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Idiots Guide to Server Set UP (23)

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Now I've been meaning to get my server side stuff handled for so long, but truth be told this shit bores me, my eyes glaze over when I read about it and I eventually say fuck this noise and go do something else.

On the weekend I decided to finally get my shit in order and well the results:



Now there aren't many clicks, I could let this run for a week to really prove it, but I've ran these landers for the past 2 years on my old set and well I've never scene these CTR's. (Disclaimer: I also optimized these landers, so the results aren't 100% from the server change, will include tools I used)

This set up can handle any country and any amount of volum you can throw at it, is it the best possible set up? No that would be dedicated servers in every freakin country, ain't no body got time for that.

Alright you've convinced me Dan explain how to get this bomb as server set up and how much its going to run me, well sir it cost me a total of $20 bucks in the beginning! And that was to register 2 domains!

We Begin

Step 1 - Domains Cost $0-$20
With this set up you actually don't need any domains, but its way better if you get at least 1. I recommend 2:
1 For Tracking (well cname tracking, we will get to that)
1 For Hosting (well cname hosting, we will get to that)
You can use ones you already have etc.

I use namecheap and register .coms dunno why I just like them. If you can't do this then god help you.

Step 2 - dnsmadeeasy.com: First month free, like $40 bucks for a year after

This site handles your DNS registery and apparently its pretty much the shit when it comes to that.

http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2012/08...naged-dns.html

There is some other charts that make it look awesome, can't find them at the moment.

Sign up and add your domains and then go back to where you bought your domains and change your DNS to your new dnsmadeeasy

For you simpletens:


Step 3 - Rackspace Set Up Cost? At small volumes dickall

Our STM Amigo Iamattila has made a guide far better than I plan to, so check it out here:

http://iamattila.com/media-buying-10...ding-pages.php

Sweet read right? Ok so now you have rackspace set up and you have your cdn url (hint part 4, number 2 in his guide)

Step 4 - Making Rackspace and dnseasy friends

OK, so in rackspace I make a container(shown in Iamattila's guide) for every country I'm working in. I then add all my LP's for that country into that folder along with all the files the Lp has. It looks like a shit show, but I dunno any better options. I then change all my lps to lp1.html, lp2.html.

Please not I then take all my images / javascripts I've uploaded to rackspace and use those links in my landers:


So in my landers html, the href used to read 'images/go.gif' it now reads 'http://f6fa5eb22686ab51b399-6da48505aeanotrealab5d7fe43e8475ff.r87.cf1.rackcdn .com/go.gif'

Now you should have your entire landers hosted on your rackspace as:
http://f6fa5eb22686ab51b399-6da48505...n.com/lp1.html
http://f6fa5eb22686ab51b399-6da48505...n.com/lp2.html

Killin it!

Grab the cdn url (hint part 4, number 2 in his guide) and head over to dnsmadeeasy. Click on your hosting url.

This should pop up:

Then:


You need to add a . to the end of your 'alias to' in order to get rid of the trailing domain

We just added a se subdomain to our hosting domain that points to our rackspace 'se conatiner'

So right now we should be able to type in:
se.domain.com/lp1.html and get our LP!
se.domain.com/lp2.html etc

You can have a sub domain for every country and control your landers that way.

Step 5 - Voluum: free for now

So many guides explaining this beast, for me it was really straight forward. We do need to cname our trackingdomain with dnsmadeeasy to point to Voluum
so subdomain: track domain: trackingdomain.com cname: fbwjke.trackvoluum.com




The End

You now have a tracking set up that can compete with the top dogs in the industry, in any country you want and it cost you $20 bucks!

Tools I used to optimize my landers:
http://gtmetrix.com/
http://www.textfixer.com/html/compre...ompression.php
http://cssminifier.com/
And photoshop to reduce image size consierably and http://www.punypng.com/

Hoped this helped at least someone!

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Much appreciated! Definitely will be helpful for the fresh STMers.

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amazing guide! I now did the same setup for myself.

I have following question:

Why do I need to setup CNAME at all? cant I just use the HTTP Link Im getting from rackspace and use it with my tracker?

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You defiantly can, I just prefer people not seeing f6fa5eb22686ab51b399-6da48505aeanotrealab5d7fe43e8475ff.r87.cf1.rackcdn .com/lp1.html as the url. I'm not sure if it effects CTRS just seems a little dodgy if they look at it

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You could always use Rackspace cloud DNS which comes completely free with your account

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Didn't know they had that, great add on!

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I want to thank you again bro, this setup is killing it! Amazing!

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Just used this guide today when setting up rackspace to speed up my landers, thanks!

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you can just used namecheap dns, rather than 3rd party one

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Namecheap DNS will work fine for most setups.

I know that when I run really compact mobile landers, the lookup time on my DNS becomes almost 25% of my total load time.

Reducing this by half by using a $30/year service ends up shaving 10% off my page load times.

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@allthegold what you used to measure the DNS loadtime ?

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When I was doing my research it said that dnsmadeeasy destroyed most others (namecheap, godaddy etc), I believe rackspace was a pretty decent ranking as well. So to me $40 a year was a no brainier.

*I never actually split tested the DNS results

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CDN's are great and all but what if you want to call out user GEO? I honestly think thats one of the best things you can do to further localize a landing page and if you arent doing it then your hurting your conversions.... so unless your lander wouldnt make sense to use PHP stuff like this then its fine but other than that i dont see myself using CDNs mainly for this reason... :/

For mobile: You can call out the carriers, model of phone, etc and with CDNS you cant do that so why would people use them? I can probably guarantee if you do that your conversions will increase even if its not "as fast".

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Great topic!

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why not use js for the geo call out or use cloudflare as a cdn.

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Yah I would opt for that route - you may sacrifice something with the geo info spawning in and the user seeing it, but for mobile, you really want to minimise the time-to-glass and IMO the best way to do this is by positioning the server closer to the user.

You could always split test anyway... server + PHP (w or w/o CloudFlare) vs CDN-based with JS lookups from your server.

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Awesome share bro, thanks for that! I am a complete idiot with technical shit, this is a great thread for the newcomers,

Legend!

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man im having a hell of a time setting this up... and im usually pretty good with setting up server stuff.
if anybody who has this dialed in could pm/skype id appreciate it
bjmaks on skype

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I'm pretty sure rackspace only offer managed server plans now -- back when this guide was written I think they were doing unmanaged plans very cheaply.

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Correct, they have gone down the managed-only route. They only want to work with clients who want this kind of service, i.e. managed Rackspace Cloud.

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thanks for the heads-up, I signed up in a rush and didnt really pay attention to what I was signing up for under the assumption it was just a CDN... Just cancelled and doesnt look like I was charged.

edit: just signed up to XCDN @ $0.14/GB plan.

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How are you going with XCDN? I've bailed on them and gone to maxCDN -- I feel like their service and support are much better than XCDN, but YMMV.

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Great guide, worked spot on for me today, cheers

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