MyNewPlace Blog

Last week, MyNewPlace performed what CTO and VP of Engineering Ken Cluff described as ‘open heart surgery' on our site, which involved the delicate task of moving all of our servers to one collocation at our datacenter, 365 Main.

Moving servers around is not exactly a risk-averse production; when a company is required to unplug the device that is the entire business, there is a certain amount of expected anxiety. Thus, the move was undertaken with the utmost care, spread over a few weeks time and under the close watch of Hitachi, a server manufacturer who sent some of their specialist to supervise.

When I asked our IT department why the move was necessary, I received a short answer and a long answer. The short answer was “power." The long answer was that it was necessary to consolidate our 2 existing server farm cages on two different floors of the 365 Main facility into one larger cage, all connected by a new cutting edge Juniper ‘virtual chassis' switch. Up until last week, we kept our server racks in two collocation areas at the 365 Main data center and have now moved our servers into one bigger collocation area.

So let's put this in terms that we can understand, by using an apartment allegory. Let's call a collocation area an apartment, a datacenter (365 Main) an apartment building, a rack a bedroom and a server a person:

A long time ago, MyNewPlace rented two apartments on different floors in apartment building. Each apartment had 3 bedrooms and three residents. Then, each of the six apartment residents went out, got married and had children, but no one moved out! Pretty soon, there was simply not enough room for all the apartment residents to be comfortable. Also, the apartment building began to ask questions as to exactly how many people were living in these apartments, since it was apparent that the electrical needs of both apartments had been rising steadily for a while. So finally, MyNewPlace talked to the landlord and said that they would like to end both 3 bedroom apartment leases and move into a brand new penthouse apartment, with enough room for everyone, as well as room for future generations of apartment residents.

Now that we have moved all of our servers to one big penthouse suite of a collocation area, our servers have access to all the power that they could ever need. Now that our site is housed comfortably, we can easily monitor all of our servers and add new ones as necessary.

Over the July 4^th weekend, cyber-terrorists launched a broad and ambitious attack on military and government sites in Asia, Europe and the U.S…. and on MyNewPlace.com. We assume that we were lower on their target list than the CIA and South Korea, but who knows?

The New York Times reports that the South Korean government stated that “an army of thousands of ‘zombie computers' infected by the hackers' program were ordered to request access to Web sites simultaneously, causing an overload that caused the sites' servers to crash."

Web ops folks refer to these as distributed denial of service attacks (DDOS). They attempt to overload a site's servers and bring it to a screeching halt. A DDOS is difficult to track because the server requests are sent from a variety of IP addresses. In the graph below the eightfold spike in requests on one of our servers is evident:

When a single bot or crawler tries to disrupt a site's operations, it's relatively easy to identify it and deny it access. However, when these requests are sent from hundreds or thousands of sources, as is the case with a DDOS, it becomes more difficult to distinguish a sudden surge in Americans looking for apartments for rent from a malicious attack.

Fortunately, our IT team headed by John Shin is ever-vigilant, and never offline. Once they determined that a broad number of IP addresses were sending automated requests with malicious intent, they used an IP locator to determine from where in the world these requests were sent. As it turns out, the IP addresses were from Iran, China, Chile, Germany and The Netherlands. Since whoever launched the DDOS had been able to hijack IP addresses from ISPs around the world, we contacted the ISP the administrators with the most suspicious IP addresses (highest and fastest request volumes) to investigate further.

One ISP they contacted, Krypt, was very helpful in our investigation (thanks Krypt!). They were able to determine that the IP addresses all belonged to one customer and were able to shut them down. We, of course, also blocked those IP addresses on our end.

These type of attacks are every NetOps Admin's worst nightmare, and are impossible to fully defend, or to proactively prevent… and, you don't have to be the CIA or New York Stock Exchange to be targeted. The best defense is a seasoned and fully caffeinated Ops team. Was your site attacked as well? How did you respond?

After examining last month's data, we found an interesting cyclical pattern in our browser report; the percentage of users who visit our site with Firefox increases every weekend, and then retreats every Monday to a percentage below Internet Explorer version 6.0.

In the chart below, IE 6.0 is the blue line, and FireFox 3.0 is red. The obvious trend is that every Sunday, IE 6.0 usage reaches its lowest percentage share of the week, while Firefox 3.0 records its highest. You can see that every weekend, (shaded blue) shows that the percent share of browser usage swaps on Friday and returns to normal on Monday.

Furthermore, though it is not included in this chart, the most popular browser, IE 7.0, dips slightly each weekend (about one percent). The percentage that IE 6.0 and IE 7.0 lose is made up by the uptick in FireFox 3.0 users.

So why does Firefox usage increase at the expense of IE each weekend? Our working hypothesis thus far is that many offices don't allow their employees to download Firefox or that people are more accustomed to using IE on their office machines.

Do you use a different browser at work than you do when you are at home? If so, is it because your office only uses Internet Explorer?

Today, we're happy to announce our partnership with OpsTechnology, a leading provider of spend management systems to the multifamily industry. MyNewPlace is the first Internet Listing Service to integrate with OpsTechnology's eBilling solution.

Participating companies can now receive their MyNewPlace invoices via the OpsTechnology platform and greatly streamline their accounts payable process. MyNewPlace already has five key clients on the system, representing more than 300 sites, and anticipates this number to quickly grow.

“With this solution, we send one electronic file directly to OpsTechnology. The system routes the invoices to each property which guarantees that they don't get ‘lost in the mail.' Our customer can quickly approve the invoice online and transmit it on to their accounting system for payment," said MyNewPlace VP of Technology, Ken Cluff.

Building best-in-class backend systems and partnering with industry leaders such as OpsTechnology are some of the ways that we try to add value to our marketing solutions. We're very excited about this latest addition to our panoply of solutions.

Visit the MyNewPlace press release page to read the full article.

Starting today, MyNewPlace users have a new resource to help them find apartments for rent–their friends and social graph. We know that finding and moving into a new place is an important event and we want to make it easy for you to get good advice from those you know and trust.

To that end, we are pleased to announce our implementation of Facebook Connect; we are excited to be the first apartment site to incorporate the social interactivity of Facebook.

So how is this going to change your apartment search on MyNewPlace? New users will have a choice of registering via their Facebook ID–often with just two mouse clicks. All users can now post properties that they're interested in to their Facebook profile page along with your note asking for feedback from your trusted network of friends and family.

Perhaps you would like to know if anyone has ever lived in a particular apartment complex and if they enjoyed it. Maybe you would like to know about the surrounding neighborhood, access to public transportation, or what to expect from the nightlife. Or, if you are looking for a roommate, posting to Facebook is an excellent way to see which friends or friends of friends are looking to share an apartment.

Above you can see how our friend Ann is planning a move to Miami beach. Great location, indeed. However, our friend Arthur (who looks suspiciously like my evil twin) knows that there are some great deals on Miami apartments right now and is recommending she consult with his friend Alex, a native of the area, for more information.

Where you live has a huge impact on your social life and happiness. Who better to help you find the perfect spot than the people you know and trust and communicate with everyday via Facebook? Check it out, and let us know what you think.

The new search term resolver has been at work for a few weeks now and so the other day we took a look at what searches people had been doing that we were still not handling.

Among the most frequent were searches for apartments for rent in ‘Hollywood', ‘Midtown‘, ‘Uptown‘, and ‘Orange County' so we used the flexibility of the new system to create new geographic entities and some aliases for common variants we found people were using. Now you can search on ‘Orange County', or even just ‘OC‘, find your new place in ‘Queens‘, or move into an Uptown apartment in New York.

We'll keep adding to the list so that you can find your new place any place.

Let us know of any geographic locations that you have had difficulty with in the comments section.

This morning we saw that our friends over at the HotPads Blog had posted an article about connecting with their company on LinkedIn, using a newly released feature. We were happy to see that MyNewPlace had also been selected as one of the 160,000 companies to be included on their new release.

LinkedIn, the popular social networking site that focuses on connecting business professionals, within and across industries, recently released a beta version of a new feature called Company Profiles. According to their blog post, which goes into some detail on the matter, each Company Profile is comprised of data that each LinkedIn member provides.

By showcasing the people that are working at each of these companies, it really helps to break the monolithic image that can sometimes be associated with corporations. There are actual people behind those mirrored skyscraper windows, which is comforting.

The information that LinkedIn is able to provide is unique because each company is represented by the attributes of its employees. LinkedIn is able to display interesting demographic information such as common universities, median age, what companies its employees have worked at before and after and common job titles.

Other features include recent hires, job listings, popular profiles as well as traditional information supplemented by BusinessWeek. Below is a screenshot of the MyNewPlace Company Profile as it is displayed to me:

I have found LinkedIn to be a great site, but usually only useful during a job search. It looks as though they are trying to increase multifunctionality on their site.

Has anyone had good experiences using LinkedIn to find or look for a job? Have you found other uses for the site? Has it become an online rolodex? Hit us back in the comments.

We've been in love with the type-ahead suggestion list feature on the Google toolbar for quite a while and have finally figured it was time to try adding it to the search box on MyNewPlace. Little did I realize what a major back end effort it would take to support something that looks so simple.

Last week we released the new search term resolution back end (and it's been great, the number of your search queries we are resolving has increased nicely and we have more tricks in the wings to make it even better) but it wasn't until Friday that we were hooked up to the type-ahead suggestion list.

Now that it is live, some lucky subset of new visitors (about 1 in 4) will experience the new type-ahead feature when entering search terms. We hope folks like it, and if they do, we'll go back and make it even snappier than our current prototype.

Let us know if it has improved your apartment search either by posting a comment or using our feedback form.

According to our analytics, visitors searching for apartments to rent at MyNewPlace have increasingly been using Internet Explorer 7.0 throughout the year and have finally overtaken the number of visitors using IE 6.0.

Apparently, this change happened in December and is logged not only on our site but other sources as well. This is probably due to holiday computer software and hardware purchases.

It is certainly refreshing to see that our users are as tech-savvy as we hope that we are. However, even if you haven't jumped on the IE 7.0 bandwagon, there is no reason to fear that you will lose functionality in your online apartment search.

All apartment searches, detailed listings, pictures, floorplans, maps and all of the data that comprises the rich tapestry of information about apartments in cities across the nation that MyNewPlace offers to renters is compatible with both versions of Internet Explorer as well as Firefox and Safari.

Which browser do people prefer? What are some of the factors that determine which browser you use?

We're pleased to announce that two MyNewPlacer's, VP of  Technology Ken Cluff and Data Integration Engineer Gabriele Cressman, have been recognized by the NMHC’s MITS Project for their contributions to developing apartment industry data exchange standards.

The MITS (Multifamily Information and Transactions Standard)  project ( http://www.mitsproject.org ) is an industry-wide effort by the apartment sector to develop common data standards and XML protocols to facilitate data and systems integration. The MITS standards are freely available as an industry resource.

We've been an active participant in the MITS project since our inception and employ the MITS standards for data exchange with many of our clients. In presenting the award the MITS committee specifically acknowledged Gabi's contributions to core components of the MITS standard and the custom extension mechanism.

“The exchange of apartment data via the MITS standard helps us provide the freshest, most up to date listings to the consumers visiting our site,” commented Ken. “The consumers are happy, the apartment owners are happy, and because we’re leveraging an XML data standard rather than doing custom integrations from scratch, even our technology team is happy.”