A few months ago, AWS introduced an extremely useful little feature to their consistently developing EC2 platform: Instance Tagging. Before tags, it was relatively tricky to define a clear instance nomenclature, forcing you to implement a vague approach using security groups if you wanted something close to the same functionality. Since there is also a full API surrounding tags, they can be put to work in many useful ways.

Naming instances

Besides attaching up to ten custom nuggets of arbitrary data to instances, tags can be extremely handy when it comes to naming your EC2 instances, and more importantly, using these names to differentiate between instances and their roles. For example, you have three instances. One holds your master database and website, the second is a slave database in replication, and the third is a staging/test server. You’ll want to make pretty damn sure that when you’re SSH’d into all three of your instances, the commands you send are received by the intended recipient server.
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“I’m already using Google Analytics” is what most people seem to say when asked if they’d like to try a new analytics solution for their site.

Google Analytics is great if you’re looking at trends, and seeing how your site has been doing in the past. It’s a fantastically advanced tool that does almost anything you could want a reporting tool to do. But it’s never up to date – it’s never instant. Google Analytics is great at finding out why things happened. Sometimes you need to know what’s happening right now.

GoSquared LiveStats is about deciding how to make changes now, how to improve your site to maximise the effects of what is currently happening, rather than what’s happened.

When you tweet about your latest blog post – you likely want to see the immediate response. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could see exactly who was on you site before and after you post on Twitter? Wouldn’t it be great to see if the people who saw your tweet actually stayed around on your site?

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Today is a very special day for us. Today is GoSquared’s 5th birthday, and what a birthday it is.

Angel Investment from Stefan Glaenzer and other top Investors

The GoSquared Team is thrilled to announce today that we have just closed an initial round of angel investment from leading investors Stefan Glaenzer, Eileen Burbidge, Robert Dighero, and Thomas Jones.

We won’t be disclosing the amount raised, but we are extremely excited about the position this puts us in to push GoSquared even further along our path to building the best real-time website analytics platform on the web. It’s fantastic to have the backing of some of the most experienced, connected investors in the London tech scene. Their belief in our plans for the future fills us with excitement for what we can achieve next.

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