System performance (your site and Control Panel) is always a high priority concern for us. Each month we make modifications to our platform and server infrastructure in keep up with the increasing demands as we add more customers and data. It starts with keeping details metrics. Over the last 2 quarters we have made incremental progress and we have several other performance enhancing initiatives underway for early December. Coming soon, you will be able to see this performance data in your Control Panel.

Additionally, on Sunday morning there was an issue at Bookt's datacenter that either caused our services to perform slowly or to be suspended. Due to a failure in our monitoring procedures, it took longer to detect the problem. Upon review, we identified one core server that was getting overloaded, which rippled out to other dependent servers in the system. After clearing up this core server, Bookt's services were fully restored.

As a consequence of this, we are initiating steps to upgrade our server infrastructure. This will be done in two stages. The first stage will be performed on Tuesday, Dec 1st between 9 and 10pm EST and will focus on reconfiguring our load balancers. During this time, there may be short outages.

The second stage will be performed later this month. We will be adding additional servers to our infrastructure. This will help to improve both performance (site speed) and redundancy.

Are You Social?

It is becoming more and more important to keep your company (and website) connected through social media. Once you are active blogging (using the integrated tools in the Control Panel) setup a Facebook Fan Page for your company. Here are two really helpful articles on how to setup a Fan Page and how to enhance it....

Setting up a Fan Page
Enhancing a Fan Page with Applications

Once your Facebook Fan Page is setup, ask your Success Manager how you can import your website blog to your Fan Page (can also be done with Twitter).

Don't Stop There!
While your at it, continue by setting up a business profile on Linkedin.

Blogging for Traffic - Are You?

Over the last month, we have noticed significant traffic to many of your sites coming in from blog postings using the integrated Control Panel blog editor. "Hi 5" to everyone for their creative and keyword rich blog titles and topics. Remember, blogs are meaningful for your website's visitors and also for the search engines... they love fresh, updated, and original content. If you are not blogging, you can get started today. In your control panel, go to Customize>>Website Content>>Blog Postings, and select 'New'. Add a title and start blogging! Remember, there are no rules to blogging, they can be as short as paragraph or as long as a couple pages. Additionally, we now have added support to upload photos to your blog!! Just click on the photo upload icon on the blog editor.

Furthermore, we have created a new page to showcase your blog postings on your site. If you have already added blogs, you can view this page by going to www.yoursitename.com/blog (remember to use your site name). If you do not have your 'blog' page available from your website menu, ask your Success Manager to have it added.