General

When it comes to Magento, what happens in Vegas certainly doesn’t stay there! This year the Magento Imagine conference was yet again, no exception to the rule.  This year we, and over 2500 attendees heard the likes of Tennis pro, Serena Williams and Magento CEO, Mark Lavelle discussing the importance of thinking differently and outside the box. Missed out on the event? Here’s what some of our partners had to say about Magento Imagine:   Daniel Mylnikov- Head of Solutions Delivery at eWave, the Magento APAC  Partner of the Year at this year’s conference. A highlight of the conference were  the breakout sessions on Magento Business Intelligence, The Future of Active Magento Cyber Security and the Special Preview: See New Magento B2B Capabilities in Action.   Derek Nolde the Enterprise Sales Director at Section.io, said, “It was…

Many Anchor customers ask us for assistance with getting the best performance out of their website. Website performance is a complex topic to which there are many contributing factors:   from a hosting perspective, these can be as simple as underpowered infrastructure or over-contention, but geographic location and latency can often come into play as well. Having your site hosted in a modern, high-speed environment with world class managed services provides a solid foundation for your website. Utilising a Content Delivery Network (CDN) as well can assist in giving your website an extra boost in speed and performance. Anchor is an official partner with Cloudflare; a global Content Delivery Network designed to optimize security, performance and reliability. Cloudflare offers robust CDN capabilities in addition to other security services including DDoS (Distributed…

Maintaining and managing the ongoing performance of your website or application is an area where ‘not my problem’ can be a recurring sentiment from all stakeholders.   It’s not just a case of getting your shiny new website or application onto the biggest, most highly spec-ed-up dedicated server or cloud instance that money can buy. There are many factors that can influence the performance of your website that you — yes you — need to make friends with. The relationship between site performance and business outcomes Websites today have evolved into fully fledged web applications. They started out as simple HTML, but have today evolved into complex, database driven, ‘rich’ multimedia content, requiring buckets of storage and computing power. Your server needs to run complex scripts and processes, and serves up…

While most drivers are capable of carrying out a few basic car maintenance tasks, the majority wouldn’t attempt to reconfigure the clutch or modify the engine, no matter how many YouTube videos or handy guides there might be. Sending the car to a trusted mechanic not only saves a great deal of time and stress—often worth the fee alone— but also gives us the confidence that it is done RIGHT. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is incredibly powerful, flexible and complex. When a competitive advantage can rely on squeezing every last ounce of performance or uptime from your infrastructure, expert help can make a massive difference that can easily justify—and often more than repay— any management fee. Plus, a certified AWS partner may have access to economies of scale that allow…

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and CentOS 5 reaches end-of-life at the end of March, 2017. This means that maintenance will cease, and there will be no further updates to any software installed via vendor packages. Although this change has no immediate effect on current services hosted by Anchor, it does mean that Anchor or any other hosting provider, can no longer make the same security guarantees. This means that any future vulnerabilities, detected in packaged software or the core operating system, will not be patched. Anchor recommends that anyone still running these, or any previous versions, should migrate to a new machine running a supported operating system, such as CentOS 7, which is the current stable release. This process involves building a new machine, testing and migrating all of the…

Faulty code remains one of the most common reasons for performance issues and unscheduled downtime. Yet, it is still possible for bad code to make its way into the Production environment, even with testing. Your Production environment is most likely a collection of interlinked servers, load balancers and more. Does it really make sense to test your code on a single sandbox server that doesn’t equate in any way to the real world it will need to operate within? Of course your code performs flawlessly within the simplified, unchallenging environment of a single testing or staging server. But that’s no indication of what may happen upon release when it attempts to mesh with the harsh realities of your full Production environment. Instead, code should be tested in a complete and…

Most businesses don’t think twice about taking out insurance policies to protect against various forms of loss, such as workers compensation or public liability. They’re rightly considered a cost of doing business. But what about the cost of downtime? If your website or application is a critical part of your business, you should be taking every precaution to guard against outages in the same way you insure yourself against other forms of loss. The most serious business consequences of downtime are often lost customer registrations, lost sales or frustrated customers. In 2015, one of Anchor’s larger e-commerce customers transacted more than $100 million dollars in revenue through their Magento store. Crunching those numbers means a single hour of downtime equals a potential revenue loss of around $11,415. In reality, the…

If your resolution for 2017 is to grow your online presence, provide a better customer experience or maximising your ecommerce revenue without increasing your workload, then switching your hosting to the cloud is exactly what you’re looking for! Moving your website or web application into a cloud hosting environment means you can take advantage of the latest, high speed, highly available infrastructure to power your application. You can easily ‘scale up’ to meet your growing demands and only pay for what you use, making it more cost effective than the lofty fixed monthly costs of traditional dedicated or virtual servers. One of the biggest mistakes however, is attempting to manage the cloud operations by yourself – highlighted in our Mistakes to Avoid in AWS  EBook. While some car drivers might be…