by Kevin Hazard, July 27th, 2006 | No Comments
For those of you tuning in to get the tutorial walking you through how to set up your very own Site5 account (including a Typo blog installation, forum installation, and photo page installation), I’ll try and get something posted soon for you. I just wanted to take a few seconds to direct you to the Site5 Official News and Announcement Forum where Matt has posted announcements on a few changes and what is in the Site5 Pipeline as of right now.
The announcements forum will be the place for getting official updates and announcements regarding our services, especially on the technical side of things.
What’s that you say? You aren’t a forum member? You should be ashamed of yourself… Well, maybe you shouldn’t be ashamed, but you should use the next 3 minutes of your internet surfing time to get in there and register to become part of the Site5 community… Tell Steven and B&T that Kevin sent you…
P.S. If you actually tell them that I sent you, they will be your best friend.
P.P.S. I can’t back up the above Post Script statement, but they are really nice guys, and I bet they’d be happy to be a normal friend of yours even if you don’t mention my name.
by Kevin Hazard, July 21st, 2006 | 3 Comments
When you understand how web hosting works and what you will be using to get your own website on the net, you run into one of your most significant tasks: choosing a web host. Instead of pitching Site5’s service to you as the end-all, perfect service, it is important to understand what you should look for in any hosting provider. When selecting a plan from the thousands of available options, the biggest concerns you should have are “Will this company help me if I need it?”, “Will the service (and space) be good enough for me to not need help?”, and “Will the host keep up with the technology changes in the industry?” These three questions are very basic and intuitive, but finding a company to consistently say, “Yes!” to both is not an easy task.
Making the Right Investment
As with most other service-related industries, new customers need to be assured that they are making a good investment, and they need to know that they can try the service risk-free for a certain period of time to ensure they made the correct decision. A common guarantee to assuage those fears is the “Your satisfaction is guaranteed with a 30-day money-back guarantee.” These guarantees hold the host accountable to ensuring that you are 100% satisfied with the decision you made in choosing their service since you have many options in choosing a “home” for your website.
The Ups and Downs of Uptime
In addition to a money-back guarantee, hosts will also advertise an uptime guarantee to pledge that your site will be up and accessible whenever you need it. A 99.9% uptime guarantee would suggest that your site will be up and running virtually every time it needs to be accessed. This guarantee is a necessity both because well-maintained servers are very dependable and should be online as close to 100% of the time as possible and because you cannot afford to have the site down. Imagine you invented the season’s most popular gift and thousands of people flock to your website every day to buy the gift directly from you. If your website is ever down, not only are you losing business for that short period of time, you are also appearing unprofessional to those prospective customers (which is likely more damaging than the lack of business). Clearly you trust your hosting provider with your site, and they are responsible for your site’s availability and performance, so the uptime and performance guarantees provide a basic peace of mind in making your decision.
It is important to understand that the idea of a full 100% uptime guarantee, while nearly impossible, may not be a great thing because downtime is often necessary when hosts make hardware and software upgrades on your server. If your server is never taken offline, you may worry about your host’s commitment to keeping you (and your site) up to date with the fastest and most secure systems.
Who You Gonna Call?
GHOST BUSTERS!! (Sorry, I had to…) After you understand a host’s guarantees, it is important to note the host’s availability in case you run into problems. The industry standard is to provide 24×7 technical support. This standard is a necessity with the understanding that people could be accessing your site from anywhere in the world at a given time, and you should be able to work on your site with immediate response at any time. Technical support comes in many forms: email ticketing systems, live chat with a support representative, and phone support.
While you would assume “the more the merrier” with regard to available avenues for technical support, Site5 has found email support as the most effective means of solving technical problems. Commonly, hosts will advertise the availability of live chats with technical support representatives (also known as system administraors) or phone support, but the nature of many website and server-related problems are easiest to solve when you (as the customer) can fully explain your situation and the representative can address the complete problem.
This finding is counterintuitive: you would imagine immediate responses to your questions in the form of live chat or phone support would get you an answer quicker, but we found that support representatives can be overrun with several requests at the same time. In these instances, the rep’s responses may not fully solve the problem (if he/she even knows how to solve the problem). Complicated site problems and complex problems (which require the “sysadmin” to track down the root cause of a problem in order to solve a continual problem) can take as long as an hour, but the nature of live chat and phone support require that the rep get you an answer quickly and give you the impression that the problem is solved upon concluding the chat or phone call. Because the availability of these two options led to a poorer quality of customer service in our experience, Site5 removed those avenues with the commitment to immediately and fully address problems within thirty minutes via email. This practice allows the support representative a little more time to make sure problems are fixed while allowing time to investigate each individual problem more carefully if necessary.
Who’s Helping You?
In-house Sales/Billing/Support teams have (unfortunately) become a lost characteristic in the web hosting realm. In order to keep up with all of the requests that are generated by hundreds of servers worth of clients, several larger web hosts farm their sales, support, and billing teams to call centers or to other companies. This practice is not surprising when you consider that many hosting companies offer phone support and live chat support which both require a significant amount of manpower to maintain… You are more likely to get a quicker response, but you are less likely to get a quality response.
Sitting at the Trendy Table
No one likes the buyer’s remorse feeling when the rose-colored glasses are taken off and reality hits like a ton of bricks. The internet is constantly changing and evolving, and if your web host is not dynamic and flexible, you could find yourself frustrated with static resources. Becoming a web host is as simple as buying a reseller plan, but becoming a good web host requires an uncommon measure of control and experience. Cookie-cutter control panels, confusing account management systems, and outdated hardware can be dangerous for customers. Site5 is one of a handful (if that many) web hosts with an Engineering team dedicated to ensuring that our customers always have the latest and greatest that the web hosting world has to offer. Obviously, it is not necessary to look for a host with a team dedicated to addressing system-wide developments, repairs, improvements, and replacements, but you certainly want to make sure your host has the ability to control and fix everything it is offering. For example, if there is a security hole in the cookie-cutter control panel you are given by your host, it is important that the host can patch that hole or at least provide the necessary fix as soon as it is available or you run the risk of someone hacking your site (which can be as gruesome to your site as it sounds).
Nota Bene (Latin for “mark well,” so pay attention…)
Now all of those cynics out there just thinking I am peddling Site5’s service under the guise of a helpful post about choosing a good web host, I do concede that there is quite a bit of overlap between “a good host” and Site5… The company’s guarantees are very similar to the characteristics of a good host (not much of a coincidence, since we are trying to be a great host). The Site5 team is committed to being at the top of the web hosting industry, and we honor this commitment by remaining accountable to the basics of “What Makes a Good Host.”
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See what I did there… Tied the title into the end of the post… As Kevin Nealon’s character said in Happy Gilmore, “It’s circular. It’s like a carousel. You pay the quarter, you get on the horse. It goes up and down and around. Circular. Circle. With the music. The flow… all good things.”
by Kevin Hazard, July 19th, 2006 | No Comments
You are at your computer. You type “www.site5.com,” and in a few seconds of internet magic, a beautiful (and most likely redesigned in the past week or two) website appears on your screen. No, this phenomenon does not happen because Al Gore invented the internet and somehow embedded a secret binary code that will forever index any possible domain name you can enter. There is a relatively simple behind the scenes process that happens each time you access a website, and when you begin to understand how domains, servers, IP addresses, and content work together, it is a lot easier to understand what web hosting is.
What Happens Behind the Scenes
When you type a domain name into your browser or click a link, you are calling that website’s data from a server. Your browser knows where to find the correct server because each domain has a DNS (Domain Name Service) entry and an IP address. DNS will tell your browser the IP address of the website you requested (basically where the website lives), and the browser retrieve the content you requested from the server at that IP address.
The Server Shuffle
A server is simply a computer responsible for giving (or serving) information to anyone trying to access it. Everyone with a website could theoretically own and maintain their own server for their sites, but because the cost of maintaining the server and ensuring top performance at all hours is typically too high for an average user’s income (and because a server has the ability to host hundreds of sites), most website creators “rent” the necessary space to serve their websites. The company or individual that is allowing others to rent space he/she controls is the web host, and the web hosting industry is essentially the amalgamation of everyone trying to get customers to rent their space. In the web hosting industry, you will run into a three major divisions: shared, reseller, and dedicated.
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is the most affordable, most available, and easiest to use among the three divisions. Several providers offer this type of hosting for free if your sites feature their advertisements, but these providers usually cripple your ability to expand and enhance your website in a quick and easy manner.
A standard shared hosting account as of July 2006 has around 2 gigabytes of space for a monthly fee of around $10. For most beginners, one of these plans is the perfect stepping stone into the world of hosting because the plans are usually upgradeable if you need more space, and they will not break the bank if you take your time to learn more about the technologies (which, as I said, is not a requirement to get a solid site up and running).
Reseller Hosting
The second major division of web hosting industry is reseller hosting. Essentially, reseller hosting gives you a bit more space than a normal hosting account with the intention of allowing you to “resell” the space you are renting. If you have a group of friends who all want to have their own website, you can order a larger reseller hosting plan and split it up into several independent plans (which would be equivalent to individual hosting plans). This option is very popular because you can have your site up and running, and if you have your own customers who pay you a set fee monthly, you could theoretically not pay anything for your plan (since you just use their money to pay your hosting provider) or you can make money on the deal (bring in more money from customers than you pay to your provider). A common fear among new resellers is “How do I charge people? That sounds complicated and too much of a hassle,” but new reseller accounts commonly provide a billing system to assist in this process.
Dedicated Hosting
The third main division in the web hosting industry is dedicated hosting. With a dedicated hosting plan, you are paying a hosting provider for your own server that they will monitor and maintain for you. This solution is most commonly used for larger businesses or customers who need more space and/or freedom for their website. When you pay for dedicated hosting, you are renting an entire server (which the provider could have split up into a few hundred shared accounts if it was being used for shared hosting), so the cost will be significantly higher than that of a shared or reseller plan.
A Little More About Hosting
In each of the hosting plans, you will see variations in price based upon disk space, bandwidth, and features. Disk space is exactly what it sounds like: the amount of space you have to put your files on the server. The more complicated variation is bandwidth, which is a limit on the amount of information going to or coming out of your account. Every time someone accesses your site to read your weblog (also known as a blog or online journal) or to download a family video, the amount of bandwidth they used is the same as the amount of data they transferred. More simply, if someone downloaded a 10 megabytes video, they used 10 megabytes of bandwidth (You will have also used 10 megabytes of bandwidth to upload the video). Clearly, users need more bandwidth than they do space, but for new users, most disk space and bandwidth levels are considerably higher than the user will ever use or need.
In general, hosting has become a commodity based upon space and bandwidth, and features have more or less become standard. You could theoretically host your site from a command line interface (try not to shudder as you remember the blinking cursor of the MS-DOS operating system), but several control panels have been created to help you easily control your site, so the majority of hosts will offer one of the common systems. This fact is not necessarily a bad thing, but the reliance on third-party control panels alleviates the need for development of new systems. In these control panels, you can control the creation of email accounts (yournames@yourdomain.com), the ability to add and remove files from your site, and the other basic functions you would typically need for a basic website. Unfortunately, the hosting industry has resigned itself to the idea that customers are experienced, know what they need (or at least what everything means), and that the current systems are entirely sufficient for what those customers need.
In the Next Installment
Next we will look into what you should look for in a new host. As I mentioned, there are thousands of options, and theoretically, all of them do the same thing… But hopefully we will be able to sort out characteristics of a host you want.
by Kevin Hazard, July 19th, 2006 | 1 Comment
You need a website. That statement sends shivers down the spine of many technology newbies. The common instinctual responses to this fact range from ‘This old dog is too old and busy to learn new tricks… I have neither the time nor the patience’ to (my personal favorite) ‘I am not good with computers… I have trouble finding the power button on my computer… How am I supposed to be able to maintain my own website?’ Those types of responses have become instinctual because, based on the nature of the Internet in the past, they are completely legitimate. If you want to get into the world of development and programming, it is almost impossible to know where to begin: dozens of programming languages exist with thousands of books to teach about them. Fortunately for all of you breathing deeply into a brown paper bag to slow the onset of hyperventilation, you really do not need to know any programming language to create a multi-functional, attractive, inexpensive website.
You read that correctly: You do not have to learn C, C++, HTML, Java, Ruby, PHP, AJAX, Python, or any other complex and/or abstract-sounding language to create your own website. It doesn’t matter f you need an e-commerce site to sell and drop-ship widgets or you want a family site to store and share pictures of Little Timmy in his pumpkin costume; all of the necessary installation and preparation could be done in a matter of minutes through easy-to-use programs designed to install everything you need. Don’t worry, we will walk through the process in a later post so you will understand the programs, what they do, and how it helps you manage your very own website.
Naturally, the programs and scripts included in all Site5 shared plans will not necessarily rival what you could create with a working knowledge of the above programming languages, but the programs will help you establish a functional virtual presence.
In its going-on-seven years of operation, Site5 has become one of the more widely recognized providers of shared hosting services. We haven’t ever run a Super Bowl commercial, we don’t have a catchy jingle echoing across radio waves as you sit through rush hour traffic, and we compete with hundreds of thousands of other web hosts. At Site5, we distinguish ourselves from our competition by innovation, design, and value. Seemingly, the web hosting industry has become a competition to win customers based on cost and arbitrary quality descriptors, so we wanted to take a moment to demystify what web hosting is and why you need it in order to have a website.
Within the next week, we’ll take a look at “How web hosting works,” “What to look for in a host,” and “How to get started.” Some people are reading this post and dying for me to add a shenanigan or an antic into the mix, but if the blog series is intended on helping people gain the confidence and know-how to surf the web hosting wave, I don’t want to confuse (or scare) anyone with odd references to slap bracelets and mood rings… Ooops… So much for not referencing them…
by Kevin Hazard, July 12th, 2006 | No Comments
Yeah, I know… The Late Show has the “CBS Mailbag” where David Letterman reads mail from viewers who write in with questions like, “Dear David, Is it really true that you are a lousy tipper?” and he’ll send them a Late Show trinket. Well the Site5 Mailbag is NOTHING like that… Well, people do write in, and we do answer the questions directly on our blog, and we are giving away free service credits to the writer of every question we answer on the site… But other than that, there are NO similarities.
On a random tangent: After we destroyed a server at our N.O.C. in March, we made it into New York where Todd was able to score a few tickets to a taping of The Late Show a day before I was set to leave (This process is supposed to take weeks online, but I think Todd was able grease some palms to get us in there).
I don’t know how anyone can survive on the East Coast during the Winter… I am from Texas, and I live in California… Neither one of those facts help my tolerance for cold weather.
Back to the Site5 Mailbag…
The bottom line is that we want this blog to be fun and to be a resource to the Site5 community (and all of those spies from other hosting companies). If you have a question about web hosting, Site5, or what our CTO, Adam Greenfield, usually eats for breakfast (I think his breakfast of choice is “Programming Flakes,” but I could be wrong), you can send a quick email to mailbag (at) site5 (dot) com or click the picture above, and it will open your email editor of choice for you (or the default mailto program that you don’t use).
Please take a few minutes to jot down any questions you may have for us so that we can impart some of our wisdom or Google-searching to you via this not-so-intimate, public medium. A free month of Site5 hosting isn’t too bad of a deal either. We will be answering at least one email per week, but if we get a backlog of solid questions, we may up that to two or three per week.