by Kevin Hazard, April 30th, 2007 | 1 Comment
According to my quick calculations, the Site5 weblog has been cranking web hosting entertainment to eleven for 444 days as of this post, and we owe a debt of gratitude to the die-hard audience tuning in to read what we have to say about… well… whatever comes to mind, I guess.
The blog has been coming on like gangbusters: we have seen a steady increase in traffic, alluded to more than a few former pop-culture phenomena, and we have even garnered a bit of worldwide attention in our outlandish and controversial claims to time machine supremacy. If you have been around since we introduced this zany medium, you probably have a favorite post out of the 70ish you have read, but you are equally likely to have been plagued by a mystery as old as time something that began on June 19th, 2006: What is this picture?
There’s no need to fear… you will not need to shell out the thousands of dollars you have spent on forced-amnesia medication, hypnotherapy, and smelling salts following this reminder of that age-old conundrum. I’ve got an answer for you: The work is called “Cigar Bar,” and it was originally an oil on canvas piece of a two-piece collection by Brent Lynch.
Whew! What a relief, huh? I’m sure that the pursuit of the title and artist of that painting has kept you awake at night; you may have been faithfully waiting for Spishak Industries to create a sleep-aid for you, but now you can sleep soundly, knowledgeably, and without any side-effects. If that isn’t an amazing “Thank You” to all of Site5’s blog readers, well then I don’t know what is. 
by Kevin Hazard, April 17th, 2007 | No Comments
Following a bit engineering sneakery and upside-down, underwater development, we’ve got yet another announcement for you… A brand new, smooth and silky, blinged-out affiliate system: Site5 Affiliate Rewards!
This news may not sound like much to those who have not had to endure the trials and tribulations we have seen in integrating a third-party affiliate system with our home-made Synco account manager and Backstage customer portal, but you can believe me when I tell you that this release is p-h-e-n-o-m-e-n-a-l. In addition to its amazing design integration, Rails base, and slick ajaxy goodness, the new system expands our affiliate team to our entire customer base (rather than being an entirely separate entity), adds the ability to quickly and easily transfer affiliate funds to pay for your Site5 hosting account(s), and provides detailed information about the people you refer to join the Site5 community.
What’s the best part about the new system? All Site5 customers already have access to start affiliating (which sounds a bit dirty, I apologize), and all of our affiliates from the previous system can log into the new system with their old username and password to find all of their information (and referrals) smiling back at them along with a (probably more important) brand new tiered affiliate payout scheme:
- If you refer up to 9 new customers in one month, you get $20 per referral.
- If you refer 10-19 new customers in one month, you get $30 per referral.
- If you refer more than 20 new customers in one month, you get $40 per referral!
If you want the run-down, the skinny, or the basics of the affiliate process, pay attention to this paragraph because I will attempt to provide all three at the same time. As a Site5 affiliate, you will get your very own personal referral URL and a selection of Site5 banners (in case you are looking to spice up the graphics on your website). By adding our link and/or banner to your website, you will be sending your friends, acquaintances, readers, and serial-clickers to Site5’s page via your affiliate portal. If that visitor chooses to order a Site5 plan (which they are very likely to do since Site5 has one of the highest conversion rates in the industry) and remains a customer for 60 days (the length of our money-back guarantee), you get at least $20. Boom. What can you do with the money you receive (via PayPal payout, check, or Site5 hosting credit)? If you are lucky, you may be able to buy 6.667 gallons of regular unleaded gas in California. Isn’t that exciting?
What are you doing still reading this well-written, entertaining, informative blog? If you are a Site5 customer, you can jump in and affiliate to your heart’s content. If you are not a Site5 customer, go order a hosting account to join in on the fun!
Note: You may not have known that “affiliate” is an active verb, but it is, and through the use of context clues, you infer that it is fun to do.
If you are not a Site5 customer and are a bit timid with regard to fun-having, you can click the image below to sign up for a stand-alone affiliate account if you want to get your feet wet and make a few extra bucks referring some of your friends to our community… we won’t hate, we’ll appreciate.
by Kevin Hazard, April 3rd, 2007 | 6 Comments
If your interest was piqued by the “big news” I was hinting at in our community forums, you can scoot back off of the edge of your seat and release the breath you have been holding for the last month. Let the April Fools’ speculation begin…
Over the past few years, Site5’s customer base has grown exponentially, and we have focused on scaling our business to accommodate our new customers while maintaining our reputation for quality service and stellar support. We would have never been successful without the incredible business relationships we established with Net Access Corporation and LiquidWeb (our two current data center providers), and we owe a great deal of gratitude to them for the work they have done with/for us. In both cases, the data centers have grown a great deal with us, and they have endured their own growing pains in the process (which, in a few cases, translated into “Site5 growing pains”), so we directly relate to their experience in wanting to provide the highest quality service through the course of their growth.
Recently, Site5’s management team has been evaluating the prospect of moving/consolidating all of our servers into a single location/data center and concurrently upgrading every server in our fleet to the newest, most reliable, and fastest hardware available (as a “Thank you” to all of our amazing customers). Clearly, a move of this magnitude cannot be taken lightly, so we researched whether or not our current hosting infrastructure with NAC and LW would provide the highest quality of service for our customers (which would then be an indicator of how it affects the company as a whole), and we feel we were able to summarize our findings in a “Declaration” of sorts:
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another…
I know you are captivated by my writing skills, but I have yet to pen anything worthy of bulletproof glass protection, so that wasn’t exactly what we came up with at the end of our research. However, we did essentially declare ourselves independent of our current hosting infrastructure; we were completely open to all options.
I will save you the details of the amount of work we put into finding the right fit for our business and cut to the chase: Site5 has established a long-term business relationship with The Planet! We’re boxing up our servers, tossing them in the back of a ‘67 station wagon, and we’re movin’ on up to the Southwest side.
Because we couldn’t locate a ‘67 station wagon that could house a few hundred servers for the trip, we will probably have to move each of our servers over a vast computer network linking smaller computer networks worldwide… Luckily, as a web host, Site5 is familiar with such a network.
Following several meetings in Texas with The Planet’s new (and amazingly helpful) management team and a few intensive tests on their hardware, we inked our intention to move our entire customer base to The Planet within the year. In their enterprise-grade data center, Site5’s customers will be hosted on brand new servers running a RAID 1+0 hard drive configuration (even better than RAID 5!) with two dual-core Intel Xeon 5350 processors and 4 GB of RAM. We are in the process of establishing a time line for the move, but a bulk of the move will be done in a six-month span (which will begin in about a month). The Site5 engineering gurus will be using this interim month to develop and test several automation scripts for the recursive actions performed in moving each server so we are not rushing customers onto the new servers all willy-nilly.
While we would like to just CTRL+C -> CTRL+V everything from our current servers to the new servers, there are a few server-related issues in making the move (IP changes, scheduled downtimes when the switch is flipped on each server, etc.). Stay tuned to our community forums for updated information on how/when your server will be affected by the move.
by Kevin Hazard, April 1st, 2007 | No Comments
There are 364 days in a non-leap year when a company can announce a huge development or release, and everyone will take that announcement seriously. Then there is April 1st — April Fool’s Day. On the first day of April, nearly every company on the planet joins in on the hoax-tastic fun of making up zany, clever, and relatively unpredictable news to publish. The day fosters an interesting dynamic: a company or person can fabricate an elaborate fable, pass it off as truth, and everyone applauds their creativity and humor. “Did you hear that Google just bought the entire internet for two hundred and twenty-three trillion dollars?” … “Did you see that Steinbrenner just sold the Yankees to buy the Red Sox?” … “Can you believe that the CHP announced that all speed limit signs in California have been raised to 99 miles per hour?”
While I would agree that the speed limit on I-5 between Sacramento and Grapevine should be around that speed, though I have never gone over 65 mph at any point in that particular stretch of open highway(*wink*), those announcements would be good-natured ribbings to catch you off-guard in the event that you did not mentally prepare to endure the day after March 31st.
We have some big news to announce, but we found ourselves hamstrung by the calendar. We could have posted all of the details today, and we would likely only get a passing “wow, Site5 went through some trouble to create that substantial of an April Fool’s joke” thought as readers surf the lists of April 1st debauchery on their new Google home wireless broadband connection.
The more outside-of-the-box, critical-thinkers in the audience are probably puzzling over the fact that we would even address this practice on April 1st… considering whether or not we are setting up a delayed April Fool’s joke or fooling you about even making an announcement in the next 72 hours. To those readers, I say that we would probably be very good friends. I was considering an exhaustive article filled with circular logic to confound our intent even further, but my moderately crafty attempt would be both exhausting to transcribe and utterly difficult to actually complete, so I will save us all some trouble and cut the self-questioning at that.
But wait. Why did Kevin question himself on the Site5 blog on April 1st? Was it to make us trust that he was not intending on tricking us? … Oh. Right. Sorry. I couldn’t help myself. Or could I?
Keep an eye out for our big announcement in the next 72 hours, and try and deduce its veracity.
