Day 35

Review of last week:

Average calls per day: 64 [Goal: 70]
Hours on ROARS: 10.83 [Goal: 10]
Average size per day: 4.55 [Goal: 5]

Better week, things are headed in the right direction.  

Review of OCTOBER:

Average calls per day: 54 [Goal: 70]
Average hours on ROARS per week: Undetermined [Goal: 10]
Average size per day: 4.1 [Goal: 5]

October was a ramp up month and I was trying to figure out what I was doing and how to do it.  Rituals failed and were re-written, schedules were adjusted and honed, word was molded. 

October's ROARS Goal:
-Website  and sales funnel 100% setup

This failed -- the website is setup, however the domain and sales funnel were not setup.

November

November's New ROARS Goals based on October's Achievements:
-Domain & funnel setup pre-product (nov. week 1 goal)
-Product setup, everything works successfully and it's ready to be sold (week 2 goal)
-Google analytics setup
-old URL NaturalCuresForInsomnia.org setup as redirect
-5 backlinks made on places online that drive traffic, and I want to see SOME organic traffic coming in from those links on analytics.

Nov. Week 1:
To achieve this week (mostly today, obviously)

-Buy and setup HowToCureInsomnia.com
-Create wordpress on site (on actual URL, not IP) & install SEO plugin RIGHT AWAY before salient.
-Get the main salient blog established and get the video and opt-in on the front page.
-Have the front page opt-in (aweber) lead to the core content video (the pre-cursor to the adv series)
-Setup the sales letter to be the logical next step from the core content video to sell the advanced series, from there next logical step will be to buy advanced series.

WEEK 2 I will work on the portfolio (the other content), like top 10 remedies, RLS, Apnea, w/e.  I'll do the main design stuff and flesh out the rest of the website then.  Week 1 is pure funnel & functionality.

Today

LOG: 7:30am - 4:15pm
8.75 hours

Linking URL to server w/ DNS -- link to Elastic Load Balancing or a single image?

First obstacle to overcome -- Domain name -- turns out to be much harder than anticipated.

The tutorials on doing this are by default for S3.  I am not interested in hosting with S3, I am hosting with EC2 as it has much more functionality.  Therefore, I need the "Web APP hosting tutorial".

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/gettingstarted/latest/wah-linux/web-app-hosting-intro.html

The problem I ran into when trying to setup the domain is that amazon is not setup to link a domain directly to an EC2 server.  It can be done, but doing so is kind of missing the ENTIRE point of using AWS to begin with.

AWS is all about making MULTIPLE EC2 servers, but you ONLY PAY FOR THE ONES YOU ARE USING -- hence I have a few servers to handle lots of traffic but I only pay for one since the others are turned off most of the time, they only turn on if the first one is maxing out capacity on traffic.

So, what you want to do is set up a load balancer.  The DOMAIN URL links to the load balancer, so the traffic hits the load balancer which then routes to one of the servers.  In my case, it'll only be one, but the point is I can add more seemlessly.

PROBLEM: just to run, it costs $18 a month, on top of the $30 / month I already use on the instance, and I don't have any use for it yet!!

http://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/pricing/

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/gettingstarted/latest/wah-linux/getting-started-create-as.html

However, I finally am really starting to understand how to scale my website when the time comes.  You essentially take your instance, set everything up, then make an image of it (an AMI) the same way you'd make a disc and then make an .iso file to image it.  Then you can burn as many CD's as you want... in this case, you can use an AMI to make as many instances as you want.

And you use the load balancer to control it all -- the load balancer sees your current instance at 70% and rising so it automatically uses your AMI to create a copy of the instance, and then it redirects the extra traffic to the new one.  Once traffic dies down, it terminates the instance it created.

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-instances-and-amis.html

IMPORTANT NOTE!

MY SERVER IS NOT SETUP TO BE DUPLICATED CORRECTLY.  

WORDPRESS AND SALIENT MUST BE INSTALLED ON CORRECT DOMAIN NAME:

INSTALL BY GOING TO HOWTOCUREINSOMNIA.COM ; NOT BY GOING TO 52.11.177.228

IF YOU SET UP ON THE IP AT ALL YOU WILL EXPERIENCE PROBLEMS LOADING PAGES, CSS FILES, EVERYTHING.  IT CREATES LONG LINKS ACROSS THE BOARD IN THE CODE PER THE URL IT IS CREATED ON ONCE IT IS SETUP.

So this is all for later... how do I set up a single static EC2 Website?

All you do... in Route 53, you goto the record sets, and change the "A" (a being link, like <a href="">) record to this: howtofixinsomnia.com. A 52.11.177.228... which I got held up on because I didn't understand that I didn't need an "alias" like they make for Elastic Load Balancers and Static S3 sites... I just needed to edit the value to the elastic IP... that's ALL!!

GAWD. I got off track on learning everything and anything related to this.  It's important for scaling later, and yes, this is the WHOLE point of using AWS to begin with... but man... what a loss... 4 hours and due to it being scatter focused the size today will either take a hit or I'll "NA" it due to the learning factor.  But either way, the goals of this week are getting away from me quickly.

It'll take 24-48 hours to see the change with my DNS since I took the liberty of deleting the old name servers and making new ones in my various attempts to get this done.  So I really hope howtofixinsomnia.com is going to that Apache page in a few days.

/end rant /begin lunch

End of Day

So, what was done today:

-Figured out how to link domain and static ec2 instance (and explored how to scale up and link domain to the scale with AMI's to create instances with an ELB)
-Solved PROBLEM -- creating wordpress / salient on the IP vs. on the URL.
-Bought HowToCureInsomnia.com ... still pending... work will continue on http://52.11.177.228/testwp1/?page_id=14 until then.
-Learned how to use the Visual Composer in salient and how to design pages.
-Found code for placing a video with an opt-in to the right side, used <div>'s to size everything.
-Contacted Hostgator about actually unsuspending my access to my content, not just my account, so I can actually port over the content into a design.

Honestly, not a bad day.  The main things I needed to accomplish today were done, and now I have everything I need to finish up the design work and get the funnel finished with a straightforward port.

While I'd like to have made it further into the design process, it's nice to have a strong understanding about how everything works and to know how to switch over from static to scaling once the site starts getting traffic -- so I know I'm doing things the right way and can move forward with full confidence and a good understanding of the basics.