The Holidays are filled with traditions both new and old. Two years
ago, we broke our old holiday tradition of sending gift baskets to our largest customers and created a new tradition of honoring their continuing successes by making donations in their names to two very worthy charities: MAZON and Operation Food Search.

MAZON works nationally and, since 1985, has granted over $50 million to prevent and alleviate hunger among people of all faiths and back-grounds.

Operation Food Search is a St. Louis-based food bank that has been
helping feed the poor and hungry since 1981. Each month, Operation Food
Search distributes more than 2 million pounds of food and necessities
to 265 food pantries, soup kitchens, and homeless shelters in 31 counties of Missouri and Illinois.

Operation Food Search feeds approximately 150,000 people every single month and nearly half of these recipients are children.

Metaphor
Yarns (www.metaphoryarns.com)
went live recently. Theirs is a great site for folks who love yarn. It is built on PDG Commerce with a WordPress component. The site has a cozy sense of place about it and given the list of classes and circles that meet there, I can see why.

The
Music Zoo (www.themusiczoo.com)
asked us to integrate a third-party custom guitar “builder” widget from
Taylor into their PDG Commerce cart such that when the user is done
building their custom guitar, the guitar is on a PDG Commerce page
ready to be added to the Commerce cart with image, details and pricing
intact.Try it out here.

ImagiKnit (www.imagiKnit.com) is another site devoted to yarn that recently went live with a new design.. Built on PDG Commerce, it has a clean presentation where the yarn colors are presented as the main characters.  I particularly like the “Yarn by Fiber” navigation on this site.

When enough is simply not enough and even more is still not enough, you need it all. And when you need it all, we are happy to oblige. HTN Cirrus Cloud Hosting accounts are now available with 30 GB of RAM and 1200 GB of disk space.

The Cirrus Cloud Hosting family of servers now ranges from 256 MB to a grand-daddy 30 GB of RAM–a whopping 128 times the CPU power of our smallest server. If you
have a Cirrus Cloud Hosting account, you can easily change your hosting account to any other size by simply clicking the “Upgrade/Downgrade Package” button in the customer portal. Since we bill by the day and not by the
month, you pay only for what you use. For instance, if you double the size of your server on the day that you send your monthly newsletter, and restore the server to its original size the next day, you only pay for one day at the larger size.

The whole process is very convenient since your files stay in place, your IP address does not change, and your server is only down for a few
minutes during the reconfiguration.

How fast would your website be if it was supercharged by dual quad-core CPUs (eight virtual cores) and a bodacious quantity of RAM? There’s
only one way to find out: Upsize to (or order a new) Cirrus Cloud Hosting account now.

If the term, “high-availability website” makes you think of companies the size of Amazon.com, never fear: as a small-to-medium business, there
are many ways to make your website highly available. Best of all, it is possible to do so without breaking the bank.

Just what does high availability mean? It means
simply making your website available most of the time. Availability is usually measured in percentages so, for instance, a site which is guaranteed to be up 99.9% of the time (three nines in geek-speak) can be down for 8.76 hours per year. A site with guaranteed uptime of “four nines” (or 99.99%) of uptime can be down for 53 minutes per year. To your website’s visitors, it can occur virtually undetected. It is important that you notice that I wrote “most of the time” and not “all of the time.” Truly non-stop computing is virtually impossible to achieve, is very expensive, and is not justified for most websites.

Small to medium-sized businesses can make their websites highly-available by following these steps:

1. Choose a web hosting company which stresses service over low prices. In the unlikely event that your web server goes down, you will probably
receive a better response from a service-oriented hosting company.  Ask hosting companies about how they handle emergency situations and how they will be able to assist you if their servers go down. If you can’t reach them by phone, you should be hesitant to trust them with your business.

2. Make backup copies of your entire website and databases from which you can recover individual files. The vast majority of website downtime results from individual files that are accidentally changed or deleted.
Often, the fastest solution is to simply recover the file from the most recent backup. While you are checking on your backups, make sure that they cover more than just the previous night. If someone deletes a critical file on Friday afternoon but you do not discover it until
Monday morning, can you still get it back?

3. Consider a cloud server instead of a dedicated server. By moving your web server into “the cloud,” you free yourself from dependence on a specific piece of hardware. If a computer fails or a disk drive
fails, your web server can be magically moved to a new computer or a new disk drive. Such a migration usually takes just a few minutes and requires no additional work or cost to you.

4. Consider having a hot backup web server on stand-by. A hot backup contains copies of all of your files and databases and is kept in sync with the master database. If your primary server goes down, some manual
intervention may be required (to update DNS records, for instance) but your site will be up and running again very quickly.

Finally, you may want to consider having multiple servers running 100% of the time, with load balancers on the front line. With this architecture, failures of any of the back-end servers are instantly alleviated by the load balancers which simply route all traffic to the servers which are still functioning.

Many, if not most, of our customers use Google Analytics to analyze their website traffic. The detailed data have always been interesting and the graphs a big help in visualizing what the numbers are saying.

Google Analytics is a free suite of tools that help you analyze your website’s traffic, write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing program, and create
higher-converting websites. If you have an account, but haven’t logged into your account for a while, you might want to take a few minutes and take a look around. Google has made some remarkable improvements in the design and reporting features:

1. A redesigned and streamlined user interface makes it easier to navigate, which was a major complaint about previous versions.

2. You can now create up to 20 customized dashboards (which boggles the brain a bit), for creating reports, keeping them organized and making them easier to find.

3. New reporting options including Pivot Tables and both Term Clouds and Keyword Clouds help you understand how site visitors found your website.

4. Detailed mobile device reporting is now available. The screenshot below shows the report screen with the graph at the top and the detailed report by device type at the bottom. To view a larger version, click here.

5. Google has completely redesigned the old Funnel Reports and created features that now allow you to more clearly visualize how users experience your site. These new reports also help you better identify navigation and bounce issues on your site. To view a larger version,
click here.

6. They’ve also added easy-to-use Multi-channel Funnel Reports so you can track every method through which the user accessed your site – not just the most recent one. This is cool in itself and might yield some information on your users’ device preferences or on
your site’s usability with some devices.

7. Rounding out the new reporting features is the Social Engagement Report which tracks the social interactions that your visitors had while visiting your site. Did they
like/send, +1 or Tweet your page? You can also read their comments and feedback that they shared with others.

8. And, lastly, for keeping a better handle on all your Google-based activities, Google Analytics now integrates with Google Webmaster Tools and AdSense and you can navigate among all three.

The best indicator that your site is doing well is, of course, sales if you do e-commerce, or traffic if you don’t sell. But knowing why it is doing well is enormously useful for making decisions on what effort to put into your website, and where.

Sometimes the truths the data reveal are surprising!