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….

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…

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…