website traffic down

 Ramblings  2 Responses »
Nov 152011
 

Did something just happen over the past few days?  Our website traffic per google analytics is down significantly.  There was a Holiday but there does not appear to be any recovery what so ever.  I’m being completely optimistic, but perhaps karma has kicked us in the butt.  All of our popular keywords are no longer showing up on the first page of google searches.  Something has been changed.

Another thing that’s interesting, is newly posted content is not getting cached as fast as it usually does via google.

[update - 01/16/2012]
Panda or not it appears as if the traffic is back.  Now i’m still not sure what exactly happened or why it magically disappeared, but its all in the past because its come back.  And thank you for that!  Sure this site has content that is repeated, but I firmly believe its not in the same context with the same amount of passion as we have here at CIBEngineering.  Sure our readers are mainly technical in orientation and we all know that technical searches are completely random and not meant to stay on the site for more than 2 pages unless something sticks out to the user.

Take a quick gander at this massive gap in traffic.  I’ll be completely honest – I was considering dumping the entire site but out of sheer love for technology, google and web development i’m going to stay.

One word to summon my experience over the past 3 months. “WOW”. I’m not a huge believer in SEO, but I firmly believe that original content and well written content will always trump all!

 Posted by admin at 4:37 pm  Tagged with: ,

xenapp worker groups

 Ramblings, Server, XenApp  No Responses »
Oct 312011
 

So I got an email indicating several users are unable to launch a published application from our production XenApp 6.5 farm.  Great was my immediate thought!  But after navigating to the icon and thinking to myself, doesn’t this environment have 6 servers this specific application? Then upon clicking on the “servers” tab I immediately became suspicious of what I saw. “WORKER GROUPS!!!”

I must have been grumbling or something as I cast a stare over at a fellow colleague. “I swore off worker groups a long time ago” he said. Yep was my response. So this utterly disgusting mix of servers in different domains and XenApp 6.5 worker groups smacked yet again. essentially Anybody attempting to access icons published to a worker group that were not sourced from the same domain the servers resided in had connectivity issues. Upon attempting to launch the icon, they were immediately presented with an error indicating > “an error occurred while making the requested connection”.

How did we resolve this specific issues?

  1. remove the server group (worker group) from the published icon.
  2. individually add each server from the worker group to the icon
  3. test, and respond to the user group reporting the issue upon success!
  4. go grab a cup of coffee, or beer depending on the time, or if allowed (even if its still only 9AM).

 

 

 Posted by admin at 4:32 pm  Tagged with: ,

hosting provider help

 Ramblings  1 Response »
Oct 312011
 

Okay, so it was a grueling 14+ hours of an unanticipated website outage, but I honestly have to say I learned a few things. Here are 4 very important topics to take into consideration when selecting a hosting provider for your websites.

  1. Choose your hosting provider with extreme caution. I’ve been with HostMonster for several years and I honestly have to say that besides getting smacked every now and then for exceeding their “file count policy”, these guys are on par and the US based service is awesome.  I feel like I’m talking to a person when I call and not a robot reading from a script.  the engineers at  HostMonster kept me up to date on what was happening and assured me my data was backed up appropriately and the restore would not create issues [mysql].
  2. Will my traffic suffer from the outage? Overall – and as it stands over the past day or so, there is no significant impact on my traffic, although I have noticed engines such Bing are doing some crazy caching. which ultimately makes me think outages could potentially be a good thing, assuming they it doesn’t happen often.  And besides, who cares about bing, msn and yahoo. Their ability to deliver traffic is horrible, and probably explains why they are so far behind the leader.
  3. Plan for a Disaster Recovery scenario? Outages completely stink! no matter how you look at it or how you handle it. Ultimately outages result traffic loss,  which directly relates to loss of business and revenue.  In my opinion, my hosting provider has such a great uptime, it’s worth taking the risk and not having a disaster recovery solution or hosting the sites on my own virtual machine.  I lucked out this time because the outage was over a weekend when overall traffic is lower.
  4. Consider the infrastructure your sites will be competing for resources on. Mysql clusters on a shared hosting providers completely suck! All it takes is for one person to abuse the database for everybody to be impacted. But you also need to weigh in the costs as well. Owning your own vm or server in a datacenter is costly and recovery is all on you.

 

 Posted by admin at 2:00 pm  Tagged with:
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