We strongly believe that using the redirection.io manager is a nice way to manage the traffic of websites at scale, and that it offers many nice features to create redirects or traffic management rules.
However, there are some cases where you would want to avoid using the graphical interface to create redirection rules:
to create a large number of rules, if the CSV import format is not flexible enough for your requirements;
to create a rule when a given event occurs (for example, when the URL of one page changes in your Content Management System);
when you want a complete control over the created rule (attach many markers, use complex triggers or actions, etc.).
There are indeed many cases where it may be desirable to be able to create rules without human intervention! This is why we have launched, earlier this week, a new version of our public API. In a few words, the newly available API endpoints allow to retrieve the projects of an organization, list both the published and draft rules, create, edit or delete rules (and drafts), publish the draft changes.
The API supports all types of triggers, actions, markers and variables - which means that web traffic automation can be taken to another level!
After growing requests from our customers for an ARM version of the redirection.io agent, we will now propose such ARM builds in our packages repository.
ARM is a processors architecture which can be used as an alternative to the more traditional x86 architecture. Many Cloud providers now propose ARM instances, which can sometimes offer a better price/performance ratio, and can be a good solution to host the redirection.io agent as a reverse proxy.
We do not propose distribution-specific packages for these ARM versions for the moment, so you will have to build your own systemd unit service file to run the agent. However, the agent tar.gz archive contains a redirectionio-agenty.service systemd file, that you will usually want to put under /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants:
As redirection.io is becoming more and more used by large organizations, the roles and permissions orchestration within a project can become quite challenging to set up. Moreover, redirection.io offers a large panel of actions and empowers our customers with many new possibilities towards the traffic of their website... and with great power come a great responsibility 🙂
Some large organizations requested the ability to restrict permissions by path, to prevent customers to manage the traffic outside the site sections under their responsibility. Several use-case were suggested:
in international contexts, it can be desirable that various users of the same project can only manage disjoint parts of the website. For example, the French marketing team should be authorized to manage redirects under /fr, but not under /de or /uk, which should be reserved respectively to the German and British teams
the customers support team of a company should be able to manage the rules under the /faq path, while the /shop part of the website should only be managed by the eCommerce team
etc.
We have therefore introduced a new concept: the project segmentation. From now on, "Pro" plan projects can define segments at the project level, which help organize rules and can be used to restrict the permissions of users within the project.
How to create project segments
Organization and project Administrators can add, edit and delete segments under the "Segments" tab, in the project settings:
In order to add a segment, click on the "Add a segment" button, and fill in the form:
You can add as many conditions as you want: all the rules for which the "Source URL" starts with one of the provided strings will be considered as part of the segment. This means that several segments can share some URLs. It also means that a segment can be a restriction on a given domain, or even on a given protocol (scheme).
How to restrict a member to one or several segments
Once segments have been defined, project members can be attached to one or more segments, to restrict their rules edition permissions. It is even possible to define a segment restriction directly when inviting a user in the project:
Go to the "members" tab, on the project settings screen. Hit the "Invite another user", and choose either the "Contributor" or "Publisher" role. The "Segments restrictions" dropdown appears and lets you choose one or more segments that must be attached to this user once the invitation will be accepted.
The segments are displayed on the members list
A user with segment restrictions will only be allowed to create rules for which the "Source URL" starts with one of its segments contraints.
Segment-restricted users have limited actions:
they cannot create or edit rules for which the Source URL does not match their segment restrictions
they cannot mark for deletion rules that are not part of their segments
a Publisher with segment restriction can only publish rules within their segment. If some draft rules are not part of the Publisher segment(s), they won't be published, and will remain untouched
a Publisher with segment restrictions cannot rollback to a previous version of the ruleset, as this could introduce changes outside his segment restrictions
Bonus: filter the rules based on their segment
Whatever their segment restrictions, all the project members can see the list of all the rules that have been configured in the project. However, as a user it can sometimes be useful to list only the rules that you can edit - so, a new "Segment" filter has been added in the rules list screen. It allows to isolate the rules that are specific to one or more segments:
With this new "segments" feature, redirection.io adds a new layer of fine-grained administration capabilities, to help delegate the traffic management to several entities within large organizations and websites. The feature is available as of today for all the "Pro" organizations!
While the redirection.io logs explorer is snappy and offers many options, it can become annoying to repeat the same filters configuration to get a specific report. For example, if your weekly website monitoring routine includes checking the HTTP errors found by search engines, you could end up being a bit fed up with configuring again and again the "Status code" and "User agent type" filters.
For such cases, we offer the "Logs views" feature. Logs views are a way to save a specific columns, filters and aggregation configuration, and to be able to reload this configuration with as few clicks as possible.
We already several predefined "Logs views" that address common analysis use cases:
All HTTP errors: This report displays the list of all HTTP errors (both 4xx and 5xx). Use this view to spot issues peaks during the last logging period.
Googlebot verified requests: This report lists all the requests that have been performed by Googlebot or any other Google-operated bot. We have validated this request and filtered out third-party bots pretending to be Googlebot.
Googlebot most common errors: This report shows the most common HTTP errors encountered by verified Googlebot on your website. Whenever possible, you should try to solve these issues by setting up a new redirect rule.
Fake Googlebot: Lists all requests that have been sent using the "Googlebot" User-Agent, but that we identified as obviously not initiated by Google services. It may be that these requests are performed by third-party bots that try to scrape some content from your website.
Most common HTTP errors: This report lists the top 100 most common HTTP errors (both 4xx and 5xx), grouped by URL and status code. The errors are sorted by occurrence count.
Top hit pages: Displays the most frequently hit URLs that serve html content.
You can also define your own log views, that will be saved at the project level, so you and your colleagues can use them.
Loading an existing "logs view" is a one-click operation:
Hover the small gear wheel on the top right corner of the filters bar
Then, choose one of the displayed views, or hit the "Load another view" button.
As of today, it is possible to temporarily disable a rule using a new "Enable the rule" switch in the rule edition form. All the pre-existing rules have been let enabled by default, and all future traffic management rules will be enabled by default. Just hit the switch to have the rule be disabled.
👉 Please note that, after you have enabled or disabled a rule, you still have to publish this change (as any other change you would make in your ruleset) for it to be applied on your production website.
One could wonder why such a feature was not available in the past 🤔 In fact, it has always been possible to remove a rule and re-enable it later on, by using the rules history mechanism, which allows to restore a past ruleset. This new feature just makes it a lot easier and straightforward to temporarily shutdown one or more rules and still keep them on hand, so it can be re-enabled in a quick way when needed.
On the other side, it may sound weird to want to temporarily disable one or more redirects on your website. This feature has been requested by several customers and can be used in several use cases:
to prepare a set of new rules that will have to be enabled in a few days only;
to execute a rule only during certain periods, and to be able to deactivate it outside these time slots;
to perform A/B tests on redirection targets.
Prepare a set of new redirect rules upfront
Imagine that a new country section is being launched on your website in a few days. The rollout of these country pages will come with a set of new redirects, that you will want to enable only when the new section goes live. Using the "enable / disable" feature, you can now prepare the new rules, and enable these rules when the backend website is ready.
Execute a rule only during certain periods
Imagine that a section of your online store is only opened during event sales, which take place on the first Wednesday of the month. The rest of the time, you prefer a redirect to a specific landing page of your website. Disabling this redirect rule to open the event sales shopping page(s) is a quick way to "open the doors" 🔓🚪
Run A/B redirect tests
You could also want to test a set of redirects over a certain period of time, measure their effectiveness on your business / revenue, and eventually re-enable those rules if necessary.
redirection.io offers several ways to be notified when things happen on your website or in your project.
We have launched today new "team notifications", to keep your team or coworkers informed of the occurrence of an event in the redirection.io project. For the moment, the notification feature is able to send notifications to Slack channels, email addresses (a mailing-list, for example) or to webhook URLs (for automation).
This feature is available only to "Pro" plans and is designed to keep your colleagues informed that something is happening in the project. This "something" can be an event of different types:
Last week, we have taken part to the #EcoEx21 online-conference - the "Ecosystem Experience" is the yearly grand-meeting of OVHcloud, the european leading hosting company. The online-conference covered many infrastructure topics during 2 days, on november 16th and 17th.
Our CEO, Xavier, shared a talk with Aline Passelègue (Marketing Manager, OVHcloud Marketplace) and Laura Berger (Global Channel Manager, Scaleflex / Cloudimage) to explain how SaaS products help businesses improve their online presence and optimize their ROI using quality tools.
At redirection.io, we are long-time OVHcloud partners and are proud to be part of the close ecosystem of this european tech champion. The infrastructure provided by OVHcloud helps us build a scalable and performant infrastructure, to collect and process hundreds of million lines of logs per day. With several PoP, the technical solutions offered by OVHcloud make a good ground to build on, and allow our customers to benefit of a reliable and performant service.
The question of Web performance
When asked about the notion of "Web performance", Xavier explained that web performance cannot be only measured based on the raw speed or the responsiveness of a Web platform, but that it is indeed made of a collection of many indicators. Does it perform well from a business point of view? Does it work well under all traffic conditions? Do media and linked assets load in a fast way? Does it help improve the brand perception, or on the contrary does it have a negative impact on your image?
How to monitor your growing business?
As a business grows, it can become quite complicated to monitor the scalability of its Web platform. Just like a real "physical" business will require some care, your online shop needs monitoring and preventive actions: does the site still work when there are many customers at the same time? What happens when a product becomes out of stock? How can you make sure that all the pages work, not only your homepage and the main category pages?
It appears that the solution is not only a technical one - the reliability of your online business can not only rest on the shoulders of your tech team, but there is a need to empower non-technical managers and provide them with the right tools to optimize the website from a business point of view.
A great source of information are the website's own traffic logs - analyzing the path of customers will learn you a lot about what to optimize on your web platform. redirection.io is a great way to collect traffic logs in real-time, perform customer analysis, and learn about issues that you wouldn't be aware of instead (and, of course, fix those issues).
Online SaaS tools and ROI
For sure, SaaS solutions and external tools do cost some money. However, you do not necessarily need to see those tools as a cost, but as an investment to improve your web platform. A professionnal website usually requires a dedicated team, ranging from developers, UX designers, marketing managers and customer support. The ROI of using quality tools is almost always immediate, as they allow your team to work in a more efficient and organized way, which will in turn generate more revenue.
The OVHcloud marketplace is a great way to find quality tools, which have been curated and chosen for their quality and high potential. Also, we recommend searching for other customer advices, asking for demos, and choosing performant products. However, keep in mind the "Less is more" principle, and use external solutions with care to avoid clutter your website with unnecessary javascript tags and solutions that would only slow down your website and make the user experience painful.
See you for the OVHcloud EcoEx22
The conclusion of the talk is all about ways to optimize a growing e-shop. There are SaaS solutions out there to monitor your traffic without making it a tech-savvy headache! Your non-tech team can also contribute in concrete ways to the good performance of your web platform.
A big "thank you" to the OVHcloud team for inviting us along with Scaleflex for this talk. Rendez-vous next year for the OVHcloud #EcoEx22!
Many redirection.io users have made our logs trail a central part of their strategy to discover traffic issues, and ultimately ensure that their website is running smoothly. Some of them even explained us that they keep a sticky browser tab with redirection.io opened, to regularly check "how things go well".
But in the meantime, some other redirection.io users were missing a long-asked feature, a regular reminder that would ping them if something was going wrong. While redirection.io is a great solution to monitor the traffic of your website and ensure that it runs well without issues, not everyone has the reflex to check the logs on a daily basis. As they say: what works too well tends to be forgotten!
This is the reason why we are launching today a new weekly digest email, available to all our customers right now 🎉 It features all the important information about your project, and all the events that occurred the week before:
how did the traffic evolve? 📈
did new errors happen, that should need some attention (and maybe new redirect rules)? 🔃
are your redirection.io agent instances healthy, or do they need upgrades? ⏩
For more readability and efficiency, the weekly digest email embeds some charts so you can notice issues in a matter of seconds:
To enable this new weekly digest, head to your profile preferences. There, you can subscribe to receive this weekly email for all or some of your projects. Of course, if you manage dozen of projects, you may not want to receive as many emails as you have projects, so pick only the most important ones!
Once done, simply wait for next Monday morning, and you'll get some news of your website 🙂
With time fleeing, some redirection.io company organizations have been growing and have become so large that it can be a bit hard to figure out who performed actions in the organization projects.
In the meantime, we have been adding several features: new rule actions, introduced at the beginning of 2021, new publication roles and a redesign of the invitation features, our public API (currently in private beta), the redirection.io website crawler, etc., and it can become a bit cumbersome, in large organizations, to get a full overview of who is performing actions.
This is why we are introducing a new audit trail feature, in order to help organization administrators understand and audit which users are actively using the redirection.io solution within their organization.
This audit trail is available for every redirection.io organizations, whatever the plan - we always considered security is a first-class citizen, and strive to provide all our users with tools that can help them ensure security and traceability within their web platform. Security should not be a paid option.
The audit trail for your organization can be read by org administrators under the organization settings. We have begun logging events at the beginning of October 2021, so you will not find any event prior to that date.
We have rolled out today a new feature for all redirection.io customers: marker templates.
Markers are the way in redirection.io to define URL patterns, which are useful to create wildcard redirection rules that will apply to several URLs at once.
For example, defining a Trigger with /shop/<REFERENCE>.html as the Source URL will match all the requests to a URL of this form: /shop/ref-a12.html, /shop/ref-12-34-56.html, etc.
In large redirection plans, it can be a little bit repetitive to define the same marker in several rules. The rules import tool already allows to create markers dynamically for many rules at once, but it does not help to update existing rules.
This is the reason why we have decided to introduce the concept of marker templates. In a few words, you can now define, at the project level, a set of markers that can be easily reused in several rules of the project. When a marker template is updated, you can update the rules which use this template: maintaining project-wide patterns is easier and more flexible than before!
Using a project-wide marker template when creating a new redirection rule saves you a few clicks, for more productive and easy rules management:
For example, defining a Trigger with 
Using a project-wide marker template when creating a new redirection rule saves you a few clicks, for more productive and easy rules management:
Want to lean more ?