Sale, sale, sale!!!
Personally, I’m a big believer in not treating new customers like “special” customers. Any major sale or discount given to all new customers is also given to Scribehost’s existing client base. Granted, I don’t have major sales often; and I don’t have a customer base numbering in the thousands - so that makes logistics a bit less daunting. But since most of my clients get onboard and stay there for five, six, seven years (all but one of the first-year clients is still with us)...why not reward that loyalty?
Sales and freebies are tricksy things. The business owner has to make sure that the business can absorb the cost of the sale (or freebies, or giveaways, or whatever.) With the global economy like it currently is, business owners - particularly small ones - have to be even more cautious than normal that they stay solvent. That means making very sure that they don’t spend everything they have this quarter in hopes of tripling their customer base in the next quarter. Hosts in particular have to be both more creative and more persistent to achieve brand recognition. Just giving away mousepads or pens won’t provide adequate return on invvestment. Yet if a host does nothing, they run the risk of their clients going to another host that does give out perks.
Posted by Lesli @ 10:21 AM · (0) Trackbacks ·
It’s not easy being pseudoGreen
The latest wave sweeping through companies of all kinds — including web hosts — is the race to label oneself a “green company”.
Let’s take a look at that for just a minute.
“Green companies” strive, in every way, to pollute less, to reuse more, and to work intelligently. Sure, they have to use resources and produce waste product; but a truly “green” company will strive to use as few resources as possible and still produce a quality product, AND produce as little waste as possible. This can include recycling metals, paper, and plastics; using soy-based inks; composting whenever and wherever possible; using energy-efficient appliances; using smart manufacturing techniques; providing for employee transportation options other than their own cars (bike racks at places of employment, shuttle busses to and from park-and-rides, subsidized monthly transit passes, what have you); using alternative energies (wind, water, solar); and more. All well and good.
Web hosting is a virtual service. There’s no physical product. With no physical product, “resources used” and “waste generated” seem to be greatly minimized, right? And since there’s no physical manufacturing process and no packaging, two big components would seem to be out of the picture. So web hosts who say that they’re green web hosts are right on the ball. Right? Maybe not.
Web hosts use servers. These servers are computers - just like your laptop computer, except a bit more specialized. That means they’re machines. Machines require electricity to run, and generate heat when they run. Since people do not like their web sites to have downtime, and since commercial alternative energies are still somewhat young and not as reliable as traditional electricity (and often more costly), datacenters and ISPs thus use a lot of electricity and generate a lot of heat. As an example of how much heat is generated per action, and per what type of action, two searches on Google uses the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle of water. Google has long touted itself as one of the most environmentally responsible tech companies - so you can imagine how well this information was received in Mountain View. Even though your average web host won’t have a data center as large as Google’s, one begins to wonder why web hosts label themselves as “green” if they have a good idea that they might not be totally green.
Part of the problem lies in the definition of the word “green”. It’s not currently possible to sue a company over false advertising if it calls itself “green” because the US government doesn’t have guidelines defining a “green business”. So what one hosting company defines as “green” may meet another web hosting company’s definition of “still got a ways to go” while someone who’s an environmental scientist might say that neither of them are truly “green companies”.
Confusing, hm? Yep. And the fun’s just beginning.
Don’t always believe the ad bullets a web host — or any company — puts on their site. The bullet points may be just that: bullet points designed to look good. They may be a series of “bullshit promises”. Web hosts who are green may recycle their office supplies. They may use only eco-friendly products wherever possible. They may do everything they possibly can to be “green”. Or…they may just be using terms that they don’t have the right to claim.
Posted by Lesli @ 01:18 PM · (0) Trackbacks ·
Learning from mistakes
When Microsoft began trying to generate buzz for Vista, I was unimpressed. Yawn, another Microsoft product - which means that in its early versions it will be buggy, unstable, and not really ready for prime time. Maybe after the first or second service pack it will have settled down.
Corporations thought the same thing: most big companies in Silicon Valley (not just companies, but internet and tech companies) flat out refused to upgrade to Vista. Their internal tests revealed too many problems and compatibility issues even with MS Office. And heaven help any company that relied on InDesign or FrameMaker to generate its technical documentation. Even with a slicker-than-slick new interface and lots of visual pretties, Vista was still not a quality tool.
Seems Microsoft has learned a bit. They’re releasing Windows 7 into beta “early next year” (think spring or even summer 2008) with a reduced installation footprint, ability to run more efficiently, ability to reduce “alerts” (because - yeesh - who needs a nagging computer?), and less quixotic network connection properties. This isn’t as sexy or geek-interesting as M$‘s cloud computing aims; but for ordinary users, it’s a refreshing change. Finally an OS that may - MAY - run effciently, install more easily, connect more quickly, and spend less time getting in folks’ way.
Whod’a thunk?
Posted by Lesli @ 01:09 PM ·
Open source projects doomed as economy stalls?
Andrew Keen, an author with Internet Evolution, predicts a change in user behavior and the demise of the ‘Cathedral’ economy, driven by current market and labor conditions. Specifically, he says that as more and more people are out of work, there will be “a sharp cultural shift in our attitude toward the economic value of our labor”. Thus, people will stop contributing to open source projects, “citizen journalist” sites, et cetera.
I don’t know that he’s completely accurate.
Open source and community projects give people more than a paycheck. (In many cases, they don’t give a paycheck at all.) They give people a way to contribute toward something, a way to learn in a real-world setting, and they provide a way for people to interact with their peers. That’s what attracts people most to sites like Flickr, YouTube, and even SourceForge: the ability to get these things which, realistically, they may not always be able to get through their jobs. How many folks have done time as a cubicle-dweller? How often did you interact with your peers for things other than meetings? And were those interactions, those collaboration opportunities, driven by your wants, or by a manager’s wants? (Likely, someone else set that agenda. Possibly, many individuals’ contributions were blocked or outright ignored if they were not suggested by the group leader.) Open source and virtual-community projects are a bit like any community group or activity: they’re an opportunity for an otherwise underutilized person to get out, contribute, and have some say in the end product.
Think of a fairy tale where the village strongman, unable to slay the dragon/free the princess/retrieve the mystical object, goes and bends a bar of steel with his bare hands…just to prove that he’s not a useless weakling. Many sites and projects like blogs, Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia, et al are a way for people to go and do something and prove - to themselves and to others - that they’re capable of doing something creative, complex, or compelling. The overwhelming majority of office jobs don’t offer any similar outlet. These community projects are much the same as a local quilting bee, a barn raising, or other group activities that don’t really exist in our culture any longer.
Working on open source and free projects also lets people learn skills in a real world setting, as opposed to learning concepts in a classroom. They can learn design, planning, management, writing, communications…anything that’s used when collaborating on a project, as well as project-specific skills like design, programming, knitting, fashion, et cetera (obviously, that list changes depending on the scope of the particular project.) People who contribute to these efforts may or may not be getting paid, but they’re getting a chance to learn. Each individual does have to determine where the “learning” stops and the “exploitation” starts; and for each individual, that definition will be different. (It will also change over time, and from project to project.)
People get other forms of compensation for contributing their time and skills: they get community recognition, “street cred”, networking, and an enhanced reputation. Some have used their volunteer work, both online and offline, to change career paths or even springboard into new ones. I remember listing all my school activities and clubs on my college applications, back in the late 80s. I’m guessing that some high school grads in recent years may have listed their significant involvement with this or that online community as their “extracurricular activities”. (Their MySpace page may not have been a big payoff, and so was probably left off. Writing multiple scripts for DynamicDrive, submitting a few dozen designs to OSWD, or contributing significantly toward a sports blog or news & opinion site may have helped show initiative and well-roundedness.)
Just as the dot-com-bust of 2002 saw many “pre-revenue” web ventures founder but saw many continue, this latest economic downturn (it’s not a war, it’s a police action) won’t see all the free services and communities suddenly disappear. It won’t see everyone halt their contributions and participation. It may not even make people think harder about donating their time. It just may make people change how they donate their time, where they put their efforts, and how long they stay at “unpaid contributor” status. But as long as people have a need to teach, to learn, to interact, and to have an audience, these community efforts will continue - both online and in the physical world.
Posted by Lesli @ 11:16 AM ·
Close Brush with (a bad) Destiny?
About two weeks ago, someone contacted me asking about “a large amount of IP namespace”. After a few rounds of email questions, I found that they were specifically seeking 5 Class-C IP blocks (254 IP addresses per block…over 1,000 IP addresses) and were going to need about 5 servers. They were using a gmail.com email address…and when I asked them what company they represented and asked why they were using a free email address as their business contact, the person replied that they kept their company email address hidden because they didn’t want to receive spam. (That’s triply ironic, considering that they wanted so many IPs - and only five servers.)
And then this week, this news breaks: Intercage, a network provider with some antisocial netizens (spammers, phishers, malware sites, et al) as their clients, was cut off. Their upstream provider had apparently had enough of Intercage’s antics and terminated their service contract. Now Intercage has been picked up by *another* datacenter after severing ties with Esthost, an Eastern European company whom security researchers pinpointed as the home of many malware, phishing, spam, and scam sites.
The person who contacted me originally didn’t reveal their employer’s name, even when I asked directly. So I wonder if this could have been Interchange, drastically fishing for other homes?
Posted by Lesli @ 12:38 PM ·
For want of a word
This is why you should be careful using boilerplate legal documents for your hosting business.
I’ve written an article, originally published in PingZine, suggesting that web hosts have a lawyer write their Terms of Service or Acceptable Use Policy - or at least have a lawyer read it over and patch any major holes. I’ve seen companies selling boilerplate legal hosting contracts to folks starting up a reseller business, and hoped that the people buying it knew how to determine quality versus slipshod. I’ve had numerous startup web hosts copy TLM Network’s Terms of Service (as well as chunks of other site content).
There’s a very, very, VERY good reason that this is a bad idea. Just one missed or misused word, such as in the case linked above, and your hosting company could find itself without the legal protections you thought were there.
We can’t specialize in every aspect of our business. We can’t be server admins, support technicians, customer service reps, salespeople, marketing artists, web developers, accountants, human resource gurus, and lawyers. But if you’re going to run a business, you need to know a little bit about each of these areas. And most important, you have to know your limits. Know when it’s time to say, “This needs to be done well, I can either learn this thoroughly or I can go as far as I competently can and take it to a professional.”
Play around with your marketing a little bit to see what works for your business. Experiment with web design. Tweak your business plan from time to time (in fact, if that doesn’t change over time, you may have overlooked something.) But do not gamble with anything involving legal matters. It could end up costing you far more than a trip to a lawyer, draft TOS in hand.
Posted by Lesli @ 10:06 AM ·
Coming here from Orkut?
I am (probably) not the person you’re looking for. I’ve owned this domain since 1996 and I’ve never, ever had an active account on Orkut, LinkedIn, Ryze, or any of the other “professional” social-networking sites. You’re probably looking for the person whose profile links here…but that profile doesn’t belong to the owner of this domain.
Why is that person linking to a domain they don’t own? I have no idea. Maybe, when they set up their profile, it was a typo on their part. Maybe they own tlm.com.br or something like that, and forgot to include the last portion of the domain name. Your guess is as good as mine.
But if you’re in contact and they ask you for money for ownership of this domain…don’t give them anything. They’re not me, they’re not someone I know, and you won’t get this domain. You’ll just be out some cash. (Which can really put a damper on your day.)
Posted by Lesli @ 11:38 AM ·
Is this domain for sale?
No. No, it is not. Not even for seven figures. So please, all questions of that nature? Save yourself the time and don’t even bother sending an inquiry.
Posted by Lesli @ 09:01 AM ·