3 Techniques that Minimize Downtime

downtime

Since users keep on expecting a stable and reliable service, many web developers and system admin attempt to create infrastructures that are more reliable and able to minimize downtime. In fact, minimizing downtime is necessary for increasing customer satisfaction and decreasing support request. Below, we provide you with three areas that are crucial when it comes to downtime and we also offer some improvements that you can apply on them. Check this out!

  1. Monitoring and Alerts

Nothing works better than properly monitoring your infrastructure. In this way, you can discover any issues before they really appear and affect your customers.  Furthermore, monitoring infrastructure will also aggregate and retain a record of stats such as application performance metrics, and system resource utilization. So, the main purpose is to look for anything weird.

Usually a client is interacted on each host that collects metrics for monitoring, and then reports back to a central server. These metrics will be stored in a database and available for many services like searching, alerting, and graphing. Fortunately, there is software that can help you monitor your infrastructure, such as:

  • Graphite

Graphite provides an API that has the support of dozens of applications and programming languages.  On the other hand, metrics are pushed, stored, and graphed in the central Graphite installation.

  • Prometheus

To pull data from a variety of community supported and official clients, you can use Prometheus. It has an alerting system that is built-in and is highly scale able. Besides, it comes with client libraries for several programming languages.

  1. Software Deployment Improvement

Believe it or not, software deployment strategies are one area that plays an important role on your downtime. Unfortunately, many people often overlook it.

Bear in mind that having a complex deployment process will result in the production environment leaving the development environment behind. This can cause any risky software releases since every deployment is a much larger set of changes that naturally brings a much higher risk of problem arising. No wonder this process can easily lead to numerous bugs that can slow down development and cause the unavailability of resources.

Therefore, the best solution for this situation is to set up some up-front planning. In order to sync your production environment with your development environment, you have to figure out a strategy that allows you to automate the workflow, code integration, deployment, and testing.

Here are some best practices regarding the continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) and testing the software that help you start automating deployments:

  • Maintaining a Single Repository

To make sure that every person on the development team works on the same code and can test their changes easily, you can maintain a single repository.

  • Automating Testing and Build Processes

Don’t forget to automate your development and testing as this will simplify deployment in an environment similar to the final use-case. Besides, you will find it helpful, especially when debugging platform-specific issues.

  1. Implementing High Availability

Another strategy that you can apply to minimize downtime is to use the concept of high availability on the infrastructure which includes principles used in designing resilient and redundant systems.

In this case, the system should be able to detect and analyze the health of the system; it has to know precisely where the error is located. Furthermore, the system must be able to redirect traffic as this can help minimize downtime through reducing interruption.

In order to upgrade to a highly available infrastructure, you have to move to multiple web servers and a load balancer from a single server. The load balancer will show you regular health checks on web servers and routes traffic from those servers that are failing.

Moreover, you can also add resilience and redundancy to increase database resilience using database replication; surely, you will find different database models on different configurations of replication. However, many believe that group replication is the most interesting one, as you can read and write operations on a redundant cluster of servers. In this way, you can detect any failing servers and routing done to prevent downtime.

In conclusion, there are three areas that can lead you to less downtime. If you truly put attention on them, you will have happier clients and of course this will lead you to more revenue.

Tutorial on How to Create the Ultimate UX Design of the Credit Card Payment

Today, credit card is the most efficient method that many people can use. Therefore, it is important for any web developers and web designers to develop and design a payment page that will make users feel comfortable to interact with. However, first, you need to know how good payment page can successfully reduce the risk of losing money.

How Good Payment Page Design Can Help You?

It will be terribly sad to lose a customer at the very last step, right? Therefore, you need to make sure that your last step will contribute you money by designing payment page that contains qualities, such as below:

Help People Succeed

When your customers have reached till this point, the good news is that they really want to pay, so, it will depend on your design whether they can help users succeed in their purchase or not. A good page design is one of the important elements that will determine their decision, whether you help your users succeed in their purchase or rather make it really hard for them.

Do the Job for them

Not only can you reduce the number of form fields, but you can also extend your help by doing part of the job for your customers. Apple in their Credit Card Payment Form detects the type of credit card you’re using and makes it a little bit easier as you don’t need to choose your type from a traditional list. The responsiveness of the form is also important as it helps people focus.

Even though it is rather simple, Credit card Numbers are created in a significant ways.  American Express cards start with either 34 or 37. Mastercard numbers begin with 51–55. Visa cards start with 4. This card can also be used to detect what type of credit card someone is using.

Make Them Feel Safe

Knowing that your customers feel safe is important, as your credit card payment form will be a disaster if you fail to provide a safe-looking environment. Therefore, we tell customers that we’ve invested in the 128-bit SSL encrypted protocol to secure their sensitive data. This is aimed to ensure that we put safety first.

Step-by-Step Tutorial

Now that you know  the reasons, you may get encouraged to create good payment page, right? If you are interested in creating one, you follow the steps below:

  1. Basic Structure

Basic structure of the interface in mind is the best form to start from. Bare boxes represent general content pieces and space that will be filled with UI elements. This will make you stay focused.

  1. Headline and Call-to-Action

The next step is to form two important elements; a headline and a call-to-action. In the headline, we’re  looking for something emotional, but not too catchy. Since we want our users to go forward smoothly, we can design a headline that is quite emotional but not too catchy.

Remember to give a statement that can support your customers in the sub-headline. For example, you can write, “we accept Visa, Mastercard, and American Express. If your card is not on the list, let us know.”

On the other hand, a call-to-action should be precise. Avoid using general things like “Continue”, “OK”, ”Done”-These kinds of words give nothing to the context for the whole process and may confuse your customers. Besides, these words have a lack of sense of urgency. Therefore, it is just seen as a call-to-action.

  1. Safety Indicators

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In the paragraphs above, we were discussing the importance of safety and price in the credit card form. Let’s try!

Moreover, it is important to make sure that the payment process will go smoothly, take a look at some tips below:

  • At the top, we describe about the technical safety provided by the SSL protocol. That’s causing a positive frame around the whole form.
  • Second, we not only inform them about the price, but also we tell them that a refund is possible.
  1. Form Fields

In this part, we design important form fields. This kind of form will let you proceed with the payment without knowing our customer’s name due to a backend transactional mechanism, but you may need the CVV code.

Moreover, to indicate that all data is safe, we’ve decided to place an additional “lock” icon in the form field. Most credit cards in the world will put “/” between two selects of the Expiration Date, we’re I’m addressing the mental model created by credit cards.

  1. Labels and Prompts

At the last stage, we place labels and all the important prompts. We’ve applied the mechanism of the auto-detection of a credit card number. However, since we want my form to respond faster to user input, we designed a place for a credit card icon at the right of the Credit Card Number field.

Since the Security Code is always a tricky field, we’ve secured it with a textual prompt “Last 3 digits on the back. Amex: 4 on the front”, as well as icons showing where to find the code.

In conclusion, all of the attempts above are made to help you close the sales and gain money from your selling; therefore, you need to work together with your developers and designers to produce a payment page that support customers and make them feel comfortable with the ultimate UX design tips above.

The Most Effective Ways to Respond to Negative Reviews

The most effective ways to respond to negative reviews - YWF

Online review is one of the most important factors that can help your online business reach more trust or vice versa. This is because 84% of consumers trust an online review as much as they would a personal referral. This makes good reviews are welcome and bad reviews are feared by the business owners. Actually, bad reviews do not always have to be bad; in fact, it can be good things if you know how to utilize it. Below are some of the tips that can guide you to turn bad reviews into good opportunity. If you are online entrepreneur or web developer, you might need these tips.

Stay Positive
No one wants to get attacked by a customer, but no one can avoid themselves from negative review. So, what is the best way to cope with this negative review? First of all, do not attack your reviewer. In fact, approach all of the negative reviews with a calm, positive attitude. By performing this behavior, you let customer know that you’ve heard their concerns, without even pointing fingers on them.

The point is not to make your customers feel like the victim, even if you’re not wrong. Furthermore, don’t ignore the review as it will show that your business cares about its customers.

Offer a Solution
When something bad happens, simply offering an apology to your customer won’t do. Your customers want a solution to their problem. Therefore, you need to explain through your respond how you will fix the problem.

Reiterate Your Company’s Policies
Ordinary people will worry a lot on negative comments and they will try their best to avoid that kind of comment. But, wise people know that it is impossible to make everyone happy. So, the only way to conquer negative comments is by turn the bad comments into the positive ones. For example, you can respond by saying, “We’re sorry you had a poor experience. We’ve been doing business for several years and most of our customers leave happy. We’re sorry we didn’t meet your expectations this time around.”

Take the Conversation Offline
Since your negative reviews will be read by many people, so you need to respond immediately on the same platform. However, some things can’t be addressed online; for example, your customer’s personal information should be discussed in private or over the phone. Therefore, you need to provide a direct contact for your customers when addressing these types of negative reviews.

Ask for an Update
Don’t hesitate to ask for an updated review after you solved the problem. So, once you’ve solved the customer’s issue, politely ask them if they’ll update the review online. You can ask them politely, such as “we appreciate your feedback, and would like other customers to know how we’ve solved your issue. Would you mind updating your review to reflect this?” Then, make sure that you thank them for their feedback.