Founder's blog

Tricks to speed up your AWS EC2 Windows server I/O

Say you have a pretty general Windows server, that runs Microsoft IIS (webserver), MS SQL (database engine) and probably some basic stuff, like SMTP, SSH etc. etc.

Here are some I/O performance hacks I came up with when trying to optimize our Amazon EC2 instances on Windows

SaaS startups - Beware of Spammers!

TL;DR if your SaaS app has some sort of email-sending functionality in it - beware of spammers who will register trial accounts massively and use it to send spam.

Now that's what I call a Hacker

An ex-coworker of mine has posted this gem to a russian bash.org, so I decided to translate this and steal all the credit post this to my blog under his permission.

How I Improved My SEO Rankings In Just 30 Minutes

TL;DR: You can use a CDN service (free, no technical knowledge required) to minimize your TTFB - "Time to First Byte" - which turns out to be an important SEO metric.

Resolving issues with Store in Windows 10

UPDATE: If you found this page helpful, please retweet it

After upgrading my Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 I started having issues with Metro apps and the Store. It was simply not working.

Huge metric that Google Analytics will never show

Google Analytics is a fine product. It's nice, free, easy-to-install and ready-to-use right out of the box, while at the same time offering advanced configuration options and data-mining opportunities to those who want it.

The history of a radio-button

A radio-button, AKA "an option button" is a UI element known to every web/mobile/desktop developer: it allows choosing only one out of a set of options.

How "Disqus.com" got their Google PR9

I was recently checking my website for unnecessary 404s, 302s and 301s using ScreamingFrog spider and discovered hundreds of outgoing "dofollow" links to Disqus.com. All with the exact same anchor text:

Moving our site to HTTPS and the early SEO-effects of it

About a week ago we have moved our site to HTTPS. I always wanted to, and now that Google has made it a ranking signal - we finally ran out of excuses. Here's what we did:

Pages that can be instantly improved for more search traffic

There are tons of "on-site" tactics you can work with to improve your website's organic traffic and conversions. Like Lazy SEO and A/B tests or even using on-site search data. I'd like to share another handy tactic today: