After our server was attacked by a Trojan last month – which was attacking other servers in the data centre – we had to completely rebuild it, this resulted in several days downtime and over a week of disruption.

Although we never managed to locate the source of the virus, we did manage to reload the server and restore the most recent backup – although it was a few days old.

The events had obviously done some damage as it took several weeks for our traffic to build up again. Hopefully all is resolved now.

It did teach us a few important lessons though – we have since removed all other domains from shareworlds server – making it easier to restore backups in the event of a problem.
We also run multiple backup schedules now – you really don’t want to be relying on one backup source – JUST IN CASE!!

Most importantly it taught us that a backup plan is no good unless it’s fully tested on a regular basis – when we went to restore our very latest backup, we found it was corrupt, as were the last few days backups – so if you are running any critical service, your backups need to be check regularly and your backup plan needs to be tested in a real scenario and on a regular basis.

I was once advised that these redirects should really be kept forever. However, I was fed up with the size of the htaccess file – considering this has to be accessed every time a page is loaded, thats quite a demand on the server.

So, I decided to check all the pages listed for Shareworld using “site:www.shareworld.co.uk” and found that a lot of the old pages I had redirected with htaccess (301) were no longer showing up in the list of pages indexed by Google – so I thought it would be safe to delete the redirects in question.

I have now managed to reduce my htaccess file from 100k down to 20k! Lets see if that makes any difference…

This is a great tool that puts another light on search engine optimisation – as most people will know, Google has recently confirmed the completion of its new search index – Google Caffine, which takes the speed of a website much more seriously.  The link above will take you to a great (and free) online tool that will test the speed of your website – and the factors that effect the result – it will detail for you the size of your page, the amount of objects on the page, size of css,images,javascript etc and it also gives you advise on how to optimise your site for speed.

The great thing about this tool is that once you start reading the recommendations, you get enveloped in it – I ended up learning about, and implimenting CSS Sprites, optimising external JS files and removing space amongst other things.

Lastly, I love the websites layout, its actually a very basic design, but I think it looks great – and its one of those websites you can tell has been built on functionality, whats more, it actually validates – which isnt seen much these days!!!

Take a look:  http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/sample.html

To enable it, goto Exchange system manager>Global Settings> Internet Message Format>Default> Properties>Advanced And tick “allow out of office responses”. Then restart the SMTP server, and all should work!!

References: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/821899

If you are interested in SEO this is a must watch – there are some great tips in the video presented in a practical manner.

Click here to Watch the Video.