by Kevin Hazard, December 20th, 2006 | No Comments
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).
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 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 Kevin Hazard, May 25th, 2006 | 4 Comments
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. Yes my friends (by association due to the fact that you read this blog), the little timer on the bottom of your favorite Site5 control panel, hints to you nearly as cryptically as I am hinting to you right now, that we have made some slick updates which you will definitely notice.
You may ask, “What are the changes?” and I may then laugh mysteriously and say something to the effect of, “Wouldn’t you like to know?” before scampering away. If you haven’t had a chance, investigate the happenings in your very own account’s control panel and bask in the glory of the engineering team’s coolness. Don’t be intimidated by the task; there are two major changes that are about as hard to spot as Waldo is in the picture below…
Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?
by Matt Lightner, May 11th, 2006 | 3 Comments
For the past two weeks, Rod and I have been on a crusade to fix broken windows. No, we haven’t become glaziers. According to Rob May, a broken window is a metaphor for something about a business that’s in need of fixing. While these problems may seem trivial, they detract from a company’s overall image and can ultimately lead to larger and more serious problems down the road.
So what broken windows have we been fixing? Oh, anything and everything.
In particular, we’ve spent quite a bit of time tightening up the main Site5.com website. You may have noticed some of these changes:
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Our main index page has been redone and now has more information about our hosting, rather than the company in general. We tried to design a page that would quickly and easily inform visitors about our hosting and what makes it unique. We’d love to hear feedback on the new index!
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Our “about” section, formerly composed of six different sub-pages, has been condensed into a single brief page. Traffic analytics showed that less than 2% of visitors went to the “about” section. I guess fewer people than we thought are interested in hearing us self-glorify.
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The “contact us” page now has its own top level tab. I recently experienced some annoyance when trying to find an online merchant’s contact page, and I’d like to save Site5 customers (current and future) from the same hassle.
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Our neglected 404 error page is now up to date.
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The index pages for both our “web hosting” and “resellers” sections have been completely redesigned to better present what we feel to be the key points about our services.
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The “features” and “technology” pages, both of which were sub-pages of the “web hosting” category, have been merged into a single page. This page was re-styled to be easier on the eyes and content was removed in order to emphasize the most important bullet points about each feature.
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We created a page to talk specifically about Site5’s Ruby on Rails hosting capabilities. With the explosive growth Rails has seen, more and more people are coming to Site5 for Ruby on Rails hosting.
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We corrected several outstanding browser compatibility issues.
In addition to web site updates, we’ve also been making some behind the scenes fixes. Just because it’s not a street-facing window doesn’t mean it’s not important!
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We completely audited all of our email templates–from our welcome email to our billing invoices–for consistency, accuracy and, of course, grammar and spelling. First impressions count!
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Todd has been working with new Level III Systems Administrator Andrew Galloway on setting up several tools that will help us proactively address server performance issues. Further development of these systems will be a priority moving forward, and will eventually get the attention of the entire Engineering Team (cue ominous engineering theme song).
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Vince and Todd found that a new OS kernel provided an enormous performance boost. That kernel has now been deployed to all servers.
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Adam and I added functionality for managing past and current support tickets into Backstage. Many of our customers were sad to see it go when we made the transition from my.Site5 to Backstage.
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Kevin compiled a short survey that will be sent to new customers. The survey is aimed at helping us better understand who our customer base is and what they’re doing with their Site5 hosting account.
Over the coming days, Rod and I will be auditing, updating and expanding our knowledgebase in order to make it a more valuable resource, especially considering that nearly half the traffic to our site winds up there. If you have suggestions for ways we can improve this area of our site, please let us know.
That’s all for now. We’ll try to do a better job of keeping you in the loop henceforth. Much to my dismay, it’s been 12 days since our last blog post here (I guess that’s what happens when Kevin goes on a week-long Caribbean cruise). You have my word that the blog won’t go stale again… even if I have to make inane posts just to keep things fresh.
Cheers!
Matt
