Blog of Hamlesh

Google is about to make landing page load time a factor in their AdWords Quality Score. The goal is to reward fast-loading websites and punish slow-loading ones, all to improve the ever-important user experience.

From Google’s Inside AdWords blog:

Keywords with landing pages that load very slowly may get lower Quality Scores (and thus higher minimum bids). Conversely, keywords with landing pages that load very quickly may get higher Quality Scores and lower minimum bids.

This change is being rolled out in March and will soon take effect. Having a well-performing website is important, and Google has just given you another excuse to make it a priority.

Why load time is important

We all know that no one likes waiting for a website to load. Here is Google’s motivation from the AdWords Help Center:

Users value ads that bring them to the information they want as efficiently as possible. A high-quality landing page should load quickly as well as feature unique, relevant content. Fast load times benefit advertisers as well, since users are less likely to abandon a site that loads quickly.

Time to monitor your load time!

You can test your website load time with the Full Page Test included in Pingdom Tools (this test is performed from Dallas, USA). If you want a browser-based test made from your own computer, Yahoo has an excellent Firefox add-on called YSlow that will help you analyze your website load time in great detail.

Google has some basic tips for how you can improve your load time values in regards to the Adwords quality score.

• Use fewer redirects.
• Reduce the page size by using fewer, smaller, and more highly-compressed images.
• Do not use interstitial pages.
• Minimize the use of iframes on your landing page.

Yahoo has published a set of “best practices” for speeding up websites, though some of the advice may be overkill for smaller sites (such as the use of a CDN).

Hosting is a key factor

Where you host your website also plays a key factor in how quickly it will load. If your customers are based in the UK, and are searching Google in the UK, hosting in the USA may be detrimental to your quality score.

HostPlanetUK - UK based reseller website hosting

UK servers, UK staff, 24/7 support, 100% uptime (proven)

So what exactly is cloud computing - well Ed Felten explains in the following video.

The video begins with an introduction by several Princeton officials. Ed’s presentation starts about 6:20 into the video, which runs 38 minutes.

Golding (Othello Tech CEO) has a nice sum up of this years hosting outages, my favorite being his comments on Rackspace’s outage, although they are always claiming 100% uptime, but like all hosts they suffer downtime

Having brought a number of new racks online recently and installing/migrating servers, I realised something; its not all that difficult to keep cables tidy.  So when I come across pictures like most of the ones below, I do wonder how people manage to get it this wrong.

The simplest way to keep cable tidy, velcro!  Velcro is the king of cable management

Cable management is key to ensure rapid troubleshooting and high uptimes. The longer it takes to resolve an issue, the more your revenue suffers.

Taken from: http://www.berkeleyit.co.uk/server_room_builds.php 

Last week was one of the more exhausting weeks I can remember having for quite a while. I’m sitting here reflecting on the week, and thought I’d share some thoughts and experiences.

The main focus at my IT company, Berkeley IT, was gearing for delivery on a number of large new customer signups; think 300 to 3000 new Hosted Exchange customers. We’ve had new hardware arriving every single day of the week, its been a mad house! I am very lucky to have the excellent team around me that I do; Will Ottewell, my support manager is second to none in his commitment to delivering customer excellence – and I credit a lot of the recent new business to his dedication, especially focusing around our offsite backup offering. I’ve also taken on a new member of support staff to work with Will, and we are still looking for more people.

My PA Hire business, The PA Hire Company, has had a very good week too, delivering and engineering the launch party for a new and upcoming band. Nath Robinson, whom I brought in as Operations Manager for The PA Hire Company has done an awesome job in liaising with customers and delivering first class events. Having been up since 03:00 the day of the album launch, and with the demands on my time of my IT company, I wasn’t able to oversee the event delivery from the start. I drove to the club on Bethnal Green around 22:00, I arrived in time to help the guys pack up and load the van, as well as speak to the bands manager, Peter Davis. He was very impressed and grateful for the top notch level of service and the quality of our work. Its always nice to speak to a happy customer, and fortunately for me, it happens a lot
I always say that delivering IT that works is very simple, its how you support and liaise with customers that makes you stand out from the crowd, and it has worked wonders for Berkeley IT. Fortunately for me, this same mentality has transferred over to the PA Hire Company, and I am sure that we will see this grow into as stable a business as Berkeley IT.

Great article on the impact utility computing will have on traditional IT, Bob Worrall has it right, IT is a critical element of every business, but keeping it running requires skills and assets that have nothing to do with anyone’s core business. In the future, the role of the IT department will be to source and integrate services for the users, and build (or at least design) custom apps that drive strategic value.

Berkeley IT have already started noticing this shift in the marketplace here in the UK. We are pushing more and more managed services as well as managed solutions (theres a difference).

It makes complete sense when you look at the IT demands now on most medium-large organisations, think manufacturing, finance/banking, media etc;

• £1000/square foot data center space
• Hardware experts
• Linux and windows experts
• Virtualisation experts
• Networking experts
• Security experts
• Storage experts
• DR experts
• Business continuity experts

The list goes on. We (Berkeley IT) still have a long way to go; on demand, business outcome driven, pay for what you use services are on the horizon. IT will never be the same.

Its a good time to be alive!

Few skills are as useful for a Friday afternoon as the rewarding power nap. The Ririan Project introduces 10 benefits to power napping and details four styles of power nap: nano nap (10 to 20 seconds), micro nap (two to five minutes), mini nap (five to 20 minutes), lazy man’s nap (50 to 90 minutes) and the traditional power nap (exactly 20 minutes).

Contrary to popular opinion, napping isn’t for the lazy or depressed. Famous nappers have included Bill Clinton, Lance Armstrong, Leonardo da Vinci and Thomas Edison. The moral of the story: to be ultra-productive, just rest your head. You snooze, you gain.

• 10 benefits of power napping and how to do it

IBM has built a data center in the virtual world of Second Life. It’s part of the company’s Big Green energy saving initiative designed to cut dramatically the power consumed by data centers. Not for an airy fairy save the world reasoning, but more importantly as businesses can no longer get the electrical power they need to expand and grow, making as the IBM video puts it “important capital investments” ie: buying more IBM kit

A fairly good explanation by Forrest Norrod (General Manager for Dell’s Data Center Division), as to why data centers are important, and what “Hyperscale” data centers are. You’ll have to forgive his over plugging of Dell…

2Advanced demonstrate yet again that they are better than everyone else when it comes to graphical design and purdyness. See data centers and delivery of IT infrastructure are important to all aspects of business, even you arty types need people like me!