by Kevin Hazard, October 23rd, 2006 | 4 Comments
In preparing to write this blog post, several prospective titles were swirling through my mind: “How Apple Learned from Site5,” “Marty McFly Would Choose Site5,” “Flux Capacitor Sold Separately,” and “Apple Copied Our Idea and All We Got Was This Awesome Program” were the frontrunners, but my nagging curiosity as to which year of the DeLorean was used in the filming of the Back to the Future trilogy led me to the short and sweet title, “Apple’s Time Machine, Site5’s Flashback, and a 1981 DeLorean.”
What do these three things have in common?… If you guess that they all use “One-point-twenty-one gigawatts” of power, you may be right (since I really have no concept of how many gigawatts are involved in Site5’s Flashback and Apple’s Time Machine), but the answer we were really looking for is that you can use them all to go back in time.
Note: Please don’t destroy your complete, nearly-functional DeLorean (with Flux Capacitor, of course) in the expectation that Site5 or Apple will be letting you travel through the space-time continuum without the weapons-grade plutonium you have been waiting to show up on eBay. To my knowledge, neither Site5 nor Apple will not physically take you back to a time when the milk in your refrigerator did not smell like old socks and when that mullet you still groom was in style (read: when it was less of a cult-engendering joke than it is now).
What They All Do
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An innovative, easy-to-use, Rails-based versioning system for web hosting customers. With only a few clicks, your entire website can be “Flashed back” to a specific design (seasonal, promotional, etc.) or you can quickly roll back to a dependable version of your site if any of the your design/coding changes don’t work out in a live production environment.
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Apple looks to have taken the OS restoration functionality to a whole new level. The graphics and features of Time Machine in Leopard are indicative of the millions of dollars in R&D they spent copying our idea. 
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Doc Brown would tell you that the DeLorean (with Flux Capacitor) could potentially ruin the time-space continuum, but I think it would be an awesome Sunday driver. Despite the fact that it was a very marginal-looking “sports car,” it definitely has a lot of character, and I’d bet that you would get more glances on Sunset Blvd. if you drove one of those bad boys than if you were one of the 200 Bentley owners picking up your 3 year-old kid at his/her acting lesson with Dustin Diamond… That doesn’t even take into account that you could use it to go back in time and buy BRK.A when it IPO’d.
Site5 and Apple: Kickin’ It Old School
So here’s the deal (slightly embellished in dramatization):
- Site5 saw an industry-wide need to improve site management and content backups.
- Site5 created an innovative website time machine to provide for customers called Flashback.
- Apple saw the idea when Site5 initially tried to launch it (in December 2005).
- Site5 continued to work through bugs in the system to bring Flashback to full functionality.
- Apple realized how genius Site5 was and created a similar feature in their upcoming OS X build.
- Site5 launches Flashback.
- Apple releases OS X Leopard (with Time Machine).
Now I will concede that Apple has had a good idea or two in its time (as I am listening to iTunes on my PowerBook with four other Apple-made products within arm’s reach), but it would be pretty cool if our idea was cool enough for Apple to rip off. There are several solutions to provide similar functionality (previous OS restoration programs and web-based systems like SVN), but they have really been unintuitive or difficult to use for tech newbies (or n00bs for the 1337 kids out there).
Apple, if you are reading this, we’ll hook you up with the Flashback code for your faltering, rather lame .Mac service for a few million… We invested a whole heck of a lot of time, money, and energy in the system, but you can give me a call to discuss how much you are willing to compensate us for the original idea and easily-scalable and changeable web-based functionality. The Google guys went and bought the garage where they started working, so it isn’t totally out of the question.
Site5 and a 1981 DeLorean: Site5’s DeLorean Quest
As a member of the Site5 Management Team, I am at liberty to disclose the fact that we are currently looking to buy a fully-functional time traveling DeLorean. If you run across a semi-functional version or one from another year, we may be able to facilitate some kind of web hosting-for-time machine swap.
P.S. If you are a Back to the Future fan, you should definitely check out the Tom Wilson (Biff) “Question” video on YouTube.
P.P.S. Yes, “gigawatts” is the correct spelling of the “jigawatts” in the “1.21 jigawatts” line Christopher Lloyd yells in the movie.
by Rod Armstrong, October 19th, 2006 | 1 Comment
A brief history in the Design of Web Hosts:
When the great industry that is now Web Hosting was first born out of fire, space dust, and a random sampling of prehistoric garage-based servers (around 1998, I’m guessing), the designs of web hosts were pretty boring. This is because web design as a whole was pretty boring. A great deal of design was created in Microsoft FrontPage, there was a lot of Times New Roman still floating around, there were still very welcoming splash pages and if Flash was used, it was used pretty obnoxiously.
During this era Web Host designs were utilitarian. There were servers, prideful-looking logos (think Heat and Refrigeration Supply company logos, and you have the idea) and maybe some un-ambitious stock photography of people in suits or shaking hands. The designs may have been flat, but they conveyed the information they needed to.
This all began to change around late 2001/early 2002. A few key designs landed on the scene that had the industry in an uproar. The designs were fresh and futuristic. They introduced some staples of what has now become all but the Web Hosting Standard:
- Flash: Flash was used, but not just wasted in some opening Splash page introduction. It was used more to adorn header images and create flashy introductions within a page. Now those servers once sitting next to a hosts’ logo in the background were flashing, glowing, twinkling, jetting through a wormhole, etc. And often times you would use Flash’s sound properties to give everything a nice digital chirp and a techno beat.
- Stock People: This is the year Stock Photo People really got their big chance. The requisite Stock Photo of a handshake or a shadowy data center hallway (or a globe with dollar signs all over it sitting in the Matrix or whatever) was replaced by Stock People with attitude. They were standing on servers, grinning, using laptops (flashy, glowing laptops), and really enjoying their hosting. It introduced a level of personality to hosting designs that just wasn’t there before.
- 3D Shapes: The push was now for 3D elements in designs, especially logos. There was always a 3D cube, cylinder or polygon to be found somewhere. Also, navigation buttons and overall design layouts weren’t complete until every inch was completely rounded and shaded in glorious pseudo-3D.
- Space/Future/Wireframes/Binary Code – With all of the hosting industry seemingly still infatuated with The Matrix, Hackers and The Chemical Brothers, the final touch on the next-gen designs of this time was the liberal inclusion of some kind of random, vaguely techno-ish design element. Headers, backdrops and homepages were now flying through space, lines of binary, fiber optic data, wireframe maps and 3D Cube Farms. Servers didn’t need to look like servers – they were now fully 3D rendered Futureservers made of adamantium and pulsating blue orbs. Everything was now hip, sleek and advanced.
These kinds of designs were a real push forward for Web Hosts. There was finally some imagery that tried to make hosting seem more exciting. Things were more colorful, interesting and attention-grabbing.
And, just for the record, I was never innocent of the crime of following these trends.
The problem then was that this design scheme proved to do very well for one Web Host, so it was adopted by two more. And ten more followed suit after that. And so forth. Some were created by the original masters of the movement and continued to be hallmarks of Digital Chirp Outer Space Design, and many, many more were made by imitators.
Now the problem is that a lot of the web hosting industry still hasn’t moved on from this trend. There are many variations of host design, but a fair amount of the previously mentioned Great Four Hosting Clichés above still make the rounds today. The veritable cottage craft industry that is Hosting Template manufacturers is still firmly planted in these traditions.
While the rest of the Internet has moved on to candy coated icons, bright pastels, large Arial headers and more and more whitespace, web hosting is still stuck in 2002. Now, I’m by no means suggesting that up-and-coming Web Hosts all universally adopt Web 2.0 clichés (like we did. Ahem.), but here would be my advice:
Move to more agile designs. A major issue with the 3D Space Future graphics-intensive layout is that it is very static. It’s extremely hard to change later on if you need to update something. It’s always a good idea to keep your website design flexible, so that it can accommodate future changes.
Be different. There are web hosts out there that started the whole Server-in-Space thing, and they did it well. But it’s done. Get over it. Your servers don’t need to be in Space. In fact, just about any other location in the universe is about as logical as having them in Space (aside from a data center of course, how very uncool.) Don’t copy these pervasive trends just because it worked for someone else. Think creatively and come up with your own unique look and message.
Start moving towards CSS/XHTML/Standards. As a designer who had heavily, and I do mean heavily, relied on image-intensive designs in the past, I am now a passionate Web Standards advocate. You can still say anything you want to say with complex and fancy images within a clean framework of CSS and XHTML, but the advantage is it will be easy to change later on, be compatible with all browsers, etc. The entire web is moving in this direction, so it’s also an easy way to say that you’re at least somewhere near the edge of Internet curve.
Web Hosting can be a lot of things besides Hip, Cool and Futuristic. I think a big part of this design push was how successful it was in making Web Hosting, something that is intangible and lame, seem, well, somewhat more tangible and cool. (Just imagine if your website was being stored on a futuristic fileserver in space!) But in this day and age, you don’t have to sell the service as something sexy and hip, you can sell your company that way. Though customers might not be able to visualize what hosting looks like, they don’t really need to. They need to get an impression of how you run your business. Use your website and your imagery to show the personality of the company, not the servers.
Unless of course, you actually do store your websites on polished-white, full-gloss, die-cut, cybernetic-Data-Cargo-Containers from the year 2050.
In that case, I want to host with you.
by Kevin Hazard, October 17th, 2006 | No Comments
About a year (and a few hundred thousand dollars) ago, we came up with the idea of creating a reliable, functional, and customer-friendly auto-versioning software application that we would give to all of Site5’s shared hosting customers to use in their sites’ content management. We had everything fired up and ready to roll in December 2005, but we ran into a bit of a problem as we began to roll the software out to all of our servers: the SVN guts of the system did not work the way we needed them to work. David Felstead, one of Site5’s Senior Software Engineers described the bottleneck in his blog about the insufficiency of SVN, and even after replacing SVN with some wicked pure-Ruby algorithms, it seemed like every time we were ready to release the software, something else would go wrong (yeah, that’s a shout out to Finagle’s Law of Dynamic Negatives).
Flashback was always going to be ready “sometime next week,” and it was often pushed to the side as the Engineering team successfully released Synco (Site5’s infrastructure and internal management portal), Backstage (Site5’s home-grown, redesigned customer portal), Squire (in-house server monitoring and reporting system), and several operations-related projects to ensure quality service and support for all Site5 customers.
Over the past few weeks, Site5’s CTO, Adam Greenfield, was able to work with David and Scott Deming to iron out the last wrinkles in the Flashback system to ensure that it lives up to the initial vision we had for Flashback:
“Flashback is essentially a website time machine. We see this development as a new user’s dream come true: Changes you make to your site are saved and indexed on a backup server, and you can revert to any change in the life of your website at any time through a quick, intuitive interface. This technology creates an immediate backup of your site, so if you make a mistake or like your old design/content better, you can quickly “flash back” to your old version with the click of a button. This development is an example of an industry oversight; it is clearly a valuable tool, but the industry operates under the mentality of “good enough.” The “good enough” approach to accomplishing this goal is to maintain nightly backups of sites and encouraging users to backup old files before changing them so they can be uploaded to revert to them. On top of the labor-intensiveness of the “good enough” approach, you run the risk of not restoring small changes that could play a large role in your site, so the Flashback system seems like one of those “should have been done a long time ago” developments which will provide security and peace of mind for newbie web developers.”
Obviously, Apple agrees with us about this kind of system’s value (*cough* Time Machine *cough*), but that’s a story for the next installment. To get a more in-depth look at Flashback, check out www.whatisflashback.com.
And yes… Flashback is out… seriously this time…
by Matt Lightner, October 14th, 2006 | No Comments
I love YouTube. Late at night, after a day of hard work, I often find myself browsing through a dozen or more videos before finally heading off to bed (YouTube videos, that is). But as a loyal visitor, I can’t help but feel that YouTube is losing more and more money with each video I watch. I’m not paying for anything, so how can they afford all that bandwidth?
Like almost all Internet sites, they run advertisements. But since their service is based entirely on streaming videos free of charge, it seems like it would be hard to make up for that cost. I, personally, have never clicked on an ad there, so I’m almost certainly a drain on their resources. I actually had to load up a YouTube video page just to verify that, yes, they have ads on them. Am I really the exception here?
Then I got to thinking about all of the other large, social networking sites that experience explosive growth. It seems that for most of these sites, making money is a total afterthought. People simply start up a site because they have a cool idea, and make the assumption that if it becomes “successful,” money will follow. The problem is that turning massive amounts of untargeted traffic into money is not as easy as it sounds.
Unless you’re Google.
The Google AdWords program has become a booming market that connects publishers to advertisers with impressive accuracy, especially when you consider that it’s almost completely automated. It’s like an online dating service for advertisers, except there are thousands of really smart engineers continuously perfecting the criteria used to find matches. Wherever you are, chances are Google’s advanced algorithms have already determined the text links that are most likely to pique your interest. This unique content-based targeting gives Google placements a significant advantage over traditional media advertisements. Because Google’s text ads are specific, relevant, consistent and unobtrusive, visitors are less likely to be on “ad defense” and are more likely to click (and ultimately buy).
The magic of Google is that they don’t need to do anything special to generate more profit other than serve more ads. Their system determines which ads best fit a page without any real human intervention. Sure, they need to screen text ads to make sure their advertisers aren’t making untrue claims, but that cost is inconsequential when you consider that some of the more popular keywords (”web hosting” for example) sell for almost $40 per click. These ads probably require less than a minute to review. That’s a pretty good business model if you ask me.
So it seems like buying high traffic websites is Google’s winning strategy. Fortunately for them, they’re already well aware of this fact–as is evidenced by YouTube’s jaw-dropping price tag of $1.65 billion. Rather than splitting the advertising revenue that YouTube generates, why not just buy the site and keep all the money? And when you account for the fact that Google already has one of (if not *the*) largest content delivery network on the Internet, you have to figure that they’re getting some cool deals on bandwidth pricing (and by “cool” I mean “totally sweet“). Now I may have forgotten some of the material, but while getting my expensive finance degree, I think I remember one of the professors saying something along the lines of “as long as it brings in more money than it cost, it’s a good investment.” (I also learned some other things in college, but applying them to business problems would almost certainly result in the wrong decision, unless the answer really is “more beer.”)
Websites with visitors that can be segmented, such as Digg and Craigslist, also seem to be great matches (although eBay already has 25% of Craigslist). Other popular sites like Friendster and Facebook (MySpace, of course, but they were recently purchased) and pretty much any other website that generates a lot of traffic could be potential candidates for “Googilation” (a term which is a combination of “Google” and “assimilation” and has no x-rated connotations, to the best of my knowledge). As for whether or not these sites match Google’s brand and master plan, I guess we’ll just have to wait and find out.
In the meantime, I’ll continue my late night YouTube constitutionals. If videos like this don’t make you more “happy and relaxed” before bed, I don’t know what will.
by Kevin Hazard, October 3rd, 2006 | 1 Comment
If you opened this blog page (or whatever RSS feed-driven medium you use to quench your never-ending thirst for Site5 tomfoolery) in search of the reasons you should order web hosting from Site5, you should probably head to a content-rich page like our Specials page or our newly redesigned Why Us? page… It’s not that you aren’t welcome to read the post… Those are better equipped to actually tell you the best reasons to choose Site5. Go check those pages out and sign up… I’ll wait.
***Time is elapsing as I am waiting patiently.***
Welcome back! Thanks for signing up with Site5! For those of you who already knew how awesome Site5 was without checking those links, I am very sorry to make you wait however long it took those new Site5 customers to sign up, but now we’re back on track with the understanding that the rest of the post will be 83.29% egregiously farcical.
Without further ado and with apologies to the Late Show’s Top Ten Lists (only the funny ones, we don’t apologize for the ones that aren’t funny), here are the top ten reasons to choose Site5.
#10:
No other web host (that we know of) uses the words “egregiously farcical,” “antidisestablishmentarianism,” and “heretofore” as content on their corporate website. (You see “egregiously farcical” in this post… If you have the inclination, go find the other two on our site… It’s like a treasure hunt!)
#9:
We send all of our servers to a secret, underground training facility where each of them learns how to beat up pesky server afflictions like spam and door to door vacuum cleaner salesmen.
#8:
If you forget the number “5″ after “Site5″ in your web host’s name, you would only guess a wrong number 4 times before getting the right number (assuming that you started with 1 and counted sequentially upward). Imagine if you chose to host your site with “Site4293″: It would take 4289 more wrong guesses to stumble across your host’s page. Clearly, Site5 is a better choice than Site4293.
#7:
All the “cool kids” choose Site5. If you want to be one of the “cool kids”, you should choose Site5… If all of the cool kids chose to get a million dollars for free, wouldn’t you want a million dollars for free too? I think I have proven my point.
#6:
As it turns out, all of the rebels who don’t want to be “cool kids” also choose Site5, so if you are anti-”cool kids,” Site5 is the host for you! We revel in the idea of scoffing at the “cool kid” majority of fad-imprisoned lemmings… FIGHT THE POWER! KEEP HOPE ALIVE! I DON’T KNOW WHAT WE’RE YELLING ABOUT! LOUD NOISES!
#5:
You can place bets with the other members of the Site5 community about how many times we will redesign the Site5 website in the next calendar year. The current over/under is 23. I’m betting on the over…
#4:
You can look back with nostalgia on the past as you peruse weblog posts about Office Space, Vanilla Ice, Where’s Waldo, Oregon Trail, and more… Theoretically, you could do that without actually choosing Site5 as your web host, but in the interest of shameless self-promotion, we will operate as though that is not the case.
#3:
The Site5 team is comprised of web hosting veterans with a broad spectrum of non-web hosting expertise: we have two world-renowned fooseball players, one professional basket weaver (specializing in the underwater variety), the world record holder in solving a 1×1x1 Rubik’s cube (blindfolded), and a four-person team of Olympic hopefuls in the 100m Office Chair Relay. We could go on with more of our credentials, but we don’t like to brag.
#2:
We do not impose a dress code on our customers. We shake our heads at any web host that tries to enforce a dress code on their customers. Note: If the web host insists that its customers must wear vintage 1980’s Adidas sweat suits, we do not shake our heads at them… We will never dissuade the prospect of wide-spread adoption and acceptance of that classic style.
And the #1 reason to choose Site5:
Your site will be happy here. We know because we speak Websitian, the language of websites. We go to websites hosted by other web hosts and hear them crying… Don’t make your website cry, choose Site5!
***Waiting for the roars of laughter and applause to subside***
Thank you, thank you… You’re too kind. If you made it through the above reasons for hosting with Site5 and you haven’t placed your order, I would argue that you are inhuman. Don’t worry… Even if you are inhuman, we can probably set you up with a plan.
Don’t Click Here… Who says reverse psychology doesn’t work?
