I think we may have outdone ourselves this holiday season.
Sure we have the amazing $5 deal running for shared hosting, and the $20 reseller plan (with rebates) is one of the best in the biz. We have celebrated Festivus with the Site5 community. Our corporate site’s halls are decked for the holidays… but something is missing. I know what we need! Go grab a cup of hot apple cider or egg nog or hot chocolate, cozy up to a fire or your computer monitor, and join us in a holiday carol.
One of my good friends, Jared Milos, took an old holiday classic and “tweaked” it a bit for Site5. While we could offer it via iTunes to make millions of dollars, we really wanted to share the Site5 spirit with the citizens of the internets. Without further ado, we give you the first Site5 Hosting Carol!
A Site5 Hosting Carol
Site5’s hosting all your websites
While you’re out shoveling the snow
We’ll be online, so go replace the lights
That burned out twelve months ago.
Everybody knows it’s crazy in the holidays
We’re just trying to be nice.
You’ll be searching a parking lot maze
As we keep an eye on your site.
You know that hosting can be lame…
So we do everything we can to make it change
Site5’s the best host that you can find
So you can choose us and have peace of mind.
And now we’re offering you this cheesy song
Since we are fun and goofy too.
Other hosts can’t compete as Site5 sends along
Happy Hosting to you! (yeah…)
If you would like to download the song and spread it virally like… a virus… You can get it HERE (Right-Click, Save As…).
Nothing I could possibly say could top the hilarity of that song, so I will just stop right here.
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).
In our Digg nightmare post, I may have volunteered myself to be skewered by the Web Hosting Consortium Concerned With Propagating Misunderstood Buzz Words (or WHCCWPMBW for short). That consortium may not actually exist, but the hosting industry is full of fully qualified, prospective members. As a rapidly-growing web host, Site5 negotiates great deals with our vendors. This allows us to get incredible servers for low prices, and we subsequently pass the extra dough on to our customers (for examples, visit our Specials page). An unfortunate side-effect of offering “Totally Ridiculous” deals in web hosting is the common assumption that your service to these deals will be horrible (both server-wise and support-wise): A “You get what you pay for” mentality. Site5 has been extremely successful simply because we try to provide the most hosting value per dollar in the industry.
I am sure if you opened this post with the expectation of hearing what I have to say about overselling, you are thinking that I will dance around the issue for another few paragraphs, but I just have one more bit of dancing before I get to overselling:
Now that Will The Thrill and Bugaloo Shrimp have primed the pump for me, I can explain the post title’s reference. If you don’t need me to explain where the title came from or what the next four words in the script were, you get twenty-seven bonus points and an automatic friendship with me. For the majority of the people reading this post that find my random movie references annoying and overly-obscure, I will shed light on the quote and add another “must see” movie to the growing list you started if you are an avid Site5 Weblog reader: The quote is from Antitrust:
“The answer is not in the box, it’s in the band.”
Now I am not much of a programmer (though I do find it funny that they scroll HTML in the opening credits of a programming-themed movie), so I am not sure how that programming thought fit into the nurv+ synapse contraption, but it is extremely functional in describing the common overselling misconception.
Overselling, simply, is selling more of some thing than what you have available currently (commonly in web hosting: bandwidth and disk space). I have seen people debate the practice of overselling in several web hosting forums, and often I see posts that say “overselling isn’t a problem… managing the overselling is a problem.” It’s a matter of overselling v. overcrowding/overloading. There are bottlenecks when it comes to a server’s performance, but those bottlenecks aren’t related to the bandwidth available to the box or the amount of disk space on the box.
As some other authoritative blog posts have explained, usage among customers on a single box varies dramatically. Our plan limits are based on historical usage averages and a detailed evaluation of the competitive industry landscape, and the industry has clearly proven disk space and bandwidth to be commodities to be sold in bulk. Joe Not-Overselling’s server will not necessarily perform any better than Jane Oversell-Like-Crazy’s server, and even though you feel all warm and fuzzy inside about having your own dedicated space on an essentially empty server (if our historical numbers are any indication), you are in a shared environment, and shared environments can get a little messy if people are allowed to hog the server’s resources…(As a side-note, this is the first time I have used the verb “to hog” since I was in 3rd grade and we had an ice cream party at the end of the year, and for reference, Jason did hog the Cookies ‘n’ Cream, so he brought it on himself.)
If the answer’s not in the box, then what is the band?
If the bottlenecks are not at the disk space or bandwidth levels, where are they? That’s where we cannot reveal too much information. The Site5 management team was taken to a secluded island in the Pacific to be taught the intricacies of hosting dynamics by Pei Mei’s web hosting cousin, Pei Yu. Needless to say, after carrying buckets of water up ridiculously steep stairs for no real reason whatsoever, we shall not forget what we learned in our training… We have a homegrown automated system that monitors, evaluates, and notifies us of any server activity that may jeopardize the performance of any of our boxes; we hand-pick the best hardware and software technologies to build each of our servers; we provide extensive service quality guarantees to all of our customers. What more can you ask for?
If you are snickering in the back of the class, whispering “No one else on my server” to that rhetorical question, imagine I am giving you the stern “The teacher knows it is you that was talking, but instead of calling you out on it, he/she will just burn a hole through your head with his/her eyes” glare, and I will discuss our prices (and if you weren’t snickering or whispering, you have my permission to give an upward-inflected “oooOOOHHHH” as you would do when someone got busted in elementary school).
Site5’s $5 Hosting Deal is phenomenal. It is unbelievable. It is not, however, “too good to be true.” Our pricing structure is simple:
We know the cost of maintaining an account of each type on our servers.
We don’t spend ridiculous amounts of money on advertising, which translates directly into lower prices without sacrificing any of our product’s greatness.
We price our plans competitively in the industry.
Things get cheaper, and we offer even better deals as time goes on.
Customers like what they see and frequently sign up.
The Bottom Line
Not much rocket science is involved in web hosting. However, in the event that we need to consult a rocket scientist on a hosting question, Matt has a dedicated line to a NASA employee with the necessary connections to get the question answered… assuming he didn’t recently neglect her for 48 hours while on a programming binge.
Site5 has a commitment to providing a quality hosting experience. Site5 gets good deals on good servers. Site5 has empirical proof to back up our current plan limits v. customer volume strategy. Site5 keeps non-hosting-related expenses to a minimum. You, the customer, get an inexpensive plan on a quality server with money-back guarantees to ensure your happiness. You should sign up with Site5.
Star Date: 1312.4: A look at what Flashback can do for you.
I don’t know why I started this post with “Star Date,” but it seems like a good way to express the inner-geek in all of us. Based on my 8-second Google search, I chose (with a 50% confidence level) the first “Star Date” mentioned in the Star Trek series. Ardent Trekkies will probably have me shot and killed if that claim is made incorrectly, so I am open to correction if it is found to be necessary.
Back to the real intent of the post: “What can Flashback do for you?” (What’s that you say about some United Parcel Service tagline? Never heard of it…) Our initial re-announcement about Flashback, a certain cult-classic car, and an upcoming release from what would seem to be a very large fruit company garnered a bit of attention from the tech universe, but a resounding sentiment was echoed back to us:
“That looks like awesome system, but I don’t understand how I could use it.”
Rather than go through miles of paperwork with the folks at the United Artists studio to secure Tom Cruise in what I believe to be a great idea for Mission Impossible 4: Explaining what Flashback Can Do Without Excessive Marketing Hype, a blog post may be a bit quicker and a lot less religiously charged.
Three Simple and Practical Uses Of Flashback
A Life Saver for Website Updates
Whether you are a webmaster-in-training or a seasoned veteran, you know the trials and tribulations inherent in making major changes to your website’s code. Flashback can function as a “Peace of Mind” resource in case your site didn’t quite come together in a production environment as you laid it out in Photoshop (or in a more “What you see is what you theoretically should get” app like Frontpage).
Seasons of Sites
Without going to the Clark W. Griswold school of Seasonal Decoration, you can make subtle changes to your site during seasonal period and easily revert back to the original look later.
You would upload the seasonal images, “overwriting” the current versions and flash back to the originals when you are done with the seasonal images. IMPORTANT NOTE: This functionality does not mean it is okay to have crazy blinking graphics or eye-sore colors at any time of the year.
Track the Changes to Your Site
With Flashback, you will be able to monitor the changes being made to your site and reverse them if necessary. This could be particularly useful if you work on a site with other people and sometimes have the need to undo the damage they have done… Newton’s first law of motions (or website damage) says that an object in motion (or website that gets ruined) will stay in motion (or stay ruined) until it is acted on by an unbalanced force (or webmaster with l33t Flashback skillz). You can’t argue with physics… Unless you are Chuck Norris.
These are only a few of the ways Flashback will make your hosting life easier. Whether you want to have a pink version of your site (which we have had in the past) or you like the idea of being able to return to a stable site if you get a little too ambitious with your site changes, Flashback will be there to help you out.
P.S. The title is only semi-related… This post talks about what Flashback can do for you, but a statement like that is just inherently humorous.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
