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
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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….
Continuous Delivery for your Magento store with Fleet You may have heard of continuous delivery (CD) and continuous integration (CI) without giving either term much further thought. It’s not uncommon for e-commerce managers and even some developers to be confused about how CD and CI can improve your online e-commerce store. Maybe you don’t see the commercial benefits. Maybe you don’t see the need to change your existing processes. Maybe the concept of pushing so many code changes into production every day sounds daunting. So I’m going to explain why you should, you must, you need to understand CD and/or CI and how to apply the deployment process to your Magento website using Anchor’s Fleet platform. The speed, method and frequency of your code deployments will each have a massive impact on the…
Anchor is proud to announce a new partnership with CloudFlare. CloudFlare is a global CDN (Content Delivery Network) and DNS (Domain Name System) provider that helps to increase website performance and security. Further, it helps to keep web pages (especially with ad servers and third party widgets) quick on mobile phones, tablets and computers. CloudFlare routes web traffic through their intelligent global network. This allows them to automatically optimise the delivery of the customer’s web pages to ensure that the pages have the fastest load times and performance figures. Additionally, routing through the CloudFlare network blocks threats and limits bots from wasting the customer’s bandwidth and server resources. On average, a website using the CloudFlare network; Loads twice as fast Uses 60% less bandwidth Has 65% fewer requests to deal with Is far…
We have a new Anchorite! A big welcome to Sarah Wilson. Sarah is joining the Anchor team as an Account Manager, based in Anchor’s Sydney office. Since finishing school, Sarah’s worked in the hospitality industry, customer service and more recently as a Marketing assistant. On top of all this, Sarah’s completing a Bachelor of Commerce and a Bachelor of Arts, Marketing and Media. She has always been interested in sales and is looking forward to learning everything about the hosting industry and what it means to be a great Account Manager. She’s passionate about both playing and following sports, especially the Manly Sea Eagles in NRL and the Golden State Warriors in the NBA. In just her second week, Sarah managed to break the Anchor ‘coffee bot’ that delivers Slack notifications…
Here at Anchor we really love our virtualization. Our virtualization platform of choice, KVM, lets us provide a variety of different VPS products to meet our customers’ requirements. Our KVM hosting platform has evolved considerably over the six years it’s been in operation, and we’re always looking at ways we can improve it. One important aspect of this process of continual improvement, and one I am heavily involved in, is the testing of software upgrades before they are rolled out. This post describes a recent problem encountered during this testing, the analysis that led to discovering its cause, and how we have fixed it. Strap yourself in, this might get technical.
The Fleet team continue to release new features and improvements to our Magento-as-a-Service platform, Fleet. The highlights for this week’s release include performance improvements, support for custom health checks and improved usage reporting. Support for custom health checks. Added warning when loading a third release into an environment. Fleet cron fragments (under /etc/cron.d/) are now readable by the deploy user. Weekly Fleet usage reports now sent. Autoscaling history now exposed as a log. NewRelic license can now be unset if it was previously set. Performance improvements to env describe. Version number (–version) now has meaningful output. Please see the Fleet changelog for more information about this and previous releases. As always, to take advantage of the new features you simply need to create a new release. Any changes at the environment…
‘The biggest startup conference in Australia’, Syd Start 2015 (October 29-30) brought an impressive line up of international speakers and attracted over 2000 people to Sydney’s Town Hall. The Anchor Team hosted a booth at the two-day event, showcasing our involvement in the start-up community and some of our clients that have grown into massively successful global businesses, most notably the Silicon Valley behemoths GitHub and TestFlight. The event featured speakers such as Mark Bouris (Yellow Brick Road etc), Ray Chan (9GAG), Sean Ellis (Growthhackers.com), Jane Lu (Showpo) and Anchor’s own co-founder Andrew Rogers, sharing insights into the success and failures of an entrepreneur. The event also gave us a chance to talk to tech startups looking to adopt Cloud/Agile development methodologies about outsourcing the DevOps management of their AWS infrastructure to Anchor, with…
Hand-tailored by Anchor and Acidgreen Thwarted by the limitations of its existing CMS, Princess Polly chose Magento as the flexible foundation for the fashion retailer’s future ecommerce plans. However, for the project to succeed, Princess Polly also needed a digital agency to perform the necessary alterations to create a personalised designer platform. Plus, they needed a hosting partner to tailor the bespoke hosting ensemble to Magento’s particular shape, for a perfect fit with plenty of room in all the right places. “Working with Anchor is like having an extra developer in house. We consider them to be part of our development team” James Lowe: Senior Technical Consultant, Acidgreen GROWING PAINS Princess Polly started as a fashion boutique in Surfers Paradise back in 2005, launching an online store in 2010. “Within…
The dame introduced herself as Chantele Gibson, Director of Sales for a company called SearchSpring. How she got in my office I didn’t know. But she wasn’t pointing a .45 at me, which made a change. Chantele—even the name told me she was in the wrong end of town—spilled the facts on SearchSpring. Turns out two brainiacs called Gareth Dismore and Scott Zielinski founded the business in 2007. Today they supply intelligent on-site search services for over 600 online retailers around the world. Better on-site search results means guys like me can find what we want faster. And that means more customers. Smart. The kind of smart that doesn’t normally seek me out. I knew search engines were putting private detectives like me out of business. I poured a bourbon from…