Brendan Diaz and I were invited to attend a VIP customer session at The Planet’s headquarters in Houston, TX last week. After a jam-packed, fun-filled 24 hours of meetings with top people at The Planet, we are confident that we are in very capable hands.
Once the sessions were complete, we hopped in our account manager’s car and headed up to Dallas to tour the Dallas facilities and view our infrastructure in the datacenter. Believe you me - we were in for the surprise of our lives.
Have you ever seen anything like that? We were simply amazed and beyond impressed! We even got to see our newest server get unboxed. Technology these days is unbelievable.
Oh, wait..
Those aren’t what real datacenters should look like? Really?
Of course not!
The Planet’s facilities in both Houston and Dallas were stunning. Sorry to disappoint, but the above pictures are far from reality.
Real pictures of some of our actual equipment:
Our very first rack of dual dual-core woodcrests.
A picture of the back of one of our racks. Excellent wiring, well organized. Can you see the KVM units on each server?
This is how our new racks are currently being configured. Beautiful, isn’t it?
Each of these storage servers weighs over 100 pounds!
Monster storage servers. Look at all those hard drives!
Lastly, as many of you know two former Site5 employees now work at The Planet. Todd and Kevin send their best to everyone!
Thank you to everyone at The Planet for a great conference. We’re excited to see our partnership with The Planet develop further.
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.
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.
I remember days when libraries had cards with each book typewritten and filed in “card catalogs.” I recall having to spend hours searching for the correct card only to realize that I was looking in the wrong section all along. I believe I even had to walk up to a stranger and ask them (in person, mind you) for help. In fact, I am still working through some of those experiences in therapy… they were quite traumatizing.
Gone are those days. I say “Good riddance to bad rubbish” (even though I can’t recall the last time I used the word “rubbish” in conversation). Libraries now have computer systems to find the books you are trying to find… At least that is what Wikipedia tells me.
Adam told me to make sure and include Antitrust in more posts (like this one), so I will paraphrase another great quote from the Skullbocks team:
“Human knowledge belongs to the world [wide web].” [Bracketed addition mine]
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that libraries are murderous conspirators seeking to silence the uneducated masses… though you shouldn’t develop a false sense of security and immediately turn away the “Librarian Insurance” salesman…
I mean that it is important that we make information as available as possible, using every effective avenue. It may be true that our ticket queue is currently sitting almost empty with 9 tickets, and our sysadmins are fighting for the chance to answer every last one of your questions, but we are still developing informational resources for our current and prospective customers. When we release the initial version of this resource, it probably won’t blow you away, but you will certainly find it helpful.
Want a hint as to what the mystery resource will be? Well… I’m risking my job on this one (due to the Mutual Non-Disclosure Agreement I had to sign), but here goes in hidden ink (highlight with your mouse)…
*
It doesn’t rhyme with iPhone. Your computer might now self destruct if you have a Sony battery.
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 Rod Armstrong, December 7th, 2006 | No Comments
Reputation is important, especially for businesses and services.
Doubly so for Internet-based services (like Web Hosting), where literally thousands of hungry competitors are just a Google search away.
Keeping your reputation stellar is a fairly epic battle that gets exponentially tougher the bigger and more successful you become. Even when your business machine is well-oiled, running smoothly and you are pretty darn good at keeping just about everyone happy all of the time, it’s still very likely that something, somewhere can and will go wrong. And heaven forbid that many things go wrong in many different places.
When some obstacle eventually does come forth: whether your customer satisfaction levels start to drop off, you get a bad write-up in a magazine, or a lovely blogger singles you out as the devil, the most immediate tendency is to fly directly into Full-On State of Emergency mode.
This isn’t a bad thing. After all, years of positive reputation building can go down the drain with just a few negative blemishes. Negative word of mouth spreads ten times faster than positive. (I’m not sure if this is true exactly, but it sounds right.) Immediate response to the issue is critical. However, in this day and age, the first instinct to such a seemingly dire situation is often this: what do I say in response? How do I keep [whatever negative message] from spreading? How do I play damage control? How do I spin, manipulate, counteract, defend, attack, save face, foil, act the fool, et al.?
This indeed seems like a reasonable first instinct because this is often what we see from the big, established players. This is almost always their first response strategy to some type of public problem. Not to mention that we see the same from politicians, governments, media outlets, celebrities.
So it might go without saying at this point, but Internet businesses don’t need to behave like giant corporations or celebrities. Unless you have dedicated PR people at your disposal (and well, even if you do), your first reaction to a possible Reputation Crisis shouldn’t be how you can spin your way out of it. It should be how you can fix it. If the bruise is public, you may even feel hurt and defensive. Keep an open mind towards criticism. When your first instinct is to defend your honor to the death, there may certainly be a valid suggestion hidden under even the most inflammatory and idiotic of critiques.
Save your resources for the problem itself, may that ever-curious Public Eye be damned.
Reflect. Listen to your own clients and employees. Try to find the root cause of the issue, and fix it quickly before it becomes worse. And don’t talk about it. Except with your own customers, that is. They deserve the disclosure about how and why things are improving, and they will probably, hopefully, have your back even more when your reputation is again put to the test. Effectively and healthily dealing with a critical situation can speak volumes more than a little exaggerated bad gossip once everything is said and done.
Brendan Diaz and I were invited to attend a VIP customer session at The Planet’s headquarters in Houston, TX last week. After a jam-packed, fun-filled 24 hours of meetings with top people at The Planet, we are confident that we are in very capable hands.
Have you ever seen anything like that? We were simply amazed and beyond impressed! We even got to see our newest server get unboxed. Technology these days is unbelievable.
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.
