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ZFS for the Cloud

The Best Cloud File System was Created Before the Cloud Existed

You know what NTFS is, that’s your windows file system, right?
You probably also know that Linux uses several different file systems, the most extended one being ext4…

Here’s the thing…. there’s an old file system called ZFS, originally designed by SUN Microsystems in 2001 and delivered for the first time as a Solaris product on 2005.
At the time, it was a very specific tool designed to serve the needs of a reduced number of companies running large pools of disks sitting in a server room.

What happened between then and now we all know, the Internet became mainstream, allowed cloud computing, then DevOps emerged and then containers exploded; as a consequence of those changes, the needs of system administrators and users alike have completely changed. What used to be a strange and relatively complex file system, tailored for very specific needs and used exclusively by just a few people, might be the best option nowadays and because it was so well architected, 15 years after it’s now shining more than ever, rapidly growing in adoption and menacing to become mainstream.

Let’s see what all the fuss is about…

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Mautic email: Which email provider is best for Mautic?

Mautic can do a whole lot of smart stuff for your email, except sending it! Mautic users have to use a third party service to send emails, in this post I’ll go over 3 different options for sending Mautic emails, the pros and cons of each and I’ll give you a final recommendation for your business type.

There’s a lot to consider when choosing the best email delivery for Mautic emails, for starters a lot of work can go into building Mautic campaigns, in those cases, the cost of sending emails will be just a small fraction of the overall spend and deliverability should be second to nothing. On the other hand, companies using Mautic to send newsletters or simpler DRIP campaigns might be more sensible to the cost of sending these emails. And finally, heavily IT bound companies might care less about pricing and will consider flexibility as the main feature to consider.

I have chosen 3 companies that will cater to each of those needs, keep reading!

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Bye Bye Joomla…

For me It’s been 13 years since I started using Joomla professionally and a couple moreyears playing with it before that (well, with Mambo).

In 2007 I even developed a free affiliates plugin for Virtuemart, Jafilia VM Affiiates, it lived for some 4 years and helped lot’s of Virtuemart shop owners increase their income (Affiliates and CPA was all the rage at the time, we called it “Viral Marketing” and it really was viral!).

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Mautic-advantages-VS-SaaS

9 Mautic Advantages Hubspot won’t provide you with

SaaS is all the rage in every industry and Marketing Automation is no exception, tools like Hubspot, Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua and many others to the count of more than a hundred MA SaaS tools!
However, SaaS tends to use a “one size fits all” service model (or better said, 3 sizes fits all), which tends to leave a big chunk of companies out of their offerings.
Your company might be one of the special outliers that don’t perfectly fit in the SaaS model. The good news is, most probably, Mautic will cover all of your needs.

Read More »9 Mautic Advantages Hubspot won’t provide you with
Mautic Pricing

Mautic Pricing: The Real Cost of Mautic Self-Hosted

Many companies turn to Mautic in search of a more cost-effective way to enable their organizations for the future.

Since Mautic is free to download, yeiii! One could think running it at scale could be done for free too, however, Mautic is quite a complex piece of software, and depending on your requirements, it will also need some decent hardware to run on top of.
In this post, I’ll give you details about the costs involved and how to source what you need.

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Mautic Support: Get Help from the Mautic Community

Mautic Support: How to Get Help from the Mautic Community

If you are a Mautic community user or Mautic self-hosted user, chances are you are going to need help, a lot of times…

Have you noticed how some requests seem to get a lot of attention while others seem to be ignored? Some users seem to get their questions answered fast while questions from other users go unanswered forever and finally fade into oblivion.

Also, it would seem some questions get well-thought responses while others get short answers that seem not to be helpful at all.

If you are one of those guys who’s questions tend to go unanswered, this post will help you get proper answers almost every time.

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Mautic Hosting: Mautic Self Hosted Best Practices

Mautic Hosting: Mautic Self Hosted Best Practices

Mautic will run on any server that supports PHP and a MySQL compatible database, which is little short of saying it will run anywhere, you could run it on Linux, Windows, you could run it on your phone, what the heck! you could probably run it on your smart coffee maker!

But should you? Of course not, your coffee maker runs java! hehehe.

Now seriously, which is the best platform to run Mautic? As always, it depends, so I will try to give you enough pointers for you to choose the best option for your own situation.

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Mautic cron jobs: Which ones to use?

Mautic cron jobs: Which ones to use?

There are many Mautic cron jobs you can use in your Mautic installation, but Mautic can get resource hungry over time, so you don’t really want to run them all, in fact, that would be a great mistake, you only have to add the cron jobs that you actually need in your own setup, based on your own Mautic installation and the Mautic features you’re currently using.

This is a guide to help you both, first discover and then choose the right Mautic cron jobs you want to deploy in order to have a perfectly smooth Mautic installation on your server. 

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How to Install Mautic Plugins

Install Mautic Plugin for dummies & marketers too

Installing Mautic plugins is really simple… most of the time…
But there’s always some obscure unofficial plugin that you really need so badly, and those always have little or no instructions and hence they refuse to install.

Don’t worry, it really is very simple, if you know a couple of tricks… Let’s start with the basics:

Read More »Install Mautic Plugin for dummies & marketers too
Mautic and GDPR Compliance

Mautic and GDPR Compliance

Here are some basic guidelines for GDPR compliance in general. This information is not exclusive to Mautic, it applies to any company that wants to be GDPR compliant.

The basic data privacy rights of an EU citizen that we have to respect:

– The company is responsible for any data breach
– We have to obtain explicit consent to store and use data.
– Consent to store and use my personal data within or outside the EU.
– Inform users of where the data is stored 

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Install Mautic 3

Mautic 3.3.5 Installation on Ubuntu 20.04 with PHP 7.3 and MySQL 5.7

UPDATED on August, 6 2022 for Mautic 3.3.5. This is by far the simplest way to install Mautic 3 on a VPS.
With this Mautic 3 Installation tutorial, you will learn how to complete the Mautic 3.3.5 installation with PHP 7.3 on top of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and MySQL 5.7 (MariaDB 10.2).

3 Simple Steps to Install Mautic 3:

  1. Install the packages required to run Mautic 3.
  2. Install Mautic 3 and run the configuration wizard.
  3. Install Mautic 3 Cron Jobs.
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Mautic Acquired by Acquia, What About the Mautic Community?

Mautic Acquired by Acquia, What About the Mautic Community?

Dries made sure both his creations, Drupal and Acquia, remained independent from one another, and hence Drupal became a democratic meritocracy over time. This is not only smart but also elegant and consequent with the community. A clear separation, even if there are strong ties between both entities, allows the community to flourish and grow and hence Drupal grew its reach to become one of the most amazing Open Source communities in the world.

Read More »Mautic Acquired by Acquia, What About the Mautic Community?