We’ve done it! And it launches today…
Advertisers will now notice new ‘targeting’ options when creating ads, these allow you to target your advertisements to a specific set of users. The Branchr system currently supports two types of targeting Contextual (keyword targeting) and Geographical. We hope to launch more types of targeting including OS Targeting and Behavioural Targeting in the New Year!
Branchr statistic tracking systems have been ‘double counting’ each day, we’ve fixed the issue, but will leave the historical stats the way they are, after about seven days, all of the graphs will reflect only the new data.
Sorry for any inconvenience.
We’ve been working all day today on the move, and we’re happy to say that all of the databases, ad servers and load balancers have now been successfully migrated to their new home.
If you’re experiencing any downtime with ads on your site, it’s just due to the DNS propagation of the domains resolving the IP’s of the new servers. This should resolve itself within 12 hours, depending on your internet service providers DNS cache.
We’ve only got one more server to do… which contains the ‘branchr.com’ site, and the ‘publisher.branchr.com’ site, you shouldn’t experience any more downtime in terms of ads being served, but when we do the move tomorrow the branchr.com, and publisher.branchr.com sites may become inaccessible for a period of time while the DNS changes to the new servers.
Since our last update we’ve successfully migrated our database servers to their new home at Rackspace, and we’ve also migrated over our load balancing and ad code generation servers. Tomorrow will see the migration of our ad servers, targeting servers, and the branchr.com site.
Once it’s all done we’ll have our lead engineer tell you about all the new changes, and some behind the scenes at Branchr.
Branchr is making a rather large server move this weekend from our current providers to the much more reliable, and scaleable Rackspace.
We expect very little downtime for accounts and the Branchr site, and no downtime for ad serving.
So, we haven’t blogged (or tumbled?) in a while so we thought we’d just give you an update about what has been going on here at Branchr. It’s been super busy for us over the last month or so, hence the lack of updates.
I suppose the first thing to talk about would be our recent acquisition of the web-based application called Atomplan from Avecora. We were really excited about acquiring the app, and we hope to grow it in the future, it turns out the acquisition sparked some more interest in the application, resulting in various posts on a number of well known blogs. Most notably, TechCrunch.
A little closer to home, we’ve been making daily refinements to our ad serving engine, making it all together faster, and more reliable at serving ads. Behind the scenes there has been a lot going on, we’ve refined about 60% of all the code that makes up Branchr, with a goal of finishing the rest by the end of September, so we can make a move to new servers in mid to late October, (don’t worry, we’re making sure this doesn’t upset service, at all).
Some other things you may have noticed are a brand new design for the Branchr homepage, we think the new design clears things up, and allows our visitors to differentiate better between what the role of a publisher, and what the role of an advertiser in the network is.
Another, quite notable thing that we’ve done is launch our FAQ section, we’re hoping that this will clear up any misconceptions about the network, and make everything more clear. Oh, and we do have rules here at Branchr, so, the FAQ’s might be worth a read.
Until next time.
Branchr Advertising
Branchr today announces our latest unique publisher, Lavabit who will now be serving Branchr text-based advertisements across their email platform.
Publishers! You can now block ads from appearing on your website! Login to your Branchr account to do so!
