Hello everyone, I'm Louise and as the new spokesperson for Fubra I thought I'd quickly tell you about what I've been doing since I started, and let you know what we've got planned for the coming months.

I joined Fubra full time in December to take over the publicity/press/PR from Brendan, who'd been juggling dealing with the press and running the company at the same time. No mean feat considering I'm now doing it full time and still find myself rushed off my feet!

My first week really threw me in at deep end, in a good way. It was the week that a splinter group of the original fuel protesters who disrupted the country in 2000 were planning to protest at refineries around the country, so after a quick briefing on the intimate working of the petrol industry, I got stuck in writing press releases for our petrol price comparison site, PetrolPrices.com. I did a radio interview on BBC Radio Leicester less that 24 hours after I'd started (!) and a series of newspaper interviews throughout the week, which got us come really good national coverage as 'the voice of the motorist'.

Since then I've done so many interviews that I don't get nervous any more – I've been on radio stations around the country, most of the BBC local station, as well as Radio 5 Live and even a TV interview for BBC News 24 (check out the gale force winds I was battling against!)



To maximise our coverage I write one topical blog article and one press release each week, both of which I email to our members and press contacts, and then it's just a case of waiting for the press to call. I quickly learnt that if you want to go home on time, don't send out a press release at 5.30pm...

To make my job easier, the web developers have made me some really useful tools. For example, I needed a place to keep all my press contacts in one place, that I could add to and edit easily, and use to email all my contacts at once. A few days later I was presented with an all-singing all-dancing database to do exactly that. Now I don't have to waste time sifting through random bits of paper with hastily scrawled numbers and email addresses on, which makes me much more efficient.

Another tool I now have to help get the most press coverage possible is the 'Generic Graph Generator'. I wanted it to be able to make graphs of our data really easily, so journalists can see at a glance if there is a story behind our data. For example, I used it to illustrate a blog about why diesel is more expensive that petrol, and how how diesel prices had risen across the UK over the last 30 years. But I can use it to make graphs for OurProperty.co.uk or any other site too, because it's not tied to one site.

At the moment only I can use the Generic Graph Generator, but we're working on making it part of a big press area for all our sites, where journalists can go to get all the information they need, all in one place. It'll have loads of other cool features too, like the ability to book a radio interview slot online, examples of our press coverage and access to easy-to-digest facts from all our sites.

Things are shaping up really well, and I'm enjoying looking for innovative ways to get Fubra in the news... like the front page lead on the Daily Express today!

The Fubra Network has been growing steadily over the past few years, and we now manage over 100 physical servers across 3 geographically diverse sites.

In the past we have operated a fairly re-active strategy to fixing server problems. For example; if we noticed, or someone told us, that a site was running slowly, we would look into it. If a site went down, we would fix it. Of course, in the long run, this isn't a great way to look after your network. As the sayings go, "a stitch in time saves nine" and "a ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". The same is true with server hosting.

So over the last year, we have begun to implement a much improved strategy to network maintenance that involves pro-actively monitoring all our server resources and identifying potential problems before they occur.

In this blog post, we will describe a real world example of this form of problem spotting that happened to us today.

Zabbix

We now use Zabbix as our main monitoring system. Zabbix monitors indicators such as disk space, memory available, CPU usage, load average and network usage across all our physical machines. Today we spotted a Zabbix graph that looked a little extraordinary.



As you can see from the graph there was a spike in activity on an hourly basis. Look closer and you can see this was happening at 28 minutes past the hour.

From that most server admins will think cronjob! So did we, so we had a look at the server which houses several vServers and on this server we run mirror.fubra.com which is a mirror service we provide to the open source community.

Anyway one of the site's we mirror is uk3.php.net and as a PHP mirror they install webalizer on the mirror so that the traffic can be tracked. When we set the mirror up it was set-up in a bit of a hurry and we forgot something. Paul describes his chain of thought: "I was thinking to myself, how the @£@$ is that webalizer process causing a constant load avg of 4 for an hour? There are only 6000 visitors per month so it should only take a few seconds!"

Anyway, Mark checked the log files and it turns out they were not being rotated, so we have a 2.7GB log file that webalizer is processing each and every hour over an ATAoE storage network that we have set-up.

This meant this particular problem was causing network load, fileserver load, and web server load all because of a simple error forgetting to rotate a log. As it happens this didn't bring it to a halt and everything still worked just fine, both before and after we fixed the problem.

To fix things Mark simply installed logrotate, and now it is working a lot better. The result of this is that we can squeeze more value out of our existing hardware.

Becoming more proactive in the monitoring of all our services is a luxury we have been working towards. Up until recently we have been fighting just to get things up and working but now that we have some more server admins and we are looking for even more talented ones we are starting to really get proactive in this area.

When I talk about Fubra to people I often find it hard to explain exactly what we do. Because we operate over 100 web sites now it's very difficult to communicate fully what we actually do. This has often left me confused what the word Fubra really should mean to people.

In part that has been because it was never really supposed to be a brand that was line extended like the Virgin brand is. Where for example you see Virgin trains, planes and automobile insurance! I had never intended for Fubra to be on the front of all our products; not least because hardly anyone can pronounce it! When I tell people I work for Fubra I don't expect anyone to know what we do or to have even heard of us, but if I say I work for PetrolPrices.com the reaction is normally totally different.

So what is our brand strategy and why do we have so many web sites?

Firstly we have taken a leaf out of the books of one of the world's most successful companies.

Toyota
Toyota is a great example, of a company with a brand that I associate with reliability, value and sturdiness. These are all great things for a car brand that is targeting the mainstream, which is why we bought a company Aygo. But when they wanted to get into the luxury car segment in the US they had a problem. People didn't associate Toyota with luxury. Toyota had a choice to make. Either they line extended the Toyota brand and launched Toyota LUX models or they started from scratch with a totally new brand. They decided to launch Lexus which actually means Luxury EXports to the US. The rest is history and the Lexus brand in the US now dominates that area of car sales in a way Toyota never could have.

Secondly Fubra is a brand, but it doesn't aspire to be a big one. The reason for this is we know our core expertise and what we want most people most people think of when someone says Fubra and it is:

Technology
Technology has been and will no doubt remain Fubra's greatest strength but it's not always exciting technology. In fact a lot of what we do is create building blocks that allow cool features on web sites to be deployed easily. The great thing about technology is that if it is built right it is one of the few things in this world that you can gain significant benefits from centralising the production.

What this means in practice is that when we come to launch a new brand (website) if we were most companies with one successful product we would need to replicate ourselves over again. This is so that we could build our new brand successfully and stand a chance of competing in the market place. The major costs of doing this are higher wages, product and marketing spend.

This means lots of extra money must be spent to expand most businesses and is what persuades most companies to line extend their brand. They feel that at least they can now save on marketing spend if they don't have to promote a new brand. But this has a horrible side consequence: companies that fail end up with a mixed message in customers minds of what it is their company actually does. I have come to the conclusion that line extension of a brand only really works if the marketplace the brand is trying to enter is easy to crack. I think this is the reason Virgin Cola never measured up against Coca Cola and why Toyota is not a luxury car brand in America. Conversely I think it's why Virgin Trains and Planes work well because both of those industries suffer/ed lack of good value competition.

So what we have been working hard on for the past few years is reducing the cost of launching and operating lots of brands because we want each site we develop to build an identity that people can relate to and decide to recommend to their friends.

As part of that we have created amongst other things:

• A support system to manage all the email from every one of our web sites with one team which reduces admin costs hugely.
• Fubra Passport a login and permissions system to make usage of our web sites simpler for our users and this is now very close to going fully live.
• A payments system that will allow us to take direct debit and credit card payments on any of our sites securely.
• A framework for a growing number of common site elements which our developers use to share their best code across different web sites.
• Our own hosting infrastructure so that we have a clustered hosting architecture capable of scaling quickly to a variety of high load requirements.
• Flexible spidering and storage technology that allows us to aggregate and filter content from across the web for representation on our web sites.
• A content management system to allow any of our web sites to be easily updated.
• An advertising system that allows us to work with partners like Google and also sell our own direct advertising to maximise the value of our inventory.
• A statistics system to track all of the activity on our web sites so that we know what is going on and can drill down to a granular level easily.
• An accounting system so that we can manage our business easily and effectively.
• An email system that can send millions of personalised highly targeted emails every day.
• A copywriters marketplace so that we can produce content for our websites quickly.
• A task system which integrates with the companies email, telephone system, diary and wiki so that we can collaborate openly internally and work effectively as a team.

All of these things on their own are huge undertakings and businesses in their own right so it's hardly surprising that we have been a little quiet since we launched OurProperty.co.uk and PetrolPrices.com in 2005. But everything is stepping up a gear in 2008 as we get ready to show off all the work we have done by extending the features on our current sites, launching new sites and cross promoting our other sites. We hope because we have lots of separate sites rather than one big portal like Yahoo! we will not dilute or confuse the meaning of our company brand by giving people mixed messages of what Fubra means. As a result we hope our customers will place an extra level of trust in our expertise in a range of niches than they otherwise would had we decided to offer all our services from one website.

So in short Fubra is a business operating a large number of web sites using centralised information technology resources. We will deploy these resources to strengthen the individual sites (brands) in our portfolio. Technology has helped us lower our wages, product costs and marketing spend which, if we haven't missed something obvious, should mean we can create better web sites than other companies, in a number of areas, without stretching ourselves as hard as we would otherwise have to.

It's been a huge risk for our business taking this route, so I really hope, as a user of our web sites, that you will enjoy the benefits which I am sure our strategy will bring.