In a lot of real life scenarios, services need to store information in databases tables. The tables contain critical information, where changes need to be tracked for security, accountability and regulatory requirements. Typically, this sort of action is not time critical, so adding an audit trail with the same availability and access times as the rest of your application is not advised, especially if you don't want your costs to increase unexpectedly.

In this blog post I will detail an example of how to extract changes made to an Amazon DynamoDB table and store the audit trail of those changes in an Amazon S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service) bucket, making use of AWS Kinesis Data Stream and AWS Kinesis Firehose.

## Architecture

![afe2af11-e264-48ab-825c-4b24ac957eb1.png](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/9/10/afe2af11_e264_48ab_825c_4b24ac957eb1_ec971b9cc2.png)

### Change data streaming

On the initial step of our design, an AWS Kinesis Data Stream is attached to the Amazon DynamoDB table. What this means is, every time a new change happens in the table, that change is captured and kept in a data stream.

The format of the data sent includes: a timestamp of the captured change, the primary key (will be the partitionKey + sortKey), and a before and after image of the changed item. With the before and after, it's possible to understand what particular values have changed.

After this, a consumer, in this case, AWS Kinesis Firehose, must retrieve data from this stream. Its only purpose on the architecture is to retrieve data from the AWS Kinesis Data Stream and into an Amazon S3 bucket.

### Audit trail storage

When data reaches the Amazon S3 bucket, we could leave it as is and be done with this example, but in order to reduce costs of such a solution, we're going to use Amazon S3 lifecycle rules.

Lifecycle rules allow us to move older data to cheaper storage classes progressively and in an automated fashion. The reasoning behind this is, most recent auditing data is the most likely to be accessed, and older data should still be accessible, but we can live with it taking longer to get. This should be tweaked according to your use case.

## Building the infrastructure

### Using AWS CDK to deploy infrastructure

This post assumes you have AWS CDK Toolkit. You should have an AWS account created.

Amazon offers an Infrastructure-As-Code solution, called AWS Cloud Development Kit, or CDK for short. It uses AWS Cloudformation internally to define infrastructure in a reviewable, deployable manner. CDK is offered in multiple languages, we'll use Typescript in this example.

#### AWS CDK setup

Assuming you already have CDK Toolkit installed, create a folder for the CDK code and initialise the project:


```
mkdir audit-trail-cdk
cd audit-trail-cdk && cdk init app --language typescript  
```

cdk init app builds the initial scaffolding for the project. It creates a Stack, which will contain the pieces of infrastructure required. To finish up the setup, go to the generated code for the stack under bin/audit-trail-cdk.ts and uncomment the env: line and replace with your AWS account info:


```
// env: { account: '123456789012', region: 'us-east-1' }, 
```

Let's add the necessary pieces for building our infrastructure stack on lib/audit-trail-cdk-stack.ts:


```
import * as cdk from "aws-cdk-lib";
import { Duration } from "aws-cdk-lib";
import * as dynamodb from "aws-cdk-lib/aws-dynamodb";
import * as iam from "aws-cdk-lib/aws-iam";
import * as kinesis from "aws-cdk-lib/aws-kinesis";
import * as kinesisfirehose from "aws-cdk-lib/aws-kinesisfirehose";
import * as s3 from "aws-cdk-lib/aws-s3";
import { Construct } from "constructs";

export class SimpleAwsAuditTrailStack extends cdk.Stack {
  constructor(scope: Construct, id: string, props?: cdk.StackProps) {
    super(scope, id, props);

    const auditTrailStream = new kinesis.Stream(this, "Stream");

    new dynamodb.Table(this, "TableToAudit", {
      tableName: `TableToAudit`,
      partitionKey: {
        name: "partitionKey",
        type: dynamodb.AttributeType.STRING,
      },
      sortKey: {
        name: "sortKey",
        type: dynamodb.AttributeType.STRING,
      },
      kinesisStream: auditTrailStream,
    });

    const auditTrailBucket = new s3.Bucket(this, "AuditTrailDestination", {
      lifecycleRules: [
        {
          transitions: [
            {
              storageClass: s3.StorageClass.INFREQUENT_ACCESS,
              transitionAfter: Duration.days(30),
            },
            {
              storageClass: s3.StorageClass.INTELLIGENT_TIERING,
              transitionAfter: Duration.days(60),
            },
            {
              storageClass: s3.StorageClass.GLACIER,
              transitionAfter: Duration.days(90),
            },
            {
              storageClass: s3.StorageClass.DEEP_ARCHIVE,
              transitionAfter: Duration.days(180),
            },
          ],
        },
      ],
    });

    const deliveryRole = new iam.Role(this, "deliveryRole", {
      assumedBy: new iam.ServicePrincipal("firehose.amazonaws.com"),
      inlinePolicies: {
        s3: new iam.PolicyDocument({
          statements: [
            new iam.PolicyStatement({
              resources: [
                `arn:aws:s3:::${auditTrailBucket.bucketName}`,
                `arn:aws:s3:::${auditTrailBucket.bucketName}/*`,
              ],
              actions: [
                "s3:AbortMultipartUpload",
                "s3:GetBucketLocation",
                "s3:GetObject",
                "s3:ListBucket",
                "s3:ListBucketMultipartUploads",
                "s3:PutObject",
              ],
            }),
          ],
        }),
        kinesis: new iam.PolicyDocument({
          statements: [
            new iam.PolicyStatement({
              resources: [auditTrailStream.streamArn],
              actions: [
                "kinesis:DescribeStream",
                "kinesis:GetShardIterator",
                "kinesis:GetRecords",
                "kinesis:ListShards",
              ],
            }),
          ],
        }),
        logs: new iam.PolicyDocument({
          statements: [
            new iam.PolicyStatement({
              resources: ["*"],
              actions: ["logs:PutLogEvents"],
            }),
          ],
        }),
      },
    });

    new kinesisfirehose.CfnDeliveryStream(this, "DeliveryStream", {
      deliveryStreamType: "KinesisStreamAsSource",
      kinesisStreamSourceConfiguration: {
        roleArn: deliveryRole.roleArn,
        kinesisStreamArn: auditTrailStream.streamArn,
      },
      s3DestinationConfiguration: {
        bucketArn: auditTrailBucket.bucketArn,
        roleArn: deliveryRole.roleArn,
      },
    });
  }
}
```

### Understanding the infrastructure code

The code tries to emulate the architecture diagram as much as possible, but let's go through it in more detail:
1. Create an AWS Kinesis Data Stream.
2. Create an Amazon DynamoDB table and add the AWS Kinesis Data Stream created in the previous step.
3. Create the Amazon S3 bucket, and define on it the lifecycle rules.
4. Create the AWS IAM role to be used by AWS Kinesis Firehose. The role needs to have permissions to retrieve data from the AWS Kinesis Data Stream, and to store data in the AWS S3 bucket.
5. Create the AWS Kinesis Firehose resource, with reference to the data stream and the S3 bucket.

## Testing the solution

Let's create a record in the Amazon DynamoDB and make a change, to see what the data in the AWS S3 bucket looks like.

```
aws dynamodb put-item  \
--table-name TableToAudit \
--item '{"partitionKey": {"S": "1"}, "sortKey": {"S": "State"}, "Data": {"S": "Initial state"}}'

aws dynamodb put-item  \
--table-name TableToAudit \
--item '{"partitionKey": {"S": "1"}, "sortKey": {"S": "State"}, "Data": {"S": "Changed state"}}'
```

At this point, the Amazon DynamoDB table should look like this:

![0481cd29-9829-4173-9dcf-744e568839ba.png](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/9/10/0481cd29_9829_4173_9dcf_744e568839ba_f89ce2951f.png)

Let's see what the data looks like on the Amazon S3 bucket, inside a file.

![fa79e3ec-9c1b-4008-b1a4-d7ce17bba922.png](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/9/10/fa79e3ec_9c1b_4008_b1a4_d7ce17bba922_9aac2f6b93.png)


```
{
  "awsRegion": "us-east-1",
  "eventID": "65eed7c0-4c74-4e71-b443-3b68b28f9455",
  "eventName": "INSERT",
  "userIdentity": null,
  "recordFormat": "application/json",
  "tableName": "TableToAudit",
  "dynamodb": {
    "ApproximateCreationDateTime": 1662992934392,
    "Keys": { "sortKey": { "S": "State" }, "partitionKey": { "S": "1" } },
    "NewImage": {
      "sortKey": { "S": "State" },
      "Data": { "S": "Initial state" },
      "partitionKey": { "S": "1" }
    },
    "SizeBytes": 67
  },
  "eventSource": "aws:dynamodb"
}
{
  "awsRegion": "us-east-1",
  "eventID": "55c911a3-d0a6-4d23-99ab-c1fd3e4d01b5",
  "eventName": "MODIFY",
  "userIdentity": null,
  "recordFormat": "application/json",
  "tableName": "TableToAudit",
  "dynamodb": {
    "ApproximateCreationDateTime": 1662992947714,
    "Keys": { "sortKey": { "S": "State" }, "partitionKey": { "S": "1" } },
    "NewImage": {
      "sortKey": { "S": "State" },
      "Data": { "S": "Changed state" },
      "partitionKey": { "S": "1" }
    },
    "OldImage": {
      "sortKey": { "S": "State" },
      "Data": { "S": "Initial state" },
      "partitionKey": { "S": "1" }
    },
    "SizeBytes": 109
  },
  "eventSource": "aws:dynamodb"
}
```

As you can see, there's data about each change in a [JSON Lines](https://jsonlines.org/{externalnofollow}) format, first the "INSERT", then the "MODIFY", where the modification has the "OldImage" and "NewImage". Data on changes is partitioned by default inside the bucket, with the smallest partition being on the hour of the day.

### How to query the data

In the past, one of the negative sides of storing this kind of data in Amazon S3 would be losing some flexibility: typically, you would have to get (download) the files that were relevant, and then do some data analytics on it. That is no longer the case. There's a nice feature in Amazon S3 where you can query the data in files directly, using a SQL-like language. For example, to get all audit records with partitionKey equal to "1":

```
aws s3api select-object-content \
--bucket BUCKET_NAME \
--key BUCKET_KEY \
--expression "select * from s3object as s where s.dynamodb.Keys.partitionKey.S = '1'" \
--expression-type 'SQL' \
--input-serialization '{"JSON": {"Type": "LINES"}}' \
--output-serialization '{"JSON": {}}' "output.json"
```

## Conclusion

In this blog post, a simple architecture to store audit trail from an Amazon DynamoDB table was presented. The data pipeline to export this data through AWS Kinesis was detailed, and information on how to query the final data was provided. Future improvements on this pattern include data preprocessing and scaling.

All code referenced in this blog post is available in [this repository](https://github.com/luiscrs14/simple-aws-audit-trail{externalnofollow}).

An article about audit trail solution with AWS Kinesis and S3 with a focus on simplicity and affordability

thumbnail_AWS_Kinesis_S3.png

AWS_Kinesis_S3.png

Simple and affordable audit trail solution with AWS Kinesis and S3

In this blog post, I propose an architecture using 2 AWS services, namely AWS Lambda and Amazon SQS, to achieve a notification pipeline using a webhook.

Before we dive into the solution, let's review the concepts we'll be using.

## What are Webhooks?

Webhooks offer a way to send real time notifications to clients. Opposite to traditional APIs, where a client requests data from a server, Webhooks allow a client as a consumer to subscribe to server events. After the initial registration, no more interaction is needed.

## What is Amazon SQS (Simple Queue Service)

[Amazon SQS](https://aws.amazon.com/sqs/{externalnofollow}) is message queuing service commonly used to decouple services: instead of having two or more services communicating synchronously, queues can be used to defer this communication asynchronously, allowing simpler scaling.

## What is AWS Lambda?

[AWS Lambda](https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/{externalnofollow}) is a serverless compute platform. This means it uses AWS compute infrastructure, but all the instance setup is managed by AWS: the customer is only responsible for the business logic. AWS Lambda uses Lambda functions, which are applications that are triggered by events.

## Proposed architecture

Here's a diagram describing the main components of the architecture. They will be discussed in more detail later.

![aws_sqs.svg](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/7/27/aws_sqs_b5e200e356.svg)

## Setting up the listener

This post assumes you have [Node.js](https://docs.npmjs.com/downloading-and-installing-node-js-and-npm{externalnofollow}) installed, as well as [AWS CDK Toolkit](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cdk/v2/guide/cli.html{externalnofollow}). You should have an AWS account created.

Let's start by creating the customer webhook endpoint. This will serve as a target to the notifications.

Create a new file app.js with the following code:

```
const http = require('http');

const port = 3000;

const server = http.createServer((req, res) => {
    let body = '';
    req.on('data', chunk => {
        body += chunk.toString();
    });
    req.on('end', () => {
        console.log(body);
        res.end('ok');
    });
});

server.listen(port, () => {
    console.log(`Server running  on ${port}/`);
});
```

This is a simple listener that will wait for a request with a body, and will print the body contents to the console. We will use this to make sure we are getting our notifications, meaning the webhook is effectively working.

To start the listener, run:

```
node app.js
```

By default, the server will be running on localhost:3000. Since we need to communicate with our listener from AWS Lambda, we need to make this endpoint public. A really useful tool for this I often use is [ngrok](https://ngrok.com/{externalnofollow}), you can use it to create a public proxy to your local port (you’re free to use any other method you’re familiar with). After exposing the endpoint publicly, you should have a URL that is reachable from the Internet.

## Infrastructure

So we have a client endpoint waiting for notifications. Now we need the infrastructure to send the notifications.

Let's detail how each architecture component fits together.

### Components

#### Amazon SQS

In this particular use case, Amazon SQS is used as a source of events for the notifications. The server business logic is abstracted here, for simplicity purposes; in a real life scenario, a service would send events, which eventually reach an Amazon SQS queue. Here, we'll push messages directly to the queue to model this behaviour.

#### AWS Lambda

For this particular use case, the Lambda function will be invoked to consume messages from the SQS queue and, for each message, will send a notification to the customer webhook endpoint.

### Building the infrastructure

#### Using AWS CDK to deploy infrastructure

Amazon offers an _Infrastructure-As-Code_ solution, called [AWS Cloud Development Kit](https://aws.amazon.com/cdk/{externalnofollow}), or CDK for short. It uses [AWS Cloudformation](https://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/{externalnofollow}) internally to define infrastructure in a reviewable, deployable manner. CDK is offered in multiple languages, we'll use Typescript in this example.

#### AWS CDK setup

Assuming you already have CDK Toolkit installed, create a folder for the CDK code and initialise the project:


```
mkdir notification-cdk
cd notification-cdk && cdk init app --language typescript
```

cdk init app builds some initial scaffolding for the project. It creates a Stack, which will contain the pieces of infrastructure required.

A final step for the setup is to go the generated code for the stack under bin/my-app-cdk.ts and uncomment the env: line and replace with your AWS account info:


```
// env: { account: '123456789012', region: 'us-east-1' },
```

Let's add the necessary pieces for building our infrastructure stack on 'lib/cdk-stack.ts'

```
import * as path from "path";
import * as cdk from "aws-cdk-lib";
import { Construct } from "constructs";
import * as sqs from "aws-cdk-lib/aws-sqs";
import * as lambda from "aws-cdk-lib/aws-lambda";
import { SqsEventSource } from "aws-cdk-lib/aws-lambda-event-sources";

export class EcdevWebhookInfrastructureCdkStack extends cdk.Stack {
  constructor(scope: Construct, id: string, props?: cdk.StackProps) {
    super(scope, id, props);

    const queue = new sqs.Queue(this, "EventsQueue", {
      queueName: "EventsQueue",
    });

    const lambdaFunction = new lambda.Function(this, "EventHandler", {
      runtime: lambda.Runtime.NODEJS_16_X,
      handler: "index.handler",
      code: lambda.Code.fromAsset(path.join(__dirname, "lambda-handler")),
    });

    lambdaFunction.addEventSource(new SqsEventSource(queue));
  }
}
```

#### Code walkthrough

Let's go through the code to make sure everything is clear.

1.  Create an Amazon SQS queue.
2.  Create an AWS Lambda function, using a local folder as source.
3.  Set Amazon SQS queue as an event source for the function.

#### Edit code for AWS Lambda function

We'll use the CDK stack to include the Lambda function code, since it's a simple example.

In the root of the cdk project, run:

```
mkdir lambda-handler
touch lambda-handler/index.js
```

This creates a new folder and file where the AWS Lambda function code will live. Edit the file with the following code, replacing <LISTENER_URL>:

```
var http = require('https');

exports.handler = function (event, context) {
    event.Records.forEach(record => {
        const params = {
            host: "<LISTENER_URL>",
            body: record.body,
            method: "POST"
        }
        var post_req = http.request(params);

        post_req.write(record.body);
        post_req.end()
    })
}
```

What the lambda handler's code does is, for each event record (which will match an individual queue message), create a HTTP POST request and send it to the Listener endpoint that was setup earlier. Please note that the host mustn't include the protocol (http:// or https://).

#### Deploy the infrastructure

Now that we have the infrastructure ready to be deployed, let's execute the following command to do it:


```
cdk deploy
```

### Sending the message to Amazon SQS


```
aws sqs get-queue-url --queue-name EventsQueue

aws sqs send-message --queue-url 'QUEUE_URL' --message-body 'This is an important and time-critical message'
```

### Checking the notification is received

After sending the message to the Amazon SQS queue, if all went well, you should see the message in the client application console:

```
Server running  on 3000/
Received notification: This is an important and time-critical message
```

### Cleanup

To clear the infrastructure resources just created, you can use CDK Toolkit to destroy the stack. Simply run:

```
cdk destroy
```

## Conclusion

In this blog post, a simple architecture to use a webhook to send notifications to clients was presented. This shows the essential working blocks the solution. In real life scenarios, there are other concerns, such as security, reliability, cost, that are out of scope for this use case, but definitely crucial to a production service.

All code referenced in this blog post is available in the [listener](https://github.com/luiscrs14/ecdev-webhook-listener{externalnofollow}) and [cdk](https://github.com/luiscrs14/ecdev-webhook-infrastructure-cdk{externalnofollow}) repositories.


An article about using Amazon SQS and Lambda for Webhooks processing

thumbnail_blog_9.png

blog_9.png

Reliable Webhooks processing with AWS Lambda and Amazon SQS

Amount of businesses that failed due to poor web hosting is tremendous. You can make a stunning design, build a quality product, build your brand, and build a sales funnel, but if you take hosting lightly, it can ruin everything you did. Surprisingly, how many web hosting propositions are available across the web, and they all look so promising that you might think nothing could be better.

Web hosting is like a truck, which needs to be fast enough, reliable, and strong enough to carry heavy loads.

In this article, I will examine the following topics:
- What is the high availability on a website
- What are 3 types of web hosting commonly used for [WordPress](https://www.ecdevstudio.com/hire-wordpress-developers/)
- How to install AWS hosting for WordPress with preinstalled cPanel

## What is the high availability on a website

People usually say that website hosting availability is when the server is able to respond 99.9% of the time. I'd include a load resistance here too, otherwise it makes no sense if the server that is up 99.9% of the time goes down because of too many connections.

Below is a list of **key facilities (services) that help in better availability of the site:**
- Correct web hosting. More information about that I will write below.
- CDN service.
- Proper caching mechanism.
- Load balancer (rarely used for WordPress).

Of course, the WordPress website should be technically correct itself, otherwise no one hosting will help.

## What are 3 types of web hosting commonly used for WordPress

### Type 1. Shared hosting

In this type of web hosting, your website resides on a single server instance along with others, and all resources are shared among all sites hosted on that server.

Advantages of shared hosting:
- Low cost.
- Simplicity in use.

Disadvantages of shared hosting:
- You are restricted in traffic and bandwidth.
- Shared resources are not isolated. In the case of a traffic surge on one website, all others may go down for some period.
- A large number of websites are usually hosted on one server instance, about one hundred.
- You are limited in the number of websites you can host.

### Type 2. Managed WordPress hosting

This type of web hosting offers isolated system resources and a ready-to-use WordPress environment.

Advantages of managed WordPress hosting:
- Simplicity in use.
- Very quick site setup.
- Backup and staging options in a few clicks.

Disadvantages of managed WordPress hosting:
- You are restricted in traffic and bandwidth.
- You are restricted in the amount of hosted websites.
- You don't know the exact hardware resources you pay for. We think users significantly overpay for the allocated resources they have.
- Most of the managed WordPress hosting platforms have their global server-side cache to speed up hosted websites. It cannot be disabled, it cannot work together with other caching mechanisms, and in some cases, it can cause problems when developing user flows of higher complexity. In EcDev Studio we can make a custom caching configuration that provides a pretty higher speed increase than such a global cache. This is a primary reason why we don't recommend managed WordPress web hosting to any of our clients.

### Type 3. Cloud server

Before talking about cloud servers I want to mention such hosting types as **VPS (Virtual Private Server) and Dedicated Server**. They are advanced hosting types and they offer isolated resource allocation. When you purchase hosting, the initial configuration and launch of the server instance are handled by hosting company staff, and the hardware configuration is fixed. VPS and classic dedicated servers we consider outdated hosting types and I will not describe them in detail in this article.

The cloud is a network of connected hardware with the ability to quickly set up server instances, change their configuration on the fly, or destroy them. Unlike VPS and dedicated servers, with **cloud server instances** all the operations are performed without human staff involvement. For example, it is possible to change RAM, CPU, and SSD storage with just a few clicks without contacting customer support.

The cloud server is an advanced and recommended approach to hosting websites. There are such popular cloud server providers as AWS (Amazon Web Services), Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Heroku, and Digital Ocean. In EcDev Studio our preferred provider is AWS so in this article I will provide an in-detail guide on how to host a WordPress site on AWS without previous knowledge of cloud administration.

Advantages of cloud servers:
- Infrastructure is backed by a large company.
- Easy and fast setup in a few clicks.
- Relatively high overall performance and stability of the cloud server instance.
- You are able to choose the exact hardware resources you pay for.
- You can pay $30-$80 per month for the average resources and host an unlimited amount of websites. Of course, you should care if the allocated server resources are enough for your needs.

Disadvantages of cloud servers:
- Together with total freedom, it usually requires higher skills in order to administrate the server instances. Administration tasks can be simplified in case of using options with a preinstalled web panel like cPanel.
- You need to have basic Linux skills in order to connect to the server and check the disk usage, as well as RAM/CPU usage.

## How to install AWS hosting for WordPress with preinstalled cPanel

In this guide, we will launch the **AWS EC2** instance of class **t3.small**. AWS EC2 is an on-demand computing service based on the AWS cloud platform, that allows you to create server instances quickly and scale them as needed. The total approximate price in the **us-west-2** region (Oregon) is **$30.96 per month**. I say approximate because billing is calculated on an hourly basis. Later, you will be able to scale your server to a higher plan according to your needs based on the expected number of hosted websites, traffic, etc.

Here is what's inside the **t3.small** package:
- 2 X CPU Intel Xeon 3.1 GHz.
- 2 GB memory.
- 20 GB SSD disk space.

In this guide, I will show how to create a server with cPanel, however, in the real case, you will be able to use a free [CentOS Web Panel](https://centos-webpanel.com/{externalnofollow}) instead of a poplar cPanel, but in that case you'll need to manually install it on the server via SSH.
Below is a step-by-step instruction for setting up an AWS EC2 instance with preinstalled cPanel.

### Part 1. Creating EC2 instance

**Step 1.** Log in AWS console, and switch to the right region.

**Step 2.** Enter EC2 in the search, and click on the corresponding service.

![EC2 search](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/2_bfbce33d0f.png)

**Step 3.** Click on “Launch instance” and choose “Launch instance”

![Launch instance](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/3_7d5a7b0b7d.png)

**Step 4.** Set the server instance name, for example, "WordPress Web Server"

![server instance name](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/4_9fe85a0d7f.png)

**Step 5.** In the search enter “cPanel&WHM for Linux” and press Enter

![search cPanel&WHM for Linux](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/5_5fe33766d6.png)

**Step 6.** In the tab “AWS Marketplace AMIs” select “cPanel&WHM for Linux” By cPanel

![select cPanel&WHM for Linux](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/6_3e8f28727e.png)

**Step 7.** Click “Continue”

![Continue](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/7_5b3f47f5c3.png)

**Step 8.** Click “Confirm Changes”

![Confirm Changes](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/8_875f051892.png)

**Step 9.** Leave “t3.smal” in the Instance type field

![Leave t3.smal](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/9_b7c82c049b.png)

**Step 10.** Click on “Create new key pair” to create a new SSH key.

![Create new key pair](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/10_f69d291fda.png)

**Step 11.** Enter a key name and click ”Create key pair”. You should download the key pair and save it on a local computer. You need it to access the server instance via SSH.

![download the key pair](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/11_67a27ac4bf.png)

**Step 12.** Leave the default Network settings.

![Leave the default Network settings](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/12_bc2b58b976.png)

**Step 13.** For the storage, you can either leave the default 20Gb or make it higher.

![storage](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/13_5945a68fd5.png)

**Step 14.** Click “Launch instance”.

![Launch instance](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/14_956dec7938.png)

**Step 15.** Click “View all instances”.

![View all instances](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/15_98d4ca9bb7.png)

**Step 16.** Select the newly created server.

![Select the newly created server](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/16_284e78ccb8.png)

**Step 17.** Open the Security tab and click on the security group that is created by default. You will see the security group settings at the bottom.

![Security tab](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/17_41e1da3c0d.png)

**Step 18.** Add the following rules:
- 22 - for SSH access.
- 2083 - for cPanel access.
- 2087 - for WHM access.


It should be the same as in the screenshot below.

![rules](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/18_a0d2c8db5c.png)

**Step 19.** Click “Save rules”.

**Step 20.** Go to the Elastic IPs section.

![Elastic IPs section](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/20_47825dd666.png)

**Step 21.** Click “Allocate Elastic IP address”

![Allocate Elastic IP address](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/21_fff41c3779.png)

**Step 22.** Click “Add new tag”, add tag “Name”, and click “Allocate”

![Add new tag](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/22_9dac8484fe.png)

**Step 23.** Select the newly created IP address, copy the “Allocated IPv4 address” value, and save it locally (you will need it for further server access via SSH). Then click Actions >> Associate Elastic IP address.

![copy the Allocated IPv4 address](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/23_752a36f310.png)

**Step 24.** On the next screen choose the server and click “Associate”

![choose the server](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/24_007a944104.png)

We completed steps 20-24 to set the static IP address for the server. Otherwise, the IP address would change with every restart of a server instance.

### Part 2. Configuring cPanel

**Step 25.** Launch SSH terminal. If you use Windows OS it can be a Putty application.

**Step 26.** If you use a Linux-based OS you should grant the right permissions for the key. Use this command:\
chmod 600 {path_to_private_key}

The key pair you have downloaded at step 11.

**Step 27.** Connect to the server via SSH in order to get the URL for accessing WHM (Web Host Manager). Use this command if you use a Linux-based OS:\
ssh centos@{server_ip_address} -i {path_to_private_key}

**Step 28.** When you get the question “Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no/[fingerprint])?“ you should type “yes” and press Enter.

![Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no/fingerprint)](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/28_2089d17ebf.png)

**Step 29.** Connect to WHM using the URL that you get in a terminal.

![Connect to WHM](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/29_59b7089302.png)

**Step 30.** The browser will show the SSL error “Your connection is not private”. You should click “Advanced” and then “Proceed”.

![ click Advanced and then Proceed](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/30_dcd14e13a7.png)

To get rid of a warning, the SSL certificate should be installed for your cPanel instance, there is a lot of available information about that in public access.

**Step 31.** Accept the terms of usage for access to WHM and cPanel.

![Accept the terms of usage](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/31_4fbd65c2f5.png)

**Step 32.** Click “Log in”

![Log in](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/32_9b310246c1.png)

**Step 33.** Create a new cPanel account or log in to your existing account.

![Create or log in](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/33_74157f7da5.png)

**Step 34.** Enter the email address for receiving service notifications and click “Finish”.

![Enter the email address](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/34_f8b05573d7.png)

**Step 35.** Set the root password. Click WHM >> Home >> Server Configuration >> Change Root Password

**Step 36.** Click WHM >> Home >> Networking Setup >> Change Hostname in order to change hostname. You can choose one from the list displayed on the right side.

![change hostname](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/36_5964b137ae.png)

### Part 3. Adding the domain

**Step 37.** Create WHM account. Click WHM >> Home >> Account Functions >> Create a New Account

![Create WHM account](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/37_06489da53c.png)

**Step 38.** Copy Name Servers from your WHM account and set them for your domain.

![Name Servers](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/38_b1505ec14e.png)

**Step 39.** Log in to cPanel. To do this you should go to WHM >> Home >> Account Information >> List Accounts, and click on the сPanel icon.

![Log in to cPanel](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/39_3ab93032a1.png)

**Step 40.** On the new page, you should choose WordPress.

![choose WordPress](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/40_9c9b76e439.png)

**Step 41.** Wait until WP installation finishes, and click on “Add content”.

![Wait until WP installation finishes](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/41_f13eb51bf4.png)

**Step 42.** You will be able to fully control WordPress on the opened page, log in as a WP-admin, etc.

![fully control](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/7/27/42_min_4af1669e5f.png)

## Сhoosing and configuring high availability WordPress hosting: Final Thoughts

There is a large room for improvement of the WordPress site and web hosting in order to achieve higher speed and availability. It is possible to use Docker container, setup automated deployment, move a database to the cloud and decouple it from the server instance, add CDN, make the headless architecture for WordPress, set up autoscaling, and make other improvements. Here in this article, I have covered just the basics, so users without much technical knowledge can start using the high-availability AWS cloud to host their WordPress websites.

In addition, consider [hiring WordPress developers](/hire-wordpress-developers/) if you need assistance with the development, optimization, maintenance, or infrastructure changes to your WordPress website.

Different types of web hostings listed, and a guide to configuring high availability WordPress hosting on AWS

thumbnail_Frame 68.png

Frame 68.png

A guide to choosing and configuring high availability WordPress hosting

SaaS stands for Software as a Service, which is simply a cloud-based application accessible via a smartphone (mobile app) or web interface (web app). SaaS applications have been developed since around the beginning of the 21st century. Among top SaaS companies that we are well familiar with are Dropbox, Slack, Google Drive, and others.

**Customers like SaaS** because they just work. They are easy to set up, you don't have to install anything in order to use the software. There's a very little risk of data loss due to hardware failures or operational errors.

**Investors like SaaS** because its economics look much more attractive than selling software licenses. Revenues from SaaS companies are typically regular and easy to predict so business management is easier with them.

SaaS startups are turning into a mainstream in the software development industry. In this article, I will examine the following topics:
- Why SaaS startups are so popular today.
- SaaS platform benefits for the customer.
- Unique SaaS ideas for 2022.
- Ways to brainstorm your own SaaS ideas.
- Ways to validate SaaS startup ideas.
- Recommendations for building MVP for SaaS platform.

## Why SaaS startups are so popular today

Pricing models on the subscription basis are increasingly adopted by the companies to satisfy their IT needs, despite limited IT budgets. That's especially relevant for small and medium businesses. Yet, established enterprises don't look down on Software as a Service either. Rather, they embrace an enterprise grade SaaS business model to meet diverse needs with agile, modern solutions.

In fact, SaaS adoption is growing across all industries as it facilitates business management significantly. Here are some stats about SaaS companies today:
- Currently, the SaaS market is growing by 18% each year.
- One or more SaaS products are used by 99% of organizations in 2022.
- Nearly 78% of small businesses already use SaaS software.
- The adoption rate of SaaS in the healthcare niche is 20% per year.
- 70% of CIOs claim that agility and scalability are two of the top motivators for using Software as a Service.

## SaaS platform benefits for the customers
![Frame 65.svg](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/Frame_65_6008b5a4c1.svg)

SaaS companies provide the following benefits to customers:
- **SaaS software delivers higher strategic value versus on-premise software deployments.** By utilizing a SaaS model, software deployment time is reduced from several weeks to a few minutes.
- **Enterprise SaaS solutions provide users with a wide range of options to get the job done.** Therefore, organizations are experiencing a higher level of employee engagement thanks to feature-rich SaaS products designed to improve user experience for their customers.
- **SaaS companies are capable of pushing feature updates, bug fixes, and security updates on the fly.** With on-premise deployments, these revisions once had to pass through several layers of organizational protocols and governance.

As a result of successful SaaS adoption, enterprises and software vendors have become more capable of delivering the necessary functionalities and features to the end users, resulting in increased popularity of SaaS startups compared to on-premise software development. SaaS companies are constantly working on extending their software capabilities for the end consumers.

## 7 unique SaaS ideas for 2022

You might think that the best SaaS ideas are already there and running, but in reality, tech world is far from being perfect yet. There is always something useful you can invent and that can later be found among top SaaS tools in the industry. Here are a few startup ideas to consider:

## Ways to brainstorm your own SaaS business ideas
![Frame 62.png](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/Frame_62_6d97661f52.png)

To generate your own SaaS startup ideas you should follow these rules:

- Find people's problems you can solve, rather than SaaS ideas. It is only relevant, though, if the product is not about entertainment in B2C business model.
- You should consider the demand and growth rate of your future SaaS product. It's important that people use your service and bring you revenue for months, not just occasionally. You should make sure your main focus is not just keeping your product alive. You should focus on building a fast growing SaaS product where the retention of existing customers is a must.
- Don't invent something entirely new. You aren't big enough to create a market from scratch for your SaaS startups. Find something in your niche that lacks useful features, is based on outdated technology, or that could simply be improved with some additional services.
- Find the right keywords. Your SaaS startups can be promoted via social media and social engagement like video Ads, but if you have good keywords with volume and fair competition, then why not to use them in your SEO strategy?

Below are provided some proven methods of finding business ideas for SaaS startups.

### The Job Search method

Examine job offers in a particular industry. Pay attention to job descriptions. Determine if there are some routines performed by the employees on a regular basis and if you can help them reduce the time and effort spent on that.

As a final step, check if there are related keywords with the sufficient volume. It will tell you if people feel the problem and actively look for the ways to optimize their tasks. If not, then your main traffic source to promote your product is going to be paid social ads, especially in the beginning.

### The App Store method

Choose an app store (Apple, Google Play, Salesforce, Chrome, Shopify, etc), select the category, and sort results by ratings. You should analyse 1-star reviews of the top apps in a category. You will see that people discuss their problems there. Based on this information, you can compose a list of problems and turn it into the best SaaS startup idea.

### The What-they're-using-Excel-for method

Research what people use Excel spreadsheets for. You can take advantage of public surveys to do this. Many competing approaches might be available to solve the problem, some of which involve employee time and paper, others involving spreadsheets, while there may be some that involve one of several competing software solutions, none of which has a dominant market share.

### The Meat Grinder method

According to the Meat Grinder approach (by [Tyler Tringas](https://tylertringas.com/business-ideas-meat-grinder/{externalnofollow})), you should come up with five business ideas for SaaS startups every day. This part should be basically effortless. A successful business idea is a result of running hundreds of ideas through the meat grinder of questions. There's an active effort to find holes in the idea and stress test it. Beat it up, try to find the ways to discard it, and move to the next one. In brainstorming, the quantity is more important than quality.

The worst thing you can do is stick to seemingly the best SaaS idea, which is actually fatally flawed, talk about it with your friends for decades and never actually getting to the one that you could have actually built and launched to bring a growing SaaS product to life.

## Ways to validate SaaS startup ideas

There are 2 proven ways to validate your best SaaS idea before the development begins:

- Ask your potential clients about that by creating a questionnaire on Reddit, Facebook groups, or forums.
- Create a simple landing page for gathering pre-orders for your software product. You should run an Ad campaign to quickly collect about 100 pre-orders, either free or paid. Based on the conversion rate you can determine the viability of your idea.

## Recommendations for building and launching MVP SaaS Platform
![Frame 66.svg](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/Frame_66_9fc371e8c2.svg)

MVP stands for Minimal Viable Product. It isn't necessary to develop a full-fledged product before you understand how marketing is going to work for you if you do something larger than a micro SaaS. There are 3 reasons for building MVP for your SaaS startups:

- You will obtain additional proof of concept for your startup ideas.
- You will get market experience with feedback from your users before scaling the MVP to a fully-functional SaaS product. It is evident that a final product with the preliminary created MVP and client feedback will differ from the one created without the MVP.
- You will be able to create a product website with blog content that will index early.

Moreover, MVP is an essential part of a lean startup business model. It is stated in this methodology that there are several repeating cycles of improvement in the IT product development process. Here is a list of primary recommendations for building MVP for your SaaS startups:

- You should focus on building the core, and get it out there as quickly as possible.
- Make it budget-friendly.
- The MVP should provide the possibility to collect potential users' opinions, and what they want to see in the final product.
- Focus on your users. Nobody cares about your quota, your payroll, bounce rate of your SaaS startups, etc. No one. Only the problem you solve for them matters.

To validate your MVP, there are 2 methods available:

**Method 1.** Create a landing page for your SaaS business and take advantage of paid traffic to generate leads for your SaaS startups. You should be aware that a paid search and social traffic require completely different strategies for your marketing, including Ad content, landing page content, targeting, social media, and some other aspects.

**Method 2.** Use the websites from this list below, they are solely focused on getting exposure for a product on its initial stages:

- Product Hunt
- Indie Hackers
- Hacker News (Show HN)
- BetaPage
- BetaList
- SaaS Hub

The second method I do not consider reliable for promoting SaaS companies, because you need to rely too much on the audience of those services. With the paid traffic and even SEO you have a higher level of control over your strategy. For the majority of top SaaS companies, when a product is already sustained, the main traffic source is SEO, and they make an additional boost by paid campaigns. There are also offline methods of promoting SaaS startups through personal meetings, which are especially relevant for corporate solutions.

## Building top SaaS startups: Final Thoughts

SaaS business appears to be very attractive for startup companies: ease of entry, flexible pricing, and great accessibility are the key reasons why users choose web-based tools and services over traditional software. Though SaaS software development is brighter than ever, there are many challenges and pitfalls to overcome.

Among these problems is the increased demand for proper high-tech knowledge. To create fast-growing SaaS startups, you need a software development team that is proficient in web development and has experience building scalable cloud-based solutions. Also, it will be a benefit if your development team has a track record of building successful SaaS startups that bring revenue and also provide outstanding technical support. EcDev Studio is experienced in building high-performing SaaS products that are successful on the market and follow high standards in security, data integrity, UI/UX, speed, scalability, and other important factors. 

SaaS business model description, unique SaaS ideas, ways to validate the idea, and suggestions for building an MVP.

thumbnail_Frame 60.jpg

Frame 60.jpg

7 awesome SaaS ideas for a product in 2022

This article is not an attempt to describe project management theory from books. It rather enlists my key project management techniques and principles based on years of practice, pitfalls and pearls.

#### 1. The more risks identified at the planning stage the better

Apart from affecting budget resources and reputation, risks can even lead to project death. A carefully-selected project management technique will help you detect all the major risks at the early stages when you only start building a project model.

Imagine you are responsible for developing a high-load system that supports 5,000 users, but you don't have the right team member who can handle such complex projects. For sure, it is a risk as you might fail to find the right fit in time or a newcomer will fail you in the long run.

Or, let's say, you need to enable data synchronization between your data storage and a few other 3-rd party platforms. So what exactly needs to be done within this project scope? First of all, writing code that will do the necessary synchronization. But what about data integrity, big data support, automatic scaling, automatic process retrieval after the downtime, and finally finding the right tools and ways of testing all the above-mentioned project activities? Does this mean extra time estimates and the risks to be taken into account? For sure, yes. Will all the project managers consider it at the project initiation stage? From my experience, no. Yet, risk management is definitely one of those winning project management techniques that will help you create more accurate estimates as well as prevent unplanned scenarios and frustration. It's better to spend more time on program evaluation and review than later discover significant deviations from the agreed budget and timelines.

All the risk types can be checked here in this reliable [article](https://www.simplilearn.com/common-project-risks-article/{externalnofollow}), so I will not copy them. But please take them into account when estimating the scope of your next project and creating a project plan.

#### 2. Predict and prevent problems during development

When the development process is on and running, a few problems might evolve: a lack of understanding of how to implement an appropriate technical solution, repository mess, server configuration instability, no data backups, certain team-specific issues, such as low performance of one or multiple developers. That's especially true for more complex projects.

In such cases, the owner might fail to (or be unwilling to) discover these issues on the project. Or may know about them, but do nothing. Yet, it's for sure one of the best project management techniques to react to them in a timely manner. This will save dozens of hours and tons of effort in the long run.

Any working environment will only get healthier if you keep things organized. Everything that could possibly go wrong, will go wrong. So what's the point in ignoring the problems if they show up later anyway?

Lastly, even if you understand the customer requirements well despite hazy specifications, you cannot expect your project team to be on the same page as you are. To achieve the project goal, all the specifications must be well-detailed at the program evaluation and review stage during the team meetings so that any misunderstandings are resolved before they occur.

#### 3. Visualize progress to see the whole picture, use appropriate project management tools

On multiple projects, progress visual representation is an important project management technique that allows you to immediately see project progress, spot any dependent tasks and plan other important tasks. In a project management methodology, the most popular ways of visual representation are Kanban Board and Gantt chart. Some key details are provided below:

##### Kanban board

Kanban itself is a project management methodology with its own rules. It is well described in this [article](https://kanbanize.com/kanban-resources/getting-started/what-is-kanban/{externalnofollow}). I will talk about its visual aspect only, from the perspective of understanding the project workflow. In Kanban Boards, you have different statuses (columns) and a set of tasks in each column, which are moved from left to right systematically, upon changing statuses.

##### The key things you can see in Kanban Boards:
- It helps to create a detailed plan, make predictions, and conduct risk management by means of setting specific statuses for certain project tasks (e.g. Code review).
- Easier workflow health tracking. Another helpful project management technique lies in making sure one specific to-do column is not overloaded with tasks, while other columns contain fewer. Ensuring a balanced amount of tasks in each column leads to good workflow health and better work breakdown structure.
- Almost in every project management software, you will find user icons next to the tasks in a project board. They show people's involvement in a more visual way and thus project managers can spot task dependencies more efficiently (see picture below).

![ecdev kanban board.jpg](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/3/kanban_5688eb4374.jpg)

The huge benefit of Kanban Boards is that a project manager does not need to spend time on maintaining them throughout the entire project life cycle, unlike the Gantt Chart that I am describing below.

##### Gantt chart

In project management, you always need a reliable way of calculating the valid completion dates of specific manageable tasks within one project. A Gantt chart is an ideal solution. It is one of the oldest project management techniques that was originally used in the Waterfall technique, but now it can be easily used in Agile, let's say for visualizing sprints and project progress tracking.

![ecdev gantt chart](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/3/gant_88fc06d9f6.jpg)

For you as a project manager, the smartest advantage of Gantt charts is seeing the exact project timeline for any task. It might be really useful in identifying task dependencies and seeing how the project progresses. However, it requires spending additional resources on chart maintenance, as you have to constantly reestimate each task separately.

#### 4. Always be aware of priorities, approaches and current problems

Throughout the project life cycle, reconsider task priorities occasionally, discuss approaches with the team (regarding delivery strategy, server infrastructure, technologies, task dependencies, etc), assist the team in resolving current project problems, or make necessary allocations for any new project activities. This project management technique will help you avoid a bunch of common pitfalls that usually occur on a project.

#### 5. Split the responsibilities correctly to avoid demotivation among the team

If project managers assign more complex projects to a developer than his skills level allows him to accomplish at the moment, it is normal as it will contribute to his growth. But if all the tasks related to e.g. administration, automation or infrastructure are assigned to a web developer, then you should expect his demotivation about the job he is doing.

In project management, to ensure a balanced work breakdown structure, the above-listed types of tasks should be assigned to other team members, such as an IT administrator, DevOps expert and an infrastructure expert. In addition, it is always better to assign new employees (who you trust) to those smaller tasks than exploit your current team member. If there are no trusted people available, then the problem lies more in recruiting than project management. My recommendation is to start cultivating friendly relationships with experts in different fields. It is highly useful to always be able to have specific/untypical tasks done within a project schedule just because you have the right people at hand and can assign those smaller tasks to them. Even in extreme project management, it is always recommended to have someone qualified for non-typical tasks.

#### 6. React immediately in critical situations

Project managers should never hope for luck. If the problem occurred, it cannot be ignored or postponed for later. Technical problems can be resolved by lead developers or tech leads. However, everything related to organization problems, resources planning, task dependencies, decision making, etc., should be a subject of prompt intervention by the management staff who should be able to apply suitable project management techniques depending on the situation.

#### 7. Work with the budget carefully

When working on any project tasks, whether big or small, respect your client's budget and inform in advance if you feel that one task requires more resources than you estimated initially or if there are certain unplanned task dependencies. It is always a winning project management technique to agree on all the time estimates upfront with your client than "surprise" them later. Dividing the project into distinct phases and work packages is the most reliable evaluation and review technique that will help you plan resources more carefully.

To work with project budgets more accurately, a critical path method (CPM) can be used. It is useful for analysing and planning mid-to-high complexity projects. It allows you to determine which tasks are the most critical and how to schedule them in a way you can meet the deadline at minimum cost. These tasks are called critical because if they take longer, the entire project will take longer to complete. This is the reason why the critical path method is very helpful for project managers. With its help they can estimate project duration more accurately, spot any task dependencies, identify risks, create more realistic project schedules and thus budgets. Program evaluation and review is made easier, smoother and more accurate.

#### 8. Be a superhero project manager - grow your soft skills

To manage the project successfully and achieve smooth project completion, the importance of soft skills cannot be underestimated. I mean communication, empathy, stress-resistance, leadership, and others.

Let's say you have difficulty getting some precise details from the client. This is because he is either a non-technician at all, or just explaining some real case scenarios in a specific domain like fintech. However, you don't understand them, no matter how much research you put into that. Or your whole team overworks to demonstrate the best delivery they can, but the client complains that your work is slow anyway.

Skilled project managers should be able to resolve these and many other unique challenges in an elegant way, so that both parties are left happy with the result. By implementing tried and tested project management techniques that are proven to work, you will contribute to not just your current project's success, but will also get more confidence when working on each next project.

## An ideal project management technique - can one size fit all?

Being a good project manager is not just about following specific project management principles and rules. Very often, certain situations require immediate actions when you need to find a solution to some problems on the project. No matter which party caused this problem, the customer or the development team, it needs to be addressed. All the project managers at EcDevStudio are trained to serve as problem-solvers for the customer, not just an intermediary. Out of many project management techniques described above and even more, we never try to find a one-size-fits-all scenario. Each project is unique, so the project management principles and other approaches need to be selected accordingly.

In our team, even the choice of the most suitable project manager is made based on some project specifics: technologies to be used, UX focus, etc. Let's say, if the project needs to start with the design stage and the customer deeply relies on excellent UX, we will definitely assign it to a project manager who is a former [UI/UX designer](/hire-ui-ux-designers/). If you are looking for a team you would find comfortable to work with, contact us for free a consultation.

There are many ways to organize project management, but to increase the efficiency there are specific principles and techniques for that.

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8 ultimate project management techniques and principles

When you run a startup, you definitely can't risk wasting your time or budget. Your specs have to be followed, and things need to go as planned. There is no room for pitfalls or failures. So it's only obvious that the choice of a software development company needs to be made with the utmost caution.

Fortunately, Ukraine is a reliable outsourcing destination for hiring software developers for startups. This article will give you an in-depth look into:

- Why you should hire Ukrainian developers
- How to hire software developers in Ukraine

#### Why is Ukraine a good fit for software development outsourcing?

![good fit for software development](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/7/27/Frame_69_2_f84f3fb6f3.svg)

There are countless reasons that make Ukraine one of the best places in the world to outsource your software development. Before I dig deeper into the details, here’s a short list of the top reasons for hiring Ukrainian developers:
- **More dollar-for-dollar value** - A Ukrainian software development agency can provide the same quality services you can expect from an EU- or US-based firm at a much lower rate.
- **Intellectual property protection** - Ukraine respects intellectual property rights across the globe. This means you won’t need to worry about your software development partner lifting proprietary code.
- **Dedicated teams** - Ukrainian developers are known for burning the midnight oil to meet strict deadlines. If you have a problem, rest assured that they will quickly solve it.
- **Top-tier talent** - Ukrainian software development and IT industry are exploding right now, and the market is packed with highly educated Ukrainian programmers ready to help you with the web and mobile development.
- **Staggered time schedules (for US clients)** - Ukrainian working hours take place while you’re fast asleep. So if you make a request past sunset, your development company could have it delivered by morning.

These are just a handful of reasons why you might want to outsource software development to a Ukrainian company. There are many more that I will address.

#### Engineering and Mentality in Ukraine
What is undeniably true about Ukrainian developers is their positive mindset and determination.

In fact, Ukrainians have earned a strong reputation as hard workers. It’s their tenacity that makes them well-suitable for custom software development positions. This is a role that requires them to constantly invent innovative digital solutions to stay one step ahead of their competition and become top software developers in Ukraine.

#### Resourcefulness
Ukrainians are also known for their passion and resourcefulness: two essential qualities you want to get when outsourcing software development. Meeting strict deadlines often takes a level of ingenuity that only comes from a truly dedicated service provider.

#### Responsible Teams
Another core trait associated with Ukrainians is their strong sense of responsibility. Software developers in Ukraine will treat your project as if it’s their own. They want to do their job right and will take any steps necessary to build world class software products that will make your project successful.

#### Communication and English proficiency
A major benefit of outsourcing software development to technology companies in Ukraine is that about 70% of Ukrainian developers have an intermediate to upper-intermediate level of English proficiency.

Strong communication is a key in project management, so it’s important to have a dedicated team with a firm grasp of English in your corner.
![Software development team in Ukraine](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/5/6/Frame_56_f0269e1919.jpg)
With such a high level of English proficiency, you won’t need to worry about miscommunications when dealing with software developers in Ukraine. 

#### Ukraine is a hub for software development companies
From 2015 to 2017, the number of Ukrainian software developers grew from 74k to 166k. In 2020, it reached as many as 166k. Yearly, this number grows on average by 30k of new specialists, who are usually the graduates from Ukrainian tech universities.

With the largest number of C++ and Unity 3D developers and the second-largest number of JavaScript developers, it's no wonder why Ukraine is listed among "Top 10 Countries with the Best Software Developers in the World" (source: HackerRank). Yet, the variety of programming languages in this talent pool is much bigger.

Giants and global corporations like Microsoft, Samsung, and Oracle have already discovered the tech talent of Ukrainian developers and thus keep hiring them on an ongoing basis. In fact, companies of different sizes often feel lucky to have found a great development team for a long-term partnership at a fair cost.

#### IT market and development costs in Ukraine
The average rate of skilled software developers in Ukraine of middle-to-senior levels varies from $40 to $50 per hour, depending on the technology stack and technical expertise. Lower rates (e.g. $30 per hour) are relevant to mostly junior developers, they can be a part of an experienced software development team in a startup, but not to be its skeleton.

#### Potential risks when hiring a software development company for a startup
Below are some specific risks that startups might face when hiring software developers. These insights are based on real-life stories that the clients have shared with my team.

- Inappropriate or faulty tech decisions made by software developers, insufficient technical skills, low-quality of deliveries and quality assurance.
- Product performance issues. Delivered website or web application is either slow or unstable upon high traffic load.
- Security issues. The delivered product (or any of its components) comes with vulnerabilities like XSS or Insecure Deserialization.
- The delivered software is poorly usable and imbalanced/outdated in terms of UI/UX.
- The delivered software fails to meet expectations. Developers demonstrate a poor understanding of business goals, no respect for the mission, and are not committed to the idea of building a successful startup.
- Software developer doesn't meet the timeline or budget constraints.

The above-listed issues can be relevant to any country, and they are mostly caused by ineffective check-up of soft and hard skills.

The ways how EcDev Studio prevents the above problems can be read in my separate [article](https://www.ecdevstudio.com/blog/how-ecdev-studio-prevents-six-most-common-problems-in-software-outsourcing/).

#### How to hire a Ukrainian software developer for your startup? 

![How to hire a Ukrainian software developer for your startup](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/7/27/How_to_hire_a_Ukrainian_software_developer_for_your_startup_45ef5b32aa.svg)

As said above, Ukrainian software developers have earned an excellent reputation for providing quality and affordably priced services for their partners all over the world. 

Yet, it does not necessarily mean that the hiring process is a 1-day job. Once you’re ready to hire Ukrainian software developers, these are the steps you should take when building relationships with the outsourcing companies and looking for the reliable candidate:
1. Evaluate the local IT industry market.
2. Analyze your potential vendor's portfolio.
3. Check the reviews and compliances.
4. Set up a call with the vendor and evaluate their soft skills.
5. Evaluate the hard skills.
6. Get involved in the engagement process.
7. Agree on the estimation, delivery plan, and payments.
8. Sign the contract and get your software development process started.

#### How Can EcDev Studio Help with Your Software Development?
We will provide you with a one-on-one consultation regarding your startup so we can understand what tech approach is the most suitable for your software projects. This will also be a decisive factor in planning your budget and time constraints. Our goal is to provide premium-quality custom software development services, and in-depth analysis is the first step in this process.

After we understand the scope of the project and all the planning processes are done, we assemble a team of dedicated developers who are perfectly qualified to build your product based on your software concepts and specifications. Rest assured that our engineers are highly vetted and deliver reliable, well-tested solutions.

#### Hiring a Ukrainian software developer: Final Thoughts
The choice of the right software development company is a crucial step toward bringing your software idea to life. You want your future product to thrive and bring value to your clients — not die on the vine. That's what we focus on when building our company values.

Software development is like rowing a boat with a team. Either everyone works together, or you’ll spin in circles and never reach your destination.

For your startup, you’ll need to pick capable performers who can deliver complex custom software development solutions so you can surpass your competitors. Working with software developers in Ukraine is a winning strategy, and that's what millions of success stories can prove.

If you’re looking for a software development firm you can trust, contact us for a free consultation.

Tips and guideline of hiring Ukrainian developers, potential risks described.

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How to hire a developer for startups in Ukraine

In the following list are 6 common problems and the well-tested solutions offered by EcDev Studio for each of them.


#### Conclusion
These are only common problems but not the entire list of problems that can happen. Some cases are easier to prevent, some not. My point is that we understand the IT outsourcing market, its common problems and work hard to prevent most of them for our clients.

There are common problems in software outsourcing. You have more chances to prevent them if you know about those problems.

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How EcDev Studio prevents 6 most common problems in software outsourcing

In my view, people that pay for quality services should get quality results, and any commercial services should be upscale. That’s why with the business that I run, I take every step possible to ensure that our clients receive a high-end service. That's especially relevant to hiring remote developers in order to succeed with software projects.

I've seen people try to save pennies on services only to realize that, in the end, they wasted their time and money by receiving an uninspiring product. On the other hand, I've also seen people pay top dollar for a service or product that provided no tangible value to the buyer. There are many examples when companies hire remote software developers but the main goal of those developers is to just check enough boxes to get paid.

That’s why I want to offer my insights on how to help you find a quality service. You'll also get a better understanding of when to cut a service provider if they fail to deliver.

The success of an entire business can depend on the relationship with your software development team. If you have a truly good business plan and strategy, your goals are still at risk if, for example, your in-house or remote team is not involved enough or lacks analytical or communication skills.

Below, I will describe 5 common issues business managers encounter when hiring remote or in-house developers, and then tips on how to avoid such issues. If you see something similar throughout your collaboration, you need to take action to prevent further risks.

## Potential issues when hiring remote developers

#### 1. Insufficient skills
The remote developer or team can have poor technical skills, limited understanding of development processes, and make faulty decisions which harm the development process and lead to the overall low quality of the delivery. Usually, this situation creates a need for a customer to spend significant time testing and reporting obvious bugs. Meanwhile, the development process is better organized when a customer only suggests improvements (such as UI tweaks, new use cases, etc.) but does not perform QA testing work which is what a remote development team is responsible for. In order to hire developers, the candidates should not only pass the technical interview but also complete a coding challenge of decent difficulty.

#### 2. Bad communication

Ideally, when a team of software developers works on a particular project there is a productive environment, high motivation, professional communication.  But exceptions happen, and here are the precise examples:

- Lack of interest. Reluctance to productively discuss an actual problem during remote working. Instead, the developer is doing some lower-prioritized tasks and postponing the problem discussion for later.
- Logically incorrect sentences, language, and communication barriers of remote employees. It causes difficulties when trying to understand the pressing issues or explain them.
- Aptitude to criticize teammates/customers instead of resolving mistakes. It is rather a personal characteristic, not a communication problem. Btw, the experienced hiring manager would spot this in the screening process.
- Delayed responses. It belongs to the issues with culture fit and dependability. During the hiring process, this can be determined with specific questions in the interview process.

There also exist etiquette problems, such as interruptions during voice calls, personal criticism, lack of respect, raising the voice while communicating. Etiquette problems of both in-house and remote teams are the most critical and should be avoided at the very beginning when hiring remote workers. Ensure there are no such issues before you hire remote developers. I'll tell you more about that below.

#### 3. Insufficient understanding of the requirements
Small interest in understanding the requirements, reluctance to think and analyze out of the boundaries, reluctance to think like a customer or see particular cases from the end-user perspective.

Apart from motivation problems mentioned above, software engineers can also lack soft skills or technical expertise which makes it difficult to understand project requirements in detail.

#### 4. Attempts to make poor deliveries
It is a common and well-known issue when a developer either knowingly or mistakenly delivers an unfinished or wrongly done job and hopes it to be enough to get approved. If you are going to hire developers consider giving them a complex test, and see I they will try to deliver a poor result instead of researching a task deeper.

#### 5. No respect for customer's business
It happens when remote developers work on particular tasks but have very little interest in what the final plan or business objectives are. It is fine if your developers deliver tasks based on your precise specifications. But your engineers should be team players who care about common success, for maximum efficiency.

## How to avoid the above listed problems when hiring remote software developers

Hiring remote developers, or in-house teams is a highly responsible activity because you either move forward growing your startup or keep struggling with the technical or other issues. I will describe how we at EcDev Studio hire engineers and build talented teams.

The first thing we do when we hire software developers is review their resumes, where we check how responsible the candidate is when searching for a job (resume accuracy, informativeness of the details, overall openness, etc), and also check actual skills with the experience in the resume.

The next step is soft skills and language proficiency check. During the first interview round, we check the developer candidate for the culture fit, dependability, emotional intelligence, communication skills, problem-solving attitude, perseverance, leadership qualities, English language. Many companies either skip this step or do it unprofessionally, but to hire remote developers and do well, a soft skills assessment is necessary. The short but great guide to checking soft skills is by this authoritative [article](https://sprockets.ai/interview-questions-to-evaluate-soft-skills/{external}).

![soft skill ecdev](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/6/small_skill_8c711133a1.svg)

Next comes the hard skills check, which is a pretty straightforward step in hiring remote developers.

![hard skills](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/7/27/banner_471d784c81.svg)

Finally, a 2-month evaluation period starts where the newcomer gets a deep drive into work ethics, and the company-established rules and gets a chance to prove themself as a credible team player. The goal is to give a higher complexity task in this period to either identify the talented developer with high technical skills or drop the underperforming developer in the early stage. A probationary period is a good and proven practice in software development, especially when hiring remote talents.

Tech companies usually spend some time in order to hire remote developers successfully, sometimes it can take weeks to close particular positions. If to do things right it's definitely possible to hire a developer or team and avoid the problems listed in this article.

## The biggest trap in hiring remote developers

What do you think is the biggest trap? To hire a low-performing developer with poor hard skills? Or maybe to hire a developer who communicates badly? But what if you hired somebody who delivers and communicates, and you even see the results constantly (e.g. new web flows delivered), but you feel something is still wrong you don't know what. You see new flows getting developed but their page speed is average, the developer is telling you there are no technical capabilities to make it higher, you trust them and say "Okay, I understand". Read further.

Later after 6 months of a relationship, you decided to give him a more complex task e.g. 5 out of 10 complexity, while in the past he did only easy tasks (e.g. 3/10 complexity). You see developer fails and you fire him away. Let's say later you were lucky to hire somebody truly proficient.

Upon seeing how a skilled developer got your complex tasks done, optimized speed to the utmost, you became amazed at how it could be done. Finally, the new developer makes a code review of your previous engineer and concludes there is a ton of poor code that needs refactoring.

So what is the biggest trap? That's when you hire remote developers guessing you evaluated them well but in fact, the developer is burnt out, they have a junior level with low growing capabilities and poor motivation. Finally, it results in wasted months of time and corresponding expenses, which were possible to prevent in the beginning.

What is the difference between professional hiring managers and amateurish ones? It is the ability to professionally evaluate soft and hard skills, and give the complex (10 out of 10) test at the beginning to properly identify the real capabilities of the developer candidate.

Here in the EcDev Studio team are only such talented developers who passed the evaluation, and we proudly call them vetted experts.

There is a specific set of rules to follow when hiring remote developers, to avoid a lot of known issues.

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What you should know about hiring remote developers

You should carefully consider the relevance of a particular technology for your business goals, development costs, and the risks associated with further support when choosing a technology stack. If you want to create a custom e-commerce store for retail, you can choose between WooCommerce and Magento platforms. Magento comes with more built-in features, however development is more expensive. Moreover, due to market peculiarities, there is a risk of failing to find good Magento developers when required (it could become an issue during further maintenance).

If you are thinking of using CMS such as [WordPress](/hire-wordpress-developers/), Drupal or Magento, I recommend you to avoid using ready themes and page builders. Use only custom themes and clean markup without auto-generated excessive code. Otherwise, you may experience significant performance and maintainability issues. Websites that we delivered on WordPress ([https://picupmedia.com/](https://picupmedia.com/{externalnofollow}), [ https://www.ratesandmoney.com/](https://www.ratesandmoney.com/{externalnofollow})) have excellent load speed mostly because they are custom-made (without the use of ready themes and page builders)

If you consider using back-end frameworks, the most popular are Django, [Express](/hire-node-developers/), Laravel and Spring. The most popular front-end frameworks are Angular, Vue.js, and [React library](/hire-react-developers/).

As mentioned above, instant site speed is essential. A significant performance indicator is TTFB value (time to the first byte). In CMS-based sites, the only way to avoid delays is the proper use of server-side caching, which caches the entire back-end, including database queries and page response. A proper mechanism for updating the cache should also be implemented based on both schedule and content updates by the admin. With framework-based websites, it is easier to achieve the good TTFB. It is often enough to follow standard coding practices and have NGinx or Apache configured correctly.

Avoid using shared web hosting services (like GoDaddy or Hostgator). Use only reliable cloud servers like AWS, Google Cloud, or Digital Ocean. Of course, you will need the qualified staff to set things up on a clean Linux server, but for sure, you can't let such a detail as web hosting prevent you from fulfilling your business goals. In my other article [a guide to choosing and configuring high availability WordPress hosting](/blog/guide-to-choosing-and-configuring-high-availability-wordpress-hosting/) I've described how people without deep technical skills can set up a reliable WordPress hosting on AWS.

Whenever possible, use cloud infrastructure. For example, if your website is equipped with a search feature with autocomplete functionality, you can integrate AWS Elasticsearch and achieve immediate search results or auto-suggestions on your website. Instead of utilizing your servers' space to store large files, use AWS S3.

Use CDNs (content-delivery networks) such as Cloudflare and Amazon Cloudfront. This method allows your heavy content (e.g. images, videos) to be distributed across multiple servers in different countries, reducing distance latency and allowing your visitors to access this heavy content almost immediately. A Cloudflare Pro plan can also store HTML output in multiple locations, not just heavy content like images and videos.


Recommendations regarding technology choice to organize web development correctly.

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The importance of right technology choice in web development

A couple of years ago, we started working with an Australian company, a supplier of B2B services for the jewelry industry. Their idea was simple: provide retouching services for jewelry product photos so they look professional.

The company initially came to us with a small website and small client flow. Today, the company is widely successful and scaled up to provide its services worldwide.

I’m going to tell you some mistakes that were made early on, but could have positioned this business for its current success much sooner, if solved earlier.

Read on to find out if you’re following the best practices.
#### Problem 1: The website was incredibly slow and defective
It's great that our client decided to change their website developer, but why do companies like this wait for so long? In most cases, a client doesn’t have benchmarks set which can inform them if their website is functioning properly or not. Instead, they hope for the best outcome.

If you have a buggy site that runs at a snail's pace and your developer can’t resolve this after multiple attempts, they most probably lack the technical skills needed to complete this task. This is usually a strong indicator that you should terminate the contract with the developer and start looking for a new one.

Don’t fall into the trap of hoping that problems will get resolved on their own. You need to be proactive and intervene. To learn how to avoid such situations, check out my other article: [what you should know about hiring remote developers](/blog/what-you-should-know-about-hiring-remote-developers/).
#### Problem 2: The website was poorly designed and complicated to use
Too often, [UI/UX design](/hire-ui-ux-designers/) is an afterthought. In the case of my client, the company’s website was too difficult to navigate and use. That's because the website was not created with the user experience in mind.

The result? A lot of lost visitors who could have been potential buyers left the site without giving it a second thought.

First impressions are important so you should take your time finding a designer who can deliver a website that drives engagement and motivates visitors to take action. Carefully vet your talent to ensure they can craft a site that provides the best user experience possible.
#### Problem 3: Having an ineffective sales funnel was a problem for the company
This is a problem for tens of thousands of businesses across the globe — not just our client. Business owners expect visitors to buy products or services from their website, but visitors lack the motivation to even scroll down and continue reading.

An effective sales funnel builds a chain of user actions to smoothly warm up interests instead of expecting clients to buy on the first visit.

Our client implemented a sales funnel that incorporates warming leads, and their sales saw an immediate jump. Yes, it’s more complicated, but the rewards are much greater.
#### Problem 4. The company picked the wrong web hosting service
I’m going to write an extended post on this area later. For now, I’ll just say that choosing shared web hosting (the cheapest one) is one of the most common mistakes that businesses make. Unfortunately, selecting the wrong host can hamper a business ability to execute their planned goals.

Many business owners use websites built with [WordPress](/hire-wordpress-developers/), and use WP-managed web hosting (e.g., WPEngine, SiteGround, etc). This hosting type is faster but it’s too expensive to host several websites under the same account. The ideal hosting is to use cloud server instances (e.g., AWS EC2 or Digital Ocean) with a custom configuration.

Setting up cloud server instances requires a one-time expense for a DevOps expert to configure everything properly. But after setting it up, it only costs about $40 per month to have strong hardware, host unlimited amounts of websites, and maintain higher speed than with other hosting types I mentioned earlier.

I have more content in the pipeline that I’ll continue to release in the near future. Follow this blog to receive upcoming insights on how to cut down on waste.


The story about Australian business that struggled for 2 years before blowing up.