Invision Power Services: Invision Power Services -> IPS Company Blog

Origins of IPS offering hosting services

IPS has always considered itself a services company above and beyond a traditional software company. Through the years we have always found ways of providing offerings to our clients from phone and ticket support all the way to our new spam monitoring service and upcoming chat service that extend our software beyond a standalone application.

Soon after IPS was founded we started offering hosting services. We wanted to bring a complete experience to our customers who were interested in both using our software and the advantages of a managed hosting environment that went along with it. The response was immediate and, to this day, IPS hosting provides these great managed hosting approaches to communities.

Over the years IPS grew and we decided it was necessary to stop renting servers from third-party providers. Not only would this reduce our operating costs but, by owning our own hardware, would offer us great flexibility for our service offerings. In 2006 we began leasing space in a quality data center in Reston, VA outside Washington DC and started the process of purchasing, configuring, and installing all the various hardware required. From servers and switches through our core routers and load balancers.

Growth brings us to today

It is now late-2009 and three years after we started, our data center facilities now include:

• Fully redundant, multi-honed 10 Gigabit connections to providers such as Level 3, Global Crossing, Nlayer, Savvis, and Cogent.
  
• Cisco 6509 core router
  
• Cisco 3500 distribution switches
  
• Foundry networks load balancing and failover equipment
  
• Internal and external network separated for fast backups and restores

In addition to these capabilities, the facility in which we locate our equipment also features everything one would expect from backup power to high security entry requirements.

Here are a few actual pictures of our racks and servers:








(For those of you interested: The RES.S#### means "RESton" - with the servers at our backup facility starting with a different prefix plus - "S" for server (routers, switches, KVMs, etc. marked differently) and the number is the ID of that hardware. For example, if you're hosted on "server40" here at IPS, that's actually RES.S1048.)

Managing our own network connections, network hardware, and server hardware has allowed IPS to provide everything from shared hosting to high-traffic, load balanced solutions. We have experience hosting everything from fun, hobby sites all the way to highly visible communities owned by corporations with tens of thousands of online users. Today we provided managed hosting and services for everyone from national sports teams to world-famous music artists.

In addition to community hosting, operating our own facility allows IPS to offer additional services to enhance our software. Services like our spam monitoring service and upcoming chat service were made possible for free or low-cost to our customers by leveraging the resources available to us in our own facility.

Enhancing our software by using our software

Above all else the most important advantage of our own hosting facility is constant, first-hand knowledge of our software's operations. Because we host our own software on the order of thousands of installations the performance of the software is paramount. Our hosting staff and development staff constantly work together to target areas of the software needing optimization. We do not resort to the simple approach of telling customers to "add more server power" if they are experiencing performance issues as we know, first hand, how much traffic a server should be capable of handling using IPS software and can advise our customers accordingly.

We run our own company forums on a simple VPS setup without any fancy optimizations like Sphinx search, memcache, and other specialized server software. By keeping the setup simple we can emulate what a customer would have on the average hosting provider and learn how to optimize our software in a normal environment. We certainly could implement multi-server clusters for our own company sites but we think it's important to use our software as others do and learn from that experience.



Over the years, our hosting facilities have allowed us to grow our offerings and learn how to create a software platform that can scale with that growth. We will continue to leverage our unique position to develop software and host it all in one, managed environment. Those clients who choose not to host their community with IPS can always be assured that our constant monitoring and learning process will benefit them as well through our continued software updates.

Development for the next version of IP.Gallery is well underway and we're excited to tell you about some of the new features you can expect. Please keep in mind that this is only a sample of the new features and not a complete list.

Friendly URLs

Categories, Albums, and images are now integrated into the global IP.Board 3 FURL system.

Category/Album Covers

It is now possible to specify one of the images in a category or album to be the cover of that category or album. If a cover image is specified, it will always be displayed for that category or album, instead of the last image thumbnail.

Sub Albums

Albums now support unlimited sub albums, which work exactly like gallery sub categories.

Profile Picture Album

You can now create a new kind of album, a 'Profile Picture' Album. After this album has been created, any images that you upload to it will be displayed on the change picture page in your User CP, making them easy to select as your profile image.




New Slideshow

The slideshow has been completely redesigned, you can see the new style in the screenshot below:




More to come

We'll have a lot more to show you in the coming weeks, from new features to an improved interface, we hope that you will enjoy this new version!

Works is progressing well on the next version of our blogging software. A lot has already been completed and I wanted to take a moment to share some of the improvements.

Efficiency and Extensibility
I've put a lot of effort into refactoring a few core classes to make them more useful and extensible. The ultimate aim is to remove function duplication and consolidate common actions into single functions or classes.
I've also introduced more caching to lower the query count and remove some of the more intensive queries. This has seen a reduction of nearly 60% of SQL work on a few page views alone.

Categories Return
During the development for IP.Blog we converted the categories system into tags. We felt that being able to apply several tags to a single blog entry was more useful than putting it into a category. This worked well but I felt there was still a need for 'fixed' categories. I've added categories back in and you can select multiple categories to file an entry in as well as as create new ones on the fly.

The following screen capture shows the new interface when making an entry:



This screen capture shows the blog list with the new "Categories" widget showing available categories with the number of posted entries in each.



UserCP Improvements
I've put a lot of work into making the UserCP more functional for the blog. Currently, you can create a new blog and edit its settings.
The new version allows you to do that as well as quickly mass-moderate comments and entries.

This screen capture shows the new UserCP Blog dashboard:



This screen capture shows the new UserCP Manage Comments screen:



These are just a few of the features already completed. We'll follow up with some more next week.

We have added the ability for those that submit downloads to our community resources database to submit blog entries on the community resources blog. This new feature will allow resource authors a great place to update users on their work and promote new features or updates. We hope resource authors will take advantage of this new option to reach out to fans of your offerings. You can find the link to submit an entry on the community resources home page.

If you are interested in resources for IPS software, don't forget to track (requires account on IPS forums) the community resources blog or subscribe to its RSS feeds for updates. Also have a look around the community resources section of our site for articles, ideas, and more for your IPS-powered communities!

While upgrading our addon applications for IP.Board 3.0 compatibility, we blogged about the state of the updates and our plans for the future. At that time, we detailed that there wouldn't be many new features in the applications initially, but instead that we would be releasing feature updates for our addon applications later this year.



Development for IP.Downloads 2.1 is well underway and we wanted to take a moment to highlight the new features you should expect to see in the next release of IP.Downloads. These features have largely been decided upon based on suggestions in our feedback forum.



Friendly URLs

IP.Downloads 2.1 will feature friendly urls for the main index page, category view pages, file view pages, and downloading files.



Resume Breakpoints Toggle

Some customers have requested the ability to turn off IP.Download's capability of downloading files in "parts" (this is primarily used by download accelerators that request multiple pieces of a file simultaneously). There will be a setting in IP.Downloads 2.1 to disable this functionality.



Global Settings vs Per-Category Settings

Some per-category settings (specifically: max file size and screenshot dimension settings) can now be configured globally as well. Once a global setting is set, if you do not specify the fields when configuring your categories, the global option will be used instead. This will allow you to more easily control some common settings quickly for your entire IP.Download installation, while still allowing for finer-grained per-category control should you need it.



Download Sessions

IP.Downloads already supports download sessions (which are used to track the number of simultaneous downloads a user has going). We will be expanding upon this to allow for download session urls. When a user requests to download a file, a unique link will be generated and this url will be used to download the file. Once complete, this unique url will be discarded. This feature will help prevent users from sharing direct download urls, and instead require users to visit the file information page before the download will commence.



Major changes to file storage

Presently, IP.Downloads allows you to upload (or link to) a single file and a single screenshot with each record. While generally this works well, many customers need the ability to support more than one file or screenshot for each record. We will be changing how files are stored within the system to accommodate some new features that are not presently possible. These features include:

• Use of the flash uploader for file uploads. This will allow for multiple simultaneous file uploads, as well as progress-bar support, when uploading files.
• Multiple files per file record. For instance, you might submit "My Home Movie", and then upload "movie.part1", "movie.part2", and "movie.part3" to break your movie into multiple pieces.
• Mirror support. Along with multiple physical files, you will be able to submit multiple urls, providing for built in mirror support by linking to copies of the download hosted elsewhere.
• Multiple screenshots per record

Thinking beyond the above features, you will be able to use the mirror support functionality for other things as well. For instance, you could submit links to "Related Tools", "Required Files", or "User-Contributed Files". By allowing multiple files and links per record, you will have a lot more control over the grouping of your files and how they are presented to your users.





We believe the above features represent the most requested and most needed features for IP.Downloads, and hope that our customers will be able to benefit from the new functionality. We will post another blog update later on when IP.Downloads 2.1 is ready for beta testing, as well as blog updates about our other applications in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!

bbAuthority.com has posted an interview with Matt Mecham, CSA and Chairman of IPS:

http://www.bbauthori...-founder-of-ipb

The CleanCut skin has been updated on our company forums and in the client area under: Downloads / IP.Board / Development Releases

This version will work with 3.0.4 of IP.Board. We hope you enjoy!

New Mobile skin

When we developed IP.Board 3.0, we took the decision to keep the same basic Lo-Fi skin that appeared in IP.Board 2.x, but expand it to include the ability to post, which was a commonly requested feature. Since 3.0's release, we've had a lot of feedback requesting that we expand the Lo-Fi skin further, and create a truly mobile experience for IP.Board users. Now we're pleased to introduce the new Mobile skin.

The new Mobile skin provides handy trimmed-down access to almost all areas of IP.Board, including topics, posting, searching and the messenger. Non-essential information and features have been stripped out, to ensure the interface for mobile device users is uncluttered as well as quick to download and render.

The CSS used to build the Mobile skin is minimal, to help keep page sizes down, but we have added a splash a color to enable webmasters to brand their Mobile skin, if they wish. By default, the Mobile skin is traditional IP.Board blue. A GDK for the few images that appear will be released in due course.

We've designed the Mobile skin to be usable on any modern mobile device, such as iPhone and Blackberry. It should look great on any size screen, too.

We'd love to hear your feedback on the new look, and any questions you have! The skin will be available for testing on this forum in the next few days.

Oh, one more thing... it has topic markers

Good news:

Our demo system has been upgraded to IP.Board 3.0.4 and IP.Content 1.1.0 and the standard time for a demo increased from 8 to 24 hours. Feel free to create an account to have a look. As always, certain functions do not work on the demo system for security and other general oddities can pop up because of the restrictions. Of course you will not have such issues on a real install of our software.

Temporary bad news:

The demo system has been completely overloaded the past few days. We have to limit the number of accounts on the system just because of simple storage space and resources. If you get the "system full" message just check later - accounts are constantly cycled off the system as they expire.

IP.Content 1.1.0 Beta 3 has been made available through the client area for users with an active IP.Content license. It has been posted under the "Development Releases" category. Please note that IP.Content 1.1.0 Beta 3 remains unsupported. If you are not comfortable using beta software on your site, we recommend you wait for the final release of IP.Content 1.1.0.

Please see our blog entry regarding Beta 2 for more information regarding IP.Content 1.1.0.

http://community.inv...ta-2-available/