug-in on WordPress, built by Michael Yoshitaka Erlwine, which gives you more cards to play with.

If you decide to use Markup for your clients, make sure you immediately expose it to them when you go live with their site, to help them acclimatize quickly and avoid blow-back.

Both options above give you some measure of control and allow you to minimize the damage caused by unstructured content entering your WP install.

Filed under: Industry Trends, Tips and Tutorials by Clint Reeves
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You can use affordable web hosting from midPhase to drive down costs and implement a robust server platform, but you still need to keep your eye on how clients interact with your products and the devices they use to ultimately make a purchase.

For this reason, a recent digital marketing insight from Adobe reveals an interesting piece of information regarding how the mobile revolution will shape future online purchases.

Adobe analyzed the 2011 online transactions of more than 140 U.S. retailers which when tallied up amounted to over 16.2 billion transactions.

If you have heard of the term Big Datathis is it! Once their engineers had done the number crunching it emerged that Tablet Visitors were the pearls worth fighting for.

In one calendar month of 2011, the Christmas period, Tablet Visitors spent over 50% more per purchase and were nearly three times more likely to purchase than Smartphone visitors.

From all accounts, it appears that Tablet Visitors are the big spenders in the mobile sector pushing up Black Friday and Cyber Monday averages by as much as 16% over 2010 levels.

Quite obviously, product research is easier, more streamlined and attractive to Tablet users than those using phones.? In retrospect, this finding seems obvious, but still, these numbers back it up!

There are a few reasons for this development, said Adobe.

?Tablet Visitors are more affluent than other online shoppers and tend to be males.

12% of the U.S. Internet population, or 28 million consumers, own a tablet. Tablet owners skew toward 18- to 34-year-old males and come from households with above average incomes: 29% have an annual household income greater than $75,000.?

The second reason playing into the rise of the Tablet Buyer, is the environment in which the Tablet is used, often less stressful than its Smartphone counterpart.

?Adobe’s analysis shows that 34% of Tablet Visitors shopped on the weekends, compared with 24% and 27% for Traditional and Smartphone Visitors, respectively.

So, what should you do about this?

According to Adobe, these are the key takeaways:

• Don?t develop your website for a general Smartphone market. You will need to cascade your presentation and store displays for separate devices. Oh boy does this not remind one of the browser wars and separate coding for IE and Netscape?

• Tablet Visitors, said Adobe, respond favorably to promotions and deals. Thus, any online incentive should have a Tablet-specific feel to it, to bait Tablet Visitors.

If you are currently coding your site separately for Tablet specific users let us know!

Filed under: News, Tips and Tutorials, Web Hosting by Clint Reeves
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In a recent blog post entitled Is Google SEO sleeping with Google SEM, we refuted the claim that Google Adwords strategies by small business owners somehow positively or negatively influence natural search rankings for your website.

According to Vanessa Fox, author of Google in the Age of Marketing, her research indicates that when a brand appears in both the organic and paid results, web searchers clicked on the brand 92% of the time, compared to 60% of clicks when the brand appeared in only location. Thus, if you were to shutdown your Google Ad campaign you would most likely see a reduction in SEO leads from natural rankings, too.

Many misinterpret the lead drop-off? (from natural results) to conclude that running Google Ads improves your SEO keyword ranking.? This is definitely not the case.

But, never mind that: What happens AFTER they land on your home page and decide to inquire. Are you connecting the lead to the Ad that spawned it?

This is often one area of weakness for small business owners who run their Ad campaigns on autopilot. There is of course an easy way to solve this issue: It’s called conversion tracking.

?This free tool in AdWords can show you what happens after a customer clicks on your ad (whether they purchased your product or signed up for your newsletter, for example),? said Google.

By doing this you turn data into information and dare we say it: ROI! If you already have a Google Adwords account the steps are relatively straightforward and listed here.? However, it’s worth pointing out one very neat piece of functionality, which dovetails with one of the biggest IT developments, EVER!: The Smartphone revolution.

According to research firms, by 2013 the dominant form of web browsing will take place via a Smartphone. Armed with this fact, don?t? you think it would be awesome if you could track people who called your company directly from a Google Ad?

Well, you can if you have a mobile website that displays a company phone number.

?Customers with mobile devices can click and call that number. You can track those calls in AdWords and assign a monetary value to them,? said Google.

This is especially useful to a small business who does a lot of business over the phone, or conversely if you do not take orders through your website.

Google provides a concrete example:

You sell car insurance on your website. But many customers who search for “car insurance” want to talk to an insurance agent before they purchase. So, they visit your website on their mobile phone, see a phone number, and call. With Conversion Tracking, this call could be tracked and measured in AdWords. Without it, this important customer segment isn’t counted.

This super-cool feature is outlined in the final step of setting up conversion tracking.

Please let us know if anybody reading this blog has used this feature, we would welcome your comments!

Filed under: News, Tips and Tutorials by Clint Reeves
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If you run a small business, there is a strong likelihood you may be running a Google Adwords campaign to stimulate lead conversion — in addition to your SEO strategy!

And, if you are heavily reliant on paid Search Engine Marketing (SEM) leads from Google Adwords, the odds are high you?re reluctant to reduce your ad spend or shut it down entirely.

That’s why a recent Small Business Experiment by Paul Downs in the New York Times may be very interesting to you.? Mr. Downs is small business owner who contributes regularly for the NYT You?re the Boss series.

He bravely decided to test the impact on current lead generation (and sales) by shutting down his $500 per day Ad campaign for a period of 11 days, which on average, had generated about 3 leads per day (and arguably contributed to $1.8 million in sales over several years.)

While his broad analysis and findings are interesting, including the fact that visitor rates dropped 97% and leads fell off dramatically, there is one particular outcome that is even more illuminating and one he does not appear to fully understand.

“What is surprising to me is the steep drop in organic visits, the clicks from free links. They have fallen 47 percent, from 328 to 173. Stopping the AdWords payments seems to have affected unpaid traffic as well,” said Mr. Downs.

Quite understandably he suspects an algorithmic connection between SEO and SEM, which is something Google has always categorically and unequivocally denied.

He thus concludes: “Why shouldn?t Google boost the free listings of its paying customersand degrade the results when they stop paying? ”

However, despite his astute research and conclusions, he is largely wrong on this point and may not understand a key metric with regards to how people scan and act upon a search result, paid or organic.

The answer to this vexing question, can be found in the 2010 book, Marketing in the Age of Google, by Vanessa Fox, a former employee at Google renowned for her work in developing Google Webmaster Tools.

“Numerous studies have found that when a site is visible in both paid and organic search results, both results receive more clicks than if either appeared alone,” said Vanessa Fox. “Studies have found that click-through rates, conversion rates, and revenue are all higher when both organic and paid listings appear in the results.”

Therein lies the missing piece of the puzzle for Mr. Sands who did such a sterling job sharing his quantitative findings with us!

Filed under: News, Tips and Tutorials by Clint Reeves
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Django is bound to attract interest from propeller heads who value the contributions of this high-level Python Web Framework thatencourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design?.

If you are? web developer you will undoubtedly recognize the data-model syntax below that is typical to Django:

Source: Django Documentation

Django, an open-source web app framework, written in Python, was first developed inside The World Company Newsroom and was named after guitarist? Django Reinhardt, considered one of the all-time greats.

The original development team wanted to write apps with the least amount of code possible. They basically re-built Python from scratch rather than use existing Python libraries.

?The point of a Web framework in the 21st century is to make the tedious aspects of Web development fast. Django should allow for incredibly quick Web development,? said the Django Team.

One of the most interesting things about Django is its reliance on the PostgreSQL database system to power its backend.

Django pursues a number of general Database API goals within its framework includingexecute SQL statements as few times as possible and optimize statements internally.?

It further states:

• The database API should allow rich, expressive statements in as little syntax as possible. It should not rely on importing other modules or helper objects.

• Joins should be performed automatically, behind the scenes, when necessary.

• Every object should be able to access every related object, system-wide. This access should work both ways.

The New York Times built their Interactive geo-app called Represent with Django.

?Using your address as a starting point, Represent figures out which political districts you live in and who represents you at different levels of government,? said The New York Times.

?It draws maps that show how where you live fits into the political geography of the city. And using information collected from around the Web, it presents a customized activity stream that tracks what the people who represent you are doing.?

The NYT said they had chosen Django — despite most of their historical work being done in, Ruby on Rails — because they wanted to use GeoDjango, an add-on that supports geometry fields and extends the ORM to allow spatial queries.

Filed under: Tips and Tutorials, Web Hosting by Clint Reeves
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A recent list of technology predictions put forward by the SMG Group suggests that progressive SMBS will invest up to 73% more in technology in 2012 than they did in 2011.

The report said that around 50% of all SMBs have now launched a social media presence. However, many confirm they are just too busy to keep their social hubs updated!

The SMB Group also concludes, as many others do, that mobile app use will extend beyond email to business applications.? At least 52% of SMBs may start implementing mobile payment strategies for their clients and customers.

At least 33% of all SMBs plan to implement some form of online Analytics system to help them crunch data and analyze social graphs.

The increasing use of Smartphones and Tablets by employees, will create a number of IT challenges. Those SMBs that stick with on-premise solutions to drive their IT will experience a number of infrastructure growing pains. MidPhase Cheap Web Hosting is likely to become increasingly attractive to those SMBs seeking to cut both cost and complexity.

2012 will also see the continued rise of the Accidental Entrepreneur. Many startups will prosper simply because they unintentionally created a solution for existing companies. They will morph from freelancers and contractors into LLCs and S-Corps.? Many will resist hiring employees and exist as one-person operations.

While initially slow on this point, SMBs will begin testing new collaboration portals like Yammer and Google Apps to drive their business processes and aid communication with customers. An increase of between 28-35% is expected in this area.

Finally, SMBs will continue to seek out remote hosting providers to help them drive websites and deploy business-related tools.? These may include WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and various E-commerce platforms.

This is part of what is known as the IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) which is transforming SMB business processes over the Internet.

Filed under: Analytics, News, Tips and Tutorials, Web Hosting by Clint Reeves
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The past several months midPhase has joined Twitter and Answers.com on the massive, highly reliable C7 Data Centers in Lindon, UTAH as part of our 2012shared? infrastructure revamp that seeks to drive down prices, introduce flexible billing options and offer the highest degree of protection and uptime for your data.

Utah is now the new economic motor for the United States with recent studies ranking it number 1 in terms of economic outlook for all 50 states.? And, this is for the fourth time in a row.

A low, flat 5% tax rate is one reason for this. However, the state also has some other compelling features that make it attractive to huge, powerful data centers that are the lifeblood of large IT companies and reputable web hosting companies.

One of these features is the fact that UTAH is situated in a FEMA-sanctioned disaster-safe location. C7 Data Centers, Inc. thus had some very good reasons for starting out life in the Intermountain regions of UTAH in 2000.

Since then their data-backbone has grown to more than 70,000 square feet of space and the company is now researching additional land acquisition opportunities.

The four data centers that make up the C7 floor plan have the enviable reputation of maintaining a 99.98% uptime and a record of NO annual shutdowns since 2000.? This remarkable statistic is what led our IT teams under to pursue a long-term relationship with this data powerhouse.

And, we are not alone: Twitter, Answers.com and Level 3 have all elected to deploy some, or all, of their server infrastructure in Utah.

Recent upgrades to the Utah data centers allow us to consume large amounts of bandwidth at reduced prices, which we can pass onto you.? This is one reason why midPhase continues to offer some of the lowest, cheapest and most affordable hosting plans on the planet. And, this trend will continue through 2012 and 2013 as we seek to become the number 1 hosting choice for small businesses.

All data on our shared platforms resided in Tier-3 data centersthe highest level of server infrastructure available from C7. They come with these benefits:

• Custom data center solutions
• Proprietary cold-aisle cooling technology
• High density power delivery
• SAS 70 Type II
• Disaster-safe region
• Low operational cost savings
• High connectivity
• Multiple Tier 1 carriers
• High availability (N+1)
• Multiple substations provide power

Filed under: News, Web Hosting by Clint Reeves
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“It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products,” ~ Lamar Smith, Republican Chairman of House of Representatives Judiciary Committee.

Well, Google, Facebook, WordPress, Wikipedia and YOU did it!? The controversial anti-piracy bill called SOPA has been defeated via a coordinated effort between playmakers and users on the Internet.

While it is true that illegal file downloads and similar activities are a problem, imposing more regulation on Internet usage is probably not the way to do it.

Just about every major site including Wikipedia and Facebook featured major? banners on their site slamming the upcoming vote.? Wikipedia even went dark for 24 hours to illustrate their contempt for the proposed bill.

However, Wikipedia also issued this statement: Thank you for protecting Wikipedia. We’re not done yet

And, it went further stating thatSOPA and PIPA are not dead: they are waiting in the shadows. What’s happened in the last 24 hours, though, is extraordinary. The Internet has enabled creativity, knowledge, and innovation to shine, and as Wikipedia went dark, you’ve directed your energy to protecting it.?

There is thus a major battle underway in the United States between those individuals who favor big government to protect us (both online and offline) with more regulation and those who do not.

This sometimes crosses party lines and it’s becoming an interesting battle.?

Let us know where you stand by writing your comments below!

Filed under: News by Clint Reeves
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