BlackwaterOps has taken the work out of moving to the cloud. 

The premiere version of the BlackwaterOps Content Accelerator doesn’t “port” your applications, it proxies them so that you can take the bandwidth, and CPU load off of your server.  Because Google AppEngine has Points of Presence (PoPs) all over the world your content will load faster, and more reliably.

Unlike using S3 for hosting Images which requires you to upload your images manually to Amazon, Blackwater Content Accelerator automatically offloads your images to the cloud when they are requested.  This allows your existing CMS solution such as Movable Type, WordPress, Joomla, Media Wiki, to benefit from cloud hosting.

What really sets BlackwaterOps Content Accelerator apart is that you can off load large portions of the traffic to your servers with only 2 lines of code in your .htaccess file if you are on Apache, and it is no more than 4 lines on most other servers.

This is the single easiest way to dip your toe in the Cloud waters. To get an understanding in a safe easy to use environment of uptime, reliability, and scalability of cloud apps, and the price associated with them.

For $99 and about 30 minutes you can reduce the load on your server, and drastically increase the number of users you can serve.  Often also speeding up the load time of your pages.  Or opt to have us do the install, and you will be able to “upgrade” your site to run in the cloud in less than 5 minutes.

The BlackWater GAE  Content Accelerator is licensed per domain.  You will be provided with instructions for installation and a customized version of the GoogleApp for your domain. You can launch on an AppSpot.com domain and then use GoogleApps to map to a subdomain of your primary domain.  At this time you need one App Id Per Domain.

Content Delivery is billed by Google.  We are typically seeing the price of delivery at about $.15 a gig, but your price may vary based on size of your images. Up to 30 Gigabytes a month are delivered by Google for free (1 gigabyte a day), which is enough for many small sites. Large sites can often cut their bandwith costs by 60% when compared to CDN delivery from Akamai, LimeLight, or others. Unlike other CDN’s you only pay for what you use, and there is not an increased price for “overages”. We have tested Content Accelerator up to 500 served images a second. Higher rates can be achieved but require an override from Google.

The BlackWater GAE Content Accelerator v1 includes all bug fixes as they are released.

Item Type

Just Software $99.00 Software Plus Install $249.00

Please allow 48 hours to receive your software as we have to modify it for your domain. We will contact you for details to complete your order.

Due to limitations of Google AppEngine, Images must be smaller than 1meg to be accelerated.

Success in China is not just a function of having the best product, but is also about having the right relationships to get your product in the market.  It is also about having the understanding of how meetings, politics, and sales channels work in China.

Christine Lu brings experience of being born in Taiwan, but having grown up in Los Angeles.  Her years in China working with her parents China based clothing brand gave her the experience needed to become Home Shopping Network’s head of marketing for TVSN.

Christine is currently advising companies such as M1NT Shanghai and Go Green Initiative, the world’s largest environmental education program reaching over 2 million kids worldwide.

I’m this girl with a highly functional form of self-diagnosed adult ADD standing at the intersection of east and west. In particular, where China business intersects the world is where you’ll find me hanging out these days.

 

Follow me on Twitter: @christinelu

Christine Lu is the Top China Expert, if for no other reason than she understands there is no one approach to business in China that will work for all business, and that the little things like “do the Chinese use that type of product” or “is your logo offensive for some reason” or “to be competitive you have to be 80% cheaper” are all balls that need to be juggled, and so you can’t get an hour of someone’s time and have all the answers, you have to engage, research and test potential strategies. 

That said if you would like to schedule a call with Christine Lu, you can book a 2 hour conference call or face to face with her through BlackwaterOps for $1,000.

A typical call involves getting background on your company, your strategy, and then Christine providing insight in to opportunities and pitfalls related to your business strategy in China.

Following the call Christine will provide a potential plan of how her team can help you go to market in China, and potential relationships she can help you leverage to make your entry easier and better received.

Ready to make the move?  For sure?

Have you checked that the new domain doesn’t have penalties attached to it?  Are you sure you sure?

Got your 301 redirects set up correctly? Are you sure?

Google has an official “Step list” for making the move, which Matt Cutts wrote.

• Test the move process by moving the contents of one directory or subdomain first. Then use a 301 Redirect to permanently redirect those pages on your old site to your new site. This tells Google and other search engines that your site has permanently moved.

• Once this is complete, check to see that the pages on your new site are appearing in Google’s search results. When you’re satisfied that the move is working correctly, you can move your entire site. Don’t do a blanket redirect directing all traffic from your old site to your new home page. This will avoid 404 errors, but it’s not a good user experience. A page-to-page redirect (where each page on the old site gets redirected to the corresponding page on the new site) is more work, but gives your users a consistent and transparent experience. If there won’t be a 1:1 match between pages on your old and new site, try to make sure that every page on your old site is at least redirected to a new page with similar content.

• If you’re changing your domain because of site rebranding or redesign, you might want to think about doing this in two phases: first, move your site; and second, launch your redesign. This manages the amount of change your users see at any stage in the process, and can make the process seem smoother. Keeping the variables to a minimum also makes it easier to troubleshoot unexpected behavior.

• Check both external and internal links to pages on your site. Ideally, you should contact the webmaster of each site that links to yours and ask them to update the links to point to the page on your new domain. If this isn’t practical, make sure that all pages with incoming links are redirected to your new site. You should also check internal links within your old site, and update them to point to your new domain. Once your content is in place on your new server, use a link checker like Xenu to make sure you don’t have broken legacy links on your site. This is especially important if your original content included absolute links (like www.example.com/cooking/recipes/chocolatecake.html) instead of relative links (like …/recipes/chocolatecake.html).

• To prevent confusion, it’s best to make sure you retain control of your old site domain for at least 180 days.

• Add your new site to your Webmaster Tools account, and verify your ownership of it. Then create and submit a Sitemap listing the URLs on your new site. This tells Google that your content is now available on your new site, and that we should go and crawl it.

• Finally, keep both your new and old site verified in Webmaster Tools, and review crawl errors regularly to make sure that the 301s from the old site are working properly, and that the new site isn’t showing unwanted 404 errors.

 

If you follow these directions, and don’t have any domain penalties your domain "*SHOULD* go smoothly, but what Matt doesn’t tell you is the time line, or how to check that each step was done correctly.

BlackwaterOps can help you make the move, and verify that each step is going smoothly.  Yes you can do this yourself, but be aware that if you mess it up, there is no “redo” if this goes horribly wrong, so if your site is small, follow Matt’s advice, if your business depends on it get help from a professional. 

The Analogy I like to use, is that I am more than capable of doing my on brake shoe replacements, but if I screw it up bad things will happen so I pay the money to a pro, so that nothing goes wrong.

While many of our customers have thousands of pages to their website which require deep analysis to figure out where they can get the most return on their investment in SEO and SEM, Small Business and Start up customers often have small sites that we can easily assess what work is to be performed and begin.  Hence we are happy to announce our Small Business and Start-up packages.

Ad Pack: $1,500 You can’t rank #1 for every keyword you might want to get traffic for. This is why Google Adwords make sense for businesses of all sizes. We can help you create: Ad copy that will get only well qualified leads; Landing pages that will lower your Cost per Click; and track which keywords give you the best return on investment. $1,000 consulting $500 in Adwords buy.

Get Listed Pack: $500 Get your new domain listed in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Most domains have to wait months to get listed in Google, and Yahoo. We will get your site in to the index much of the time the same day, but certainly within 5 days. Yahoo will generally take a week, and MSN can take up to a month. This package meant for professionally designed sites which have had some amount of SEO consulting done during their creation.

Get Ranked Pack: $1,000 Our team will analyze your site, make suggestions to improve its overall quality score, and help make sure when Google indexes your site that you will score well for many of the terms you are looking to capture. After your team has updated the site so that it is ready for submission to search engines we will use the same tools as the “Get Listed Pack” to jump start your placement in search engines.

Out Rank Pack: $4,500 Our team will work with you to figure out what keywords your competitors rank for, and work with your to take the necessary steps to be on the same page as they are for many of those keyword searches. This is not a comprehensive SEO Package, but it is suitable for Small business competing in local markets. This package includes all of the services from the Ad Pack, Get Listed and Get Ranked Pack.

Getting Serious Pack: $30,000 Our Team will take your existing Website up to 30 pages, and re-work it to score as high as possible with Google. Adding additional text copy where necessary, creating additional inbound links to increase the sites over all rank.

Thrive Pack: $100,000: This package includes all of the services of the getting serious pack, includes a blog post per week about the happenings in your industry on your “corporate” blog, includes a “Girl in Corporate Tee” video for inbound links and marketing on 12 Video sites, Adwords services and Press Release services to boost the buzz of your corporate brand. This package is recommended for companies looking to launch new products, rebrand their existing company, or companies changing markets.

BlackwaterOps can help your blog, online magazine, or other web site drastically increase its ad revenue.  There is more to monetization than just putting the ads on the page, and we can help your pages get every last cent out of Google.

Whether you have an established in-house team or are just getting started, BlackwaterOps can give you the advantage of their years of web analytics experience.  We can help you with:

• Installation: For technical assistance on getting Analytics properly installed on your site.
• Consulting: To help you take action once you have Analytics properly configured.
• Training: Onsite, classroom, and webinars are all available

BlackwaterOps can help you to improve your user experience, verify that the largest portions of your market are viewing your site as you expect, and show you what path users take once they have arrived at your site.  We can also help you set goals, and funnels so that you can evaluate if your web site is giving you the ROI you expect.