Here at Envoy, we use the marriage of the Scalr.net service and Amazon AWS to create a super stable, super scalable server infrastructure. Here is a screenshot that I took today which shows the uptime of our servers:

There are other good services out there like RightScale, etc, but if you were looking at or considering Scalr.net let me be the first to tell you that it is awesome and super stable. I think the image above speaks for itself. For any of you out there that are thinking I have gone way too long without a kernel upgrade, let me remind you that the Amazon machines run on modified Xen kernels and the upgrade path is a little different than what you may be used to.

FWIW, here is a link to our case study with Amazon:

http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/envoy/

Michael Taggart
CTO 

Another startup, Mixpanel, just wrote a very interesting piece on their company blog about why they are moving from Rackspace Cloud to Amazon AWS. The post is really well written and point for point explains why they believe Amazon is a better offering than Rackspace. Here at Envoy, we have been using Amazon AWS successfully for a couple years now and couldn’t be happier. If you are curious about the differences between these two cloud providers, or are thinking about using either one for your own servers, please read this post:

http://code.mixpanel.com/amazon-vs-rackspace/

Michael Taggart
CTO 

An industry that we generate prospects for here at Envoy is debt relief. In the United States, and abroad, there are millions of people that get so far in debt that they see no way out. Many of these people will turn to the internet to research their various options which include debt counseling, debt settlement, bankruptcy etc.

Through its various properties, Envoy has been able to help many consumers by learning about their situation and referring them to a company that is setup to help their specific needs. In the process of learning about a particular visitor’s situation, we will ask a variety of questions. One question that has some interesting statistics behind it is below:

Now, this is a very basic question and Personal Difficulties can include many different reasons. However, it is interesting to see what people select as the primary reason for them being in the situation they are in. Here are the statistics for the answer to this question:

Sample Date Range: March 13, 2009 => October 10, 2010 
Sample Size: 819,491

Personal Difficulties: 41% - 333,249
Loss of Income or Job: 31% - 256,133
Other: 23% - 186,628
Medical Bills: 5% - 43,481 

Keep in mind that while this is a large sample, it is biased to our own marketing efforts. For instance, we do not market specifically to people in medical debt which may indicate it being such a low percentage here.

The data is interesting as it seems to point to a loss of job and personal difficulties being the main driver for people getting into a high debt situation.

If you find yourself in a situation where you can barely make minimum payments, don’t worry because you are not alone. While there are companies out there that have been scams in this industry. There are companies that genuinely help people climb out of debt and avoid bankruptcy. To get connected to a company that can help you visit Debt Relief Center.

Internet Explorer, is quite frankly, the bane of my existence as a web developer. While the standards support from 6 to 7, 8, and 9 has gotten “better” it is still not where it needs to be. Our current web development cycle looks like this:

1. Program css/js for Webkit/Gecko browsers
   (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, take your pick they are all consistent)
2. Load up the page/site in IE 6,7,8
3. Start fixing for IE with underscore hacks and other idiocracy
4. ????
5. Profit!

The problem being that step 3 takes hours at best and sometimes can take days depending on how complicated the page/site we are developing is. That leads to wasted time and resources and I know that our company isn’t the only one that goes through this arduous “fix for IE” development cycle.

The other annoying thing in “fixing” pages for IE is that we have to test it for each IE version. IE 6 is by far the worst, but unfortunately still commands sizable market share. We start doing hacks for 6 and then move to 7, 8 and now 9. They each have their own set of quirks and CSS files can get really interesting with all the underscore hacks and such to get IE to render pages correctly. In short, it is incredibly frustrating that IE is the only browser where we have to run fixes for every single version.

Why am I talking about this at all? It turns out that in an effort to promote IE9, the Microsoft marketing team thought it would be great to use the Reddit community to promote their new browser and open a dialogue where they answer questions. Well the community really let them have it. I’ll post the links here so you can read the comments… errrrr …rants.

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/dk3s0/the_ie9_team_responds_to_your_questions/

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/dkk3l/iama_we_are_members_of_the_ie9_product_team_here/

It turns out I’m not the only developer that has some critical words to say about the browser. In short, Microsoft is playing the same proprietary, forget standards, game they have always played. IE just happens to be the product that shows it the most.

At Envoy we develop a lot of consumer facing websites which means we have to bend over backwards to get them to look right in IE. However, one highlight of my day recently was adding the following notice to the login page of our backend. We only use this backend internally and this notice only shows if the visitor is using Internet Explorer. This notice is actually quite important because in any version of IE the backend simply refuses to work correctly or at all, but every other browser out there works perfectly. Quite frankly, we don’t feel like investing the enormous amounts of time it would take to get the backend working in IE so we just show this notice instead.

Why is Internet Explorer a cancer? Because it strangles innovation. It wields a large market share that locks people into a proprietary, Microsoft standards world. This stifles developers that are looking to innovate because they can’t trust that Internet Explorer will render their code the way the rest of the browsers do. In a nutshell, the more Internet Explorer loses market share to browsers like Firefox and Chrome, the better the web will get. 

Here is a link to the HTML code for those of you that would like to include it on your pages, but do me a favor and download the images and upload them to your own server. ;)

Click here to grab code for this notice to embed in your own site.

Michael Taggart
CTO 

It is with much excitement that I get to announce that Envoy Media Group has established it’s first server presence overseas! We just launched an external gateway farm in Amazon’s EU-West region which is located in Dublin, Ireland.

For those of you that are interested, we use Amazon EC2/Scalr/Dynect to direct our traffic globally. This setup has given us tremendous flexibility, redundancy, and performance and we look forward to expanding to other areas of the globe in the future!

Michael Taggart
CTO 

The transition of our accounts and marketing spend from Yahoo to Bing/MSN/adCenter/Microsoft/whatever has been an interesting one to date. Keep in mind that we are by no means a “normal” advertiser. We have existing API access with both engines and are trying to figure out the best way to transition our Yahoo Master Account with ~20 subaccounts over to the adCenter backend. I thought it would be fun to make a quick post about an amusing thing we are working through now.

Apparently for accounts like ours, Yahoo is continuing to handle billing. However API access, backend access, campaign management are all done on the MSN side of things. This lead to an amusing back and forth where I am trying to act as the liaison between our Yahoo and MSN reps. Apparently to have new accounts under our API shell account we have to fill out an “Insertion Order”. We have to fill this form out (as in print out on paper, physically sign, and fax back) and tell MSN our budget for the next 2 years and the exact dates that the order will run. What’s hilarious is we aren’t going to use “invoice billing” rather we will have cards on file for all our accounts that auto recharge in $500 increments. Why this step is necessary in setting up a new account is beyond me. My guess is that Microsoft has some strange legal reason that worked its way down its bureaucratic channels that forces me to go through this pointless step. Why any large internet company requires paper forms for anything is beyond me in the first place.

No problem, I fill out all the necessary forms and voila we have our accounts ready to go. All this to then receive an email from our Yahoo rep that is confused because things like billing/account setup are supposed to go through Yahoo. Interesting. So in an effort to appease shareholders and promote synergy Mrs. Bartz and Mr. Ballmer decide to split up roles that normally are handled seamlessly with just one backend. Somehow I don’t think I am going to be investing in either of these companies any time soon. I’ve ironed out everything (I think) and we are finally now ready to transition/setup new accounts.

I will say one more thing in closing. Both my Yahoo and Microsoft reps have been as helpful as possible throughout this process. It’s nice to see that both companies have some good reps on hand to handle the transition.

Does anyone else out there have any interesting stories to share with the transition?

UPDATE:
Our Yahoo rep just called me back and let me know that there isn’t any internal policy in place to force me to fill out insertion orders. Oh well, it just seems to be a case of wires crossed between the two companies.

Michael Taggart
CTO