Image by TheBrockenInaGlory

A denial-of-service (DoS) is an attempt to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its users. For many businesses, that translates as an attempt to overload your website with spam traffic, with the aim of sending it offline. DDoS simply means distributed denial-of-service, or, in other words, many different computers bombarding your site at once in order to be more effective in their goal, and harder to identify and stop.

DDoS on the increase

DDoS attacks are on the increase. In 2012, a survey by analytics company Neustar showed that 22% of UK companies had experienced a disruptive DDoS attack during the year, 37% of which had lasted more than 24 hours. By 2014, Neustar’s survey showed that the proportion of UK companies suffering an attack had risen to 30%, while the figure for North America was a staggering 60%.

In June 2014, research by BT showed that 41% of organisations around the world had been hit by DDoS during the preceding year, with more than three quarters of those (78%) targeted twice or more in the year. One-in-five organisations have had their systems taken down for an entire working day.

DDoS attacks that make the news are usually large scale attacks on large companies. But the numbers above show that organizations of all types and sizes are affected. Neustar’s 2014 research showed the highest rate of increase to be among retail companies, who also have the most revenues at stake. At the time of writing, a quick Google news search shows news of overnight attacks on XBox Live, the City of Ottawa, a DNS company and many, many game servers. The list goes on.

Why do people perform DDoS attacks? Find out in our guide to website security threats.

Cost implications go further than revenues. Neustar’s 2014 research shows that 33% of DDoS attack mitigation involved 6 or more people. The disruption notably affects staff in the IT, customer service, call center and risk management departments.

Be prepared before it happens

The first step in any DDoS plan is to evaluate the potential cost of disruption to the different elements within your IT systems. The impact of a DDoS attack on a corporate blog, for example, will be a lot less than a website that is your main revenue generator, or a system that is a lynchpin in your operations. The higher the impact of a DDoS attack, the more justified time and money invested in protection.

See our article: how much downtime is acceptable?

Mitigating the risk of DDoS attacks means understanding your hosting architecture. Once you have evaluated the elements within your IT systems, understand where they reside on your servers. By knowing which server ports relate to business-critical services, you can ask your hosting provider to close down non-critical ports once you know that you are under attack.

Speak to your hosting provider to understand the steps and the delay involved in making this request, as well as the price of any system administration provided.

Now lets consider those critical components, like your website. An overhead of server and network capacity will allow your systems to handle surges in traffic, whether caused by DDoS or spikes in demand for your services, but comes at a price. The distributed and sophisticated nature of DDoS attacks means that firewalls do not provide comprehensive protection – firewalls do not necessarily detect traffic anomalies, only filter out known bad traffic, while the inline nature of Firewalls means they are actually a target of DDoS attacks that seek to saturate their capacity and cause a failure.

Instead, more sophisticated DDoS protection solutions are needed. These may take the form of data center hardware, offered by providers like Cisco, or network level solutions like Incapsula that are more suitable for servers hosted in a third party data center with a hosting provider like iWeb.

Incapsula DDoS protection, website security and CDN are available to iWeb customers.

Network level solutions like Incapsula are useful because much of the cost incurred is only incurred with your consent at the moment of an attack. These solutions use a variety of traffic anomaly detection, content delivery networks and traffic filtering to both reduce the impact of DDoS and provide the bandwidth capacity to cope with the attack. Since volume attacks can be measured in Mbps (megabits per second), network level solutions like Incapsula are priced according to the level of protection required at a given moment in time, itself determined by the gravity of the attack and the capacity of your network to cope with the traffic surge.

Example DDoS protection pricing

Neustar’s 2014 survey reported the following distribution of DDoS attack volume, measured in bps (bits per second).

Data source: Neustar

At the time of writing, optional DDoS protection from iWeb, powered by Incapsula is priced as follows (price also includes content delivery network, comprehensive website security, application firewall and many other services).

• 1Gbps DDoS Attack Level – $300 (per month recurring)
• 4Gbps DDoS Attack Level – $1000 (one off option in the event of an attack)
• 8Gbps DDoS Attack Level – $3000 (one off option in the event of an attack)
• Unlimited  Attack Level – Variable price (one off option in the event of an attack)

Find the full information and pricing here.

Sources and resources

How to tell if you’ve been hit by a DDoS attack, and 5 ways to be prepared (IT Pro Portal, June 3, 2014)
Disruptive cyber attacks a growing concern for UK organisations (BT, June 30, 2014)
2014 Neustar Annual DDoS Attacks and Impact Report (Neustar)
Defeating DDoS attacks (Cisco)
Anatomy of a DNS DDoS Amplification Attack (Watchguard)

Step 1: Initial Setup

As a small startup looking to provide a wide variety of digital services ranging from website design and development to application development and web optimization, we initially just needed to find an easy and affordable hosting solution to get us started.

The challenge

If you are not really tech savvy, or if you don’t know a whole lot about servers and hosting, it can get scary to make a choice of server architecture. As small business owners it’s easy to be drawn to the more affordable “entry-level” solutions. Being on a tight budget doesn’t help to make a clear decision.

Hosting solution #1: 1x “unlimited” Shared Hosting plan
(available from hostgator, funio, 1&1, and many more).

Step 2: Taking Control

No so long after we had started up, we received our first project requiring a small web application in addition to a website. We needed a specific framework to develop this web application, and that’s when we faced one of the major drawbacks of shared environments: the lack of control over the server. After such a short period, we were already in need of a new server.

The challenge

Rather than looking further ahead, we made the mistake of only looking for a quick solution to our current problem. What we should have done is take the time to analyze the needs that we might have in the future, and choose a solution adapted to our goals.

Hosting solution #2: Addition of a VPS server
(available from bluehost, godaddy and many more).

Step 3: Growth

As time went by we needed more and more resources in order to host our growing roster of websites. But once again, instead of looking for a longer-term solution right away, we kept pursuing the same path towards inevitable limitations.

The challenge

Our challenge was to dissociate ourselves from a hosting solution that was clearly not suited for our needs, even though we had invested a lot in it. We did not meet this challenge! We continued to expand on shared hosting and VPS, finding out the hard way that the longer you wait to get a long-term solution in place, the more it will be painful to switch.

Hosting solution #2 (XL):
Addition of 2 more “unlimited” Shared Hosting plans
Addition of another VPS
Upgrade of the first VPS

Step 4: New beginning

Finally, it started to become very clear that we had made some bad hosting decisions and that we needed to make a step up in order to evolve and offer the right kind of service to our clients.

Most of our more bulky websites were very slow, and this was affecting the conversion rate and other performance metrics, as well as their SEO. We had similar problems regarding our applications, especially on mobile.

We needed better performance on all fronts, so we looked into possible alternatives: cloud servers and dedicated servers (or perhaps even both).

The challenge(s)

Switching from the user-friendly cPanel of a shared or vps server to a blank server can be frightening. To our surprise, we found out that cPanel is actually available on cloud and dedicated servers, which would have made these options a far more appealing choice if we had known. But it can still be a daunting prospect to find the right server when you don’t know much about hardware, which is why we opted for a scalable cloud server (available from iWeb and many more providers).

Hosting solution #3:
A complete shift of architecture in panic mode
1 shared grid system for our smaller websites
Cloud instances for the web applications and bigger websites

The key to this solution is that we have private servers that we can scale up and out when we need to. Although we chose cloud hosting, the same applies to dedicated hosting (although the servers can only be scaled out in increments of full computers rather than scaled at the computing and storage level like cloud hosting).

The future

One other option that we are looking at for the future would be to transfer all of our websites to a more powerful, fixed-price dedicated server. Although a higher outlay than “entry-level” cloud, dedicated servers are also more powerful, and we could potentially host up to ten time more website on one server than in a cloud environment. At some point it will become more economical to host on a dedicated server than in the cloud, with a better performance to be expected.

Looking back

If we could go back we would probably thing twice before initially putting all of our eggs in the shared basket. Yes, it is less expensive and less complicated. But there is some significant drawbacks and is less suited for a serious entrepreneur and small businesses. Quite simply, it limits the services you can offer to clients, and no one likes to say no to customers.

At one point we were paying 250$/month for our shared and vps setup and the only result was some very poor performance. For half the price we could have chosen an entry level dedicated server as well as scalable cloud servers to suit all of our needs with a far better performance.

Why does file exclusion take time?

R1Soft server backup manager is block-based backup. And while block-based storage is very flexible and convenient for storing and accessing data, it is at odds with excluding certain files and including others.

In order to exclude files, the R1Soft system reads all the blocks of data on your server in order to find the files to be excluded, then excludes them as blocks. Even excluding whole folders requires this process to be run in order to exclude all the correct files.

This means that file exclusion is a very useful feature if you wish to exclude one or two files. But when you wish to exclude whole folders and large numbers of files, the process becomes very inefficient and the time it takes to run a backup may become impractically long.

How can you reduce the time it takes to exclude files?

In order to get around this problem, create a disk partition for the folders that you wish to exclude. This is far more convenient for the block-based R1Soft system to deal with, as the entire partition can be excluded from your backups.

Although creating a partition may seem like a big step just for managing your backups, if you’re reading this it’s probably because you have large quantities of data on your server that do not need to be backed up, but would cost a lot of money or resources in terms of disk space and bandwidth, in which case properly configuring your server for backup would be worthwhile.

Choosing a software version

The latest version of Windows Server is Windows Server 2012 R2. However, your applications may dictate that some of your servers run WIndows Server 2008, itself due to be supported by Microsoft until 2020.

To decide whether you need to run Windows Server 2008 or you can migrate directly to Windows Server 2012 R2, analyse your applications. Applications written for 16-bit applications are not compatible with 64-bit OS Windows Server 2012 R2 (but are compatible with 32-bit OS Windows Server 2008).

Choosing a server

Choosing hardware depends entirely on the requirements of your applications. If you are keeping the same applications that you have been running on older servers, it may be that you are considering servers towards the less powerful end of the spectrum.

Minimum requirements for Windows Server 2012 R2 / Windows Server 2008:

• 1.4 GHz 64-bit processor

• 512 MB RAM

• 32 GB Storage

However Ken Hess on ZDNet suggests: “Both of the newer operating systems require 4GB just to run their basic services. Start with 8GB of RAM and 50GB of system disk space.”

The smallest Windows 2012 Cloud Server offered by iWeb is a 1GB RAM server with 1GB of SSD Storage at US$0.06 per hour (or $43.80 per month based on 730 hours).

The smallest Dedicated Server offered by iWeb is an Intel® Core™ i3-540 3.06GHz H/T with 8GB RAM and 2TB of Storage + SW RAID at US$89 per month (clearance servers available for less).

Test and production environments

Migration that requires a change of hosting architecture, hardware or operating system will require some testing and configuration (if not development) in order to make applications compatible and to manage security. In order to properly test your applications it’s therefore necessary to have at least two identical environments: a test environment and a production (live) environment.

In order to manage costs you may wish to host the servers used for your test environment on your own premises. But live applications, websites and database that need to be available 100% of the time should be hosted in a professional data center with full N+1 redundancy. For more information about that see our article on the mistakes to avoid.

Another option is to use virtualization to create two or more environments on a single dedicated server.

Virtualization in Windows Server 2012

In the decade since the release of Windows Server 2003, the major shift in internet infrastructure has been the rise of virtualization – the creation of Virtual Machines (VM), each with their own operating system and an allocation of resources from the underlying pool of resources in your architecture.

Windows Server 2012 R2 is geared around virtualization. The Hyper-V hypervisor makes it possible, and Windows Server 2012 and the System Center add monitoring, automation and operations management tools that make up the Microsoft Cloud OS and enable a full Microsoft Private Cloud.

Windows Server license pricing

Following the release of Windows Server 2012, Microsoft amended their licensing to accommodate the new reality of virtualization. Regardless of your version of Windows Server, from 2003 up to 2012 R2, licensing is charged in the same way, at the same price, for the same licenses.

When you purchase Windows Server licenses to use on your own servers, the number of licenses now depends on the number of processors and the number of Client Access Licenses (the number of users or devices accessing the server). More information here (PDF Download).

For customers of hosting providers like iWeb, licensing is based on the number of processors in a server multiplied by the number of Virtual Machines (VM) on the server. A ‘datacenter’ license allows unlimited VM included the price. It is therefore advisable to purchase a ‘datacenter’ license if you intend to deploy more than 2 VMs. You can see the prices for licensing at iWeb in our Knowledge Base.

Resources and assistance

Need help planning a migration? Take a look at these popular resources from your friends at iWeb :)

Planning a server migration – How to turn the pain into an opportunity

Guide to database hosting – Help sizing a server for your database

Step 1: Get your head around private cloud

Private Cloud gives you all the benefits of cloud computing and storage, on your own private servers. It differs from Public Cloud in so far as the users of Public Cloud all share the same servers, and are subject to the pricing and terms of use of the Public Cloud provider (e.g. iWeb Cloud, Rackspace Cloud, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure). With Private Cloud you have the exclusive use of your hardware and pay a fixed rate for software licenses and hardware/data center costs.

Cloud computing itself uses virtualization to pool the resources of several physical computers and allow you to create as many virtual computers (virtual machines, or VMs) as you need. That makes managing your data center easier. You can deploy a server in seconds, or even automatically when an application needs to scale out. It also lets you charge the VMs you create to their users on a pay-per-use basis, which is useful for allocating costs within a business or reselling web hosting.

Step 2: Know the software

Microsoft have converged their server software into a range of integrated technologies (Windows Server, System Center, Hyper-V…) collectively known as the Microsoft Cloud OS. It’s a server Operating System that facilitates cloud computing, in addition to the more traditional Windows Server OS functionality.

So how do you turn this into an ‘Azure Private Cloud’? By deploying the full Cloud OS, and adding the Windows Azure Pack, you can create a private cloud with the Azure interface – your Azure Private Cloud.

Because the Windows Azure Pack gives you the same interface as the Microsoft Azure public cloud, you can offer your users (for example the application/website/IT owners in your company, or your own web hosting customers) the same service features as Microsoft Azure does, but at fixed overhead consisting of the license fees and data center costs. What’s more, you can monitor and allocate resource to the users, and charge back the service at according to your own pricing policies, just like running your own cloud.

In Microsoft’s words:

“The Windows Azure Pack delivers Microsoft Azure technologies for you to run inside your datacenter enabling, rich, self-service, multi-tenant services and experiences that are consistent with Microsoft’s public cloud offering”.

Step 3: Find your private data center

Your cloud is private because it’s hosted on your own servers. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the servers are hosted in your own premises. In fact, given the overheads associated with data center operations and the redundancy you need in order to achieve a 100% power and network uptime SLA, it almost certainly means finding a third party hosting provider who offers an Azure Private Cloud option.

In fact, you’ll need to find a hosting provider that meets all your data center / hosting criteria (location, quality, experience, reputation and service) and that also has the Microsoft partnership, expertise and licensing needed to help you deploy, manage and scale your “Azure Private Cloud”.

Given that there are hundreds of hosting and data center providers out there, making the right choice may seem like a daunting task. But whittling down a shortlist of potential providers gets a lot easier when you know where to look. We recommend iWeb. ;)

Why not Microsoft Azure public cloud?

The truth is that benefit (or not) of a private version of Microsoft Azure depends on your situation. If you’re reading this, you may already know why you prefer private to public cloud. But here are a few common reasons why people go private while keeping the amazing Azure features and interface that Microsoft have developed.

Scale economies: If your organization is of a sufficient size, you may find the cost of equivalent resources is lower when you have your own private version of the Azure public cloud. With the private option you’ll pay for your data center (server hosting) and licensing at a flat rate and that’s it. With public you’ll pay for every GB of RAM, Storage and Traffic you use.

Central control: Don’t fancy giving every application/website/IT owner in your organization the power to spend company dollars in the cloud? You can centralize the cost and control of your global hosting spend with an Azure Private Cloud, and then charge it back to people who use it (the ability to charge at your own rate is part of the functionality of the Cloud OS).

Data privacy and jurisdiction: Perhaps the most self-evident benefit of private cloud is that all your data is held privately on your own servers. For some industries, there’s a regulatory requirement to house data privately. It may help you plan disaster recovery to manage your data yourself, knowing where it is and that it’s backed up. And you may be obliged, or prefer, to house your data in a country or jurisdiction that is not offered by a particular public cloud.

By having complete control over your choice of data center / hosting provider, you know exactly where your servers are, under which country’s data laws they are governed, what your SLA is and what your expenditure will be at the end of each month.

Not sure if a private cloud is for you? Start a live chat on iWeb.com and talk with someone who can explain how a private cloud might address your own requirements. Our advice is straightforward, and free.

If you migrate a multiplayer game between servers, the change in IP address will mean your game stops working.

By using the DNS to find the server rather than changing the IP in your code, you can move between servers again and again – perhaps moving to the latest technology or a more powerful server as your game becomes more popular. Find out exactly how to do it with the help of Evil-Dog Productions and iWeb Game Servers.

When we talk about careers at iWeb, we often talk in terms of culture, personal development and career progression. But what’s it really like working at iWeb from day to day? Come with us through the high security doors, into the comfortable surroundings of the iWeb offices, past the buzzing hive of the customer support center and through the high-tech hum of the data center, and see what makes iWeb a special place to work.

iWeb’s HQ is situated in the unusual location of a small island in the St Lawrence River, where the waters pass the historic southern bank of the Island of Montreal, not far from the city’s center. The famous waterway that connects the Great Lakes with the Atlantic Ocean seems a fitting location for iWeb, serving as it does as a daily reminder that iWeb is itself all about connections – connecting people and organizations with customers, colleagues and collaborators all around the world.

It’s also a location that makes for a special commute. Summer or winter, from the north or the south, traveling by bus, bicycle or car, it’s hard to get tired of the changing views of the expansive waters of the river. Whether it’s the warm blue skies and lush greenery of summer or the crisp air, morning mists and ice flows of winter, it’s a spectacular way to start and end the day, all just 5 minutes from the center of one of North America’s oldest city via a route that passes the Victoria Jubilee Bridge, opened in 1859, and some of the silos, ships and docks of the Port of Montreal as well as the river itself. For those arriving at iWeb by car, private parking is plentiful and free.

Champlain Bridge to Nun’s Island, where iWeb is based.
© Transports Québec © Héritage Montréal memorablemontreal.com

Those who don’t work set shifts will make the journey according to flexible working hours that can be based around the requirements of work objectives, coordination with colleagues, the needs of the family or the allure of the vibrant city of Montreal. Breaks and mealtimes can be spent in a well equipped dining/breakout area, or outside on picnic tables surrounded by grass and trees, under the summer sun. Occasional organized barbeques and ‘5 à 7’ after-work aperitifs are a nice way to break up the week, but you can also treat yourself or your colleagues to a barbecue lunch or dinner whenever the feeling takes you.

Service launch and BBQ at iWeb’s offices in Nun’s Island.

For those looking to relax after work, the island also boasts the largest indoor tennis center in North America, a Nordic spa, golf course and shopping conveniences, and is close to many of Montreal’s most famous sights. The Lachine Canal, built from 1821, is the first leg of weekly bicycle rides throughout summer that also take in the Saint-Louis lake to the west of Montreal, itself part if the St Lawrence river. The island connects with the historic neighborhood of Verdun, a popular place to live amongst iWeb employees, as well as the heart of downtown Montreal, just a stones throw from the Old Port, to which tourists travel from around the world. The Grand Prix Circuit Gilles Villeneuve lies on a neighboring island and is open all year round for cycling, running and walking. A third neighboring island is home to the Casino de Montreal, and the location of some summer festivals and even a summer beach.

“Festival International de Jazz de Montréal” by fr:Jocelynhade.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The dress code at iWeb is informal, a policy that’s both comfortable and practical given the extremes of the seasons. Some departments choose to have a ‘dress-up’ Friday, just for a change, and branded shirts and t-shirts accompany most service launches and event sponsorships, so it’s easy to sport your iWeb colors, as many people do.

For those interested in languages, iWeb offers an incredible opportunity for francophones and anglophones to practice, improve and perfect their second language. Meetings often blend French and English, depending on the needs or preferences of the attendees (iWeb is based in Montreal but part of an American company, Internap). There is an opportunity for many colleagues to take language courses without even leaving the building. And everyone has the chance to practice English, French and Spanish with colleagues from all around the world.

iWeb does offer a great chance to develop your technical abilities, to build a career in the technology sector or your chosen profession. But, at the end of the day, what makes iWeb unique is the people and the environment. And at the end of the working day there are many ways to enjoy all that Montreal has to offer with your newfound friends and colleagues.

Visit the iWeb careers website to learn about current opportunities with iWeb.

Fantastico De Luxe is the leading autoinstaller for cPanel, seamlessly integrating with the cPanel control panel and WHM for web hosting resellers (both available with iWeb dedicated servers).

It lets you install hundreds of the most popular programs for your server in minutes, with no skills required – no setting up MySQL databases, no importing structure, no chmoding files – just one click to install.

iWeb Resellers can use just one instance of Fantastico De Luxe to allow their web hosting customers to install the following scripts, in add-on domains, in subdomains or in top level directories (root of main domain and/or any addon domain/subdomain).

Scripts available for install

How to add Fantastico

1. Log into the Customer Hub and click ‘Technical support’ then ‘More assistance’
2. In ‘Step 1: Choose product’, select the server to which you wish to add Fantastico
3. Click ‘Add or change software’ and request for Fantastico to be added to cPanel

Go to the Customer Hub >

The Branham300 ranks the top Canadian and Multinational ICT companies operating in Canada by revenues, providing industry intelligence and illustrating the depth and breadth of innovative technologies developed in Canada, of which iWeb has been a part since our establishment in 1996.

This further recognition of iWeb’s growth through innovation comes in a year during which iWeb launched the iWeb Cloud, the first OpenStack powered public cloud entirely hosted in Canada, and expanded operations outside of its native Canada in response to unprecedented global demand for faster content delivery via mobile and web services.

As Canada’s most popular hosting provider, iWeb recognizes the need to offer our customers in over 150 countries the most extensive and innovative range of services in the hosting industry. iWeb customers can now choose from new data centers in California, Dallas, Singapore and Amsterdam as well as the latest dedicated server, private cloud and public cloud hosting in Canada.

Find out more about iWeb

Worldwide data centers
The Canadian Cloud
iWeb on The Branham300

The first ever iWeb Fun LAN will take place on April 5-6 2014! Visit iweblan.com to register for the official TrackMania 2 Stadium and CS:GO tournaments, or to watch a live stream of the tournaments. iWeb will be hosting game servers on our infrastructure, come join us and play!

Hot on the heels of our Trackmania LANniversary last year, the epic League of Legends: Internap vs. iWeb in December, and February’s LAN ÉTS, this is our first of many Fun LANs to come.

We chose TrackMania 2 Stadium because everyone enjoyed the LANniversary so much, and we want to see Carl Jr playing again. We chose CS:GO because we’re big fans of both the game and its community.

Alongside the official tournaments, we’ll probably also launch some other game servers like Team Fortress 2, for gamers to test them for future events.

All of this has been arranged by some enthusiastic iWeb employees and it’s all free. The streaming will be provided by our partner CyberActiv. Join us on April 5-6 or follow us on Facebook or Twitter for announcements of future Fun LANs.

On August 16 and 17 iWeb participated in #HackMTL, a ‘hackathon’ event organized by MTLStartupTalent and held at the Montreal Olympic Stadium. The hackathon brought together more than a hundred developers from a wide variety of backgrounds for 24 hours of hacking in Javascript, creating single page applications, Chrome extensions and Node.js based systems, and even integrating it all with hardware. Here’s an account of the event for anyone who couldn’t attend, or is simply interested in understanding what a hackathon is. We also have details of the competition winners.

Friday

Friday began with presentations covering the uses of Javascript, frameworks and related topics. After a quick break for lots of pizza and beer, the participants took to the stage to pitch their ideas and attract other developers to join their projects. Teams varied in size from 2 to 4 developers, and some people even went solo. After that many teams went home or somewhere else to start coding their app through the night, before returning to the Olympic Stadium’s tower for a whole Saturday of hacking.

Saturday

One of the nice things about the event is that it was held at the top of the Montreal Olympic Stadium Tower, the tallest inclined tower in the world at 175 metres (574 ft)). From the tower we could see the whole city from morning until night, a really special treat. But besides occasional breaks for lunch and sightseeing, everybody was there to code.

iWeb donated 25 free dedicated servers with the Smart Layer to be used to host the participants’ applications during the event, and in total one third of the teams used them. No one using Node.js on the server side even considered using something else.

I showed people a quick recipe to have a Node.js up and running in 5 seconds. It’s not a production grade install, but it’s enough to get going. Here it is:

# Create a new, non-root user
 adduser node
 echo "node ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL" >> /etc/sudoers
 su – node

 # Install git
 sudo yum install git

 # Install node.js through nave
 cd ~
 mkdir .nave
 cd .nave
 wget https://raw.github.com/isaacs/nave/master/nave.sh
 sudo chmod +x nave.sh
 sudo ln -s $PWD/nave.sh /usr/local/bin/nave
 cd ~
 nave install 0.10.15
 nave use 0.10.15
 node -v

After that all you need to do is git clone your code, run “npm install” and “node my_app.js”. And that’s it. It’s a simple way to get started, and time is of the essence during hackatons!

I stayed at the event during Saturday talking with the teams and helping people out with server side questions, and I met a lot of nice people and had awesome conversations with the developers.

Cakemail, makers of a e-mail marketing tool for resellers based in Montreal, and the hosts of the JS-Montreal user group, also pitched in and offered private beta access to a new product they are developing that allows developers to send transactional e-mails even from client-side apps. It was really neat, and I’m looking forward for them to make it public. A big part of their infrastructure is hosted on iWeb’s Smart Servers. A part of their team was there too, coding along.

PasswordBox, another Montreal based company which offers safe password management tools, was the main sponsor of the event and Marc-Antoine Ross, their co-founder and CTO, was there helping people, sharing ideas, and looking for great talent. Marc-Antoine along with Cedric Dugas from Cakemail and Lauren McLeod from FlightFox, made up the panel of judges for the finished applications, which were presented around 6pm.

The winners

Most of the teams had something to show for the judges, and it was refreshing to see so many nice ideas becoming reality in such a small amount of time. The winners were:

• Best Team: Jean-Philippe Caissy, Alexandre Rimthong and Louis-Bertrand Varin, with Crypto-Chrome.
• Best Solo Developer: Marek Za?uski with BarCoder, barcode scanning using a webcam and Javascript
• Best Security Project: Mohit Shah, Shabbir Hussain and Sujay Kathrotia with EasySec Suite
• Best Google Chrome Extension: Michael Lakhia mapify.io, adding location to Kijiji

The winners got prizes offered by the sponsors: PasswordBox, iWeb and Google. Everybody did an awesome job coding and deploying their apps, while learning a lot while having a great time at the top of the world. It was fantastic.

You can read more and see some great pictures of the event on Montreal Tech Watch article about the event. Stay tuned for more hackatons!

Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (or “GPL”), Drupal is developed and maintained by a community of over 630,000 users and developers around the world.

The Drupal Montreal community invites you to the fourth edition of the DrupalCamp that will be held on September 16-18, 2011 at McGill University’s McIntyre building.

The objective of DrupalCamp is to gather all those interested in Drupal so they can get acquainted, share experiences and their ideas in person in an informal setting.

This year, organizers hope to receive more than 200 participants and the event will offer, in addition to an open-space meeting format, a number of workshops and conferences (see program for details). A few days before the camp, a multilingual code sprint in Drupal will be held at the Notman House, September 14-16, 2011.

iWeb’s team is very pleased to partner with the event as a sponsor and several of our developers will be on hand to share their knowledge with other participants. Watch for break out sessions!

It’s not too late to register ($20 for participants already registered online and $25 for those who register on the same day).

Be seeing you!

P.S. FYI, Drupal 7 is available as a One-Click Install from the customer-hub (Panelbox shared hosting) or if you use cPanel and the Fantastico extension on your dedicated server.

Font choice, along with page layout, font size and type arrangement, is one the most important ingredients in the overall typography of a page. With tens of thousands fonts out there, how do you know which one to use? Some fonts are best suited for a professional business like Apple, while others are better for a children website. Serifs, kerning or weight can determine the portrait of the page.

Mainly, to choose the proper font, you have to go with your gut feeling when you see the font for the first time. Categories are already established to help you find the correct font (handwriting, fun, techno, business, etc.). By choosing the right font, you can provide a better message to your audience, since the font is as powerful as an image. Tim Brown, the Type Manager for Typekit, said: “I don’t start with a layout and then choose type; I start with type and then grow out from that.” Since a typographer understands his responsibility towards the reader, the best typographers and type designers are obsessed by details, so that the readers aren’t.

Here is a list of a few font websites recommended by our designers:

• http://www.fontsquirrel.com/ – Free
• http://new.myfonts.com/ – Reseller
• www.google.com/webfonts – Free
• www.typekit.com

Don’t be shy to ask colleagues, friends or family about your font choice. Even a glimpse at the typography should evoke some sort of feeling. Finally, typography matters because words matter.

What are your favorite fonts? Do you know good foundries?

Organized by Montreal Tech Watch, this event gathered developpers and product managers from several companies to test the usability of their respective products.

The companies present were mTrip who develops intelligent travel guides for the iPhone and Android; matchFWD whose objective is to connect talent with growing companies; ArtSumo connects artists from emerging countries with art aficionados around the world and Twtpoll who develops tools to create polls to use on Social Media sites. The main goal for iWeb was to gather comments from people who have never used our products, specifically, the Smart Server and its control panel, the Control Center.

First, we were pleased that our product caused a real “Wow” effect! The participants were impressed by the quality of the design of the Control Center, and the disconcerting ease with which they were able to navigate and manage the Smart Server! Although not purposely optimized for smart phones, we also received feedback that our Control Center performed particularly well on mobile platforms. Of course there were some critiques and minor cosmetic bugs were pointed out during the session but nothing dramatic. So, we are confident we are on the right track!

We are actively listening to comments from the community, whether from existing clients or specialists interested in web hosting and software development. Being an Agile organized development team allows us to relatively easily prioritize and introduce new features as well as improve and optimize our existing features. You can be sure you will be hearing about the Smart Server for quite a while ;-)

Feel free to add your comments or questions, we’ll be glad to hear from you!