AffJet = Better Affiliate Analysis

AffJet’s slogan summarises what AffJet is in three short words which is targeted at it’s market, but for those of you who don’t know what affiliate analysis refers to, here’s a quick introduction.

Affiliate marketing is a great way for websites to make money from their content and essentially, the process goes like this:

Site A displays links to Site B within their content, using a tracked or “affiliate link”. Every time a user on Site A clicks that affiliate link and performs a desired action on Site B (buys something, signs up for a service etc…), Site B gives Site A some commission as a little thank you!

This process works at it’s best when Site A and Site B are highly related to each other and, because the sales are tracked, Site B only pays for the desired actions when they happen. This differs with traditional display advertising, used online and offline, because as an advertiser you pay for all your advertising regardless of whether you receive any desired actions from it. For this reason it has taken off really well and is used by many websites across the world wide web.

Affiliate marketing uses intermediary software providers called affiliate networks who provide a platform which connects Advertisers and Publishers (aka Merchants and Affiliates). Affiliate networks allow relationships between these two parties to be built, agreements to be put in place and actions to be tracked and they also supply reporting for their merchants and affiliates.

Where does AffJet come in?

The problem with the current affiliate marketing system is that there are many affiliate networks each with lots of merchants and affiliates on their systems. As an affiliate, logging into each of these affiliate networks to find out how your websites are performing can be really time consuming, and creating reports to combine all of the data together really does take a long time.

This makes effective analysis of your data a much more daunting task than it needs to be.

AffJet provides a solution which aggregates all the data held by affiliate networks into one place. This allows affiliates to log into one place to find out how their websites are performing and saves loads of time.

What can affiliate marketers do on AffJet?

As an affiliate, you can take advantage of many useful, comprehensive and varied features within AffJet including:

• Custom Projects to allow grouping of links from any website, network or merchant
• Custom dashboards to allow you to see the metrics you want to see upon logging in
• Automatic import every night, we take the load on our servers to save your computer coping with an import
• Highly secured protection for your data, and regular back ups meaning you won’t lose out if your computer gives up
• Access your data from anywhere with an internet connection
• Allow yourself to act on the crucial difference between viewing your data and analysing it

The interface, design and features make AffJet simple to use and allow you to retrieve affiliate data and statistics quickly and simply, giving you back more time to spend on analysing and acting on the trends you have observed.

What direction is AffJet moving in now?

We are working hard on adding new affiliate networks (for greater coverage) and also new features into AffJet at the moment. A lot of these changes are being brought about by real user feedback as we want to make sure that we work on things that will make a real difference to affiliates daily work load.

We currently have a launch competition running, where affiliates using AffJet have a great chance to win an iPad regardless of their size. This competition will start when we have 50 users on AffJet and we are hoping to get a lot of feedback from these users that can help us make AffJet even better. You can read more about the AffJet iPad competition here.

Did I mention Affjet is free to use while we are in our beta testing stage?!

You can keep updated with what is going on with AffJet by following us on our AffJet Twitter account

Benefits of Cloud computing

Published June 30th 2010

Cloud computing can now be considered an established technology, with its adoption by giants like Google.

The article, Benefits of Cloud Computing looks at the issues of scalability, cost, stability and security, and the solutions that Cloud Computing offers.

UK Government hosting

Published June 30th 2010

The COI (Central Office of Information) released the annual report for government websites at the end of June 2010, giving us an insight into expenditure for all sections of government informational websites, and analytical data such as visitor numbers.

In the report, Does the UK Government get value for money?, we carried out an analysis on the data provided by the COI to determine whether or not the UK Government receives value for money (cost per request) from their hosting expenditure…

Cloud hosting check-list

Published July 16th 2010

Numerous web hosts are now providing Cloud hosting products but, after conducting some market research, the features and services offered vary greatly.

In order to help customers choose the most suitable cloud hosting platform for them I wrote the Cloud provider sign up check list which offers advice on the important features to look for when choosing a host, and to suggest services that they may not have considered before.

WordPress Multi-site guide

Published August 9th 2010

The release of WordPress version 3.0 has integrated the WordPress MU (Multi User) functionality into the standard WordPress install. It is now possible to host numerous blogs on a single instance of WordPress.

Enabling multi-site and setting up a blog network does require some technical knowledge and is not the simplest process. The guide Enabling WordPress 3.0 multi-site walks users through the process with the required configuration specifically for CatN vCluster explained in detail.

Remember, you can check out the CatN guide section at catn.com/support/guides for a regularly updated vCluster knowledge base.

The CatN blog is available at catn.com/blog, and remember to follow us on Twitter for updates about new guides and articles.

This is taking us quite some time however, as it contains hundreds of gigabytes of production storage. We hope to get this process completed later today.

Platform Improvements

On Tuesday we are expecting to receive a replacement for the failed unit, at which point we will be making some fundamental changes to our storage model to ensure that any future failures of this type can in future be recovered much more quickly. This will be done by replicating all data to a warm standby array that can be switched in immediately in the case of an array going bad.

Although there is still more planning to do, we expect that this measure will massively reduce the impact of any future storage array issues.

In addition to improving our storage array architecture, we are also making other improvements.

The most fundamental change is that we are finally eliminating all of our Lustre-backed storage, and replacing all customer volumes with raw volumes hosted directly on the storage array itself. This has been planned for some time, and will reduce the complexity of our storage to provide much fewer points of failure. The difference will be noticed by all customers previously hosted on our Lustre filesystems.

In addition to stability this will also improve filesystem performance as there will be fewer servers and network round-trips involved in the stack.

Improving Communication

Another area we will concentrate on is communication. We recognise that improvements need to be made when it comes to giving a realistic resolution timescale, and are going to work on this in the coming days to put in place an improved system that enables us to communicate more effectively and respond faster during events such as this.

On this occasion, due to the scale of the outage we had difficulty keeping everyone informed in a timely manner as we scrambled to get things fixed. In the first hours of response it can be very difficult to give an idea of timescales, as it can take some time to get to the root cause. This is much more difficult when the issue lies in storage.

As the week unfolds we will make further progress announcements. In the time being if you experience any problems at all then please contact us via the usual channels and we will rectify the problem as quickly as possible.

I’d like to offer our sincere apologies to all customers affected by these recent issues, and give our assurance that the measures we are taking will dramatically improve our hosting platform for the future.

Why clustered hosting?

Clustered hosting has many benefits:

• Load is spread across numerous servers, reducing the reliance one machine, and avoiding bottlenecks.
• Your site will be spread across all parts of vCluster, so if one server goes down, the remaining servers will continue to host your site and keep it live.
  
• Different processes can be separated. We use a separate layer of servers for serving scripts to static content like images, which enables us to control resource use and guarantee performance of php scripts with dedicated resources.
• The nature of clustered hosting enables us to scale our super computer to meet any demands on capacity instantly. Experience no drops in performance when they receive a visitor spike, we simply add more servers to meet the new demands.

Features

We have focused all features of vCluster in order to give total control to you. Our policy of transparency allows you to view and control every aspect of your vCluster. We have achieved this by clever implementation of features…

We have developed a control panel that currently offers management of all access control options, vCluster stat viewing with 5 minute accuracy, and phpMyadmin database management.

Control panel features; running total bill viewing, billing alerts, data centre environment stats, and domain purchasing will be added soon.

vCluster has been developed specifically for hosting php applications such as WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal, and provides a powerful platform for php developers, with SSH, (S)FTP and version control support.We have tested and written install guide for the majority of php CMS’s and forum applications.

We currently offer a dedicated IP for every customer, multiple domain hosting, SSL and ecommerce support, upgrades to extreme database hosting, and usage billing.

Too good to be true?

Over the last few weeks we’ve been reviewing and refining our billing system before deployment next week. Until this new billing system is in place we’re allowing free sign ups on catn.com. All the pricing information pages will be deployed with the billing system, so you can check prices before you decided to continue with your vCluster account beyond the free period.

This is your last chance to get to grips with the vCluster super computer before we start charging in 5 days time, so head over to catn.com and sign up for your free account now!

“Updating your site regularly gets you noticed, your competitors and clients may be watching, and when you update something it might get their attention and they’ll come look.”

They also listed a total of 19 tips on how to drive traffic to your blog, including these:

We here at Fubra have been part of the discussion surrounding the release of the data for the last few months, and are really pleased to see something coming to fruition.  While the site is still in beta it really does show promise for those of us who just can’t get our hands on enough data.

It took nearly 8 hours, 6 staff members and over 100 snow blocks to create, as you can see the result was pretty fantastic.

My fellow designer Harry has prepared a brief video of the event complete with Hoff/Pingu soundtrack enjoy!

As mentioned in this blog post the plugin makes use of the new PetrolPrices.com XML data feed in order to build a fully customisable table.  The plugin provides both a widget which can be included in any widgetized theme, and a shortcode which can be included in any post or page.

There’s more information on the PetrolPrices.com feeds page, and the plugin can be downloaded from WordPress.org.

It has been a busy week here at Fubra with investments, birthdays and lots of late nights making some cool Halloween posts for SixCrayons. Just like to say a big welcome to new Fubra investment Marble Construction who we have already been working with this week.

A few weeks ago myself and fellow designer Nick decided to create a couple of Halloween posts for SixCrayons. After a few late nights of pizza and lots of Cherry Coke we finally got them done. I created a rather fun Zombie Transformation Tutorial taking a few of the Fubra staff and turning them into Zombies.

Read the full tutorial here »

Nick - being a huge movie geek - made a GhostBusters Isometric tutorial including all the GhostBusters, Ecto One and the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Check out the full tutorial and be sure to ask him in the comments if there is anything you would like to know how to do. He has also included the Ai file of Ecto One for you to download and play with.

Read the Full GhostBusters Tutorial here »

One person who has been extra busy also outside of work is Annie, who has been making personalised cakes for the staff birthdays.

Annie bases her cakes around each member of staff’s personal interest, this week it was Steve’s birthday. He has a fascination with anything LEGO, hence this rather impressive LEGO minifig cake based on Steve himself!

Not only has Annie been making birthday cakes, we also had a selection of Halloween treats this morning ready for when we all arrived work! Great stuff – Thanks Annie!

Happy Halloween!

The beta version was launched back in December last year (2008) and since then the software has shed it’s beta label (July ’09) and evolved rapidly, boasting a number of great features and reasons to use Clear Books.

The aim of this revamp was to standardise the page styles throughout and help clarify to new users exactly what Clear Books is and the services that are available, as well as including help and information for existing users.

Although no new content has really been introduced in this version, a number of previously hidden features have been made easily accessible. This includes the Partners and Business Directories and the VAT Calculator.

The re-launch coincides with completing the 100 paying users achievement and use of the new company slogan, “Free Your Time”.

All of those involved are really pleased at reaching this milestone, but we’re not quite there yet. Next on the list is to carry out a similar procedure on the accounts system itself (internal pages).

Displayed below are a couple of the pages which have been dramatically transformed to give you an idea of what things were  like previously and how they are now.

There hasn’t been much on the feedback side so far, but if you like what you see and are interested in using an online accounting product then head over to Clear Books now to find out more.