VPS Blow-out Coming to an End?

Posted about 1 year ago

So… you’re one of those “procrastinator” types, aren’t ya? You hear about a great new service or an upgrade to your favorite product and what do you do? You wait.

If this sounds like you then pay close attention to what I’m about to tell you. The Blue Box Group VPS sale isn’t going to last much longer. That’s right, the sale you’ve been following for the past month but have put off acting on is coming to an end. How much longer do you have? Well, not long. The VPS sale, offering 40% discounts on any new virtual server purchased from Blue Box Group, is going to conclude at the end of the month. So, don’t miss out on this great deal! If you haven’t already, checkout our VPS offerings today and be sure to get yours before it’s too late!

Affordable Content Distribution Network Services

Posted about 1 year ago

Blue Box Group is happy to announce it’s newest addition to our superb line-up of Rails hosting services: Bundled Content Delivery Network Services. We’re proud to offer services and features not found at other providers and designed to make your business operate more smoothly and effectively. We have historically been at the forefront of Rails hosting technology (Carbon Neutral Web Hosting, Ruby on Rails Hosting Service Level Agreement, IPv6 Services) and now we’re one of the first to make a Content Delivery Network an affordable part of every day rails hosting.

So what is a CDN and why does it benefit your business? More than likely, your site has thousands of visitors not only from the US, but from across the world. By caching your site’s static content on both our national and global network of caching servers, your visitors will experience faster load times regardless of location. Powered by Internap’s powerful network backbone, the Blue Box Group CDN will automatically determine the closest content server to each visitor and serve your content from that point. Since electronic information is transmitted at roughly the speed of light (think fiber optics), placing your largest data closer to your end users is the most fundamental way to speed up your site.

Increasing the speed of your site isn’t the only benefit of the Blue Box Group CDN. In addition to bringing your largest files closer to your visitors (typically videos, images, stylesheets and javascripts), many clients will see their server loads remain stable paired with an INCREASE in traffic. Curious how this happens? As your site’s static content gets cached and redistributed around the globe, the CDN begins to serve files from its cache instead of directly from your site. Any request for a piece of content that already exists on the CDN will now be served from the closest server to your customer as opposed to your site’s main server. All of the requests processed by the CDN are requests that your hardware doesn’t have to worry about, freeing up system resources for more important non-cached requests. By moving the burden of serving the hundreds of media files your site has to external hardware, your site will find itself with an increased ability to handle site traffic while seeing a comparably lower server load.

A client of Blue Box Group located in Australia recently decided to utilize the CDN with their content heavy site which had visitors from all over the world. Before utilizing the CDN, this client was experiencing slower response times on some of its pages due to the long distance those images must travel (Washington State to Australia). After configuring their site to use the CDN (less than a few hours work), we saw some pretty exciting results:

As you can see from the above graphs, not only did our client see a dramatic reduction in ping response times to the asset servers after implementing the CDN, but the total amount of traffic that the site was able to serve went up as well. This was largely due to the CDN improving usage of server resources by keeping server resources available for dynamic content. Any site will see some improvement in speed and reliability after utilizing the CDN, plus our platform extremely easy to get started on!

Content Distribution Networks are used by some of the largest internet content providers on the web today: Google, Amazon, Apple and more! Now your site can utilize the same technologies as these internet superstars, at a price anyone can afford. With minimal startup fees and pricing inline with traditional bandwidth rates, there really is no reason to avoid using this type of platform. It’s possible to implement not only for large enterprise clusters, but for shared hosting and virtual and dedicated platforms as well. To get more information about this great opportunity to improve your site’s functionality, give us a call today!

—Joe Clark
Blue Box Group

JSConf 2009

Posted about 1 year ago

It’s probably a little strange seeing a post about a JavaScript conference come from a Ruby on Rails host. It also may surprise you, but Blue Box Group has customers running applications not only written in Rails, but in Java, PHP and many other languages as well. Regardless of which language the primary application has been developed in, JavaScript provides that extra pop we’re all looking for in our apps. Since JavaScript is beneficial to anyone in the web development community and many of our customers utilize it across their sites, we wanted to share some information about an upcoming conference organized by one of our customers with you.

JSConf 2009 is the first conference dedicated to JavaScript developers in all forms and it is shaping up to be one amazing conference. The conference brings together some of the greatest visionaries and developers within the JS community including John Resig creator of jQuery, Jason Huggins creator of Selenium testing environment, and Stefan Stoyanov from YUI. This is an incredible opportunity for anyone doing web based development since the conference material will show you how to use JavaScript in the browser, on the server, and on mobile handsets.

For anyone currently hosting their mobile apps with us or for those of you who’ve been considering writing a mobile application, this conference provides a wonderful opportunity to learn from some of the best in the business. With platforms like the iPhone and Android becoming more and more popular, now is the time to go mobile. Check out the conference and Blue Box Group’s Mobile Application Hosting to jump start your mobile app today!

JSConf 2009 will be held in Washington DC between April 24 and 25, 2009. The conference brings together 16 speakers to present on JavaScript development in the browser, mobile, desktop, and server environments. If you haven’t had much of a chance to do some deep JavaScript work, this conference is a great way to learn from some of the best. Although many people don’t realize it, JavaScript can also be used to build thick client desktop applications. In addition, it is one of the only languages to successfully bridge object oriented and functional programming in a way that anyone can use it. JavaScript has seen an incredible rise with modern web application frameworks and it only seems to be increasing in the coming years, this is the only conference that will show you how important JavaScript is to your programming and design capabilities.

The conference is purposefully being kept small and intimate so you will be able to interact with the speakers and attendees during the day and during the social events. Also there will be many opportunities to interact with the sponsors and select vendors that will present to network and potential pursue employment opportunities. The conference costs $450 right now for two full days worth of speakers, breakfasts, lunches, a beer and wine tasting social event on Friday Evening, and a networking social event on Saturday Evening. If you are looking for more work, this conference has also drawn the attention of a lot of hiring employers who are looking for top notch developers.

If you are interested in going, we recommend getting your tickets soon at http://jsconf2009.eventbrite.com as they are selling very quickly. For more information or other speakers, check the website at http://www.jsconf2009.com

—Joe Clark
Blue Box Group

Passenger / Mod_rails Community Sponsorship Campaign

Posted about 1 year ago

The great team over at Phusion who make Passenger (aka mod_rails) have done an amazing job on the latest round of mod_rails updates. They’re about ready to release version 2.1 into production form which has some great updates, but they are asking for community support. Here’s there post from the passenger mailing list:

Blue Box Group has been very satisfied with passenger and so we feel it to be important to support the project. We were initial donors during their first campaign, and we’re happy to donate again. This time, we’ve contributed $750 to the campaign, and we encourage our customers to donate as well.

We can’t wait for 2.1 to be released!

- Jesse Proudman
Blue Box Group