Sep/090
NitroSell’s Content Delivery Network (CDN) consists of three tiers, with multiple redundancies in each tier:
- The origin servers facilitate synchronizations, the provisioning of the dynamic data associated with your store – such as product and customer data – as well as secure transactions, and configuration details;
- The storage servers cache the static content that is synchronized with your webstore, such as media – product images, etc. – and files like PDF documents, CSS stylesheets and client-side scripts;
- Edge servers deliver the static content to your shoppers from the server geographically closest to your end users, using the data on the storage servers.
NitroSell eCommerce Content Delivery Network
Origin Servers:
- Our origin servers are divided into groups, with servers in each group providing a single function, while still being capable of additional functions as a fail-over mechanism. Functional groups include: database management, web provisioning, logging, e-mail and DNS;
- A minimum of two servers is dedicated to each function of your store, with workloads continually load-balanced between them to ensure maximum performance and responsiveness;
- Origin servers are networked in secure, private local area networks (LANs), in a PCI-DSS-compliant environment, with all external traffic filtered through dedicated Cisco (hardware) firewalls, which are in turn fronted by enterprise-level Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS).
Storage Servers:
- Our storage servers are part of a secure service that consists of: multiple terabytes of storage capacity, geographical data replication, a hugely scalable architecture, and proprietary mapping and routing technology;
- By using this fault-tolerant storage service, NitroSell eCommerce makes your content available to shoppers on demand, anywhere in the world;
- When you upload static content to our origin servers, it is automatically uploaded in turn to the nearest storage server. As soon as the upload completes, the content is replicated to multiple storage servers in multiple geographical locations.
Edge Servers:
- The edge servers we use are part of the world’s largest distributed computing platform; it is a network of consisting of tens of thousands of servers, equipped with proprietary software and deployed in 69 countries;
- These servers reside within almost 1,000 of the world’s Internet Service Providers (ISPs);
- When content is requested by end users, our edge servers determine the optimal storage server from which to pull fresh content;
- Advanced algorithms are used to optimize routes and replicate data dynamically to deliver content more quickly, reliably and security;
- Therefore, static content, which makes up the bulk of your webstore’s content, is delivered via the fastest, most reliable path from the edge server closest to the user, improving performance and reliability of both retrieval and delivery;
- Finally, freshness control features ensure that the content served to end users is always current.
Since NitroSell manages your entire e-commerce solution, concerns about the availability, reliability and performance of your webstore are worries of the past.
Sep/090
If your customers report that the webstore order history shows an order that has been fulfilled – through Microsoft RMS POS – as having the “processing” status, it likely means that NSc Mail isn’t running, or wasn’t set up in the first place.
For the order history to function correctly, you need to keep NSc Mail running at all times: NSc Mail is what updates the statuses of web orders. The status is changed to “shipped” once the order is processed through the POS.
You may download the latest version of our software here, which includes NSc Mail in the installer. Only NSc Mail should be installed, on the same server/PC as that running Sync and, preferably, your RMS database.
Further Information on NSc Mail is available in the following Knowledge Base articles:
KB Article 34: “Introduction to NSc Mail”
KB Article 36: “Using and Customizing NSc Mail E-Mail Templates”
KB Article 373: “Sending E-Mail Updates to Ordering Customers“
Sep/090
Many people are so busy with the day-to-day maintenance of their webstore that they neglect key activities that can dramatically improve performance. One such activity is link building. This is the practice of getting other sites to add links to your site. Although it can be time consuming, when done correctly it can lead to excellent medium-to-long-term results.
Put simply: when a user enters a search query, the engine must determine how to return the best results. One aspect is to establish the pages that relate to the query; another aspect is calculating the authority of the pages that link relate to the query results. The link profile of the site containing the web page being evaluated and the link profile of the page itself are also important metrics.
Another way to look at it is: each link to a page is seen as a vote of confidence. That is, if there are two pages that are equally relevant to a given search query, the page with the better link profile will rank higher because it has greater authority.
That said, engines do not lavish authority upon those who sit idle and hope for links to come to them, as if by magic. It is essential for the store owner to be proactive and engage in orchestrated link building strategies. Publishers who sit on their laurels are unlikely to build up their stores to the useful levels of traffic.
As always, we’d love to hear your feedback: comments, questions and suggestions! We’d also like to hear from people on what they think the best link building tactics are and how they’ve successfully implemented these on their webstore. So please feel free to post your comments below!