From now on, all new paying subscriptions for Invoicebus will be processed by 2Checkout.com, Inc (Ohio, USA), which is authorized retailer for thousands of tangible or digital products and services worldwide.

How it works?
When you’re purchasing plan at Invoicebus website, you will be taken to the secure site of 2Checkout.com and brought back to Invoicebus upon completion of your order.


What are the benefits?

• Super convenient – no need of creating account at their site (like Skril requires) in order to purchase Invoicebus plan
• You can pay super-fast with
  • - Any major credit card – Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, Diners, JCB, and debit cards with the Visa and MasterCard logo
  • - PayPal
• You can easily access and update your billing details at https://www.2co.com/
• You will receive clean and short receipts by email each month.

The existing paying customers will not be affected by this change. However, during the next 90 days, they will be asked to update their payment method voluntarily.

Author information

Stefan Chachovski

Co-founder of Invoicebus. Huge lover of nature, science, and chocolate cherry cordials. He occasionally writes on this blog about Invoicebus' stuff. Hello him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.

| Twitter | Facebook |

The post 2Checkout.com – New Payment Processor appeared first on Garage.

This is the last part from the security talk series where I’m going to explain you the methods and technologies we use to host and test the web servers of Invoicebus.

When I talk about hosting, the very first things that pop-up in my mind are reliability, speed and redundancy. Three reasons which were plenty enough to choose Rackspace as our back keeper, one of the biggest cloud hosting providers in the world with cutting edge technology and state of the art data centers across the globe. According to Wikipedia its clients include 40% of the members of the Fortune 100 Magazine and its infrastructure platform is 60% bigger than Google’s. But let’s see what actually we are into.

Reliability

The primary data center of Invoicebus is located in Chicago, Illinois, USA and it’s called “ORD1”. To familiarize better, you can visit the gallery and get a quick view of the facility environment. They claim that can provide 100% uptime, so one month before the official launch of Invoicebus, we decided to conduct a test and make sure if the statement is true. We set up the Rackspace server, transfer the domain from the old hosting, re-hosted our early marketing site, and started experimenting.

One of the tools we’ve been using is called Pingdom, an online service that provides analytics for the server up-time, response time and a couple of other stats and tests. We set up to inspect the server repeatedly on one minute intervals by pinging it from 41 different locations around the world. We were checking the stats almost every day for 30 days, but the dashboard constantly was displaying the same boring message: “Last error seen: NEVER”.

The one minute pings are still running, so if something goes wrong, couple of alerts are triggered and sent instantly to our mobile phones via SMS and email. However, during the 94 days period of Invoicebus, we haven’t got any critical alert, so far so good. We decided to share these results with you:

The graphic shows 99.993% of uptime and 10 minutes of downtime due to scheduled regular maintenance of Invoicebus (applying upgrades and new features). Rackspace promise fulfilled.

Speed

To test the speed and response time we used couple of other services. The simplest was Speedtest.net which yielded

• 350+ Mbit/s Download (Rackspace claims it’s unlimited, or as much as the test server supports)
• 30Mbit/s Upload

constant rates initiated from the ORD1 datacenter, which means from the user’s perspective download and upload would be reversed. However, this was just out of curiosity, because it doesn’t mean anything especially when you deal with concurrent connections from different parts of the world. That’s why, we took in consideration a few other parameters, and most of them depend on the server hardware.

Currently, our server runs on:

• Quad-core AMD Opteron 2375HE @ 2.33 GHz
• 1GB of RAM Memory
• Windows Server 2008 R2 64 Bit

To stress test the web server we’ve used a service called Blitz that initiates so called “rushes” – parallel connections generated from multiple points of presence around the world, so you can calculate how much load your web server can handle in a given period.

The Blitz analysis showed the following:

This went awesome, but what about response times and error rates?

The error rate was 0.
The response time peak was 1.6 sec at 240users/second, which is pretty high.
The average response time was 733ms which also is considerably higher than most other.

Our goal is to keep the response time below 250ms, which means our upper limit would be 120users per second or 7200 in a minute (if we assume uniform distribution on interval between 0 and 60 seconds). If the number of users / visitors increases more than 120/second, we should upgrade our server probably with additional RAM memory (1GB+), so we can maintain the response time within the desired range and keep our customers bright and happy.

Upgrading the Rackspace server is very straightforward and fast process, but for now, this hardware configuration is plenty enough.

What’s on tap?

Reduce the load
Currently our marketing site and web-app are on the same physical machine, however, as the number of visitors/customers increases, we plan to separate them on different machines and reduce the load.

Cloud files via CDN
Cloud files is a service of Rackspace that provides an online storage for files which can be delivered across the globe at blazing speeds over Akamai’s content delivery network (CDN). This CDN caches content at global edge locations saving users time as the requested content is received from within the region instead of coming from the origin server. Let me explain what it means.

The cloud files keep caches of the web-app files (Images, CSS, JavaScript etc.) at different locations around the world and are served depending on the user’s current location. For example, if the user/visitor is located in India, than the content will be requested from the nearest data server in Asia; or if the user is in Germany, the files will be requested from the data server in Europe, regardless if the origin server is located in Chicago, Illinois, US.

Redundancy

Invoicebus creates database backups on a daily basis and here’s how: The backup procedure is scheduled automatically at a specific time of the day when the traffic is least congested, and the server is minimally engaged. The whole database is archived, encrypted (additionally), and uploaded to cloud flies, thereafter replicated to 8 datacenters across the globe on 3 different continents:

The data in each of these 8 nodes is mirrored to three storage disks instantly with dual power supplies and round the clock surveillance.

We’ve been keeping backups from the very first day, which means today we have exactly 94 copies of the database for all of our users, regardless if they run a premium or free plan. If the database drastically increases in future, we plan to implement additional logic for creating backups only from the new or modified data, and not the whole data set.

I believe I’ve covered the most interesting aspects and techniques we’ve been using for our hosting and I hope you’ll find some of them useful.

Now it’s your turn.
Have any suggestions or personal experiences with cloud serves?
Share with us your story; we’re eager to hear how you manage your hosting and backups.

Author information

Stefan Chachovski

Co-founder of Invoicebus. Huge lover of nature, science, and chocolate cherry cordials. He occasionally writes on this blog about Invoicebus' stuff. Hello him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.

| Twitter | Facebook |

The post Sleep tight, your data is secure, part 5 – Hosting Server Security appeared first on Garage.

Invoicebus is built to make you feel comfortable while doing your business, as we shown you with our previous security posts. First and foremost we have to emphasize that for processing payments we’re using third party payment processor gateway Moneybookers (soon to be rebranded to Skrill), so that means your financial transactions are secure and Invoicebus don’t have a clue about your credit card information. Look for card payment providers that offer customizable solutions and compare them. Skrill is the most famous European payment processor with headquarters in London, UK; have over 24.5 million users at the time of writing this and is still growing with about 100 000 new users every weak.

Here is short description about Skrill from their site:

Simplified flow of your payment process look like this:

If you’re wondering what is going on in the picture, here is the explanation:

1. From Invoicebus you are redirected to secure Skrill web page. From there you can make your payment with various credit and debit cards;
2. After you make your payment Skrill contacts your credit card issuing bank;
3. Then funds (the amount depends on your selected plan) are transferred from your bank account to your Skrill e-wallet;
4. At the end funds from your e-wallet are sent to Invoicebus Skrill account and you are redirected back to Invoicebus where you can continue making invoices.

TIP: When you are making online payments never forget to check the URL for secure data transfer with SSL. Checking this is very simple, just see if your browser address bar starts with https.

Author information

Dimitar Stojanov

Co-founder at Invoicebus

Dimitar is co-founder of Invoicebus, an online invoicing tool for easy invoice management. He's passionate about creating beautiful and simple web applications and occasionally writes on this blog about web design, online business, and fighting the status-quo. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

| Twitter | Facebook | Google+ |

The post Sleep tight, your data is secure, part 4 – Payment Processing Security appeared first on Garage.

Data Storage Security

In our case, data storage security refers to the way of keeping and managing customer’s data within the database: invoices, quotes, clients, company details etc.

These kinds of sensitive information are kept in a form that is encrypted by the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) – first open symmetric-key cipher approved by the National Security Agency (NSA) and used by the US federal government for storing secret information.

The human way of showing how this thing works is by the picture below:



We use the words lock, unlock as a way to visualize the meaning of encryption, decryption process of the powerful AES algorithm respectively.

The security key is kept encrypted (with RSA algorithm) in a separate, isolated place (on a different server protected by other security mechanisms and firewalls). Every time when AES needs to lock/unlock data, it requires the decrypted form of his key.

Hypothetically spoken, if security breach happens to the database server, the attacker would not be able to retrieve any meaningful data without this key, unless he has Dan Brown’s TRANSLATR at home.

Other aspects of Data Storage Security

Backups and redundancy are closely related to the Data Storage Security, but will be covered in the upcoming part 5 – Hosting Server Security.
Part 4 and 5 of this security talk series will be continued after the Invoicebus launch.

Author information

Invoicebus Team

We're a team comprised of a few die-hard code freaks, lovers of beautiful design, stewards of simplicity, and passionately dedicated to the user experience. Invoicebus is a great vehicle to express what we do best. Click here to learn more on our business philosophy and how we actually do it.

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The post Sleep tight, your data is secure, part 3 – Data Storage Security appeared first on Garage.

For storing passwords Invoicebus uses something called one-way encryption with salted hash functions. Why is it called one way? Because it can not be decrypted ever, actually it’s not even an encryption. It’s a hash that is completely different thing. In fact, this is one way ticket algorithm for which there is no returning path. This is too awkward explanation of hashing and it might sounds like a rocket science, so with a couple of diagrams we will try to explain as simple as we can what it’s all about.

Password Creation

This process happens every time you enter new password, you sign up, reset or change your password.

• Step 1: Generating random text called random salt, unique for every user.
• Step 2: Generating hash value from both your plain text password and the salt. The hashed salt will be stored in the database (DB) for validating the password in future (at login).
• Step 3: Generating hash value of the concatenated hashes from the previous step. This is the final password hash that will be stored in the database (DB).

The entered password is transformed to a binary value which looks like random gibberish, and nobody, absolutely nobody can retrieve the original plain text back, at least not with today’s technology.

What if two users choose exactly the same password? Will their passwords be represented with same binary values in the database? – No! That’s what salt ensures, unique and hardened passwords, so every password is absolutely unique in the database. Even if you try to reset the old password by entering a new one that is exactly the same as the old password, its representation would be completely different in the database.

Example:
Old password: invoicebus123 —–> generated as: 8de0c3c519
New password: invoicebus123 —–> generated as: bc9fe98a12

Password Validation

Let see how the password is validated during the login process.

• Step 1: Generating hash value for your plain text password. Retrieving the stored salt form the database for that particular username.
• Step 2: Generating hash value of the concatenated values from the previous step.
• Step 3: Comparing the final hash password from the second step with the final password retrieved from the database. If they match the user is authenticated to access the system.

If ever happen to forget your password, Invoicebus would be unable to retrieve it in its original plain text representation. That’s why an email is sent with a link where you can enter a new password.

Be aware of online services that retrieve your password in plain text when you try to reset it. That indicates they don’t use hashing; probably they have some poor password encryption or don’t have an encryption at all. And even hashing is used, it’s a good advice to always choose unique and strong password for every online account you own.

Author information

Invoicebus Team

We're a team comprised of a few die-hard code freaks, lovers of beautiful design, stewards of simplicity, and passionately dedicated to the user experience. Invoicebus is a great vehicle to express what we do best. Click here to learn more on our business philosophy and how we actually do it.

| Twitter | Facebook |

The post Sleep tight, your data is secure, part 2 – Password Storage Security appeared first on Garage.

• Data Transfer Security
• Password Storage Security (upcoming)
• Sensitive Data Storage Security (upcoming)
• Payment Processing Security (upcoming)
• Hosting Server Security (upcoming)

Author information

Invoicebus Team

We're a team comprised of a few die-hard code freaks, lovers of beautiful design, stewards of simplicity, and passionately dedicated to the user experience. Invoicebus is a great vehicle to express what we do best. Click here to learn more on our business philosophy and how we actually do it.

| Twitter | Facebook |

The post Sleep tight, your data is secure, part 1 – Data Transfer Security appeared first on Garage.