We just wanted to wish everyone a great holiday season. We hope everyone brings in the new year with a bang!
See you next year,
Setfive
We just wanted to wish everyone a great holiday season. We hope everyone brings in the new year with a bang!
See you next year,
Setfive
Just wanted to take a second to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving! Hope everyone had a great time watching the Packers destroy Detroit (sorry Daum) and some great turkey time.
Good luck finishing 2011 in style!
A couple of months ago I stopped into DangerAwesome! and was instantly intrigued. DangerAwesome! has a bunch of laser beds and which in turn let you laser etch pretty much anything.
I started kicking around the house for something to etch and obviously decided on our toilet seat.
Here’s how the toilet seat came out:
Anyway, after seeing how well the toilet seat came out I decided to try something a bit bigger. After a quick trip to Jordan’s Furniture I ended up with an awesome glass coffee table that obviously needed to get etched.
After some serious debate, I finally decided on etching a maze and a Setfive logo onto the table.
Here’s how it came out:
And then a close up off the {5}:
Pretty sweet. If you find yourself in Central Square definitely stop in to DangerAwesome! and give the lasers a shot.
Our friends over at Tēvolution were written up on the incouraged communications blog today. Check out the post at http://www.incouraged.com/2011/06/08/tevolution-authentici-tea/
The post outlines their business and how the application we built supports their business goals. There are also some screenshots of the application in action.
If you haven’t already, check out their site at http://www.trackyourimpact.com/
Over the past month we’ve been working with Her Campus (HerCampus.com) to help them with issues they were having. When we started talking with Her Campus, we learned that they had different types of issues ranging from some Drupal based ones to actual server level problems. They were having some trouble keeping up to traffic demands, and if a traffic spike occurred their current infrastructure wasn’t sufficient.
After looking at their setup, we noted quite a few areas in which we could improve performance. The old setup was a fairly standard setup, a frontend server using Apache to handle HTTP requests and then a second server which was their MySQL database server. The servers were a 4 gig and 8 gig server respectively.
It was clear Apache was adding unneeded overhead, and wasn’t the best solution for them. We revamped their setup significantly. We switched them to Nginx + PHP-FPM. We immediately saw great improvement on from this change alone. However we wanted to get them to a single server, and to be able to handle traffic spikes with a single server.
We ended up doing the following:
After these updates we were able to move them from their two servers (8 gig and 4 gig) to a single server(4 gig). We have also reduced load times significantly. Their server loads dropped from 4-5 on average to 0.25. Recently they had an article on the Huffington Post and didn’t have any problems handling the 4x traffic spike they saw. At points we were seeing according to ChartBeat over 600 people on the site at once. The single server handled this without problems.
The updated infrastructure will give them a savings of about 75% from their previous setup. It also gives the users on the site a much faster and reliable experience.
We look forward to helping Her Campus with their continuing expansion of their site and user base!