Amezmo

VAT IDs and tax rates for markets outside the United States are different than what happens here in the states because consumers generally don’t pay tax on things such as web hosting, or services ar at a federal level. I’m excited to introduce locale award pricing to the EU and UK. The next market will be Australia!

Today I decided to re-use my formula to create a new marketing page. This page is a standard 2-column layout, with a heading, and a paragraph. Each heading starts with a verb. It's important to start headings with verbs because the copy must talk to the audience.

This kind of copy is called "You-copy", which focuses on the customer, not the company.

https://www.amezmo.com/php-servers

This week I saw 3 new users sign up for Amezmo. 2 users created an application, but did not import their Git repo. Another user, created an application and deployed. I'm excited about this and my next step is to identify the source of these users. Google Analytics, while great, is very dense.

The next step is to convert these free trials users to paying customers!

I love talking to users and customers because building things that people can find useful is what motivates me. Recently I talked to an amazing customer who has been providing the most outstanding feedback I could ask for.

What are Workers

Amezmo provides "Workers", which are long running processes. These are generally background processing programs, email queues, image processing jobs, among other use cases. The Laravel PHP framework modernized the Asynchronous worker pattern by making it simple to dispatch jobs onto a queue. Amezmo manages logging, reloading, stopping, and monitoring of background workers from one simple dashboard.

The Feature

Another use case for a worker process is a WebSocket server. Naturally, you'd want to expose a WebSocket server to the Internet so your web application can consume messages from it. Amezmo is now capable of routing your domains directly to your worker processes.

What I learned

Putting oneself in the shoes of the end user gives perspective into the utility of the product.

Further Reading

https://www.amezmo.com/docs/domains/routing

The documentation was severely lacking in density. So I decided to take the good parts of the previous docs site, and redesign the layout. My goal is to make it easy and convenient to write product documentation.

To accomplish this goal, I moved away from a docs.* subdomain to a https://www.amezmo.com/docs subdirectory instead. This allows for easier documentation updates. While there is still A LOT of documentation to write, I feel that I've laid the foundation for great documentation.

A much needed blog redesign was released today. This redesign adds the Amezmo blue color to the navigation bar. It also uses a narrow single column layout.

Code snippets are also implemented using Prism.js

Check it out here: https://blog.amezmo.com

I released an incredible feature today. This feature allows you to launch server instances dedicated to one specific part of your infrastructure stack.

Run MySQL in a dedicated server instance, and access it from your front-end HTTP instance. The best part? IT'S SECURE!

No running IPTables. Every customer of Amezmo gets a /24 block in a private subnet. This means NO OTHER customers can access your instances.

Other use cases:
Dedicated Laravel Queues.
This would require a single instance of Redis running. Amezmo now supports choosing the software you'd like to run on your instance.

I'm very excited about this feature because it brings so many great things in the hands of customers. Private, secure networking between your instances is very important to me, a security conscious developer and founder. I do not want customers pinging other boxes that aren't theirs.

https://www.amezmo.com has been redesigned. All of the content, including the product description, and the benefits and features have been re-written. I took the approach of "talking to customer", rather than making statements about what amezmo is. The site features two new user onboarding components. The first is a sign up directly on the home page. It sites in the second column from left in a standard 2 column layout.

All headlines now feature a strong adjective describing something, or a verb. This allows for a better story to be told about Amezmo.

The second onboarding component is the sign up page on the bottom of the site right before the footer.

Something that I very sensitive to is bad UX. From the beginning of Amezmo, UX and the overall user interface is something that was always a top priority. One of the small things are buttons. Amezmo's buttons have three states (of which I'm sure you're familiar) with. The states are normal, hover, and active.

Amezmo's dashboard now has a consistent button across all forms and modals. The first button, is the "safe" button, which will exit out of the current action. The second button is a primary button, which will usually invoke a change to your application, or configuration.

Now with Amezmo you will be able to add up to 3 custom domains. Each domain will have an SSL certificate that's auto renewed. (Can you guess which provider auto renews this certificate?)

This idea/requirement came from my friend @jimmylipham for his new product called RepoBox - https://www.repobox.io

At one point, we realized that adding a www domain for his root level repobox.io domain was not going to work out of the box. So, instead of implementing custom business logic to determine which type of root domain prefix to add to Amezmo's automatic Nginx configuration engine, I let the users manage the entire thing.

For example, if you want to have www.example.com and example.com point to your server, then it's very easy to add that additional domain name to your application's Domain name table.