Software Channels

Workload is not getting better. I fixed some minor bugs today and Martin is still in San Francisco after the Paypal developer conference. I think he brings some good new features that will ease the payment process and improve the fraud protection further back with him. Tomorrow I will leave for the US and spend a few days in Boston, Vegas and the Bay Area again to meet up with fellow webmasters, merchants and Internet marketeers.

While on the road, new blog posts will be rare and I will not implement code changes. Martin will release some fixes until next Tuesday, but I am not sure if they are worth to mention on the blog. We are still working on the new content to roll out asap and when that happens I will put up more details about the next steps on tradebit.

Until December we will come up with some profund changes and annouce them here shortly before we start…

So - have a good weekend, solid sales and healthy traffic!

Just a short heads up: I just uploaded a slightly changed detail page for the product details - it now has a twitter button, that you just need to click and add a short link to your twitter feed.

For that we registered a short domain called “tbit.ws” which directs you to the detail page for any given product ID. These links look (for example) like this:

http://tbit.ws/32050694

and are much shorter than the original, which would steal too much space from the 160 characters of twitter. So, if you want to inform your followers about a certain product: go to the detail page and hit the twitter button!

Additionally: this does not just work for twitter, this works for any product ID you want to link to!

On request of one of our merchants I created a new PDF how-to about adding the PayDotCom payment method and affiliate network to your files. Like Clickbank you can add this service to your files on tradebit, if you like.

The idea behind that is: whatever brings you sales is fine and we try to provide you with the solution for that in an easy and fast way.

Yet registering products on Tradebit, PayDotCom and Clickbank is still some work, because you need to register the product separately on all 3 sites.

Please take a look at the How-To to learn about the integration steps!

Have a good weekend!

Our payment provider Paypal will hold a developer conference next week in San Francisco and because Martin flies over to be there, we decided to invest some more time in the new products after we messed up the database yesterday. We have to become a bit better with that and perfection needs practice. So the official roll-out for our new music section will go live next week - either at the 4th or 5th of November.

While Google announced its new music service this week, we thought it would be nice of us to provide you with all the commercial music on the planet, not just those of partners ;-). For that we do team up with a new partner, but that is for completion and not the only source for next weeks update.

The official roll-out of the files will start as soon as we are finished with the tests. After we crashed the whole platform yesterday we think we need to be a bit more careful with the Terabytes :-/

The amount of data behind that is quite crazy. We are shifting to a full quality of 320kbps encoding with these songs and will give you access to around 3.7 Mio. additional files.

Many of you know, that we are a small team and it takes some time for us to complete the task - so I am back to preparations and database optimization now and hope to meet some of you in the next weeks in person when the stuff is live!

Folks, today the platform was slow, produced some errors and sales took some extra time - during the afternoon up to 1 hour to register.

That happened during our update progress, which we planned but messed up while we started the database changes. I am sorry for that! Today was NOT a good day in revenue and we had some extra support load, too!

I think the worst is over now and we have the database back under control. Some of you already saw the new products, which can not be purchased yet. That messed up the catalog order, too.

After a few hours under extreme pressure, we have solved the biggest issues and the platform works now like it should be. If you suffered from these outages during the day, I sincerely apologize! We try to improve tradebit fundamentally at the moment and it is a complicated process…

Bare with us, while we grow - quality is important to us!

In the last 12 months, the amount of traffic on tradebit.(com/de/es) almost doubled. The amount of storage we currently use is well above 24 Terabytes. With around 150,000 unique visitors and combined with all the spiders (like Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask and all the others), the affiliate calls, Javascript shops and free MP3 previews we are currently pumping around 50-100 requests per second from our webfrontends out to the world.

The bandwidth usage is quite ok, because we deliver so many text and small files that we are not in trouble here, yet we pump around 60-90 Megabits per second in Houston and few Mbit/s on our regional outlets.

We have constantly at least 2 FTP users uploading, sometimes 20, record currently is at 41 concurrent FTP uploaders.

We have an average load of 35% spread on the cluster nodes and host more than 40 Linux servers around the world. More than half of that with ThePlanet in Houston.

Tradebit had 2 major and 3 minor outages in 5 years. We have been hacked 2 times, but we overcame that without data loss.

Next week will be a big event for us, because we will double the amount of products on Tradebit. Until then, I will stop blogging and focus on the updates unless something important should be posted.