Increase Conversions and Reduce Cart Abandonment by moving to Magento Cloud Hosting (Webinar)

Key business drivers for moving to cloud-based Magento Hosting

The Magento Commerce team recently hosted a webinar discussing the key business drivers for moving to cloud-based hosting for your site.

The short version is that EVERY SINGLE SECOND of page load time costs your site money.  The presentation started with a great overview of exactly how:

• You can increase conversions (read Sales) by 7% for every 1 second you reduce your site's latency
• Lowering load times by 3 seconds results in 40% fewer carts being abandoned before checkout completion.
• Maintaining the much sought-after 5 9's (99.999%) of availability will reduce customer churn by roughly 28%
• Migrating to cloud hosting can save your IT budget an average of 15% vs. traditional server-based hosting

I found the webinar well produced and complete with insightful information and anecdotes to help make the business case for moving to a cloud hosting system for your e-commerce store.  Although it was targeted towards Magento, the broader themes are applicable to every e-commerce platform.

The full webinar is embedded as a Vimeo below, but you can find it, along with a lot of other great webinar content on the Magento Commerce Webinar Portal.

Why Cloud? Why Now? from Magento on Vimeo.

The complexity of designing, developing, and managing PHP Mobile & Web Applications in the Cloud

Maxine Giza from Tech Target recently interviewed me for an article on the opportunities and challenges facing PHP mobile and web application developers migrating to the Amazon Web Services platform and how Zend Server 7 can help.  We discussed how Comit Developers addressed these challenges as we migrated from a LAMP stack over to Zend Server 7 running on the Amazon Web Services cloud.

Fair Warning: I did an hour-long interview with Tech Target for this piece and it was pretty substantially condensed. Some addition details can be found over on the AWS blog athttp://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/simplified-php-dev-z-ray-in-the-cloud/ for anyone interested in a deeper technical dive on the topic.

Google adds Google+ comments to Blogger

Google adds Google+ comments to Blogger

It took me less time to enable it on this blog than it did to write and share this post.  You can see for yourself how the new comments look on my blog in the capture above from a post I made a while back.

Here are the instructions:

1. Login to your blogger.com blog and navigate to the blog in which you want to enable the new Google+ comments system.
   
2. Click the Google+ link in the left hand menu.
   
3. Click the "Use Google+ Comments on this blog" check box.
   
   Mine looks something like this:
   

Developing Zend Mobile Apps that utilize Cloud Web Services with Kent Mitchell

I recently wrote about the latest Zend Studio Release, version 10.0.1.  This video from Kent Mitchell covers using Zend Studio to develop apps that are connected to cloud web services.

Additional info at the Zend Developer Zone and the YouTube Page for the video below.

If you're a (free login) member of the site, you can also watch the higher-resolution flv version of the video at http://www.zend.com/en/webinar/studio/70170000000c17m-DevlpMobApps-20130320.flv