Since my last several blog posts, there have been many changes that have taken effect at IX Web Hosting. We’re rapidly building our support team of “Personal Heroes”, we’re participating more in external social media so we can keep in touch with you, and we’re building an internal community of customers so you can put your collective voice together and be heard about the things that matter.

But what I’d like to talk to you about today makes all of that turn just a shade pale in comparison.

One of the top-secret projects we’re developing right now is one we call Imperia (seriously, this is ultra-sensitive, so I have to watch what I say about it). Essentially, it’s an entirely new way of running and managing your website. There’s a lot of technical aspects to it, but suffice it to say it will have beautiful effects on how successful your site will be and how much it will do for you.

The best part is: It will be available to you for FREE. I’ll go into more detail in a second but first… I need your help. And it’s urgent.

We have only 24 hours left.

Imperia’s technology is built on cutting-edge open source software from a wee little company called Red Hat (just joking, they’re actually huge). They hold an annual contest to determine the year’s best innovators, and guess what? Imperia, your soon-to-be new hosting platform, just won the Red Hat Award for Outstanding Open Source Architecture! We now also qualify for the overall Innovation of the Year Award.

This directly affects you.

Winning this award would be of tremendous benefit to you. Should Imperia win, Red Hat will invest significant resources into the project to make it even better. We’re competing with the likes of Geico, Verizon, Whole Foods, etc – giants compared to us. Luckily, the big award is open to public voting – that’s YOU – for the next 24 hours. I hope you’re with me on this.

If you are willing to give me your vote (it only takes 10 seconds of your time), please go here:

http://www.keysurvey.com/survey/269267/2c6a/

Vote for: “Ecommerce Inc. + Vizuri — Outstanding Open Source Architecture” at the top and the bottom and hit “Submit.” That’s it. (Ecommerce is our parent company name. That’s why it doesn’t show IX Web Hosting on the page).

Here’s a screenshot that shows you what to select and how to vote. (Of course I know you’d have figured that out yourself. But I wanted to show you that we’ve made every possible effort and even prepared a screenshot!)

I would REALLY appreciate your vote! This is about you, after all!

IMPORTANT: VOTING ENDS THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, SO PLEASE HURRY!

By the way, to read more about how Imperia works technically, take a look at this:

http://www.redhat.com/promo/summit/2009/awards/ecommerce_vizuri.html

Ok, now that I have your vote, let me show you exactly what Imperia will will do for you. If you didn’t vote yet, go do it right now!

Imperia will bring you:

What this means for you? Well, instead of being assigned to a single server and suffering the fate of that single machine (or group of machines), your website flows in a fluidic fashion across the grid, never being impacted directly by singular hardware or software glitches. This means no more localized disk failures, RAID rebuilds, slow server response, overload impacts, etc. In a nutshell, it makes your website’s life pretty much great. And as a consequence, hopefully yours too, if only in a small way!

You may be a technically interested like I am – so if you are curious to learn more about how Imperia works, read on.

Imperia Technical Background

Last year, it became clear that the H-sphere Control Panel software we use to provide web hosting services was way too outdated. We reviewed other control panels such as cPanel or Plesk – but those too suffer from inherent flaws that lead to downtime, and are sometimes difficult to use. I felt that to really improve, we were going to have to develop our own new system; from SCRATCH. Enter center stage, Imperia.

At its core, Imperia is a combination of state-of-the-art hardware, leading software solutions, innovative command and provisioning logic and an intuitive user interface. That’s a really fancy way to say that Imperia will bring many amazing features together to create the ideal hosting platform. I already elaborated a little bit on the hardware that we will use above.

To utilize this hardware to the fullest extent possible, Imperia was designed using the latest Enterprise-class software including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBOSS, EnterpriseDB, Hyperic, Zimbra and Windows Server 2008. Together with Vizuri, a Red Hat-preferred award-winning development company in Washington D.C., and our own internal development guys, we are able to coordinate these applications to work in beautiful harmony. These software solutions are being tied together in a super-streamlined customization (dubbed Imperia Command) to make them all sing, and I do mean sing.

Imperia Command is a business-decision based intelligence system for running large super-computer grids and data centers. Some may call this a “cloud” architecture, but we don’t. Clouds mean rainy days. We prefer to think of this as “ionosphere” architecture, or something else much more cool than a rainy day.

Imperia Command actively senses thousands of metrics for all of the services and nodes operating within the grid and continuously applies the results against a set of rules for action. This built-in “intelligence” gives Imperia Command the ability to move services across servers as needed to eliminate downtime and DRAMATICALLY improve speed and performance.

And what’s even better is this is all going to happen soon.

In the coming weeks we will be in touch with you about Imperia’s development and the cool features it’s going to bring you. Beginning in late October, Imperia is scheduled to go into a limited beta-release, with full migration likely occurring by the end of the year. Our goal is to make the transition as seamless as possible, so all you have to do is sit back and enjoy the improved features and performance.

And hey, thanks again for being an IX Web Hosting Customer!

Until next time.

Fathi Said, CEO

IX Web Hosting

Psst…remember to vote! http://www.keysurvey.com/survey/269267/2c6a/

I wanted to thank everyone for your outstanding feedback on my last post. We are working on all mentioned issues and I will reply in detail (as a comment to this post) what we are doing about all of it.

It’s exciting to discuss all the opportunities we have to do better for you and on that note, I want to share our idea on what kind of customer service you can expect from us in the future.

Create a “Wow!” Customer Service Experience for you. Always. By the end of the year, we will transform our customer service team into delivering “Wow!” every time you call, email or chat with us. In detail, we will give you…

One Of Our Personal Heroes

1. Your own ‘Personal Hero’. A personal and fully accountable contact at our company who will be responsible to ensure your satisfaction at all times. You’ll know him/her by name. Your Hero will know everything about you and your objectives for your website. He or she will be heroically interested in what you are trying to achieve and what obstacles you’re facing so that he or she can blow them away. And every one of them will do everything in their Hero Special-Power to make your website successful (and we are making sure they have plenty of manna to do so).

2. You can help replenishing your Hero’s manna by sending in raving testimonials. I believe they also accept candy of all kinds. In fact, they prefer the latter, but I personally prefer the first. To be on the safe side, you could also do both.*

3. You’ll be able to talk to your Hero in all fashionable, not-so fashionable and even unfathomable ways: On the phone (they feel special if you call them on their hero (cell) phone), via chat, ,   (MySpace is against our Heroes’ core values), any instant messenger (including ) and if you really have to, via email (totally unhero-ish). Or if you prefer , that works too. Webcam? No problem, your Hero is very personal and loves talking face-to-face. Or in person – visit us for a local get together.

4. By the way, don’t be freaked out. Occasionally, your Hero will call you just to ask how you’re doing and if there is anything they could iron-out or make go-away for you. And maybe if he or she can make your day brighter today. We promise there are no other intentions. (There is also no ulterior motive for making this a separate point for no reason at all.)

5. A company blog (you’re reading it). This place will soon be filled with stuff that you can really use to grow your website, Increase Traffic and eXplode Sales. You really can use a website to make a lot of money. That’s what I did with IX Web Hosting. I’ll show you how you can, too.

6. A status blog, featuring posts and your comments about any current and past service issues that warrant special attention. This is already online but not yet at its fullest capacity. We’re still working out the quirks.

7. A customer forum and comm-YOU-nity. This will be a place of vivid discussion among all of you and all of our Heroes. Participate, experience and learn about how to use your website to its fullest capacity (= how to Increase Traffic for your personal site, or how to eXplode Sales and impact your business).

8. A customer-wiki that your Heroes and you will co-create. Any content you think is worthwhile mentioning can published here and shared among our entire customer base. All of the Internet, even.

9. A presence on (up and running!),  and all the other places you’d expect us to be but we’ve failed to appear so far. Our Army of Heroes will soon appear e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e…

I’m hopeful that these upcoming changes will, umm… I don’t know! Create some kind of excitement for you?

Please don’t hesitate to leave your comments and let us know what you think. Criticism, suggestions, new ideas – anything that’s on your mind, please share it with us! Your feedback will allow us to change our plans and make sure we do less of what you don’t need, and a lot more of what you do! So what do you think about our heroic ideas? Did we miss something?

And now that you know there will be Heroes who will teach your site how to fly, let me share the most significant change that is coming:

We would like to make your success our only focus. Specifically, this means…

Customer Advisory Board (a.k.a Round Table)

1. A Customer Advisory Board. We’d like to hear from you often, in fact, we can’t hear from you often enough. Sometimes, even with our new Heroic and Wow! customer service approach, we may still miss what’s important to you. This could be a new feature that we should offer, a whole new kind of product or just supporting you in a different way. I’d like to establish a method that will allow us to always stay in touch with you and listen to your feedback. I’ll follow up soon with several ideas how this could work exactly.In the meantime, do you have any ideas on how best we can make this happen?
2. Frequent face-to-face meetings, between you and anyone of our staff. Anytime one of our managers, Heroes or Technologists travels (and some of our staff practically live on the plane!), they would love to meet you in person. To talk about your business or work situation, how an improved website and more traffic can lead to advancements for your business and career (and how to do that!), and of course to get your feedback about how we’re doing and what we could be doing better… or we can just hang out! Atlanta and Chicago are coming up next on our travel schedule. Anyone interested?
3. Show you how to Increase Traffic and eXplode Sales, or IX, for short. We know exactly how powerful a website can be. After all, we’ve built our entire company – a hundreds of employees strong organization – on just that. How interested are you in a course, or possibly a monthly digital and printed newsletter, that teaches you how to use your website to your advantage for both your business and you personally, in easy-to-understand language?

A few ideas that come to my mind: how to build a website that sells, how to get your website listed on popular search engines (mostly: Google), how to successfully advertise online, what an affiliate program is and how to use it to your benefit? How to use your website to find a better paying job or advance your career? How to make your website more popular by means of Social Marketing, Word of Mouth Marketing, and integrate core functionality such as forums, wikis, blogs and other interactive community elements? This list could go on forever…

But what are you most interested in? Please let us know.

We have a very full plate in front of us, but we will never be too busy to listen to your feedback. It is golden. Please keep it coming.

Thank you for being our customer.

Fathi Said, CEO
IX Web Hosting

PS: This blog post contains several ideas that you could try out in your business or at your workplace to improve your company’s service and relevance. Feel free to quote any part of this blog in your own publication. If you mention us in your quote, we’ll appreciate it all the more. Ideas for this blog came from Seth Godin, one of the most remarkable entrepreneurs I know of, and Andy Sernovitz, and their respective books “The Big Moo” and “Word of Mouth Marketing.” I highly recommend both of them.

*Disclaimer: Your Hero will be nice to you, so please be nice to him or her: do not overfeed your Hero.

Customer Service

Selling web hosting services over the internet can be a bit impersonal. You may have signed up on our website. You might have never talked to anyone at our company. Sign up should be easy and that might be what you were looking for.

I do much of my banking online or through an ATM for the same reasons. However, there are times when I like to go in the branch and talk to someone when I have a more complex transaction. It’s nice when they listen to me and learn more about my needs. From a position of better understanding, they can make recommendations to improve our relationship.

We thought that, sometimes, you might like to talk to someone too. Of course we have phone support, this blog, and soon a forum where you can connect. But, we also decided that when anyone from our management team travels, we will try to get to know you and find out more about your goals for your online presence, your dreams, and how we could help you attain them.

I had a perfect opportunity last week. I traveled to Nashville for a seminar by David Bullock and Jerry West from SEO Rainmaker. (Excellent conference, by the way). Wednesday night I invited some customers to meet me while I was there.

I met Karen from Room in the Inn, and Jennifer from AccuImage, LLC . We had fun talking about their organizations.

Room In The Inn

Room In The Inn provides food and shelter for up to 225 people each night in over 150 area congregations from November 1st to March 31st. The congregation is in the middle of Tennessee, and their volunteers offer hospitality by giving their time, energy, and resources. Here are a few highlights of the service provided in the past year:

• 28,522 beds were provided to 1,033 different individuals (46% first-time guests)
• More than 150 congregations served 72,217 meals. 16,804 snacks and offered 12,658 showers
• 29,373 volunteers provided 11,030 hours and drove 155,242 miles in order to offer safe shelter for the homeless in Nashville.

We feel good that IX Web Hosting plays a small part in the important work that Room in the Inn does.

AccuImage

AccuImage, LLC also does important work. They specialize in the design, development, deployment and support of systems designed to solve business problems. They streamline laborious paper-based processes and we all need that!

AccuImage works with financial services, manufacturing, retail, distribution, government, accounts payable/receivable, human resources, and a variety of specialized industries – both regionally and nationally. With health care being one of Nashville’s largest industries, AccuImage has a high concentration of health care clients as well.

WOW! Two very different organizations yet, both count on us to keep them up and running on the internet. The conference was excellent and meeting Jennifer and Karen was a pleasure.

I did manage to squeeze in a little extra fun. I’ve been to Nashville to run the County Music Marathon two times before. Both times I looked forward to the barbecue at Rippy’s. After running 26 miles, it sure tastes good! So it was a real treat to be able to walk just a block or two for a sandwich and some good music.

So, you never know when one of the IX team might come to town and give you a call. We’d love to meet you and learn more about your organization. If you want to make sure we don’t miss you, post a comment below and let us know where you are and what you do.

Depending on your online journey with us so far, you could be in awe of how well we’re doing for you and in high anticipation of what’s coming next. Or you could read this as “Gee, thanks. My server is too slow and you still didn’t fix it. You already blew me away… far away, as your customer.”

Just two years ago, the first was wishful thinking. Our servers indeed were slow (in all honesty, a few still are). Backups were made sporadically. Downtimes were frequent. Customer service, suffering from low server performance, ran at a very low morale. If you look around online, you will find many negative reviews about us spanning that two-year timeframe. Despite all this, many of you stayed on board and with us, supporting us through the tough times, allowing us to outgrow the growing pains.

To all of you, our wonderful customers, I want to say thank you. There are no words that could express my gratitude, but there are actions.

In three parts, I would like to introduce to you the sweeping changes we wish to make to improve our company for you. I would like to ensure that your continued journey with us will be worthwhile for you. The only way to ensure this can happen is with your help and feedback. So please, don’t be shy!

Before I get started, I’d like to briefly recap our major milestones of the last two years:

1. All service issues previously stated are now resolved.
2. We’ve successfully deployed IronPort anti-spam and anti-virus filtering to our entire customer base; a very expensive project, but well worth it. For you, this eliminated 99.9% of all spam and virus emails received to your domains and created a significant uptime improvement for your email service with us.
3. Database related servers (all types of SQL) have been dramatically accelerated through improved ‘abuse’ management and massive hardware upgrades. Compared to two years ago, today you will experience expedient and stable database connections.
4. Today, we operate our data center out of a self-financed and owned, state-of-the-art 20,000 sq. ft. facility in Columbus, OH connected with Tier 1 Premium Bandwidth only at 5gbit/s (from Sprint and Qwest). At some data centers, you will find ‘cheap bandwidth’ resulting in longer loading times when visitors come to your website. These delays are hardly noticeable when you test for them yourself, but as long as they exist, your sites will lose visitors. But not with IX. At this facility, we would not even allow a mediocre bandwidth provider’s fiber optics to pollute our crystal-clear path of light. This industry-grade true Tier 3/4 data space can house over 10,000 servers, all self-managed and employee-owned.

   In fact, I would love to give you a tour! If you happen to be visiting Columbus on business or you can spare a few hours on your trip, I’d love to show you around our data center. We’ve a few hundred customers in Columbus as well – you’re welcome any time. Give one of our representatives a call and we’ll meet soon!

So how will we make your hosting experience with us worthwhile?

This year alone, my company has committed to its single largest investment into customer service and the level of server performance you experience.

Old and New

Before the year’s end, we are planning to upgrade our entire web hosting infrastructure. This should put an end to virtually all service-related issues. I can’t promise 100% uptime, but it’s what we’re shooting for. In detail, we will…

1. Introduce Imperia, an ‘intelligent cloud’ hosting environment, for all of our customers. This effectively means that your websites, databases and email services will be hosted not on one server, but on hundreds or thousands, all at the same time. You could theoretically turn off half our data center, or take an axe to the server hosting your website – and it would be back online within seconds (in fact, it may not be down at all). Please don’t try any of the above by yourself.*
2. Develop and launch a website management control panel featuring a state-of-the-art user interface that we are developing in-house right now. It is designed to make your life easier.
3. Replace ALL existing hardware with brand new blade servers, centralized storage and a fiber-channel switching architecture. This is a multi-million dollar investment into our networking and server infrastructure that will make your sites load faster than any dedicated server ever could. If you were to rent an entire server and all it hosted was your website, it would load your site as slow as molasses compared to how fast your site will load on Imperia.

Our development team is starting a special Imperia VIP Membership that you can join if you are interested in providing feedback to help us test and optimize the new platform. As a VIP member, we’ll share top-secret development material with you, your suggestions will be considered first for upcoming releases and you’ll get early access to new releases (membership is, of course, free of cost.).

Stay tuned for Part 2 of 3, in which I will address a whole new approach to customer service.

Please don’t forget to let us know your opinion and feedback.

Thank you!

Fathi Said, CEO
IX Web Hosting

*Disclaimer: Don’t use axe to destroy computer of any kind.

Ohio Growth Summit

We’re Pumped!

What an exciting day Wednesday was . . . Social Media in real, live action! We felt lucky to be there.

Where were we? At the Ohio Growth Summit right here in Columbus, OH. This event was sponsored by the Ohio Small Business Development Center, located at the Columbus State Community College, and was organized by @MichaelBowers. Thanks Michael!

Jim Canterucci

The first keynote speaker was Jim Canterucci, author of Personal Brilliance. Jim’s speech focused on achieving success, by applying four key habits (Awareness, Curiosity, Focus, and Initiative) to your life and work. Thanks Jim, very motivational!

Throughout the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon, attendees chose between several enlightening breakout sessions such as: Social media – Small Business the Social Guerrilla Marketplace, Invent, Build Go to Market, Go Global Now, and Obtaining Financing: How to Play the Game.

After lunch, additional breakout tracks included: Social Media Tools that will Mobilize Your Business Growth Strategy, From Models to Sales, Supply Chain Management, and The Banker’s Perspective. After the “Pitch It” session competition, where new starts try to promote their product in two minutes or less, it was time for the afternoon’s keynote speaker.

Chris Brogan

Chris Brogan had people on the edge of their seats with his humor and quick wit. With Chris we instantly took his message to heart, “Be Human”. Chris not only “talks the talk” (or should we say “tweets the tweet”), but more importantly, he definitely “walks the walk” when it comes to social media.

Thanks Chris for knocking it out of the ballpark! Your speech made us all pre-order Trust Agents.

On the topic of startups, Chris Brogan says if he were to start today “No matter what, the very first piece of social media real estate I’d start with is a blog. It’s a website, with lots of built in features that make it useful from a search perspective, and simple from a content creation perspective. That alone is worth the price of admission.” And Chris should know.

Chris Brogan Blog

Chris Brogan is a ten year veteran of using social media to build digital relationships for businesses, organizations, and individuals. Chris blogs at www.chrisbrogan.com, a blog in the top 10 of the Advertising Age Power150, and in the top 100 on Technorati.

With a blog virtually anyone can publish their thoughts, ideas and opinions to millions of potential readers. In return, those readers can “participate” by expressing their view points or comments. This method of communication is allowing all of us a means to become involved in information rather than just being passive consumers of it.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary awarded “blog” as “The Word of the Year” in 2004, when more and more people started using them as a means to express themselves personally. Today, blogs are reaching new heights in popularity. Many businesses and corporations are increasingly implementing blogs as they discover the flourishing opportunity it provides to build relationships with their existing customers as well as developing relationships with prospective new customers!

We’ve talked to many of our customers who say they want a web-presence. Cash is tight and they don’t have big advertising budgets. Blogging is a very inexpensive way to help accomplish this goal (all you need is your IX Web Hosting account).

Some of our customers haven’t started a blog because they are intimidated by the setup process. That’s where the other Chris comes in.

The 2nd Chris

Now that you’ve heard the reasons that a blog is the first thing to do from Chris Brogan, it’s time to hear from another Chris. Our own Chris Testerman. Chris will help you with the “how” do I start. Chris created this really awesome video that will show you how to set up a WordPress Blog in your IX Web Hosting account in under 2 minutes!

If you don’t have a hosting account here’s a blog post to let you know why you should.

Now, there’s nothing to hold you back!

Now that you’re ready to start creating your content, you are going to have to start sharing it with someone, right? So please, feel free to comment to this video with links to the blogs you’ve created. We’d love to take a look at them!

By the way, here’s a link to the tutorials Chris mentioned in his video: http://www.ixwebhosting.com/index.php/v2/pages.customerCenter

First Place - Woo Hoo!

Well we did it again folks!

IX is the first American web hosting company to introduce Alipay as a method of payment for our customers. “What is Alipay?” you ask. Alipay is the preferred method of payment for China. Think of it as their PayPal. It is well known and trusted, and gives the Chinese consumer peace of mind when it comes to online purchases. It makes buying from America much more attractive.

Next question you’re probably asking yourself is “Why am I reading about a service I will never need?” Promoting the use  of Alipay is not the intention of this blog (Actually we rely heavily on messenger pigeons to do the bulk of our promotions). The real purpose of this blog is to show you IX’s flexibility and responsiveness to you, our customers.

One of our Chinese affiliates asked us to consider offering Alipay. According to an article in China Tech News , the number of members have grown from 57 million in 2008 to over 150 million as of April of this year. Alipay reaches more than half of the people who use the web in China. Also of interest are the demographics of Alipay members. They are young (83% are between 21 and 35) and their spending is increasing faster than other segments of the population.

So, a few weeks after the original request – we are the first American Web Hosting company to offer this payment method! You may not be surprised. After all, we were the first to offer Unlimited Bandwidth and Unlimited Disk Space too.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. Feel free to send your ideas or suggestions by responding to this post. We might not be able to adopt all your ideas but at least you know we listen!

Jeremy Fox

Affiliate Manager

This may seem like an extremely odd question, but I was thinking (as I sometimes do when the weather is nice), why are you reading this blog?

Is it because you’re secretly hoping that maybe, one day, it will contain information relevant to your account? It will, I promise. As much as I love delving into difficult topics like MC Hammer pants and the curious patterns of squirrels, I am fully aware that customers are interested in things that involve THEM. This is why we’re working on getting a customer forum, our status blog and our Twitter status account up and running for you. We greatly appreciate your patience while we set these things up. We would also love to get your feedback about these ventures. What are you interested in? How would you most like it presented? For example, would you like to see a status blog that churns out facts about system functions daily or would you like something more interactive where you can leave comments or interact with other customers?

Or are you reading because you’re in some way dissatisfied and hoping that we’ll address your concerns here? If you take a look at the comments we received on our first post, you might notice that many of them were cries for help—feedback voiced in our very first medium between customers and staff that isn’t LiveChat, a phone call or our ticketing system. This was a big indicator to us that we were doing something wrong. What was being expressed on our blog could have been voiced on the phone or through any other avenue of support, but obviously, those channels were not satisfying some of you. This too will be changing. Our support is getting better each day because, well, you all know why. We want you to be happy. You employ us. The changes we are making to our customer support will be big, they will be noticeable and they are already happening. If any one of these items proves untrue, I trust that more than a handful of you will let us know and more than two handfuls of our staff will get moving on making them so.

Or is it because you lost your job? OK, this is a stretch, but losing your job frees up several hours in the day for blog-reading, starting a home-business online or scowling at those that insist on constantly flaunting their new stuff.

The economy is so bad, I might actually have to break my 2 dollar bill!

So those are not real tears, but that is a real $2 bill and that certainly is a real used-tissue...

We record the reasons that our customers leave so that we can better tailor our product to prevent cancellations. Well, guess what one of the leading reasons for cancellation is? “I can no longer afford hosting.” Most of you already know that we’re one of the least costly hosts available, so it is thoroughly depressing to hear this as a reason for ceasing to host with us. Still, even more depressing is giving away free hosting to those who cite their inability to afford it only to hear that they “no longer have a need for their account” because they couldn’t get their home business off of the ground. Well, providing detailed information and resources about making your home business work is also on our agenda. We’ll have to count on Obama to take care of the economy.

When I was younger, I genuinely thought that my father was a superhero and that I was placed on the planet to get him fired from his company so he could fulfill his true calling full-time. In that notion, I was not far from the truth. He has several skills that would be impossible to use all at one company (especially with a talent list as diverse as his: wind-harmonica out of a car doing 80 mph, moustache grooming, writing, child-lecturing, JavaScript, SQL, oil painting…). My point is that people with diverse skill sets can be liberated by job loss because they can use the internet to employ themselves in their own business, or even just to secure an even better job by creating a site to strengthen a résumé.

Here’s a good example: Let’s say that you got fired from your job and now need to justify the monthly cost of hosting. Here are a few things you could do:

1. Set up a site to slander your former employer. This, while obviously a joke, is something people really do! Instead of taking that route, I would actually suggest creating a site or blog that outlines your work experiences—things you have learned, things awry with their current business model (you might want to avoid naming the company specifically if you still want them on your list of good references) and advice you would give other employers. Creating a community out of a site like this is easy as there are several people looking to release steam about being released from employment. That community would be a valuable asset for those that have entrepreneurial/superhero aspirations because more could be done than just commiserating with your visitors. There’s an increasing market for job counseling and HR consulting, and whether you earn revenue from it or not, you’ve contributed something to the global community as well as enhanced your résumé. Imagine what: “Built an online community from zero to four-thousand by providing valuable, original resources and consulting. Please see www.HireMe.com/about for more information.” could do for your résumé…
2. Create a site to show-off. Set up a site with a forum to discuss hobbies with friends, organize gatherings or anything related to things that you’re good at. Throw videos, pictures, artwork, lessons (if you have a teachable hobby) on your site and then bask in self-satisfaction.
3. Resell your hosting account. Do you know someone who is constantly talking about his/her ideas but not actually doing anything with them? Sell them a portion of your account to get them started! They can still develop their domain with your hosting and you won’t have to worry about bandwidth or transfer (because it’s unlimited) and you set the price. You can even buy a domain for someone as a gift and host it on your account, free. No more need to read holiday or special-occasion wish-lists. Just give everyone hosting! That includes Mom (Mother’s Day is coming up in the US!), your brother, your 7-year old daughter (she has to learn sometime!) , etc…

I think it’s safe to say that most of you could come up with better ways to use your hosting account. When we get our customer forum ready to go, please feel free to inform fellow customers how to make the most out of their account; if not for us, then for the economy.

Thanks for reading!

Migration- noun. Fleeing the coop for bigger, better things.

[Our design team was obviously too busy for this post.]

Moving

When I was a kid, if my mom had sat me down, looked me squarely in the eyes and said: “Son, we’re moving,” I would have been furious.  Firstly, because I’m female and it wouldn’t be the first time she called me “son” and secondly, because I hate moving.  I like getting to know my area, seeking out the best neighbors to spy on and knowing the full story behind why, for example, the squirrel in our backyard is courting a lawn gnome.

In essence, moving for a child means being stuck with whatever Mom made.

To a child, moving means exchanging friends that would have willingly traded their superior lunch for your own if it meant 10 minutes on your Nintendo DS for new friends that wouldn’t trust your lunch even if came straight out of a factory-sealed Lunchables ™ box.

Worse, they don’t even know what you own yet, so how can you lunch-leverage?

This is kind of how we felt when we moved our data center from Hopkinsville, Kentucky to Columbus, Ohio almost exactly one year ago.  Except…in our adaptation, we were not planning on filling lawn gnomes with acorns to attract local squirrels and we certainly weren’t playing with anything “Nintendo” as servers and workstations took up most of our time (though our Mom’s were still probably making most of our lunches).

Actually, our move was not very much at all like what I just described, so I’m going to let everyone else describe it for you…I at least contributed the breathtakingly beautiful migration picture up top.

On the Move:

In the words of our CEO, Fathi Said: “This move made it possible for us to focus on what really matters: customer service.  Bandwidth and space restrictions have not been an issue since and we’re able to find highly talented staff in Columbus.  I am very pleased that we’re well in schedule for 2009…a year to bear many fruits of the same kind: service, service, service!”

Our VP of Systems Operations, Rick said the following: “Thankfully, our move brought us to Columbus, which is a very nice place with good people and many opportunities. I’m glad I made the move up along with IX. With a world class data center and lots of bandwidth connectivity available, I look forward to our continued growth and development.”

The always-friendly Chris Testerman (Director of Sales) had a lot more to say: “When I think of the move, the memories that stick out the most are of our team the night of the big move. I was working in the Kentucky office at the time and had signed up to come out in the middle of the night to do the worst thing imaginable. We were going to violate the sacred law. We had to unplug servers. Hand to hand we passed servers filled with family photos and private thoughts. This one probably held someone’s family business and that one could have stored the corporate brands of someone else. It just felt .. …. BIG. A year later, I’m excited about the big changes we’ve made and the bigger improvements we are working on for the future. Things that just wouldn’t have been possible without the move. I’m glad we’ve made the investment in our customers and ourselves. But what really gets me excited, what makes me glad to come into work everyday, is that sense of commitment to each other, and to each customer that I saw the night we all came together to move your servers.”

Tiberiu Ungureanu (affectionately known as “Tibi”) is a customer-favorite for his vast amount of knowledge and complete willingness to go above and beyond for each customer. He said of the move: “I already feel as though I am a pro at moving. Coming from Bucharest (Romania’s capital) to Kentucky was not an easy task. I had become accustomed to noise, insane traffic, plenty of people surrounding you at all times, the Romanian language…but Kentucky was a different kind of place. Just as I was getting used to my new home, we were told of the upcoming move to Columbus, Ohio. Honestly, I was pretty excited. Like any man, I like extremely fast, low-latency, zero packet-loss, totally amazing bandwidth served on a platter of redundant fiber-optic loops. Well, maybe these are not the wishes of “any” man, but they are certainly the wishes of any Senior Network Engineer who cares about his customers…and these were things that Columbus offered us.”

Thanks for reading! Keep the comments coming!

I should probably start this post by introducing you to our VP of Systems Operations, Rick. This is a person who is not only passionate about his job, but also highly intelligent and creative.

OK, enough of the positive. He’s a little crazy. His insanity does happen to be almost wholly attached to the safety of the data center (he’s a really cool guy otherwise), but that insanity is there and it is something worth poking fun at.

Super, High-Tech Tea and Coffee Station

Danger: Tea and Coffee May Cost You More Here Than it Does at Starbucks

For example, when our team decided to create a coffee and tea station in the kitchen (it’s not even as elaborate as I just made it sound…see photo), Rick immediately felt the need to establish regulations. We are not allowed to leave the “station” until whatever process we initiated is complete, and then when it is complete, we must unplug every surrounding appliance. If we use the microwave, we must watch it like a hawk—watch it like that microwave could steal our livelihood at any moment. You know why? Because it can. At least, that’s what Rick thinks. Any of these appliances can start a fire, which could spread if our fire-suppression system doesn’t kick in, which could enable that fire to somehow reach the servers, which could melt our customer data, which could make our customers very angry with us, which would make us very angry with ourselves, which could sink our business.

All for a plate of bland, re-heated Chinese food.

If Rick is this way about appliances that lie hundreds of yards away from the actual servers, imagine how he careful he is about the servers themselves. Our data center is about as redundant as they come—millions of dollars went into making it this way.

Well, in the middle of the night on March the 30th, a power line went down in our corporate park. All buildings in the complex (from one end of Dividend Dr to the other) lost power. No problem, right? We have backup generators, backup batteries…we even have the energy Rick’s undying concern for the data center would provide if we could only find a way to harness it. Unfortunately, one branch of our backup setup failed (namely, a generator) and a good percentage of the machinery we need for operations was left powerless (namely, our network). Fortunately, our network was back up fairly rapidly (within minutes) and it didn’t take long for the servers to catch up.

For those of you that experienced outages, however short, we are unbelievably sorry. We were able to quickly return to status quo, but many of our customers still experienced downtime and we know that this is unacceptable. We are really, really sorry.

The issue that we had with the power loss is being investigated with the utmost priority because we don’t want anything like this happening again… and neither does Rick. I came late onto the scene (at about 2 AM, when the power had been long-restored and the servers were coming back up from their temporary, power-starvation induced sleep), but I knew Rick was still inside because his car was parked parallel to the building, nearly on the sidewalk entryway and I could still hear the echo of his tires screeching against pavement. When I got inside, the root of the problem had been taken care of, but we had another problem. Our main System Administrator/Network Engineer had clearly arrived straight out of bed, wearing MC Hammer pants… and he was doing so without shame.

While this event that took place never should have happened, we are going through great pains to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. (The downtime, that is. We haven’t yet decided what to do about those pants.) We, again, are terribly sorry for any downtime that was caused by this downed line, though we were fortunate that it happened at such an odd hour of the night. If we find out that the line went down because it was hit and knocked over by a clumsy driver, we’ll make sure to find and then glare at them on behalf of all of us.

We’re sorry, we’re sorry, we’re sorry! (I can be redundant too!)

Thanks for reading!

Michelle Schroeder

P.S. If you want to look like one of our very own sysadmins, you can get your own set of updated, metallic MC Hammer pants for one payment of only $19.95 from this website. Oh wait, I’m sorry. I put the decimal where I thought it belonged, not where it actually was… Turns out that the net-a-porter site has nudged the price into the “can’t touch this” range: $1,995.00.

That site will even suggest what to pair with them, though I personally think this other site does a better job in helping you achieve the whole “MC Hammer” package: http://www.ehow.com/how_2058695_dress-like-mc-hammer.html.