It’s important to run an organized and optimized business. Bad processes will cost time, resources, sales, customer dissatisfaction and loss of team moral. So you need to constantly evaluate the biggest pain points at each stage of your growth, because these constantly change. Then you have to create the processes that fuel your success. But you can't let perfect be the enemy of good. And 80/20 is an important principle in business and life that prevents you from getting bogged down and never reaching your goals, i.e. sometimes 80% is good ...

Whether or not SEO is a major part of your marketing strategy (and it should at least be one factor), you need to comply with the basic best practices to ensure that your site is found by people searching for your product/service. This is free traffic, free advertising. Each organic search visitor is like picking up a dollar bill off the ground (or ten). The basics of SEO include: Write fresh, keyword-rich content that appeals to customers in every stage of their buyer's journey. Tag your content with the appropriate meta data (e.g....

Creating and growing a business is hard work. Competition is always fierce. There is rarely a clear path to success. You have to bring your idea into existence through sheer will power. You force an idea to become reality. You face obstacles that stop most people from trying. You make the best decisions you can, with the limited information and resources you have. You fail. Over and Over. It's messy. And then sometimes you succeed. This type of chaos isn’t an excuse for poor planning or bad management. We’re talking about the type of chaos ...

Network Outage Gutensite experienced a network outage on Thursday, October 26th between 9:49pm and 10:03pm PST (around 14 minutes). This was caused by a network problem at the Dallas Linode datacenter. We have great redundant server infrastructure, but issues that happen at the base level network issue are beyond our control. We are discussing plans for future redundancy by expanding hosting across multiple datacenters, so that may be an option in the future. We apologize for any inconvenience. If you have any questions, please feel free ...

We've completed phase 2 of our upgrades which gives us new servers that are faster, more secure, have more redundancy and are running newer operating systems for better long term support. Faster with HTTP 2.0 This upgrade also enables HTTP 2.0 for all websites with SSL (Secure Certificates). HTTP 2.0 allows pages to load much faster by enabling multiple concurrent connections at once. That means if your page has 50 resources that have to be loaded (e.g. HTML, CSS, Javascript, and image files), instead of loading one at a time, all 50 can ...

Our planned web server infrastructure upgrades were completed successfully. It required some key changes to the Gutensite platform to allow sessions to persist across multiple servers, and for custom files to be accessible on all servers. Big thanks to Matt for taking on this task. The new infrastructure allows us to do true "horizontal scaling", with load balancing and much better redundancy. That means that your website is hosted on multiple servers at once. Every page load is distributed across a network of servers that are balanced ...

  At 8:00pm PST last night (Tuesday March 7) two of our servers were taken offline for a 6 hour scheduled maintenance window, as part of Rackspace's standard infrastructure upgrades. This caused confusion for some clients because we failed to provide you with proper notification. Rackspace had scheduled the maintenance back in February 21, but we incorrectly interpreted the scope of the maintenance and didn't realize it would effect these two servers, so we did not notify the clients effected. When the servers went offline, we immediately ...

We've been building websites for 17 years. We've met some great professionals who create gorgeous, effective, sensibly-priced websites for small businesses in need. But for every one of them, I've met a lot more who charge too much, know too little, and are more likely than not to suddenly stop answering client calls one day — who prey on those who lack the right industry knowledge to defend themselves. To level the playing field, I've summed the most important lessons you need to know into this five-point buyer's guide meant to help ...

Hardware Maintenance for All Servers Rackspace will be performing maintenance on our servers between Saturday, February 18, 10:00pm and Sunday, February 19, 12:00am PST. During this time, websites may be temporarily inaccessible to your visitors. Maintenance Information Rackspace will be replacing hardware for our servers to ensure they continue running optimally. However, to do this, our servers must be powered down which will result in a temporary loss of network connectivity. Once the new hardware is installed and powered on, ...