WonderProxy will be announcing availability of a new server in Uganda any day now. We’re very excited. When we first launched WonderProxy the concept of having a server anywhere in Africa seemed far-fetched. Uganda is shaping up to be our fifth.
Our provider asked us to pay them by wire transfer, so I dutifully walked to the bank, stood in line, then paid $40CAD in fees & a horrible exchange (to USD) rate to send them money. Not a great day, so I grabbed a burrito on the way home. A few days later we were informed that some intermediary bank had skimmed $20USD off our wire transfer, so our payment was $20USD short. Swell.
In order to send them $20USD, I’d need to go back to the bank, stand in line, hope I got a teller who knew how to do wire transfers (the first guy didn’t), buy $20USD for the provider, $20USD for the intermediate bank, and pay $40CAD for the privilege. $80 to send them $20. Super.
Luckily XE came in to save the day again. Using their convenient online interface I was able to transfer $40USD for only $63CAD, including my wire fee. I paid a much better exchange rate, lower wire fees, and didn’t have to put pants on. The only downside was a lack of burrito. Bummer.
If you’re dealing with multiple currencies and multiple countries, and these days it’s incredibly likely that you are, I’d highly recommend XE.
At WonderProxy we’ve been helping people test their GeoIP sensitive applications since launch. It’s why we launched. Perhaps ironically it’s never been a technology we’ve used on our own website. With our upcoming re-design that’s changing.
Using GeoIP:
- How to use it
- Acquire a database
- Rebuild Apache & PHP
- Handle edge cases
Deciding how you’ll use GeoIP information will affect how much you end up spending for a GeoIP database, how often you’ll renew, and what safeguards you’ll need to put in place. Country level granularity is relatively easy to come by, city level within the US and Canada however tends to be much more expensive.
Our integration goal is to support a nice slogan, for us that’s “You’re in .., Your customers aren’t. WonderProxy: Test Globally”. We opted for Region level as opposed to City, or Country level. We felt like “Ontario” or “Texas” was more impressive than “Canada” and “United States”, but were also wary of the lower accuracy level with city rate (Telling someone they’re in Brooklyn, when they’re really in Manhatten wouldn’t inspire confidence).There’s several options available. This step was easy, we bought ours from MaxMind. We feel relatively familiar with the GeoIP data provider marketplace, and MaxMind has seemed both quite accurate and responsive to updates throughout WonderProxy’s existence. IP2Location is another provider with downloads available.
MaxMind also provides API access to its data. We’ve been leveraging this for a long time in our monitoring systems (we check all our servers to ensure they’re geo-locating correctly), but they’re all batched processes. Waiting for a remote API to return during page load, in particular for a landing page is folly. IP2Location also offers an API, as does InfoSniper. APIs work really well in batched process, or anything somehow detached from page loads.
Our initial build only required the Apache module, this way additional superglobals were provided in PHP. I can grab <?=$_SERVER['GEOIP_REGION_NAME']; ?> get someone’s location, it’s really easy. We later installed the PHP module (using the same database) to support arbitrary IP lookup within our administration systems. We also encoded the MaxMind ISO 3166 data into our application to convert country codes to names.
If you’re taking the API approach life should be easy, there’s plenty of code examples for every major API provider. If you’re using an API you also have the ability to choose different levels of granularity on the fly, full data some of the time, minimal data most of the time to save on credits.
Not every IP will have a result, it’s important to catch these and handle correctly. We’ve simply decided to test the variable and replace with “Your Office” when the lookup fails.
On the API front It’s worth spending a few minutes to make a request fail on purpose and ensure your code handles it well. I’ve had a few important daily reports fail because the API we were using was unavailable, frankly it’s embarrassing.
We've been really happy with how easy the integration has been. I've already added several new integration points throughout our administrative system (providing lookups on banned users, the IP associated with transactions, etc.). For us the integration is really supporting the slogan and looking nice, but there's plenty of practical uses like estimating shipping charges, localizing prices, and adjusting content.
I decided to do this because I was finding our ticket system a bit overwhelming: pages of tickets all awaiting my attention. I had over 60 assigned tickets a week ago. Now I’m down to 39. As a small shop, and without a project manager (dedicated or otherwise), I was doing my best to prioritize tickets based on criteria like: customer impact, revenue generation, time saved, etc. Tickets that fared well in those categories tended to be large affairs, requiring a decent amount of effort. This left me with an intimidating, seemingly endless wall-of-work. Adding Date Opened to the view just made it depressing. The derby seemed like a great way to clear out the work and make the wall less intimidating.
I’m finding my open & assigned ticket screen manageable now. If your team has been working on big issues for a while, why not give them a few days to plow through some easy stuff? I awarded prizes for my derby, giving out chocolate in a few categories: oldest ticket closed, most tickets closed, most humorous commit message.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a bellyache.
For a long time at WonderProxy we neglected internal systems, instead directing our efforts to things used by our customers. We’ve built new products, launched redesigns, then a few more products, all the while maintaining user accounts by directly interacting with the database (including a few update queries lacking a WHERE clause).
This was a huge mistake
As I worked on the redesign for WonderProxy (Original vs Redesign) I added a few basic admin features almost by accident, and all our lives got remarkably easier. I added a few more, and things got easier still. Tasks that used to be a chore (like setting up a free trial) almost became fun. Researching account history is just a few easy clicks, with nice graphs using nvd3, and pretty data tables. Editing accounts in place, with code that understands 30GB = 32212254720 bytes.
Saying things “creating trial accounts is fun” may sound like gross exaggeration, but it’s not. I’m pretty happy with the code i’ve got there, which may add to it. The form supports pasting in an address like Paul Reinheimer <paul@preinheimer,com>, parsing it out to its component parts, and generating an available username. Then in for expiry, I leverage php’s strtotime() function so I can enter in something simple like “+2 weeks” or “next thursday” and have that parsed and work properly.
The speed at which we’re both willing and able to resolve requests has greatly increased. Trial accounts (which convert with great regularity) are easy to do in a minute, rather than 10, so we’re more likely to do them when they roll in, rather than waiting until we’re on the server for another reason. When it comes to customizing accounts, getting an accurate history, and being able to quickly modify accounts has helped everyone. I’m lacking a basis for comparison, but our revenue has also been climbing nicely since the change, having a dashboard to find clients exceeding their plan limits has certainly helped.
If you’re looking at the next big thing to improve for your team, I’d strongly suggest taking a harder look at your internal tools.
Since we launched WonderProxy we’ve had lots of bills to pay, often to ourselves or contractors. WonderProxy is a Canadian company, with a Canadian bank account, when we need to pay someone in the US we’ve had a few options: cheque, wire transfer, PayPal.
- Cheque
- Wire Transfer This requires me to go to the branch in person, wait in a line, pay a lot in fees, then the money shows up in a day or three, possibly with additional fees being deducted along the way.
- PayPal These are easy, open up our PayPal account, make a transfer, log out out again. The recipient ends up paying like 3.5% in fees, receives a mediocre at best exchange rate, then waits longer for the money to appear in their account.
These are easy, we open a filing cabinet, pull out a cheque, sign it and put it in the mail. Then the contractor waits for a week or so for the cheque to arrive, deposits in the bank, receives a horrible exchange rate, and waits two or more weeks for it to clear.
So, everything sucks, bad rates, fees, and possibly involving me going to a bank in person.
Eventually we got frustrated with the money we were effectively losing with crappy exchange rates, and took a look further. We came across XE's currency trading services. It took a fair amount of effort to sign up (various forms to be scanned and sent in), but it’s been fantastic. I log on to execute a trade, enter that I would like to buy USD with $1000CAD, and get a spot rate on the transfer. I choose to execute the trade, with the USD funds being deposited in the recipients US account. I pay XE through my bank’s online bill payment services, then about a week later the US funds arrive in the recipient’s account.
I get to do it all from my desk, we get a fantastic exchange rate, and the transfer service makes its money on the spread, so there’s no extra fees.
If you’re paying across borders, I would heartily recommend investigating XE to see if they can meet your needs.
