Websites and Servers
We ourselves went through a lot of experimentation and testing with various website and server setups before we arrived at what we believe is the best available for its price: Plone running on top of Zope which runs across a set of clusters of servers distributed around the world.
This allows a single interface to a highly resilient and powerful website infrastructure which enjoys superior access speeds from around the world through a technology called geotargeting: this simply connects you to your geographically nearest server, thus enabling consistently speedy page loads and access times no matter your location in the world. Want some proof? Go to justping.com and try measuring the world ping times for your average LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) provider. Now compare them to a site hosted by ned Productions Ltd - we are accessible from every part of the world in less than 200ms with the exception of Southern Africa!
As a result of our distributed service, we are also much more capable of handling bursts in traffic or network or server disruption: traffic automatically redirects itself to a different server should a particular server go down. Each node is also capable of orphaning itself for short periods of time which allows us to perform maintenance: it simply serves page content from a locally held cache until the primary data store comes back online.
Finally, we endeavour wherever possible to provide IPv6 connectivity to all our services, even though it may not always be as fast as IPv4 service provision: you can be safe in knowing that we have the future covered.
Our Server Locations
At the present time, these are as follows:
- ns1.nedproductions.biz
This is the primary ned Productions geotargeting nameserver and is presently located in Montreal, Canada with an outstanding low latency connection worldwide via New York, the telecommunications centre of the world. Whenever a ned Productions Ltd hosted website is accessed, this server decides where in the world you are and it directs you appropriately in less than a third of a second no matter your location (excepting Southern Africa). - europe1.nedproductions.biz
This server cluster is based in Roubaix, France in the OVH datacentre. OVH is Europe's largest server provider and has outstanding connectivity as far west as the US eastern seaboard and good connectivity into Russia, Northern Africa, the Middle East as far east as India. All ned Productions Ltd server data is held in Europe to take advantage of European data security and privacy law. - us1.nedproductions.biz
This server cluster is based in Los Angeles, USA in the BlueSquare colocation of the PacificRack datacentre. This has outstanding connectivity within North America and good connectivity with South America, Japan, Australia, China and the remainder of South East Asia. In short, this cluster is well connected to everywhere the European cluster is not.
A portfolio of our Plone customisation work
LowEndDedi.net:
One of the earlier sites we deployed on the above platform was lowenddedi.net, a database of dedicated servers costing less than €35/month to rent. Being experienced in server management, we believed that we could develop a business model based on a distributed platform of low end unmanaged dedicated servers which would equal or surpass the performance of the typical Plone deployment solutions costing hundreds or thousands of euro a month. At such a low price level there is an immense difference between products - and no unified list of low end products existed on the internet at that time simply because no one had yet thought to do so, so even finding the available offerings in order to compare them was hard and we keep finding providers which we missed first time round!
We developed a custom Plone datatype - a "dedicated server entry" type - to act as the database records for the site. The data fields are fully integrated into the search catalog of Plone, thus allowing the Collection Summaries on the right hand column as well as live search and other useful categorisations.
We also integrated a live connection to currency exchange rates from Google Finance which are used to add a live price conversion to each entry in the summary page - the table is also sortable by columns allowing quick perusal.
We took a very light approach to the theming of this site: it simply consists of the standard Plone theme enhanced with CSS3 round corners and ClearType fonts to improve its visual appearance. In case you're thinking it looks awfully similar to this site, you'd be right - we simply copied over the theme as it looks better on newer browsers while silently reverting almost to the Plone theme on older browsers.
DeeperEconomics.org:
This site was set up as a portal for an upcoming series of study books for Economics students and it is an excellent example of a heavy theme customisation of Plone (please do ignore the dreadful logo - it is merely a placeholding mockup awaiting the 99designs treatment). The intent behind the theming was to convey a sense of depth into the unknown, hence the choice of light content on a dark background with space-like fractal images used as the backdrop to convey a sense of nature, but with a definite definedness about it reminiscent of Economics. The screenshot does the site no justice - you should visit it in order to see for yourself.
Many advanced techniques were used in the design of this site which pushes current web browser technology to its limits. Firstly, the backdrop gradually changes over time between various 1920x1200 high definition images with an automatic switchover to using 1024x768 reduced size versions on lower resolution screens. The backdrops remain static with the foreground content scrolling over them - a great deal of testing on low end hardware was performed to ensure that the site remained usable during backdrop transitions across all the main web browsers: for example, current versions of Firefox are extremely slow in performing alpha transparency fades.
Cutting-edge CSS3 techniques were used: as one can see, much use was made of colours with alpha transparencies with CSS3 box shadowing used to blur the edges and CSS3 round corners. In order to enhance contrast to aid reading and prevent eye tiredness, a subtle black outline was added to all text via CSS3 text shadowing. An automated system extracts academic and ISBN book references from the text and generates a hyperlinked Bibliography at the bottom of each page linking into RePEC, the main bibliographic database in Economics, and Google Books.
Alpha transparency was selectively disabled in places - we found that the forums did not lend well to it as well as a few other places. Also, for some very low end computers (e.g. netbooks) we added the ability to disable some of the CSS3 features at the bottom of each page - the setting is stored as a cookie and remembered for future visits.
Lastly, despite that the site looks best in Firefox and Google Chrome, it still looks well and functions perfectly in Opera and Internet Explorer v8. It also scales itself to display size so it will make good use of 1920 x 1200 displays but is still perfectly usable on 1024 x 600 netbook sized displays.