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…

Accelerating software delivery has been an important organisational goal for well over a decade, and the new software economy is making it even more so. As I'm sure you've noticed, digital disruption is very real. The past few years has seen profound change across many established industries (with repercussions felt across tens, if not hundreds of thousands of businesses), and it's clear that we're only just getting started. Established companies have to resist the temptation to perpetuate "business as usual", instead remodelling their businesses to create and serve the new kinds of value demanded by customers in a digital world. And if the incumbents don't do it, a new entrant into your market will. "The traditional core competencies of existing companies often become less like industry-defending fortresses and more like deadweight." - Digital to the Core. Mark Raskino and...

If you’re looking to reduce your AWS spend, read on. It’s no secret that the range of cloud services offered by providers such as Amazon Web Services brings many benefits to your business. Despite this, complex usage pricing and a huge range of services (around 60 at this stage!) means that it can be challenging controlling your costs. While many organisations move to the cloud expecting to save money, depending on how you’ve set things up you may find you’re spending more than you expected to. And while AWS discount vouchers sadly aren’t really a thing – Anchor has a few simple ways to reduce your AWS costs. You can get a quick fix with the “AWS Caretaker” service – simply link Anchor as your billing provider and you’ll immediately benefit from our volume discounts. We should be able to…

In under 2 weeks, Anchor will be on our way to the Gold Coast for the Internet Conference’s 10th year.  We’ve taken out Bronze Sponsorship and will be exhibiting in the Magento Pavilion within the exhibition hall. The Magento Pavilion has been created to recognise the importance of the Magento platform in creating flexible, scalable e-Commerce solutions, making it the most popular open source e-Commerce CMS in the world. Anchor was the first Magento hosting partner in Australia and will be the exclusive hosting partner exhibiting in this space, showcasing our services including our internationally successful Magento-as-a-Service, Fleet, that sits on AWS. As well as providing more traditional hosting and managed services, Anchor also now provides a suite of services designed to help your organisation accelerate it’s transition towards taking a…

The Anchor Sales and Marketing Team have returned unscathed and intact from the 2016 Magento Imagine conference in Las Vegas….albeit with lighter wallets as a result of living in casinos for a week. On the back of our Platinum sponsorship in 2015, Anchor attended this years Imagine conference excited to learn more about the Magento community, upcoming changes and basically for a great excuse to catch up with our international (and local Australian) partners. Held at the Wynn Hotel, Imagine doesn’t disappoint. Bringing together 2500+ commerce experts, merchants, agencies and technology partners across 45+ different countries, great food, people, service and events all make for a week of learning and networking – with some awesome after parties. When you’re meeting up with customers and partners poolside, beer in hand with…

April 11th- 13th, Las Vegas, USA The Magento Imagine conference is in its sixth year of connecting global ambassadors and businesses to the ‘eCommerce ecosystem’. This year, it will bring together over 2 500 Magento ecommerce inspired merchants and technology providers from over 45 countries who will not only collaborate but also enjoy a once in a lifetime experience in the fast moving Las Vegas. Anchor are excited to announce that they will be attending Imagine for the 2 nd year in a row, excited to connect and learn about what is happening with other Magento specialised companies around the world. This year, the keynote speaker is, Earvin ‘Magic’ Johnson, whose keynote speech will focus on what strategies he used to not only be an MVP on the court but…

Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and joyous New Year from all of us at Anchor! Over the holiday period Anchor will be closed on the following days only: December 25th, December 28th, January 1st. Artwork by: Anhdres

Traditionally, new employee onboarding is very text based: read a bunch of documents and FAQs, practice a few tasks, and ‘Boom’—you’re thrown in the deep end. At Anchor, we focus on hiring smart, energetic and passionate people. However, new employees have to take in a staggering amount of information if they are to have any chance of keeping up with the constantly changing hosting industry. We felt we needed a more robust method of onboarding new employees. I was tasked with forming the core of this new onboarding framework, through the creation of ‘Minh’s Modules’; a set of training sessions I ran initially with a new intake of employees which were recorded to give future Anchorites a set of training materials to start with. But there was only one problem….