Server Upgrade Follow-up

Dear Bookt Platform User,

Here at Bookt we’re constantly challenged to continue to adapt to our rapidly expanding user base. In technology speak, we call this “to scale”. A hallmark of a good technology architecture is it is ability to scale. A few weeks we identified that our database servers had become a bottle neck in our data center. A combination of software and hardware changes were planned and implemented. These upgrades were then performed during two pre-announced nightly maintenance windows. If you look at your Control Panel Dash board you will see that our uptime for the last 30 days is 99.97%. Unlike other hosting companies, our uptime metrics does not exclude maintenance window (if your site is down, it is down regardless of the cause). In this case the 0.03% downtime corresponds to the combined 13 minutes we had to bring the systems down to make the necessary upgrades.

So what were the results? Beyond our expectations. The tracking we do in our system isolates several key metrics, and the database avg. response time this week is down to 15ms compared to 150ms prior to the upgrade. That’s a 90% improvement! The end result for you is faster searches on your website and smoother operation in the Control Panel.

As always we value your feedback and try very hard to be open and transparent about how we manage the growing Bookt platform.

Best,

Rob

Scheduled Maintenance

The number of transactions Bookt processes continues to grow. To support this growth, we will be upgrading our database servers during a scheduled maintenance window.

Start time: 12 midnight eastern on 8/23/10

End time: 2 AM eastern 8/23/10

Expected Outage/Downtime: 15 minutes.

*Due to the nature of upgrading databases, we are asking our customers to refrain from making changes in the control panel during the maintenance window.*

Our data center will also be performing maintenance on their network:

Start time: 3:00am eastern 08/25/10
End time: 7:00am eastern 08/25/10
Expected Outage/Downtime: 30 minutes

During this maintenance window, we will experience one or more brief interruptions in service while the maintenance activities are completed; the interruptions are expected to last less than 30 minutes total. However, due to the complexity of the work, actual downtime may be longer.

Our network operations engineers closely monitor the work and will do everything possible to minimize any inconvenience to you. If you have any problems with your connection after this time, or if you have any questions regarding the maintenance at any point, please contact support at Support@bookt.com

We appreciate your patience during this work and welcome any feedback.

GoDaddy Name Servers and DNS

Attention Platform Users:

We have been monitoring two problems with the GoDaddy DNS system which have been affecting the availability of many domains registered with GoDaddy or using GoDaddy's Off-site DNS.

1. All domains registered in the NS25 and NS26 nameservers in GoDaddy's system may not be resolving correctly at all times. GoDaddy has stated that these issues would be corrected by the evening of Friday 7/30, but as of 11AM Monday 8/2 the problem has not been corrected.
2. Many other domains are experiencing a problem where one or more name servers may be missing from the domain's DNS records.

If you are experiencing any issues with a domain registered with GoDaddy, please contact GoDaddy's support department. Their 24/7 support phone number is (480) 505-8877.

New Development Release 7/15/10

Dear Platform Users -

Last night we published the new development release as scheduled for 7/15/10. Please see the included documentation for further details.

New Development Release Coming 7/15/10

Dear Platform Users,

One 7/15/10, we are planning a development release that will introduce many new features to the platform including Phase 1 of Workflow tools. We will be putting together documentation for your reference that will be available after this exciting release.

7/13/10 Outage

On 7/13/2010, the Bookt platform experience intermittent outages between 1 and 2PM EST. These outages were due to missing routing entries in our primary and backup load balancers. The missing entries caused the load balancers to fight over which one was the primary creating temporary service disruptions during the switch overs. We have corrected the problem and all of our services are now fully operational.

Office Closed 7/5/10

Dear Valued Platform Users:

In observation of Independence Day, our office will be closed on Monday, 7/5/10. We wish all of you participating in the events and celebration a safe and enjoyable holiday!

Free TripAdvisor Listing for Gulf Coast Lodging Clients

TripAdvisor is helping out hospitality businesses in the Gulf Coast that have been affected by the spill by offering a free business listing for 3 months.

This includes listings for both new and existing customers. This offer is extended to owners and managers of hotels, vacation rentals, inns, and bed and breakfasts on the coastline and within 10 miles of the shore that have been impacted.

Maintenance Scheduled 6/18/10

As a valued customer, we are committed to keeping you informed about any changes in the status of your service with us. This email is to alert you regarding maintenance we will be performing on our network:

Start time: 3:00am eastern 06/18/10
End time: 7:00am eastern 06/18/10
Expected Outage/Downtime: 2 hours

Points of Interest - Nearby Property Mapping Released!

As part of our latest development build, many new enhancements to the platform were released. One that you may have noticed is the mapping of nearby properties on the Attraction detail page. Now, when a user is viewing a local attraction on your website, they will see all the nearby rentals and the approximate distance of each. To maximize the effectiveness of this tool, make sure you add numerous attractions (in the Control Panel under Customize>>Website Content>>Points of Interest), and give each the most accurate address possible. If an address is not available, use the map "Pin Point" tool to place it accordingly on the map.

Scheduled Maintenance 3/30/10

On March 30th, we will be performing a firmware update to our load balancers. The update will be done between 11:30PM and 11:45PM EST. During that time, Bookt's services may become unavailable.

Help Desk Updates Coming 4/1/10

The Control Panel Help Desk is currently going through a series of updates including the addition of FAQ's, Payment & Bookings tutorials and additional Content and Success Management documents. Over the Spring and Summer months, the Help Desk will evolve into robust source of information regarding the utilization of platform tools, getting support, and achieving more online success. If you have ideas you would like to see included, please email us at support@bookt.com.

3/21/10 Service Outage

On 3/21/2010, Bookt experienced an unexpected outage from 8:36PM to 10:40PM EST. The problem was related to our load balancer. We will be contacting the hardware vendor in order to rectify the issue. At Bookt we take system uptime seriously and believe in being transparent with these metrics. You can see the total system uptime for the last 24hrs and over the last 30days in the Control Panel on your home screen dashboard.

Transparency of System Metrics

We understand how important system performance is and we continue to take proactive measures to add further support ahead of the overall growth of our platform. We also believe in being transparent with our services and want you to be able to visualize metrics regarding the performance of your site and the system as a whole. In order to do this, we have added a new widget to your Control Panel 'Home' dashboard titled "System Metrics". This will give you an overview of website and Control Panel average page load time across our platform. Here you can view the statistics over the last 24hours in comparison to the last 30 days.

Installation of Additional Power Source Scheduled 3/6/10

The additional power has been successfully installed in our data center. In order to utilize this power, we will need to perform maintenance between 9am and 10am on Saturday morning 3/6/10. During that window web services may be unavailable.

Tape Chart Additions

In an effort to further develop our tool to better serve your business, we have added additional features to our Tape Chart. On bookings, you can now click through from an existing reservation to the booking details. This will enable you to see reservations and availability in a aggregate view, but also allow you to quickly access these reservation details from the same screen.

On the Tape Chart you can also...
1. Search by date range
2. Create a new booking by clicking on an available date
3. Filter by property types
4. Print the grid by date range
5. Scroll to the previous/next 30 days with a click

Outage on 2/25/10

Bookt's services were disrupted on 2/25/2010 from approximately 2AM EST to 6:30AM EST. This was a repeat of the issue we had earlier this week in which a fus was tripped on our power block due the additional servers and hardware we recently installed. We are expediting the installation of additional power and expect this to be ready in the next few days.In the meantime, we have added additional monitor systems to detect any power issues as quickly as possible.

Services's Outage 2/23

A message from Ben Strum, V.P of Technology

At approximately 3:49PM EST, we experienced a service outage. The outage was due to a power failure which required us to manually reset machines at our datacenter. This added to time to get our services fully running again. Solution sites and control panel access were restored at about 5:30PM EST while Bookt Connect services were restored at 6:30PM EST.


All of our services are currently restored and to ensure that this type of incident does not happen in the future, we are ordering more power at our datacenter.

Multiple Notification Email Support

You can now send your lead and booking notifications to multiple email addresses. Simply go to System>>Solution Setup, and add the notification emails separated by a comma (“,”). In the future we will be adding support to send lead and booking notifications to separate email addresses.

Services Outage 2/20

Web services went down on 2/20/2010 at 9:34am EST and were out until 10:39am EST. All services have now been restored.

The root cause of the outage was with our load balancer which appears to have shutdown its interface to the Internet. We are working with the load balancer vendor to resolve the issue. In the near future, we will also be adding an additional load balancer running in parallel to further reduce the possibility of this event happening.

We regret this inconvenience. We can assure you that we will be working hard over the next week to institute measures that will prevent this from happening in the future, and further increase the overall performance of the platform.

2/17 Development Release – New Support for Booking, Leads, and Notifications

Booking Screens
As part of our release last night, we introduced some additional support for the Control Panel booking screens. When creating a booking, you will now notice support for:

• Selecting a specific unit of a property (property must have sub-units; more applicable to resorts and hotels)


• Email Statement – now available at all times on the booking screen. So you can email this statement out multiple times as needed
  
• Statements
  -When selecting a property for a date range, the line items will populate automatically
  
  -You can add or delete a line item
  
  -You can edit an existing line item i.e. give a discount
  
  -You can apply a special by using the picker
  
  -Screen Shot Dev. Solution

Lead Email Responses
When responding to leads via email in the Control Panel, we are now populating the response field with a template pulling relevant information including: guest name, property, dates, and price. This will also populate the Control Panel user’s name in the signature. You will want to verify this information prior to sending it out, but it should help increase your overall efficiency with processing leads.

Server Maintence Scheduled 2/17 @1am ET

Tomorrow morning at 1am ET we will be performing server maintenance. We expect our services to be temporarily unavailable at for up to 30 minutes during that time. The maintenance is necessary to complete the configuration of the new hardware.

Additional Hardware Added to the Platform

As of 2/14, we have successfully installed and configured new hardware onto the platform. This hardware was added to scale ahead of the platform's growing server requests. Since the installation, we are monitoring significant improvements in average page load speeds for both the Control Panel, and for your website. When more data is collected over the next couple weeks, we will post blog quantifying these results.

Specific Property Pickers for Taxes/Fees

During our latest release, we opened up a popular feature for additional controls - the specific property picker. This was first released for "Specials" setup. Now when you setup a new Tax or Fee you can easily select which specific properties/rooms they apply to. This saves time so you don't have to access each unit individually to apply the setting.

When setting up a new tax or fee that applies to specific properties/rooms, set the type to "Not Global" and save. This means that the tax or fee is for specific properties only ("Global" means apply to all properties). You will now see a new grey button at the top called "Apply to Multiple Properties". When you click on that you will see a full list of all your properties you can apply the setting to.

SEO Editor Phase 1 Release

A topic on everybody's mind - Search Engine Optimization. With the correct strategy, SEO can be one of the most cost effective forms of marketing... especially in the long term. It is extremely important to keep the content on your site original, informational, fresh (blogging), and targeted. You also want to make this content as meaningful for the search engines as it is for your users. In our latest development release 2/1, we include the 2nd version of our SEO page editor. This will ultimately give you control over the URL's, page titles, meta descriptions, meta keywords and more advanced attributes of important pages such as property/room details, development/building pages, and predefined searches (category searches). We encourage you to see the new tool but urge you to refrain from making edits until we deliver you proper usage documentation next week. In the control panel, at the bottom pages listed above you will see a blue link "SEO Editor".

The editor is still in 'beta' and has some final styling that will be completely along with the documentation. If you are a SEO Gold service subscriber, do not worry about the changes, they will be facilitated by your Success Management team... this tool just makes their job a little easier. Over the course of this month, we will be doing more frequent development releases due to the high volume of additions we are making to the platform. You can expect an update on ones that will impact you here!

Blog Comments

Users now have the ability to make comments on your blogs! This capability gives your website another interactive function. Although this development is already released, we are working on a series of enhancements including styling, alerts, and eventually blog labels. Over the next couple months we will continue to release these improvements. We continuously see well written blogs driving traffic to individual sites, and we encourage you to take full advantage of this tool and blog at least once a week. Email your Success Manager for ideas on blogging for traffic!

1/28/10 System Outage

On 1/28/2010, the platform experienced an outage in our services. The outage lasted for 30 minutes and was due to a configuration issue with our load balancer. Specifically, the IPS (Intrusion Protection Service) process, which scans and updates the latest connection-based threats and protects the load balancer servers from common threat, had become unstable and stopped connections between the load balancer and our real servers. We have reconfigured this service to prevent this from happening in the future.

System Outage Details On 1/18/2010

We experienced an outage on 1/18/2010 from 2:43PM to 3:07PM. The outage was a result of an attack by external servers. No data was affected. Our system detected the attack and shutdown traffic to our servers. This action was a necessary step for the general protection of our servers. Although attacks like this are infrequent, they do happen. As such, we will explore ways of being able to reduce total outage time in the future.

Upcoming Server Maintenance 1/14/10

First thing Thursday morning, server maintence will be preformed between 1am and 2am. During that time, Bookt's services may not be available.