Informed Networker Blog

Dave spends most of his time on the floor. Not that he doesn’t have a desk, he just prefers the floor. More working room. He shifts from pose to pose every half-hour. Sometimes stretches and walks around. Most of his time is spent in his small, but ample home office.

At midnight the day begins. His developers in India are arriving at their offices and its time to coordinate the days projects. Conversation occurs mainly through Instant Messenger. Demos are provided and occasional emails augment the conversation. Then its time for some sleep.

While Dave is asleep some of his editors - including Margaret - continue typing away. In the morning there are more stories, spam has been squashed, and the developers have advanced on their projects. Dave reviews the mornings projects, helps deploy code, and troubleshoot any outstanding issues.

Most of Dave’s other editors are awake now as well, and much of the work begins in earnest. Andrew, Jon, Sajid, Paul, and Martha all submit stories throughout the day - ensuring a steady stream of fresh news and interacting with the site’s visitors. Dave takes part in the story submission and conversation process as well.

Emails and instant messages shoot back and forth. Communication and motivation are key to continued success. Editors give continuous feedback and Dave fixes many of the smaller bugs or adds feature enhancements himself, while major projects are handed off to the India developers.

Each day generally has a theme. One day focuses on marketing, another on advertising sales, another on fresh content or seo, another on preparing the viral video campaign. No one task ever dominates a day - Dave shifts gears, but the emphasis is defined.

Breaks are taken. Food is eaten. An hour or two for relaxation. More emails to answer, more contacts to generate, more visitors to interact with. Bills to pay, updates to apply, software to deploy, systems to scale. Then its midnight again and time to start the process over again.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t spend all day in front of the computer. There is sleep. And yes, my wonderful wife Charity ensures I spend some time socializing with others (and her). I’m involved in a number of external activities but for the safe of my privacy and security I won’t delve into them here (yes, I know you want to stalk me).

Image by Matalyn via Flickr.
NO THIS ISN’T OUR NETWORK!!

Introduction:
Today I’m going to take a few minutes to walk you through the network infrastructure that underlies Informed Networker, as well as some of our near-future plans for expansions.

DNS:
In order to for visitors to reach your website via a domain name (e.g. informednetworker.com) you need to have DNS records. DNS is similar to a phone book. Look up a name and you find a telephone number. With DNS you look up a name and find an IP address (e.g. x.x.x.x - 64.233.167.99). This all happens transparently to the end user - but there is critical work to be done by those providing the website.

In our case we chose not to host our DNS servers internally. We made this decision for several reasons:

• We didn’t want to have to be experts in DNS.
• We like separate servers for each role and this would have required additional hardware if we ran the DNS ourselves.
• Out-sourced services can provide globally distributed and redundant services.

We utilize a service called DNSMadeEasy. There are other alternatives (UltraDNS), but none as inexpensive - and DNSMadeEasy offers the same featureset as these other services.

Servers:
I really love Dell PowerEdge 2950’s. While many guys admire a beautiful car, I could care less about cars - but can describe in detail the features I love about Dell’s 2950. When I was looking at the future of Informed Networker I wanted to buy a 2950, but I couldn’t justify the price for our business model. With the opportunity to move entirely cloud-based, going with a 2950 just didn’t make sense. Here are a few of the factors that weighed into this decision:

• I couldn’t just buy one server. For redundancy purposes I would need at least two servers. While I could run virtual instances to avoid purchasing an additional server for every role, I’d still eventually be purchasing additional equipment.
• I’d need to rent a rack at a colocation facility. Even the least expensive of these would cost more than a cloud-based solution.
• I’d need to assure 100% uptime (or five-nine’s) - something which while possible would require significant time dedication on my part - something I felt could be better directed in other pursuits for the business.

Granted, I could have bough a single server, attached it to the FiOS at my house (till Verizon would shut me down), and hoped for the best - but we want to run professionally. I have seen too many times when a company compromises on a hack solution to save money or as an interim solution and the paint his can bring.

So where did we end up? With Slicehost. Slicehost is a Linux Virtual Private Server (VPS) environment. Their prices are relatively inexpensive. You can purchase a 256 MB slice with 100 GB of bandwidth and 10 GB of hard drive space for $20/mo. We started with one 256 MB slice and then expanded to two - one for the www server and a separate server for the db. In the near future we’ll expand to four - an additional www and db server for redundancy and load sharing. I prefer to scale out on lower-end VPS’ than to buy one or two really hefty VPS. This allows us to implement the infrastructure at the beginning that will allow for rapid expansion rather than suddenly finding ourselves maxing out one or two fat VPS’ with no systems in place. Once we have these four instances then we will scale up - in fatness. That is, we’ll move to 512 MB, 1024, and eventually 2048 MB as needed. But the infrastructure to scale comes first.

Monitoring/Analytics:

As mentioned in an earlier post, I had used in-house monitoring software in the past but chose to outsource this as well. By doing so I reduced hardware costs and surface area for security attacks. We use Google Analytics to track traffic patterns and Scout App/Mon.itor.us for site/hardware monitoring. We use Slicehost backups to image the servers on a daily basis and also take regular snapshots of the site - including some kept in a cloud-based SVN - as well as dumps of the MySQL databases which are kept off-site from Slicehost.

Upcoming Infrastructure:

Besides scalability improvements as mentioned under the server topic we want to create some Amazon EC2 instances. These won’t run generally - as the cost for an Amazon EC2 instance is significantly more expensive (though it isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison) - instead they’ll exist in the case of a Slicehost system failure. We can boot them up in five minutes and have our DNS (which propagates extremely fast) handle the IP updates almost instantaneously.

Conclusion:

Cloud-based isn’t the way for everyone to go, and considerations (especially as one grows) need to be made for the inevitable system outages a single provider can experience (e.g. Amazon’s S3). But for systems that are light on storage and looking to keep initial overhead costs low - cloud-based can be an efficient and forward-looking solution. Not to mention one can stamp one’s company as green - considering the significant reduction in power utilization, etc. caused by virtualization and consolidation in a cloud-based scenario.

P.S. Feel free to ask me any questions you may have about the Informed Networker infrastructure.

As I discussed in two previous posts on my experiences raising venture capital - its hard and takes a lot of time. I’m still more than willing to speak with potential investors and will pitch my heart out, but the reality is I’m moving full-time to Informed Networker in around a month and am already working on it significantly part-time. There isn’t time to continue pursuing venture capitalists proactively. “Okay, so that’s great Dave, but how do you expect to keep your home if you don’t secure venture capital?” Great question.

Venture Capitalists like several features in a business: (a) revenue and (b) a significant investment (e.g. $500k+). Advertisers on the other hand want (a) traffic and (b) traffic. This is something Informed Networker is already able to offer. With a decent traffic base and the potential only being up as well as targeted viewers (IT Professionals) - we can offer advertisers exactly what they need. So, as mentioned in an earlier post we are looking to secure around nine “charter advertisers” before August 1st. We’ll be proactively recruiting them. The commitment on their end is relatively minor ($1,500 for one year - breaks down to $125/mo.) and guarantees them a reasonable minimum number of impressions (72,000 impressions - though their ad continues rotating amongst extra inventory even beyond this number), a logo listing on our charter advertiser page, and a in-depth review of their product/service in a blog posting we’ll write thanking them for their support. They also receive the right to lock in this rate for a second year - a significant offer since we expect to be charging much higher rates within a few months as traffic increases and our reputation as a valuable source for focused eyeballs increases. If you are interested in having your company support Informed Networker please let us know. We’re looking forward to working with you!

Securing these nine advertisers would allow us to garner $13,500. This would fund us for the first several months of operation - allowing us to expand personnel (including a part-time, commission based sales force), continue innovative feature development, ramp up story quality and freshness, etc. etc. At the same time, we don’t give away any equity in the company and we hopefully establish long-term mutually beneficial relationships with our advertisers.

Note: Per previous posts, we are not indicating our uninterest in securing venture capital. We are simply stating our inability in a competitive market to rely upon or expend significant effort upon securing venture capital. We will pitch our hearts out to any interested parties with reasonable ability to invest but in the meantime will secure relationships with advertisers and continue to expand the site.

Image via Wikipedia

Informed Networker is looking to recruit local talent (Langhorne/Penndel/Hulmeville/Neshaminy/Etc.) for upcoming sketch comedies that will be used in viral web-based marketing promoting Informed Networker. Here are the details for those interested:

Cast:

• We are looking for actors and actresses. Each skit will have a minimal cast - around five individuals at most. Actors/actresses should have experience in traditional theater/film.
• Actors should be 16 or over. All actors will act as independent contractors - no employer/employee relationship will be established.
• Minimal pay, at least for first few sketches. Depending on success pay will be renegotiated.

Crew:

• Should have own equipment. Will be expected to handle most technical aspects. Will have creative freedom while working from a rough script.
• No employee, employer relationship is established.
• Minimal pay, at least for first few sketches. Depending on success pay will be renegotiated.

We expect to perform each sketch within a matter of hours on a single day. Payment will be made same day. All participants will be required to sign a release.

I’d been working on a business plan for some time - basing it off several examples I’d found on the internet. Eventually I purchased Palo Alto’s Business Plan Pro 11.0 software, a company started by Tim Berry. I found this software exceptionally well-designed and intuitive to use. I spent hours working on my business plan but when it was done I hated it. Not because of Palo Alto’s failure in any way but because I felt like so much of the business plan was redundant, boring crap. Why did I need this book when I could write more concisely and effectively the contents of my plan in ten pages? The purchase of the Business Plan software wasn’t a waste - it included a lot of great calculators and spreadsheets for creating cash flow estimates and items of a similar nature - something that I dreaded. But in the end while I have my official business plan - I don’t want to give it to anyone. I made a new one, one I call the “Informal Plan” but which offers the information needed concisely and hopefully in a interesting manner.

Meanwhile, I realized just how much work it took to raise capital. More time than I cared to dedicate to this purpose. Like the young man in the previous post informed me - it was practically a full-time job. I wanted to build things, not mess with securing money and giving away significant portions of the business. So I decided to bootstrap it. It wasn’t that I was closed to receiving venture funds (in fact, if you are reading this and want to give me money, please contact me!) but I decided that I could do it without the funds, if need be - it’d just be a bit more scary. See, Informed Networker doesn’t have a lot of costs - I’m only looking for $100,000. A little over half of that would pay my salary for the first year and we would expect to be cash flow positive within seven months of my starting full-time. The reason I wanted the money was for two purposes (a) allow me to focus on Informed Networker without worrying where next month’s mortgage payment is coming from and (b) increase marketing efforts. But the time spent raising money was outweighing the money - so I decided to deal with the stress and move forward.

I secured a $4,000 line of credit with Dell and purchased the two systems I would need - a laptop (my main workstation) and a desktop (for virtual machines, task processing, debugging, etc.). I secured another $4,000 on a credit card for business purchases and began dumping the small cash reservoirs I had available into the business. Kind of scary right? Yeah. Good news is as a Network Engineer I do some freelance consulting on the side - which brings in a slick $100/hr. - so I know that I can always ramp up that business a little should Informed Networker need a little cash infusion…

That said, the great guy who has been my proactive support in raising capital (Dick) has continued to work on finding me possible financers. Something I greatly appreciate and take advantage of to the fullest. Recently he was able to coordinate a meeting for me with Chris Fralic of First Round Capital. While I knew statistically my chances where low and that I’d have to drive a good hour each way to Conshohocken and back I wasn’t going to turn down an opportunity to raise capital. In addition to the “hey, maybe they’ll fund me” thought line I’d also met Chris at the FundingPost event and he seemed like a nice guy. I’d read up on his business background and love a couple of the companies he worked for - so it seemed like a good time investment. So I drove. Chris and one of his associates met with me for a solid hour. Wow. I pitched my heart out. They were friendly and inquisitive. They pulled no punches and pushed me to explain my reasoning in every corner. You can’t call them incomplete. At the end I knew I had failed to convince them. They encouraged me that it might be a nice “lifestyle business” but I saw the money tap wasn’t going to open up for me. Still, come on, when smart guys like this give you the time of day you have to be thankful. Chris also put me in contact with a CTO at a venture First Round did fund - something I appreciated greatly.

So that is where we are at right now. Do I expect to take venture funding? Probably not. Am I running away from this venture? Not a chance in heaven. How do I intend to keep bread on the table? Great question, you’ll have to wait till next time to find out.

Interesting Footnote: The way to Conshohoken has a toll road. I meant to bring quarters but I forgot. By the time I remembered I was too far along to turn back. I hoped I had enough cash in the car to make it - and I did, but there was none for the way back. I’m a plastic guy, I don’t carry cash. My wife has my debit card. I was in Conshohoken without any cash. Sweet. Well, I headed back, wondering what happens when you can’t pay your toll. Did they send you to jail? Detain you till someone came and paid your debt? Charge you a ridiculous amount and shoot you a bill my mail? As I pulled up to the teller it was a young lady. With a sheepish grin I said, “I’m sorry. I have absolutely no cash. What do I do?” She replied, “Its okay, go ahead.” Wow! Whoever you are you made my day.

Footnote to Footnote: I would not recommend trying this. If I had any way around this I would have taken it. I have no clue what official policy is when you can’t pay your toll. Maybe it is a big fine and she paid my toll for me? Perhaps someone can clarify. In any case, don’t do it! I think I’m finally going to sign up for EasyPass. I’d like to say I won’t forget again, but remembering to carry cash is not at the top of my priority list.

Informed Networker started because of a perceived need. As an IT Professional I had to know a lot about a wide variety of subjects. A Network Engineer oftentimes has his hands on servers (running multiple OSes), storage (from multiple vendors using various technologies such as SCSI, SAS, SATA, and FC), switches, firewalls, network load balancing, workstations, telecommunications, electrical (PDU, UPS) - the list goes on and on. It sure doesn’t hurt to have a decent handle on web server applications (IIS, Apache), database back-ends (SQL Server, MySQL), and application/web development/debugging (HTML, .NET, PHP, Java). Add onto that the stereotypical unquenchable thirst amongst IT Professionals for greater knowlege and expanding expertise and you’ll find guys like me dabbling nights and weekends on internet marketing, graphic design, and just about anything else we can get our hands on. Still, even with our unquenchable thirst - the amount of information to sort, prioritize, and comprehend is overwhelming. Slashdot and Digg both fail to offer the enterprise level information needed and traditional computer magazines offer too little too late. Informed Networker was created to centralize, summarize, and prioritize these realms of knowledge for the IT Professional.

I started Informed Networker as one of those hobby products all IT Professionals have. It was a nights and weekends project. Traffic mounted, news articles where written about Informed Networker, and the site began consuming more of my time. Eventually I realized to really take this site to the professional level required by IT Professionals I would need to work on the endeavor full-time and utilize outsourced elements extensively. I decided it was time to seek venture funding.

My first step was to join Wil Schroter’s Go BIG Network where I filed a funding request. I received several calls and emails. It took me a few weeks before I realized these individuals where brokers. They had little interest in the possible success of the company - only in ensuring that money exchanged hands between the potential startup and the investor - and that they received a hefty commission for their services. I watched as one company agreed to fund if I would place their CEO as the CEO of Informed Networker. Fat chance! Goodbye.

Okay, well that took me nowhere. I tried several additional similar sites with similar success. One day a businessman I assist with his computers asked me about my business and I explained the need for venture capital. He expressed interest and arranged a meeting between him, his son-in-law, and myself. I presented my ideas. While neither invested, the business man became my biggest advocate and has proactively and tirelessly recruited potential investors upon my behalf.

In the meantime I attended an event held at Wolf Block in Philadelphia and organized by FundingPost. The event allowed businesses seeking venture capital to give short pitches to venture capitalists and angel investors and hope for the best. I wore my best suit, printed up cards and business summaries and headed down to Philadelphia. I entered the building thirty minutes early. There already was a few individuals dressed neatly milling about. As the time progressed every minute saw five or ten more individuals streaming into the building and joining us in now crowded hallway.

A tall, slim man with graying hair and a smooth face that has resisted wrinkles stood against the wall. I picked up my courage and approached him. “What is your business?” He explained with an Aussie accent his media firm that already had a successful reality television show and was looking to expand in some innovative new directions. He asked what my business was and what amount I was looking to fund. When I told him $100,000 he laughed (not unkindly) and told me he could put that on his credit card. “Well good,” I thought, “perhaps the venture capitalists will see it the same way.” Eventually we made our ways up to the conference room. There was plenty of food and drinks laid out and all around the room sat venture capitalists at tables with signs noting their organization above them. It was jam-packed. Lines immediately formed at each table - 10 people long! Most of the night was spent standing in lines, waiting for the opportunity to speak for 2-5 minutes with a venture capitalist. I made my same pitch over and over again. Some venture capitalists expressed interest but most repeated the same thing, “We don’t invest in companies desiring less than $500k-$1m.” Dang. Here I thought asking for less money would be an advantage. Additionally I found that while the meeting was for venture capitalists and angel investors, the meeting was exclusively populated by venture capitalists - which generally aren’t interested in pre-revenue startups.

Still, I would not consider the event a waste. I had the opportunity to learn what venture capitalists want and even more importantly talked to a number of individuals with ingenious tech startups and was encouraged by their enthusiasm and interest in Informed Networker. Many cards where exchanged and at the end, with very sore feet from standing so long I made the forty-five minute drive home. Not much closer to securing capital than when I had begun.

One young man I spoke to, with an interesting idea for bringing multimedia content to emerging markets (e.g. South America, Africa, portions of Asia), had made a fascinating statement which would later play largely into the way I decided to handle seeking venture capital. He said, “I no longer participate in the businesses development. I have no time to. My partners handle all of that portion - all of my time is spent raising money. I never thought it was take this much time.”

Are you ready to know what Informed Networker is up to? The struggles and successes we are facing? As promised yesterday I’ll be blogging daily about Informed Networker and seeking to lay open all aspects of the company’s operations. Today we are going to talk about our aggressive two week objectives, for completion by EOB (end of business) July 31st, 2008.

125×125 Side-Bar Ad System.
We are going to redesign the sidebar navigation to take up a large portion of the page layout. This will include a new sidebar module for advertisers. Advertisers will be able to purchase a 125×125 ad that will appear statically or rotating on the right-hand side of the page. This is an extremely popular ad format currently and utilized by several successful businesses (e.g. TechCrunch, ProBlogger).

Six 125×125 Advertisers.
We are looking to secure six advertisers for the 125×125 side bar. The rate will be $125/mo. to start - escalating as we increase our traffic volume. Perhaps your company is interested?

Three 468×60 Advertisers.
We’ll be looking to secure three advertisers for our top 468×60 banners at $100/mo. Perhaps your company is interested?

Recruit Sales Representatives.
We’ll be recruiting two sales representatives on a part-time commission basis to handle proactive sales. They’ll receive commissions for landing an account as well as a recurring commission for as long as they choose to maintain the account. If you believe you can sell quality advertising space to IT companies, we’d love to hear from you!

Static CMS/Stories. COMPLETED!
We are designing a static CMS for the Pligg code base. This will simplify the code base significantly by reducing both PHP and TPL files used for static content pages. It also allows use of a WYSIWYG editor to make changes to pages.
Additionally, for search engine optimization purposes we are moving to static urls rather than dynamic query-string based URLs.

KillSpam Administrator Controls. COMPLETED!
Unfortunately, every day as our popularity increases so does the attraction by spammers to submit random and useless stories. We’ve moved KillSpam functionality into our already greatly enhanced administrative tools so senior administrators can instantly knock out a spammer’s account.

Story Relations.
Techmeme has this wonderful algorithmic technology that creates master/child story relationships. We are currently working on a similar technology, though it is based on a hybrid of algorithmic/human management. When completed it will allow editors to quickly and easily move stories into master/child relationships. This will help reduce story redundancy and centralize all the information concerning a specific news item into one area.

Bug Fixes.
The CSS for voting doesn’t work perfectly if you use Internet Explorer (I’m sure none of you do). We’ll be taking care of that. We also know that using the all categories tab pulls back a blank page - we’ll be fixing that bug as well.

Research and Budget Advertising Venues.
We already perform some advertising using Google Adsense, Facebook Ads, and StumbleUpon Ads. We’ll be expanding amongst additional PPC sites and other advertising opportunities and budgeting $500 for the next two weeks and August to raise awareness of Informed Networker. Know an inexpensive but effective form of advertising? Let us know!

Viral Videos - Preparation.
We are working on creating a series of viral videos to be posted on YouTube and similar video hosting sites. These will use humor (we won’t say too much, but lets just say we’ll be poking fun at some competitors) to convey the worth and importance of Informed Networker. We’ll be recruiting cast and crew - most likely local talent (Philadelphia area) and YouTube talent. We’ll hammer out the budget and ensure the scripts are fully prepped. Then we’ll look forward to making the actual videos in early August.

IT Forums Participation.
Spending time giving back to your community is important, not only as a method of marketing but also for keeping the IT community alive. While IT folks have been known to tell people to Read the Freaking Manual (RTFM - yes, I toned the acronym down), they are also extremely generous in assisting those in need. Informed Networker wants to be part of this caring community and receive the benefits of marketing through posting relevant content and answers that point us out as a resource and trustworthy source of infromation.

Rewrite Static Pages.
We’ll be rewriting the static pages of Informed Networker - expanding the content significantly - and moving everything into the new static cms.

Infrastructure.
This is a secret right now, but we have two projects on the books for completion before August 1st.

Team Development.
Our team consists mainly of volunteers who have generously given of their time to assist in this project - as well as a few paid individuals who work for far too little. We’ll be continuing our efforts at team building as well as recruiting additional team members. Its worth taking a moment to express sincere thanks to major contributors such as Andrew Vogel, Jon Hui, and Margaret Mackey - without you we wouldn’t be close to where we are today.

That’s about it for the next two weeks. There is tons more stuff we’d love to get done, but I wanted to be realistic (yet challenging) in our projections. Wish us well as we work hard to bring you the best!

Opaque No More!

Large corporations and small businesses alike are tempted to use a certain amount of opacity in their business. This creates an impersonal nature that is deemed professional. I’m not suggesting that all companies do this, but it is a trend. Its a trend I’ve struggled with. I want Informed Networker to display professionalism, enterprise quality and zeal. I want people to understand that Informed Networker is a real startup - not just a night and weekends hobby. At the same time, I think its important for people to understand what goes on behind the scenes. I feel like we have done a good job of displaying professionalism - in our site layout, in our commitment, in our grammar, etc. But I haven’t done such a great job in the opaque department. Today that all changes. From this day forward I intend to blog (almost) every day about Informed Networker - what we are doing with - our struggles and accomplishments. At the same time we will keep our vision of professionalism and will continue to strive to become the market leader we believe Informed Networker has the potential to be.

Service Outage #1, #2.

This new transparency begins today by discussing the two service outages we have experienced yesterday and today in all honesty. I will disclose the full details of the issues and resolutions implemented. I will also bear full blame where I am the weak link, but will not mention names when it comes to other involved parties generally speaking. Everyone makes mistakes, but its not my place to admit them for most.

Server Down!

Issue: Wednesday, July 16th, 2008. Around 12:30 a.m. EST, shortly after I went to bed, the Informed Networker site spiraled out of control. A rogue process consumed all of the available physical and swapfile on our WWW server, entirely crashing the server. Unfortunately, I did not notice this until 8 a.m.
Resolution:

1. Reboot the server was the immediate fix.
2. Recommendations from some technicians at Slicehost suggested this might be an issue with Apache. We applied some recent updates for Apache as well as other processes.
3. We discovered that two of our cron jobs where creating files and weren’t cleaning up after them. We also noticed a correlation between working with these files and swapfile usage on the WWW server. We deleted these old files and are working on a additional cron job that will garbage collection automatically.
4. We researched and implemented two monitoring solutions, as mentioned in the last post. The first from Mon.itor.us sends SMS messages when an issue prevents the site from loading. The second from ScoutApp offers trending on CPU, memory, and hard drive utilization. Between the two of these we believe we will see a significant increase in our ability to monitor the servers effectively.

Bad Deployment…

Issue: I use a talented team of developers who work out of India. Unfortunately, this means we operate on almost entirely opposite time schedules. As I go to bed, they get up for work. This works well when it comes to deploying new patches, but also means I am not on-hand immediately to perform Q&A. Last night they were deploying some new features to the site, unfortunately during FTP transfer a file was damaged. The problem was not immediately apparent because of the caching system used by the server. I received a notification at 4 a.m. the server was down, but unfortunately it did not continue to beep me, so I was not woken.
Resolution:

• We reverted all files to their original state. Then reuploaded the project - this time successfully.
• I am giving my cell phone contact information to the entire team (development, editors) and requesting contact 24×7x365 should there be a server outage. The editors and developers come from around the world and work all sorts of awkward schedules and can provide a front-line defense system in addition to automatic systems when it comes to service outages.
• I was delayed in repairing some issues on my end by 3-4 hours due to my current employment with Collages.net. I have phased back to four hours a day with Collages.net and will be phasing back again to two four hour days in August and then completely by September 1st. This will ensure I can offer near immediate responses to any issues.

Well, I think that is a long enough post for now. I have lots more to share with you, I’ll just give a quick preview of some upcoming posts:

• Experiences seeking venture fending for Informed Networker.
• Advertising sales goals, successes, and failures.
• New features and bug fixes in the works.
• Who the people behind the scenes are - especially some of our most dedicated editors.
• Why I started Informed Networker.
• What our hardware infrastructure and software stack looks like in detail.
• The difficulties we face and the opportunities we see.

Let me know if there is a specific issue you would like us to cover. I apologize to everyone for these past two service outages and want to assure you that I am working (and so are others) at their absolute hardest to ensure that the service is up and fully functional continually, while at the same time delivering new features on a regular basis and repairing any outstanding bugs.

Respectfully,

David Mackey,
Founder, Informed Networker.

Probably few noticed but we suffered some downtime, mainly yesterday early a.m. from around 12:30 - 8:30. Our main WWW server took a complete tank. Fortunately, we were able to get it back up and running relatively quickly, but as with any business - this isn’t something we want happening on a regular basis. The last thing we need is a reputation like Twitter’s for downtime (though we would love their popularity). We figured others might enjoy how we are working to rectify this problem.

1. In our long-term plan is full system redundancy. Every system will be in a cluster and the failure of any single node will have no visible effect on the system.

2. We have an account with mon.itor.us. Its a free ping service with a nice dashboard (you should take a look, they also let us compare our response times to that of competitors). We also purchased an SMS package from them. This means morning, noon, or night (24×7x365) staff will now receive text messages any time the website goes down. This will allow rapid and effective response to issues (though perhaps to the detriment of our engineer’s sleep cycle).

3. We have an account with ScoutApp. ScoutApp allows us to monitor and receive notifications relating to CPU, memory, and disk utilization - not to mention the ability to monitor slow MySQL queries.

Some may wonder why we have chosen to utilize hosted solutions to provide our systems monitoring rather than an on-site solution. It’s SaaS baby! Okay, I just felt like saying that. But as most of you probably already know, SaaS stands for Software as a Service and has significant advantages over on-site hosting in many situations. In fact, we have built our entire service on a combination of SaaS and cloud-based technologies.

Because we haven’t deployed a traditional monitoring solution like AdventNet’s OpManager or Quest’s Big Brother we are able to reduce our surface attack area significantly (OpManager for example runs its own instance of Apache and MySQL), we’ve also decreased in-house system requirements. While we could theoretically have installed a monitoring solution on a web or database server we like (and believe in) separating roles onto separate servers (whether physical or virtual) - this would have required an additional server acquisition, setup, and management cost. Finally, we’ve detached our monitoring solution from our in-house network. What happens when your in-house network crashes entirely (e.g. someone digs up both of your fiber connections at the same exact moment?)? You don’t receive notifications because your monitoring application is down as well.

Using out-sourced systems monitoring provides thus three significant advantages: (a) increased security, (b) decreased in-house equipment and management, and (c) better monitoring of major system issues.

Informed Networker is proud to announce that we have received a “great” rating (8.0 out 10.0) for our site. We expect this rating to only improve with time as Blogged continues to see the quality of our content and the diversity of our user base increases.

In other news, we squashed a small editorial bug that was hampering our editors efforts to effectively destroy the spam stories that spammers are increasingly throwing at us.