The Amazon S3 team launched a new feature today that makes
serving a complete (static) web site out of Amazon S3 dead simple: you set a
default document for buckets and subdirectories, which is most likely an
index.html document. This enables Amazon S3 to know what document to serve if
one isn’t explicitly requested: for example href="http://www.allthingsdistributed.com">http://www.allthingsdistributed.com
returns the index.html at the bucket level and href="http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2010/12/">http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2010/12/
the index.html from that subdirectory.  The other document you can specify is a
customer error page that is presented to your customers when a 4XX class error
occurs (e.g. non-existent page is requested), so they get something more
appropriate than just the barebones response from the browser. Click on href="http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/doesnotexist.html">http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/doesnotexist.html
if you want to see what this blog’s error page looks like. The background is
courtesy of @nalden.

All of this can be done from the AWS console as well as with
the AWS SDK’s.  You will also need to set access control to make sure that your
content is publicly accessible. I have used a bucket policy to make all
documents world readable, but you could create one that restricts it to
referrers, network address range, time of day, etc. I can now turn on Amazon Cloudfront, the content delivery service, with one simple click, whenever needed.

There are a few small pieces of the blogging process that I
still need a server for: editing postings, managing comments and to serve search
and all of these can easily be run out of a single Amazon EC2 micro instance.

Amazon S3 FTW! More details about the website feature of Amazon
S3 can be found here and in Jeff Barr’s blog post on the AWS developer blog.

View full post on All Things Distributed

Read more on PR Newswire via Yahoo! Finance

The client decided on one of our pre developed ecommerce ColdFusion solutions. The administrative back office of their selected product is very intuitive, in that authorized administrators without web development experience are able to create brands, manufacturers, products, product features, such as sizes and colors, coupon discount codes and a myriad of other features. The client loved the interface and features, but it would take quite a bit of time to continually update each of the six domains.

Now why would a company want to have multiple websites that offer the same products to begin with? Well, I guess a good first answer quite simply would be to build market share and tremendous website traffic or to perhaps build up certain domains and sell them individually at a later date. I have outlined some of the long term monetary benefits for customers further below but as I briefly outline the following project it should go without saying that it is time consuming and requires extensive testing initially. In the long run, the customer will recognize and appreciate a significant savings in both time and money after the project is finished.

In order to meet the customer’s objective, I set up the initial store (client / customer side) as well as the back office administrative area. On the customer side of the store, customers are able to drill down by product manufacturer, category, price, sale items, clearance items, etc. The results are displayed in presentable product description. If applicable, the customer will select the color or size of the products and it add it to their shopping cart for checkout.

The client had a lot of repeat business for their products and wanted the customer to be able to login to a Customer Account Management area. The following website development modules were developed for the customer login area:

For the customer desktop features, I developed and enabled a user name and password protected customer account area (directory) in which the following is supported:

Developed the customer user interface so that existing and potential clients can easily purchase the products created by the administrator, by allowing quick click on category and sub category links or search forms. Ability to search products by keywords using and / or options. Customer will be able to select from various product options and add their product to a shopping cart. Customer will either login to an existing account or create a new account. Through the customer’s account they will be able to provide or update shipping and billing information along with applicable account information to ensure timely communication. Customer will be able to login to their account at any time to view statuses that may require some sort of validation etc. Ability to create and edit account. Primary information will be their billing and shipping information. (Company, Full Name, Address, City, State, Zip Code, Telephone & Fax Numbers, E-mail Addresses etc. ) Develop interface in which customers can create, edit, delete additional and innumerable shipping addresses and points of contact. Ability to manage their login information. Ability to view and search chronological date order of purchases along with related documents etc.

After the initial store for the primary domain was completed I created five new directories (hs,xa,hc,an,ds) within the root of the web server and copied the initial store into each of the new directories. The additional directories were named a variation of the domain and would later be used as the code to identify the site’s domain and would be used to track where the orders originated from. I used ColdFusion cflocation code to determine the domain that was being passed and redirected the user to the appropriate directory that was associated with the domain. After the new directories were created I applied applicable design changes to each of the sites.

In the back office administrative area, I added additional fields to the product creation section to accommodate product features based on the domain that was accessed by the customer on the front end of the website. The following list represents the additional modifications that were added to the product creation section: I added the following domain codes (hs,xa,hc,an,ds), the same as the directories that I created above, to identify each of the six domains. This field was added to the SQL Server Orders table. Every order that comes through captures the code and identifies the domain that processed the order. The category and product development modules in the administrative back office set the precedence for all main and subcategory categories and their related products. I added additional pricing fields to the product creation modules to accommodate additional pricing for the five additional domains and update code to support this implementation globally across the entire application as necessary. I implemented additional code within the main site administrative back office to accommodate turning off features and / or ensuring features are enabled dependent on which site the administrative user is maintaining. I developed an intuitive user interface to complete the following reporting options. This reporting module will be implemented and only accessible in the primary domains administrative back office. I also included the option to ensure that the reports can be run by date and/or date range. a. Order tracking by domain
b. Order revenue (all websites)
c. Order revenue by website
d. Order revenue by customer
e. Order revenue by product
f. Orders by product (no revenue, top selling products only)
g. Orders by brand (with $ amounts)
h. Orders by category (with $ amounts)
i. The ability to import and export customer information (name and e-mail, address) by CSV file.

The main challenge, that was faced in developing the application was that the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) Certificate would need to resolve to one domain for all six of the domains. There was certainly the option to purchase an SSL certification for each of the domains, but that would be very costly. Using application and session management I created variables that would identify the referring domain from where the customer was processing their order. When the customer checked out they were passed to the primary secure domain, completed their order and returned to the originating domain. For this project I implemented the Authorizenet API solution as the real time credit card processor. The PayPal advanced API, as well as many other APIs could have been used as well.

In summary, after extensive testing, the client was able to run six domains off of one back end database seamlessly with the following benefits.

As the owner of the websites, the administrator was able to login to only one administrative back office to manage all of the domains, rather than six different login screens. The administrator had the ability to create, edit and remove products for display on the respective websites that they desired. The administrator also had the ability to offer different product pricing, shipping rates and discount codes using check boxes and additional input fields for the respective websites. On the customer side a product may have different prices dependent on which website the customer was doing their shopping. The administrator could also run reports to track total sales, for all or each of the websites.

As far as the potential savings that may be involved consider that in this case, for six websites, the client will save at least $645.00 dollars annually for SSL certificates that cost approximately $129.00 dollars per domain. Also consider that depending on the hosting structure an annual ColdFusion hosting fee may cost roughly $468 a year. Under the circumstances for this project you may spend a little more monthly due to the anticipated bandwidth, but overall the customer will save perhaps close to $2,340.00 that would be charged to host the additional five websites.

This project was completed using ColdFusion 8 and Microsoft SQL Server as the database by 2simplifi Web Solutions, Inc.. Other databases such as MySQL could be used as well. This project could also be applied from using a minimum of two to an indefinite number of domains.

There is a large number of hosting companies offering managed hosting to various clients from all over the world. Many hosting companies provide their services through dedicated servers and the server uptime is almost one hundred percent. Leased servers are also available from some of the hosting companies exclusively for many businesses that require dedicated applications or database applications. Hosting service providers also manage hardware maintenance and network security, bandwidth and site monitoring.

Websites generally require managed hosting for smooth functioning of the website and any application or email traffic that is necessary.

There are generally two types of hosting – one is Windows hosting and other Linux hosting. There are several advantages of managed hosting and depending on the requirements, suitable hosting can be selected for a specific website. Generally a team of professionals looks after the managed hosting and it is good for you to find a reputable and honest company that offers their outsourcing services at the most cost effective rates. Many new companies are coming up in this high growth sector area and you have to ensure that you balance price with professionalism and server infrastructure.

A commercial, managed hosting company provides detailed IP addresses of website visitors during the entire month as well as also providing visiting trends, anti virus, spam control and daily backups. Website statistics or analytics are very useful, especially for commercial websites. Many Windows and Linux hosting providers offer full database support and this is vital to the stability of your websites applications.

Linux hosting provides many features and many people prefer it to Windows hosting. All commercial service providers generally have twenty four hour customer support through phone or email and provide a personal control panel for easy and efficient administration.

Service providers have support in almost all areas such as Perl, PHP, MySQL, CGI bin, SSH access and Python. Some additional features such as POP, SMTP, Webmail, Anonymous FTP connections and FrontPage extensions may also be provided to the customers.

Service providers have dedicated IP addresses and excellent database support and therefore in our opinion Linux hosting provides many additional features. So, it is necessary for large commercial organizations and business houses to go for managed hosting as it provides not only hosting in a dedicated server, but all types of customer support that is required for smooth running of the website. Although Windows and Linux hosting are available, in our opinion Linux hosting is a better option.