How can a small service provider compete against Google, Amazon, and the other giants entering the cloud/hosting market? The cloud is now a reality. However, your company can start your own affordable cloud offering and even compete against the big boys and win. It may seem like a no win situation to try and compete against the big boys. However, smaller providers can compete and win provided they do the things the big guys are not willing or capable of doing. Larger companies are slow to evolve, are generally worse at customer service, unwilling to help the customer resolve technical issues beyond the core basics, and have strict guidelines for what customers can and can not do.

KEYS TO COMPETING AGAINST LARGE COMPANIES

1. Improve your customers experience. Personalize.

A good example to showcase is Wal Mart. While Wal Mart tries to be everything to everyone, they are missing a few key components that are important to the customer experience. While Wal Mart does offer an exceptional product offering and good pricing, their customer service is horrible. Employees barely say hi to you in the check out lane. You can also expect to stand in a Soviet-Era bread line while you wait to pay for your savings on the products. Contrast to Target which charges a bit more, offers higher quality products, and you can expect to wait less in the check out lane. Both are still large companies and offer a breadth of products and offer a relatively dull customer experience.

SOLUTION(S): Let your customer get to know you better. Start a company blog that contains more than simple marketing messages. Let the customer know you are a hard working company full of energetic people willing to go the extra mile. Add additional bundled support options the larger companies simply can not compete with. Spend additional time early in the process to ensure your new customers are setup properly. Perhaps give them an email asking them if everything is fine and if they need anything. Generally in web hosting, if you can get the customer setup properly and familiar with your systems within 72 hours you will rarely hear from that customer. Yes, I know… you’re afraid of getting a lot of high maintenance customers. Fear not, your good customers will far exceed the high maintenance customers.

Showcase your companies personality and willingness to help the customer get up and running. Perhaps your site could use a re-design bringing these aspects in. Focus more on service and customer experience than pricing. Don’t copy the big providers boring and bland white paper looking web sites. Add twitter to your home page, maybe a link to a company FaceBook profile.

2. Offer niche products. Specialized plans. Read the rest of this entry »

Writing Often Keeps Your Blog Fresh

Businesses have many options to communicate with their customers these days, and hosting can play an important role. There is direct mail, email newsletters, and even Twitter. One of the most effective methods to communicate with both current and future customers is a blog for your business.
With a blog you can announce new products and services, update customers on company news, and create a stronger personality for your business brand. Even if you have very little experience with technology and the Internet, you can create a business blog in just 4 easy steps.

Step 1 - Planning Your Blog - Before you get started, you’ll need to think about what you would include in your blog. Here are a few ideas for you. If you have physical locations for your business - then you may want to include directions and maps as part of your site. If you are frequently updating your products and services, can have a section for that. Do you have visually interesting products, or want to feature photos of your employees? Create a photo gallery section. The options are only limited by your imagination. Don’t worry if you don’t have a complete idea of your site before you start, you can always create new site features once your blog has launched.

Read the rest of this entry »

Are you the type of user looking to launch a comprehensive website, but lack the technical jargon or knowledge as to how to go about it yourself?  If you fall into this category, your are in luck.  Today we take a closer look at the QuickSite Hosting Service to see how Lunarpages.com created the simplest of solutions to make this happen.  The QuickSite service provides you with 3 easy steps to launch a website…..no technical knowledge required, you don’t even have to hire a designer/programmer.

To get started visit Lunarpages QuickSite, enter your e-mail and phone number and you’ll be on your way to launching your website.

One of the first steps in the process is to select a template for your website.  There are more than 400 templates to choose from and you can also personalize the templates by changing the color themes. There are literary no limitations as far as designing your website is concerned. You can juggle with all the options to ensure your website is exactly how you would like it laid out.  You are also provided with additional options to edit content within the site, this proves to be critical element prior to the design phase and even once the website is live (and you want to update your content). Read the rest of this entry »

In today’s economy running your own internal data center is an expensive undertaking. Hosting web servers, application servers, and collaboration servers within your own office building is a reality for most small businesses. IT managers prefer close proximity to equipment so they can manage any hardware failures or software issues quickly. If your company does not have an IT manager, you most likely have an outsourced IT department. A “Nerd Herd” type solution who you call when things go wrong or you need something configured or set up.

I often wonder at the amount of money that goes into this old school way of handling small business infrastructure. Power, human resources, payroll taxes, equipment, generators, routers, switches, software licensing costs, and the list goes on and on.

HOSTING INTERNALLY IS A WASTE OF TIME AND MONEY
Many companies fail to realize the implications of hosting their equipment internally. Power costs continue to rise, brown outs are increasingly common, and  power grid is sure to be stretched as people ween themselves off of fossil fuels. If your systems are mission critical then you also need to have backup batteries and diesel generators at the ready.

Hosting your own equipment also brings other unnecessary costs to the table in regards to networking equipment. Routers, switches, and experts who configure this equipment are all added expenses. Factor in hardware firewalls, DDOS protection, high availability and your costs have soared.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dedicated server shopping can be overwhelming, since there are lots of things to consider- platform, plan features, and pricing, just to name a few.  There are also less obvious considerations that can have a major impact on how successful your choice will be, and one of the biggest is also one of the easiest to answer i.e. is the company privately held or publically traded?

Looking beyond buying shares in a hosting company, (although a successful dedicated server host might look good in your portfolio), it should be a factor in your decision making process. Knowing that a company is public means that a lot of your due diligence has already been done, and done well.  Public companies are audited from top to bottom.  Not only must the company be financially sound, but everything from personnel to equipment to the overall business plan must undergo a complete evaluation.  Public companies have business practices that are fully documented, which might not seem like a big thing, but anyone who has worked in an environment where people make things up as they go along can attest to the benefit of quality documentation.

Public scrutiny is a good thing – that many secretive hosting providers do not understand.  Where a privately held company may be accountable to the customers and the business owner, a publically held dedicated server hosting company has another level of accountability to deal with- shareholders and a board of directors.  As a customer, your visibility is into what goes on at your managed dedicated hosting provider ends at the website and customer support number.  Shareholders and the board of directors on the other hand have much greater visibility into the operations of the company, questionable decisions, performance issues, and anything else that impacts the bottom line is subject to scrutiny by the stockholders. Read the rest of this entry »

When Watts Humphrey designed the framework underlying the Capability Maturity Model, his purpose was for the CMM to have positive aspects in organizations. His intent was that the CMM should help organizations improve the ability of their workforce and develop, motivate, organize and retain talent. Even though the Capability Maturity Model has constructive parts in organizations, it also has destructive parts when it is applied to organizations.

In this article by Kerime Ataker, Superb Internet Corporation Product Marketing Specialist will focus on the negative and positive aspects of the Capability Maturity Model.  Kerime intends to provide both sides of the CMM and the reasons why this model may or may not function well in a particular organization.

Negative and Positive Aspects of the Capability Maturity Model in Organizations

How disappointing it is to read that, according to research, seven out of eight information technology projects fail to meet the original time, cost, and requirements criteria (McManus & Wood-Harper, 2008). According to McManus and Wood-Harper, the key finding from studies of successful and unsuccessful projects is that no single factor is the overriding cause of project failure; however, instead, a number of factors contribute to failure, and some of them interact with each other. The most important reasons why projects fail are poor communication, lack of user or customer involvement, ineffective project managers, insufficiently managed requirements, undisciplined project definitions or baselines, and uncontrolled scope (McManus & Wood-Harper, 2008). A project that has senior-level sponsorship has a higher chance to be supportive of the strategy and goals of the business. Also, it has a higher chance to have an experienced and disciplined control team that will be actively involved in confirming the project’s objectives against those goals. Of course, this kind of involvement requires good communication within the project team as well as good management requirements. Thus, the Capability Maturity Model was established to avoid all of these failure factors and help projects succeed. Even though the Capability Maturity Model is designed to help organizations not overrun schedule and budget constraints to complete a project, the model has negative and positive aspects when applied to organizations.

The Capability Maturity Model has a well organized structure for managing the software process. When Watts Humphrey designed the CMM, he made sure that the model consisted of five levels. Kashif Manzoor, software engineer, on his website, has explained these five levels of the CMM. Initial is the first level. At this level, processes are disorganized and chaotic. Also, success is expected to depend on individual efforts and is not considered to be repeatable since processes would not be sufficiently clear and documented to allow them to be replicated. Repeatable is the second level, and at this level, basic project management techniques are established. Also, success could be repeated since the essential processes would have been established, defined, and documented. Read the rest of this entry »

In the early days of the Internet a business site was a simple brochure of products and services. More likely than not, it included a contact form and a phone number if the site visitor wanted to request more information. As time went by, Web sites evolved to include online ordering and full e-commerce capabilities.

While most Web sites evolved to include a lot of information for the visitor as well as easy e-commerce ordering they were impersonal. There was a certain anonimity to all Web sites. For all you knew, you could be buying your widget from a guy in his underwear living in his moms basement or from a huge multi-million dollar corporation.

Say Hello To The Blog.

I don’t remember the first time I heard the word ‘Blog’, but I am guessing it was around 2004. Regular people used the blog as a personal diary of sorts and shared knowledge and memories with friends and family. As blogging caught on, the SEO value began to resonate in marketing minds.

High search engine rankings fueled by a new style of web design often drive the masses towards adoption of concepts the average business owner would not ordinarily consider. The blog is a prime example of  adopting a concept one would not necessarily pair with a business Web site.

How Can A Blog Help Make Me Money?

Most business owners will ask how can a blog help increase our sales? The answer is simple - transparency. Letting potential customers get to know you and your staff personally creates a special bond that’s very hard to create on the anonymous Internet.

Imagine creating an open and friendly environment. Imagine telling customers what your plans are. Imagine asking customers for feedback on new idea’s and engaging them to participate. Most business owners cringe at the idea of exposing company secrets or how they maintain a competitive advantage. In reality, it seems that Web sites who feature an open and informational Blog see increased sales. Some Blogs like Google’s Apps even have a following and new feature requests from readers.

Most Blogging software also offer the ability for readers to obtain RSS feeds through their email clients such as Outlook. This is very important for one simple reason: People read email every day, all day. Customers who subscribe to RSS feeds from your blog don’t even have to visit your site to be informed of a new product launch or service upgrade. Read the rest of this entry »

Managed and Semi-Managed Web Services

Web hosting has never been more affordable—or more complicated. Rich media, social networking, sophisticated eCommerce platforms are all making the Internet experience incredibly dynamic and profitable. Still, security threats are greater: last year alone, the number of viruses, worms and trojans in circulation topped the one million mark—that’s in addition to ever-growing levels of spam, phishing scams and malware. The Open Security Foundation added more than 11,000 new vulnerabilities to its database in 2008. Critical OS patches and software updates never seem to end. Data loss? That’s on the rise as well, due primarily to hardware or system malfunctions or human error, but also corrupted software, power outages and malicious programs. And messaging, always critically important to organizations, carries a huge and mounting cost due to email downtime resulting from system failures.

Managed hosting services as a concept promises a coordinated, comprehensive solution to address many of the time-consuming tasks facing small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) looking for a web presence—particularly those without the necessary expertise or in-house resources to maintain and optimize their own web servers. Semi-managed plans offer a less expensive option compared to traditional, fully-managed services. Yet in terms of scalability, flexibility and the ability to deploy services quickly, both approaches present a viable alternative for server management in meeting today’s web hosting challenges.

Overview of Managed/Semi-Managed Hosting

Why Use Managed/Semi-Managed Hosting?

The cost and complexity of web hosting keeps rising: domain management, expanding server loads, ongoing software updates, and security monitoring, along with increasing demands for messaging encryption, archiving and reliability. In addition, site owners must address the critical nature of backups and data protection/restoration in the event of power outages and other disruptions, natural or man-made.

In short, it’s becoming more complex and more confusing than ever for SMBs to efficiently maintain a stable, secure web presence. The biggest challenges site owners face today include:

• Increased messaging is more difficult to manage: maintaining email functionality, data retention, and protection against spam, phishing, viruses, worms, spyware and other threats.
• DNS services are increasingly complex: DNS records configuration and management, administering multiple domains, vulnerabilities from DNS-based buffer overflow attacks.
• Server and software patch management is time consuming: consistent, regular OS patching to minimize exposure/vulnerabilities, controlling and managing software and security updates.
• Storage, data backup and data recovery requirements are growing: continuous data protection, incremental backup, off-site data management, and database and application backup and recovery (SQL, Exchange, Sharepoint, CRM).
• Network and security management will continue to command more attention—and resources: firewall configuration, scanning for malware, check sum changes in software on the server, bandwidth and port monitoring to assess ongoing risks.
• Disaster recovery and business continuity are essential, but rarely planned out thoroughly in advance: protecting against loss of sensitive data and network connectivity, downtime, reboots, service failures, power outages and other disruptions.

Server Hosting Defined

To understand further the merits of managed—fully or semi—managed services as an option for SMBs, it’s important first to understand more closely how they compare to other available types of hosting (beyond shared hosting).

Co-Located Hosting involves the purchase of a server from a hardware vendor; the server is then delivered to a web host and connected to the host’s network and redundant power systems. The host is responsible for the network, while site owners are responsible for server support, maintenance and software updates. The biggest issue with co-location? If hardware fails, the customer must ship new hardware to the data center—potential long periods of downtime outside of the SLA.

Unmanaged Dedicated Hosting is similar to co-location except the host owns the hardware, while it is the customer’s responsibility to manage and administer its operation. Support contracts may be available, but it generally falls to the customer, not the host, to install and update server software and OS patches, data backups, monitor security, manage email, etc. In this scenario, the web host is responsible for failed/defective hardware, network, and power systems.

Managed Services involves leasing one or more servers from a host, which then proactively provides support and maintenance on that equipment, usually backed by quality guarantees. Additional services then provided by experienced system administrators on staff typically include server uptime monitoring, OS patching, operating system restores, security monitoring, and more.

Market Trends

Tier1 Research:
“Managed Hosting: Market Overview Spring 2008”
(April 15, 2008)
“…the managed hosting sector has experienced tremendous growth in the past 12 months—in excess of 30%—driven by several trends. These trends include virtualization, business continuity services and security technologies, driven both by enterprise demand and regulatory compliance. Despite the dipping economy in the US, there has been increased managed hosting adoption by SMBs and mid-tier enterprises in both the US and Europe.” Read the rest of this entry »

Here are a few developments that I have seen lately regarding web hosting.

WP.com is Now WordPress.com
 First off, on the domain front - the ubiquitous blogging service WordPress has confirmed that it has purchased the domain name wp.com from Yahoo. There has been specualtion regarding the purchase for a few days as the wp.com domain was redirecting to WordPress.com. The news became official when WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg posted the information on the domain acquistion on the WordPress blog. You can read the details here: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/04/24/wpcom. The purchase price was not announced - however - judging from the latest domain prices and the obvious rarity of 2 letter domain names, you can bet it was well into the six figures. For reference, you can see the list of the top 100 domains sold this year here: http://www.dnjournal.com/ytd-sales-charts.htm.

Susan Boyle Cybersquatters
 On a related domain name theme, UK’s guardian.co.uk is reporting that since April 11, more than 30 websites have been launched that take advantage of the name Susan Boyle. Ms. Boyle has shot to fame on UK television and subsequently on YouTube as a contestant on the program ”Britain’s Got Talent”. Ms. Boyle is an unemployed 47-year-old Scottish charity worker who claims to have never been kissed. Her cover of the song ‘I Dreamed a Dream’ from the musical Les Misérables became a global YouTube hit hours after it was posted. So anyway - no big deal that all these domains are being registered and these websites set up. It just stands in stark contrast to Ms. Boyle herself who has no web presence whatsoever. She does now have an agent, however. Details and the full story are here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/23/susan-boyle-cybersquatters.

Professional Hosting Launches
 In a story covered by MyHostNews, website hosting company 34SP.com launched a new groundbreaking hosting service entitled, Professional Hosting. According to the company, The new plan specifications break down as follows: 5GB storage, 20GB transfer per month, free spam and virus filtering and free weekly backups among many other features. The new Professional Hosting plan is priced at £3.95 per month. There is no minimum contract, and every plan is sold with a 30 day money back guarantee. To learn more please visit: http://www.34sp.com/professional-hosting.

GeoCities R.I.P.
On a slightly nostalgic note, one of the original successes in the nascient web hosting industry - GeoCities - has met its demise. The owner of the service, Yahoo, has announced that it will shutter GeoCities sometime this year. For those of you that weren’t around back then, GeoCities was a free web hosting service launched in 1994. It was purchased during the peak of the dot-com boom by Yahoo for a stunning $3.57 billion (that’s with a B!). It was sort of the original MySpace / Facebook. According to Wikipedia the site became doomed by its own financial model, ”In 2001, amidst speculation by analysts that GeoCities was not yet profitable (it having declared an $8 million loss for the final quarter of 1998), Yahoo! introduced a for-fee premium hosting service at GeoCities and crippled the accessibility of free and low-price hosting accounts by limiting their monthly data transfer for webpage visitors; since then the monthly data transfer limit for free accounts is 4 GB. Later, the paid accounts were unified in the Yahoo! Web Hosting service and currently have no data transfer limits. The limiting of data transfer for free accounts made less popular the GeoCities hosting service as well as the hosted pages.” In closing the service Yahoo issued the following statement: ”We will be closing GeoCities later this year. We’ll provide more details about closing GeoCities and how to save your site data this summer.”

Everyone knows that SAN and NAS storage solutions are at a premium in terms of price and are limited. Thanks to today’s new cloud technologies, those costs can be reduced and more functionality brought than traditional storage platforms. Cloud storage in its simplest form provides complimentary space for your existing dedicated server, VPS, or cloud processing systems. Imagine adding a scalable and potentially unlimited hard drive to your existing system.

What can be stored on the Cloud?
Images, HTML, Flash files, MPEG, MP4, PDF’s, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and more can be stored. Many providers allow you to mount the Cloud as an external drive and also provide FTP capabilities for adding content to the Cloud.

How is data delivered from Cloud Storage to my existing hardware or end clients?
Delivering your stored items works in the same way as Content Delivery Networks (CDN). Providers offer you the ability to use a URL to pull files, images, and data from the cloud.

Top 3 Reasons You Should Be Using Cloud Storage

1. Low cost. Traditional SAN and NAS are limited and more expensive.
2. Reduce processor load. Data is delivered directly from the cloud, eliminating processor usage on your existing system.
3. Easy to administrate. Easily upload data to the Cloud via FTP, Browser, or Mount.

Alternate uses for cloud storage include:

• Home User backup storage. Affordable backup for pictures, important documents and files.
• Server backup. Run backups using Rsync or R1Soft to mounted Cloud storage.

Things To Be Aware Of:

• Bandwidth Charges. Many Cloud providers measure bandwidth in terms of in and out. Many allow free ‘in’ or uploading of content and charge for ‘out’ or downloading of content.

Choose Your Cloud Storage Partner Wisely

Only a very few state-of-the-art Data Centers are currently offering Cloud Storage to their end-customers. If Web Site speed is important to your online business, you should only consider hosting in one of these facilities.

Recommended Cloud Storage provider: The Planet