Site5 Year In Review 2k6
Posted by Kevin Hazard, December 20th, 2006
It is already the middle of December. As this time of year approaches, you can be sure of a few things: you can expect to go through a few tanks of gas looking for a parking spot at the mall, you can expect to see 24+ hour marathons of It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story, and Miracle on 34th Street, and you will be seeing several “Best of 2006″ and “2006 Year-in-Review” articles cropping up around the internets. In order to truly bring 2006 to a close, we wanted to give you a glimpse of what Site5 has done this calendar year. This list is not exhaustive, but it will be exhausting for me to drag together, so please excuse any tangents that I use to keep myself entertained.
Speaking of tangents, according to a Bonus Features clip on the Family Guy Vol. 4 DVD, the Family Guy writers work hard to find good tangents or “cut-aways” where characters say something to the effect of “This is worse than that time when…” to interject some kind of archaic or esoteric reference.
Speaking of esoteric references… wait… how about I just get to the Site5 Year In Review…
January
The University of Texas won the Rose Bowl and BCS National Championship. This event had nothing to do with Site5, but a lot of my family went to University of Texas at Austin, so it is worth mentioning. Synco was released, replacing BillAdmin — the billing program Matt pieced together in 1999 when Site5 came on the scene.
February
The Site5 Engineering Team was hard at work squashing the bugs we were finding in Synco, and Backstage was being released. In February, Site5 sponsored a PhillyOnRails meeting, and Adam made a cameo at the meeting with some Site5 swag.
March
The name of the game in March was Oregon Trail. That masterfully crafted work of blog genius served as a formal introduction to the initial features of the Backstage control panel.
March also saw the “disposal” of one of our old, dead servers.
April
April saw the arrival and departure of Site5 2.0 site. We never really stick with site designs for too long, but the Web 2.0-feel of the redesigned site was abandoned with special quickness when we saw how ineffective it was at actually providing relevant information in an easy-to-understand manner. For a trip down memory lane, check out the Baby Blue version of the site that preceded the whitespace version. I wish I had a screenshot of the whitespace version… as I recall, it was very 2.0 trendy.
May
We had several operations-based improvements in May. Among them, we were splitting servers to ensure the best quality hosting environment, and we spiced up our plans to stay hip with the times. From a blog-author’s point of view, May was a month for the record books. Some of my favorite highlights from May’s blog posts include: “We’re makin’ moves like we’re wearing parachute pants and sequin-encrusted jackets,” “I bet you didn’t hear a thing… We came; we sidled; we made a few changes; and we vanished like carbs from the Atkins diet,” and “Sadly, it would appear that many other people in the Blogosphere have proven that I am about as original as the guy who just ran up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art humming the Rocky theme song.”
June
June was a slow month on the Site5 blog circuit. We only had one post, and no one was able to identify the mystery picture for me. 
The engineering team began rolling out Squire to all of our servers. This new system dynamically linked all of our servers for monitoring and automated service purposes. We continue to add functionality to Squire in order to provide the ultimate hosting experience.
July
We moved our support system from an aging Cerberus software package to a cleaner, easier-to-use Kayako installation. The transition period was quite a pain, but we are extremely pleased with how well Kayako meets our needs. On the blog front, we published a 3-part series on Web Hosting Basics, from a definition of web hosting to a “How to find the right host” article.
August
To conclude the Web Hosting Basics series, we posted an in-depth guide to creating an account with Site5. If you click through to that link, you can see a few screenshots of yet another Site5 corporate site design.
September
September saw the return of MultiSite hosting after a brief hiatus. According to the good ol’ blog archive links, we did not publish any blogs during the month of September, but it was merely the calm before the storm of traffic from October.
October
If you haven’t read the Top Ten List for choosing Site5, you are missing out. You should go and read it right now… Twice… Actually, you should probably memorize it so you can quote it at parties. I have recited it from memories at parties, and after everyone’s laughter subsided and the “you are the biggest nerd I know” jeers stopped, I’m sure everyone really appreciated the awesomeness and hilarity of that post. The biggest word of the month: FLASHBACK! We got worldwide attention as we completed Flashback and compared it to a DeLorean and one of Apple’s OS features. In other news, Google acquiring YouTube for a whole heck of a lot of money.
November
Election Day, Black Friday, Mystery Boxes, and Bugaloo Shrimp made appearances at Site5 in November. Our $5 plan got Dugg, and subsequently turned into a Web Host’s Nightmare.
December
More of the same ballyhoo. We’ve already celebrated Festivus with the Site5 community, and we might add a bit of flair to the site by the end of the year. Our support times have been incredible, and our ticket queue load has been extremely low… This means people don’t need our help with their site (which is a good thing) or they are getting quick, quality responses (which is another good thing). Oh… And we have a Holiday Song. Needless to say, we are extremely excited to see what the new year has to bring.
What To Expect in January 2007
We’re taking over the world… Or at least North America… Not by force, not by prowess, but through an epic quest. The details are being worked out right now, but I guarantee that it will be fun. Keep your eyes on the prize (this blog).
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