Just came across a Maritz Research Poll, it’s good to know some of you travelers still have plans this winter holiday. In fact, those of you earning in the upper middle income bracket who earn 100k-249k are up from 28% in 2007 to 33% in 2008 in terms of the incidence of holiday travel outside your local area. The upper income bracket, those earning 250k+ is flat at 36% in 2008 over 2007. This is welcome news in the current economic environment. And for those earning 35k-99k, we know you’ll be travelling less, but check out Voyij often, you may be able to get a better trip than you thought you could afford in 2009.
December 16, 2008
It’s Not All Bad News – Holiday Travel Still Strong Among Upper-Earners
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December 16, 2008
Full Day of Voyij Live and a Tweak Here and There Coming
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Well, we’ve made it through a full day and I’m happy to report our servers only fell over once, (oops)! Thank goodness for Amazon Web Services, we can easily add 1 or 100 new instances of Voyij to the “cloud”, so scaling isn’t a problem, although the issue we had was somewhat unrelated. Definitely some performance tuning to do on the search side, we plan to speed that up a bit, with some 200,790+ deals in the system and a lot more coming, we’re already crunching through a lot of content for you.
We saw some people running the experience searches, so what do you think? Or how about the Voyij Price Challenge, did you find some good savings?
And for those of you looking to do a little traveling over the winter holidays, escape from the relatives or plan on having a fun bash to ring in the new year, (according to a Maritz Research Poll, that’s about an average 27% of you earning 35k-250k+ who plan on traveling somewhere outside your local area), we hope you can start or end your travel planning with a great travel deal on Voyij.
-Team Voyij
December 15, 2008
Well, it’s official, Voyij is now live and open to the public in beta. Yeppers, no more messy sign-up or log-in, business is open. Thanks for hanging in there or if you’re new, stopping by.
Here are a few of the things that help us differentiate ourselves from the crowded travel market:
Unique search – Voyij allows deal discovery over forced origin, destination and date entry. The consumer only needs to enter where they are and Voyij will find all the deals from there.
Unique content – we search “deal” content exclusively – last minute specials, promotional rates, distressed and excess (undersold) inventory.
Unique interface – comprehensive filtering on what is important to each individual consumer including date, stars, location, activities, price, and more.
Unique company – no one else is leveraging technology to solve the deal search problem. Literally 10’s of thousands of deals across 100’s of sites brought together in one place.
Unique market timing – With consumes especially interested in saving / stretching their vacation dollars, Voyij is the only site that will help them search and discover this deal content.
We can’t thank the team enough for working so hard these past several months to get us to this big milestone, but I’ll try. Thank you sincerely Priyank for the late hours cranking out code, Ingrid for the great designs, UX work and yummy snacks, Dshen for the solid advice, intros and feedback, Brian B. for being our cheearleader and “hook-up”, Phil for your silver tongue and support, Saeed for believing in us, giving us lots of opportunities to tell our story and making us Gold Members at Plug and Play, Brian P. for your feedback and time with us, John R. for your support, advice and ear and Rob S. for being our sounding board and spending time motivating us on our dreams. Sorry if we missed anyone.
Hope you enjoy the new travel service, gotta go, I think one of our servers fell over already!!!
- Voyij Founders: Brent Stewart, Nick Atkins and Paul S. Kim
September 26, 2008
I know we’re still a couple months away, but cranking away. I don’t know how many 4AM in the morning late nite shifts I’ve pulled this week. It’s been great though since my only complaint is it’s hard to find good food at 2A in the morning. Good thing I have friends/partners – Thanks Nick, Ingrid, Priyank and Brent for keeping me sane! 
BTW, we have a new logo…cool ya?
Travel Deals Revealed
June 29, 2008
A weekend with script kiddies
Posted by Nick under Uncategorized | Tags: BOFH, Sleepless nights |1 Comment
Our server was hit pretty hard by a distributed denial of service attack (DDOS) this weekend, so much for some time off 
. Eventually tamed on the server side, although we definitely need a hardware solution in front of the machine. I wonder if PnP has such a device…Eventually I did the following:
- smartened up the code a bit to limit DB access
- stuffed lots of DROP rules into iptables
- installed mod_evasive on Apache and configured it to put offending IPs into iptables
- hardened the server using sysctl rules, to reduce syn attack issues.
- read up a lot
Using some pretty cool tools too: bwm-ng, apachetop. The latter is especially useful for this as you can see who’s making all the requests and iptable them. That’s very manual though and requires a lot of typing (I wrote a script to make it easier).
I figured out what this attack is trying to do. Looks like a concerted effort in click fraud; many many machines (I have to assume they have been compromised and do not know this is happening) are sending requests to voyij.com port 80 for various ad servers and trackers. I guess they are trying to bump their CPCs up! They’re doing this on the chance that our server is an open proxy and will simply route the request to the target ad server. The hit would seem to come from my server and would be counted in the CPC and credited to whoever is doing the referring (and charged to the advertiser). Nice try but we’re not open like that! I think it’s slowing now, the scripts have probably given up because they haven’t been successful
These attacks result in a DDOS attack for us though and kills our server, that’s what pisses me off. I waste a lot of hours (that I can’t spare) fixing it too. I know it’s nothing personal but, well, it’s a good thing I’m not armed 
And so to bed…
June 28, 2008
Mendocino Getaway, Here We Come!
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I know it’s a bit early to be taking a vacation at such an early time for Voyij, (a wise entrepreneur once told me, “Never go on vacation when you’re starting a company, bad things happen when you are away”), but this is more like a weekend getaway, not really a vacation – plus it’s my wedding anniversary! I thought I needed to share this with you guys – I had been dreaming about a nice spa and massage getaway once we got Voyij out the door, (check my Tweets), and have been diligently tracking this great find on Voyij. Check this out:
- 2 nights in an elegant Ocean Suite with a wood-burning fireplace and views of the surrounding forest, meadow, or ocean
- 1,000 Bonus Miles (see below for details)
- A welcome split of premium champagne
- Lavish gourmet breakfast for two each morning
- A one and a half hour group horseback ride along the beach
- Gourmet picnic lunch withwine for two
- $100 Dining Certificate to the critically acclaimed restaurant
- Complimentary use of the private Stevenswood Canyon outdoor spas
- Complimentary wireless high speed internet access
- Bathrobes for use during your stay
All this for $595 at an acclaimed Mendocino Spa Resort. Fantastic right? Well, I wanted to make sure I was getting a good deal so I went straight to the hotel’s website and discovered just a two night stay in the same room without everything listed above was $499 alone, yeah, I got a fantastic deal alright.
So if YOU have been pining for a weekend getaway or an exorbitant vacation, don’t just wait, there are good deals to be found, just pull the trigger. And always remember, check Voyij first, you never know what dreams will be fulfilled.
-Paul
June 28, 2008
What a week it’s been. Paul and I have pulled some extremely late nights and had some odd sleep patterns, in our effort to get the inaugural version of Voyij out the door. Now it’s out, what have I learned?
- Getting code ready for release, i.e. doing your own QA is very time consuming, and requires multiple test/fix/rebuild cycles.
- We still have a lot of bugs
- Once it’s out, it’s out and you can’t (shouldn’t/mustn’t) take it away
- Managing real users is tricky
- Apache is your friend
- I can beat the night, still!
As Paul has mentioned we still have a lot to do, and a lot of bugs to fix. In particular I want to do a lot more adapters and need to release/expire deals on a regular basis. A lot of work on the scheduler is required. Although we’re using Quartz/Spring for this and all the pieces are in place, I still can’t just let it go out. There’s just so much to work through, so much data, and so many tweaks.
So the weekend rolls around and I’m writing adapters and incessantly watching the logs. Is this how life will be from now on?
Maybe I’ll go for a drive in the car soon…
