Status Blog

We're excited to announce the early release of one of our latest innovations: Free SEO Tracking for all Convina customers.

Due to popular demand we've decided to provide access to SEO Tracking systems more than 2 months ahead of schedule. All Convina customers now have access to track search engine rankings for their keywords in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. In addition to tracking their own rankings, they can also track rankings for top competitors.

This system is part of a broad set SEO services that Convina will continue to roll out in the coming weeks and months. In addition to providing free tracking services, Convina also provides professional optimization services like:

• Link Building
• Content Generation and Optimization
• Link Attraction Strategies and Development

If you're an existing client, please review your reports and contact us if you have specific terms or competitors you'd like to track. If you've be thinking about switching to Convina... now you have another great reason to do so!

Over the past six months Convina has been developing a mobile-version of our web development platform. This new platform allows us to quickly create interactive mobile websites that meet the following objectives:

• Accessibility: Websites can be accessed by more than 95% of web-ready mobile devices.
• Interactivity: Websites support interactive capabilities.
• Ease of Use: Websites load quickly and are easy to navigate even on the most limited mobile browsers.
• Ease of Maintenance: Websites can be easily maintained and enhanced without advanced programming skills or expertise.

For the next few weeks we'll be rolling this service out to our existing customers. If you have a website with Convina and you're interested in going mobile, we'll setup a new mobile site for you at a substantial discount. This offer is valid until the end of the year for all current customers.

We're hoping to roll-out our mobile web design service to all customers (old and new) by the end of the year.

Interested in Mobile Web Design? Contact us...

Effective immediately, all websites hosted on Convina's XPS framework now have XML sitemaps automatically generated on a regular basis. This service is provided at no extra charge for all Convina customers on our latest development platform.

Sitemaps make it easy for us to inform search engines about pages on our customers' sites that are available for indexing. A Sitemap XML file lists pages along with additional information about each URL like when it was updated, how often it changes, and how important it is relative to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to more easily crawl the website.

Web spiders usually find pages from links within the site and from external sites. Sitemaps allow search engines to find all URLs in the website and learn about those pages using the associated metadata. While using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, it does provide help for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling a website.

The Sitemaps protocol has been widely adopted by major search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft.

Learn More about Sitemaps

This is the busiest time of year for Convina. With more and more businesses having a desire to sell online, our workload sky-rockets starting in October. Many of our ecommerce customers will do 25% or more of their yearly website sales in December alone. We're excited to put the improvements we've been making to the test in this upcoming online sales season.

In the next few weeks, many of our ecommerce customers will be launching upgraded versions of their websites that showcase improvements in features, functionality, social-networking integration, search engine optimization, and much more.

In addition to great website improvements, we've also made major strides in the area of tracking and analytics. Our analytics integration capabilities allow us to more accurately measure performance and make improvements at a very fast pace.

Even with constant concerns about the economy, many of our merchants have high expectations for online sales in the coming months. Whether you're one of our ecommerce customers or a website owner using an alternate solution -- we wish everyone a great holiday sales season.

After a week of lifting, transporting, and re-arranging all types of furniture and equipment -- we're finally working at full capacity at our Draper offices. The dust hasn't quite settled, but we've got everything in place that we need to provide the responsive service our customers are expecting.

Below are some FAQs regarding our new offices in Draper.

Now that your offices are open in Draper, will you be taking in-person meetings with clients?

Over the past few years Convina has moved more and more away from in-person meetings for most projects. This allows us to save time and money and it keeps our developers and designers focused on their primary work. For most projects, Convina will continue to telecommute for all meetings.

If you're not taking in-person meetings, why do you need new offices?

For more than two years now, Convina has been developing and deploying new technologies that allow us to deliver services for a broader range of business needs. Five years ago, Convina focused exclusively on high-end ecommerce and web application projects for businesses in Utah. Today, Convina launches new websites every day for diverse businesses across the country and around the world.

With such a rapidly growing customer-base, we've seen our need for teamwork and customer service increase dramatically. Pulling all of our resources together into the same offices will help us continue to deliver the high-quality service our customers expect.

Is Convina still hiring out-of-state employees who work from home?

By November 1st, all of our out-of-state employees will have relocated to Utah to work from our Draper offices. At this time all open positions are for on site work at our new location.

After working for years with a variety of off-the-shelf backup and recovery systems from various vendors, Convina is finally doing what we do best: creating our own custom solution.

The Problems

Why don't off-the-shelf backup systems work?

• Most backup software packages use proprietary file formats. This means that you need the backup software to read and extract backups.
• Most suitable enterprise backup software packages are designed to backup large systems, making it difficult to extract and restore individual components.
• Most backup systems store data in just one backup location. We need to store backups locally at the datacenter and remotely in case our datacenter gets hit by an asteroid (or some other act of God).
• Any suitable backup system would cost us thousands each year to maintain.
• No backup system out there could allow us to report backup information to our customers on an individual basis.

So... we figured it was time to get coding.

The Solution

Our custom solution rocks. Here's how it works:

• All of our servers are constantly monitored for file changes. Every change is instantly backed up to a mirror location at the datacenter. In turn, those changes are periodically transferred to a secure remote location for permanent storage. This happens about 4 times a day.
• In addition to this full file backup, we also do code versioning backup. Every source code file, XML file, style sheet file, or any other file that contains programming, data, or markup is automatically archived multiple times each day. These archives are stored for up to 1 month locally at the datacenter, and permanently at our secure remote location.
• Finally, we do site-specific database backups in flat file format. Multiple times each day, each record in each database is archived to an external format. This data can be used to keep historical records and for data recovery. Again, this data is mirrored locally at the datacenter and also copied to the secure remote location.
• All of these backup files are conveniently packaged together in a group for each customer project and stored separately.

What's the Bottom Line?

Here's what this all means:

• Every file on every website is constantly being mirrored. If a server crashes, virtually no data will be lost.
• Since we keep multiple versions of our programming (hundreds each month), we can always revert back to a previous version of the code if needed. This helps us recover easily from programming mistakes and it also helps us optimize performance in our programming.
• Since customer project data is all backed up in a single file location (programming, images, databases, etc), it's very easy for us to recover data for a single website if needed.
• This solution allows us to permanently store backup archives. Unlike most systems that cycle through backup media, Convina's solution keeps a permanent archive of all data.
• Our customers can see the status of their backup. They can see when the last backup happened, how many files are in the backup, and how much disk space their projects are consuming in our backup system.

A few of our customers have asked if our move into new offices will have any impact on web services (hosting in particular). The answers is no.

Convina's servers and hosting infrastructure are safely and securely operated completely separate from our offices. This change will have no impact on those operations.

If you'd like to learn more about our web services operations, checkout these links:

• Hosting Service Overview
• Hosting Security and Performance at Convina
• Convina Hosting Infrastructure

What's harder: building a website or building a... building?

Moving-in to our new building is running a little behind schedule. We're hoping to have an occupancy permit by Friday. While some of our dedicated employees are helping with all things "construction", the rest of us are working extra hard to make sure productivty doesn't suffer this week.

We're dissapointed in this delay, but we're excited for the final outcome which we hope will be an explosion of productivity. This new building will allow our entire staff to work together under the same roof. Well, almost our entire staff. If any of our Utah customer have a chance to speak with Mike... let him know how wonderful it is out here! (He's our last straggler out of state).

For the past 3 months we've been working on a building project that will provide new office space for our developers, designers, and customer care assistants. We're very pleased that this project is finally coming to an end.

The week of September 29th will most likely prove to be very challenging for us. We're going to work to keep service, support, and development on track and on schedule for all customers. This will be difficult as our entire staff will be moving from different locations to this new central location throughout the week.

We don't anticipate major problems, but we're asking our customers to bare with us if any minor delays arise.

Some of our customers noticed some serious application errors over the weekend. While we hate to do emergency maintenance that causes any kind of service disruption -- this is sometimes necessary to ensure performance and security needs are taken care of.

We work hard to ensure that downtime is limited to the early morning hours when websites are least active, and this was the case with all of our updates over the weekend.

SQL injection, a very common form of attack of websites everywhere, is becoming ever more prevalent. While it is a well-known risk in web application development, it can be difficult to combat because most preventative measures are prone to human error.

Over the weekend we installed systems on all of our servers that add two extra layers of protection from SQL injection. Here are those two systems in a nutshell:

• Request Auditing
  SQL injection attacks usually have some red-flags that are easy to spot if you're looking. With our new updates, every web request is audited to see if it is suspicious, and if so it is blocked. These blocked requests are monitored by Convina techs.
• Ready-only Database User
  Most web applications require some reading and some writing to a database. For convenience, most applications connect to databases with a read/write user even though the vast majority of database requests only need read privileges. Our new XPS platform has been updated to allow read-only access for the standard database connection. This prevents SQL injection from even being a possibility for 95% of all request. The other 5% requests no require much more strict guidelines as they must go through an exclusive read/write database connection.

Convina's systems now automatically block thousands of SQL injection attacks every hour before they even come close to code written by a developer. While we wish we could implement these measures without any service disruption, we're glad they are in place to ensure maximum performance and security for our customers.

Image Credit: http://unixwiz.net/techtips/sql-injection.html