Earlier tonight, at 1:30am EST, SoftLayer - one of the tier 1 data centers we use, experienced a power outage in their primary facility, rendering thousands of sites dead.



SPI engineers were alerted to the outage within seconds (we take monitoring very seriously). After establishing that the core problem was a total data-center failure, we verified load balancers are properly redirecting traffic to other locations.

The Power Outage lasted a total of 2 hours and 3 minutes according to our friends at Pingdom:



All SPI client sites are multi-homed, which means we host everything in two independent data centers: Rackspace, Softlayer, NTT Verio and iWeb.

SPI utilizes redundant global load balancing, to immediately redirect end users from west coast to east coast, when such global outages happen.

How it works

New end users hitting your mydomain.com are diverted to active servers.

Old users / scripts (which keep a cached version of your website ip address) continue getting routed to the old server until their local DNS cache is cleared.

What's Next

While the DNS ttl (time to live) is setup as 60 seconds, some browsers and ISPs don't honor that and can take up to 2 hours until the DNS entry is refreshed.

As a workaround for these type of catastrophes where active users have cached a malfunctioning server's ip address, we'll be configuring the load balancers to reply back with all available server ip addresses, letting an end-user's machine rotate ips internally.

We understand the importance of keeping your sites up at all times and although our current setup ensures 100% uptime for new users, we are determined to come up with a solution for users with a cached version of a malfunctioning server ip address.

Your SPI account manager will contact you with any specific steps you have to take, in order to enable this setup for your domains.

Authorize.net, the largest payment gateway in the US, lost power to their Seattle data center early this morning.

SJC data center cannot handle the load and as a result, all payments are declining

Twitter is full with users reporting Authorize.net outages:



Expected resolution time is 2 hours.

If you're using the SPI shopping cart and have defined more than a single payment gateway, the system will automatically divert charges to your secondary payment gateway.

Otherwise, if you only have Authorize.net, contact your SPI account manager and we'll instruct you how to easily resubmit all declines once Authorize.net is back online.

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This outage is the third major outage this week and once again goes to show the importance of multihomed hosting.

Rackspace, one of the largest tier-1 hosting providers, is down today, affecting tens of thousands of websites, including some celebrity sites like Justin Timberlake and many others...



Here at SPI, we believe in multi-homed hosting.

Our client sites are hosted with Rackspace, NTT Verio, Softlayer and iWeb... all at the same time.

They're all great hosting providers, but as our friends at Pingdom frequently report, if things can go wrong they will.

Replicating our client sites across multiple data-centers with multiple non-related hosting providers, is the only way to deliver true 100% uptime across the board.

If your site needs to be up and running at all times, contact us today. We'd love to help.

Need to move files between two servers? No need to download to your local machine first. You can use ncftpget to recursively download all files from a remote server.

Use as follows:


Where,

* -R : Copy all subdirectories and files (recursive)
* -v : Verbose i.e. display download activity and progess
* -u "USERNAME" : FTP server username, if skipped ncftpget will try anonymous username
* ftp.softwareprojects.com : Ftp server name
* /home/backup : Download everything to this directory
* /www-data : Remote ftp directory you wish to copy

If you get an error which read as follows:

tar: End of archive volume 1 reached
tar: Sorry, unable to determine archive format.
Could not read directory listing data: Connection reset by peer

Then add -T option to ncftpget command:


Where:

* -T : Do not try to use TAR mode with Recursive mode

Chris Carpenter, Joel Comm, Amit Mehta, Tellman Knudson, Anik Singal and Mike Masterson are just some of the Super Affiliates you might recognize, who are bringing home hundreds of thousands of dollars every month, thanks to work and services rendered by third party providers.

The common misconceptions involving outsourcing are

(a) Outsourcing is about paying an offshore freelancer $10/hour to produce low quality work
(b) Outsourcing requires a lot of micro-management
(c) Outsourcing is risky because I will be revealing all my secrets to a company I don't know
(d) Outsourcing is something only big companies use
(e) I have technical skills and have engineers on staff, Outsourcing is not for me.

In reality, none of these arguments hold much merit. Much like PPC is a tool to drive qualified leads to a target website, Outsourcing done right, is a tool that can help you get your ideas to fruition at minimum risk. Successful companies (Microsoft, Sony, HP), Super Affilites and individual Entrepreneurs alike use Outsourcing daily to develop prototypes, clone websites, launch products and test new ideas.

What's the key to it all? Three little letters known as ROI (Return On Investment). If you want to duplicate the success other super affiliates are seeing with outsourcing, your first step is to get over your natural instinct to hustle. Shopping for an Outsourcing partner is not like looking for the best deal on an 8GB iPhone. And it's not like a visit to your local flea market. Not all outsourcing companies are created equal.

Forget about price-per-hour. Use deadline-guarantees, references and specific experience in your target vertical as your metrics when looking for an outsourcing partner. Pick a budget for the project and insist on deadline guarantees with penalties for not meeting the deadline. Look for a company that employs marketing account managers who can take your ideas and work directly with the engineers, so that you don't have to waste your time.

In his book, "The 4-hour Workweek", Thimothy Ferriss shares how he managed to outsource his entire life, using virtual assistants across the globe to send flowers to his wife on their anniversery, remind him to pick up his son from practice etc.

While I don't encourage you to go that far, I do invite you to explore how you can use Outsourcing to effectively employ an army of software engineers, link builders or copywriters, to grow your business for you. Start small but never lose sight of your Outsourcing projects ROI. Outsourcing done right is simply when total revenues exceed outsourcing project investment AND does not require your direct involvement every step of the way.

Working with Super Affiliates, one of the most popular uses of Outsourcing we see is when a Super Affiliate has been working with a particular niche for a long time, gets great results and is now looking to increase his/her profit margins. Using Outsourcing, the Super Affiliate can hire a small team to clone a website or create a standalone product, so that the affiliate becomes a merchant and significantly increases profit margins. This is a great model that is almost always guaranteed to work well, with the right outsourcing partner.

Another popular example is when affiliates look to avoid the mundane tasks of running a website. Content generation, Handling support tickets and maintaining your website are all tasks that you should never ever be wasting your time on.

You'll be getting a much better ROI on your time if you focus on what you do best - Marketing.

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Do you still have your business snail mail coming to your physical mailbox or a MailBoxes Etc?

Do you actually have to take time out of your busy day to check your mailbox, open envelopes, trash the junk mail etc.?

Introducing Earth Class Mail.

We've been raving fans of Earth Class Mail for the past two years and integrated them in multiple businesses.

Earth Class Mail provides you with a physical US address (not POBox) in one of 15 states. You then update all contacts with your new business address and setup a forwarding rule with your local postoffice.

This is where it gets exciting -

As soon as Earth Class Mail receives a new letter, parcel, package addressed to you, their automated system immediately scans the package and sends you an email with the scanned image.



You can login to your Earth Class Mail account at anytime to request a full scan, request a package to be delivered to you, shred sensitive documents or recycle junkmail.

Rates start at just $13.95/month for 50 mail pieces

An SSL certificate contains the following information:

* The domain name for which the certificate was issued.
* The owner of the certificate and the domain name.
* The physical location of the owner.
* The validity dates of the certificate.

When you connect to a secure web server such as https://softwareprojects.com, the server authenticates itself to the web browser by presenting a digital certificate. The certificate is proof that an independent trusted third party has verified that the website belongs to the company it claims to belong to. A valid certificate gives customers confidence that they are sending personal information securely, and to the right place.

When you install the SSL certificate on your website, visitors to your website will see a yellow lock icon, identifying the pages are secure. It's another way to build trust, especially when asking users to input sensitive information such as credit card information, SSN, home address etc.

SSL Certificates are widely used on payment forms. We found they help with basic landing pages as well, significantly increasing conversion rates.

As part of this guide, I will provide you with step-by-step instructions for registering your SSL certificate with VeriSign.

Why VeriSign? Yes - there are cheaper SSL providers out there, but many are not recognized by older browser versions. This means that the $200 you save, will result in a percentage of your users getting welcomed by a scary dialog saying your SSL certificate cannot be verified.

Step 1 - Register a domain

This is a no brainer.

Step 2 - Verify Whois information and make it public

Your domain whois information must match the company name and address you'd like to list on the SSL certificate.

Update your whois information if you need to (login to your SoftwareProjects account and click on the domain, or use your existing registrar interface) and make sure your whois information can be publicly accessed by whois.net

If you have private-registration, you MUST turn it off prior to applying for the SSL certificate. You'll be able to turn private-registration back on once the certificate is approved.

Step 3 - Generate private key

Login to your server via Telnet or SSH and run this command:


Replace mydomain.com with your target domain name.

You'll be asked to choose a password. Pick any password - it is only used throughout the registration process.

Now enter this command:


Again replace mydomain.com with your target domain name.

You'll be asked to provide the country, state, company name and domain name. Make sure you use the EXACT same information as what whois.net shows for your domain. Make sure you include the www.mydomain.com and not just mydomain.com.

Step 4 - Buy Certificate

Visit VeriSign at http://www.verisign.com/ssl/buy-ssl-...tes/index.html and click on the Buy button under Secure Site (bottom right box)




Unless requested otherwise, select 1 year and uncheck "Extended Validation SSL" and "Ensure Strongest Encryption". Cost should be $399/year.

Under Technical details - enter your information - so that you can receive communications regarding this certificate request as it goes through processing.

When asked to choose a server type - select Apache.

VeriSign will ask you to paste the www.mydomain.com.csr file you previously generated.

Step 5 - Update Contacts

I listed this as a separate step because people often mess it up -

Step 4 of buying a certificate on VeriSign is titled "Contacts". As part of this step, make sure the organizational contact, address and details match your whois records.

When we register certificates at SoftwareProjects, we always list our contact information under Technical contact and the client contact information under the organizational contact.

The organizational contact MUST have an email-address under the target domain. So if you are registering mydomain.com, it is vital that you use someemail@mydomain.com as the organizational contact email-address.

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If you've followed all steps, you can now complete the process and submit the SSL certificate request. VeriSign will contact you (technical contact email address) if they need any additional documentation to approve the request.

Once approved, you will be provided with the certificate files which can then be installed into your web server.

Did you know? When you buy ssl certificate with SoftwareProjects, setup, coordinating with VeriSign and installation of the certificate on your server is included.

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