RPMWare sites will be unavailable tonight (11PM EST) for about 5-10 minutes while we perform some routine maintenance.

UPDATE: Maintenance is done. Your site should be faster now.

We just did an overhaul of our live chat program. It’s powered by the fine people at SmartMax.

We don’t have set live chat support hours, but we do try to man the operator console whenever we’re at our computers. You can start a chat either through the Administration interface in the top right corner or on rpmware.com in the top navigation.

If you’re interested in live chat for your website please contact us and we’ll get you a quote to add this feature.

We’re looking forward to talking with you!

I just read about an interesting new service called UserVoice. Basically it is an online voting system for feature requests, bug fixes, suggestions, product line requests, etc.

The uses for us are obvious; however, it could be harnessed by your shop in interesting ways as well.

• What products do you want to see on special?
• Which cars should we focus on?
• What technical articles are you most interested in?

Find out what the customer wants and give it to them. Sounds simple, yet it’s much harder to actually accomplish.

Well I’m taking my own advice. I setup rpmware.uservoice.com and am opening the floodgates for your suggestions, criticisms, comments, requests, anything you want to throw out there.

Before you get started I have a few requests:

1. Be specific. “Add more product lines” is not a good suggestion; “add Bully Dog Performance”
   is a good suggestion.
2. Before you post make sure your post doesn’t already exist. If it does vote or comment on the first post.
3. No tech support or customer service. We’re happy to provide both by email, IM and phone. We want to respond as quickly as possible to those requests and I’m not sure we’ll be checking UserVoice as often as we check our phones, IMs and emails.

As you know we’re now using Amazon S3 for our image hosting. Today Amazon launched a feature I love, AWS Service Health Dashboard. A quick visit to the website shows the real-time health of all the Amazon Web Services. If you are having any issues with your product images check out the AWS Health Dashboard for Amazon Simple Storage Service (US).

Don MacAskill over at SmugMug has a great writeup if you’re interested in this sort of thing.

We just relaunched rpmware.com! For the eagle-eyed crowd, we actually released the new version on Monday, April 7th but we’ve been too swamped to blog about the redesign until today. If you haven’t seen it yet, head on over and let us know what you think.

Most of the site content is the same; however, we’re working on converting all our printed documentation to html and will have that posted to the new site shortly. We’re also working on a specific video section to keep links to all our videos as well as a few in the works.

Until the videos are ready you can check our our channels at Blip.tv (preferred) and YouTube (low-res).

It’s been a couple days since we pushed our latest performance update live and we’re at it again.

First a little on the update we pushed a few days ago… Our internal statistics are showing about 70% fewer database calls, and pages loading about twice as fast. We’re pretty happy with that, but always looking for that extra edge; we’re speed freaks after all … I’m sure you can relate.

Today’s Update

We just pushed another update live that should give us another bump in performance.

First we tweaked our last release. As much as we test, there is no substitute for real-world performance metrics. We scaled back on how much we were caching and lowered the time objects stay in the cache. We’re not expecting anything groundbreaking here, but every incremental improvement helps when you’re serving millions of pages a month.

Second, we’ve moved all our media storage and hosting to Amazon S3. If you’re not of the geeky persuasion feel free to gloss over the rest of this. The bottom line is your site will be faster because the servers that power your site are no longer also serving static image files. If you’re interested read on …

Amazon S3 is a scalable storage system that provides the storage for Amazon.com, the other Amazon websites and now thousands of independent sites using Amazon Web Services. Think of S3 as a huge, redundant, fully backed up file server cluster with a huge pipe connecting it to the net.

When you (or we) upload images to RPMWare we generate 7 versions of that image (different sizes), save the largest to our servers and then send all 7 versions to Amazon S3 via a REST webservice. When customers are browsing your site the RPMWare servers generate your pages and the Amazon servers serve up the media files directly to their browser.

Because Amazon is HUGE and some of the other sites using S3 are HUGE we benefit from a number of economies of scale, the first of which is leveraging infrastructure that only HUGE companies like Amazon can afford. I have no idea how many servers are running S3 or how much bandwith they have available, but it’s more than we could ever dream of for RPMWare.

It’s completely redundant and the chances of losing anything are extremely small, as close to impossible as you can get.

Our servers have more resources to do what our servers do best. By transferring the bulk of our static file serving off-site we’ve got more power to throw behind powering the core features of your site. Everything will be faster.

It’s infinitely scalable. We could add 20 TB of data overnight without blinking an eye although we’d probably melt our credit card. While that’s far fetched the theory behind it is the same. We can add more and more images and media to our product catalog and not worry about where we’re going to store it all.

Changes

If you’re linking to RPMWare images offsite we’re going to continue to support the old images indefinitely. You’re offsite images will not stop working; however, to take advantage of the speed of S3 you may want to upgrade your links.

Moving Forward

The next step will be moving all your client files to S3 and increasing the upload limit from the current 1GB. Don’t expect this right away but it is on our todo list.

Questions - Comments

We’d love to hear your questions and comments regarding the latest changes. Feel free to leave a comment on the blog, shoot us an email or call us anytime.

You guys have been doing great lately, every month our servers are getting hit harder and harder by millions of people browsing your sites. Pat yourselves on the back!

We just pushed an update live to speed up the sites. We’ve improved our caching, minimized our database calls and optimized a couple of the longer running queries. The update has been live for about half an hour now and we’re seeing response times cut in half and the number of database calls down 80%.

We tested everything extensively before going live but if you see anything quirky please let us know, otherwise enjoy the new found speed.

Today Windows Server 2008 (Win2K8) has been released to manufacturing (RTM). It will be launched at a launch event on Feb. 27th and be available to the public on March 1st.

Why should you care? RPMWare runs on Windows Server 2003 (Win 2K3) and Internet Information Services 6 (IIS6). Win2K8 includes a major overhaul to IIS as well as a faster core foundation. Once Win2K8 is out and tested properly we’ll be releasing RPMWare on to new hardware running Win2K8 and IIS7. While our current servers are no slouches you’ll all be very impressed by the performance of IIS7.

Probably more exciting to most of you, Win2K8 and IIS7 is a prerequsite to RPMWare 2.0. With that out of the way we’re steadly progressing on our next major release.

I’ve got calls into our datacenter to find out the exact date we’ll have 2K8 available, but expect it’ll be pretty close to March 1.

We started our upgrade around 5:30AM EST. We had a few unplanned setbacks but none took the sites offline.

We finally took the sites offline around 7AM EST and had them back up by 7:15AM EST. No Data was lost. No changes were made to your site’s configuration. This was purely a maintenance and performance release, you shouldn’t notice any changes.

If you have any questions or concerns please don’t hesitate to contact us.

It was recently brought to our attention that the live shipping rate calculator was quoting low shipping rates. When we sent rate requests to UPS, UPS was replying with the shipping cost for the shipper, not the published rate on UPS.com.

This was fixed and now all shipping rates exactly reflect what is on UPS.com. Check your shipping markups / markdowns (Settings | Shipping Methods) and let us know if you see any issues. kyle@rpmware.com