What does this all MEAN?

Site5 is bringing something new for Summer 2008. It’s time to up our hosting game once again.

While I could continue (for the sake of blogging) to be vague and aloof and cryptic about what it could be (hosting 3.0? green hosting? cloud hosting? Site5 gridocitygridflow gridboxes? other innovative and trademarked-pending buzzwords?) I will simply cut to the chase.

We will be unveiling a relaunch of our entire brand with a completely new site, a fresh look, new services and more. Okay, we’re pretty well known for launching a “new” Site5 every few weeks or so, but this time we’re serious. It’s a new new. Teaser images don’t lie. We’re hard at work and can’t wait to show it off.

We will be keeping pretty much everything top secret until the big unveiling. In the meantime, however, I will be using this blogging medium to tease, draw out suspense and build hype as the countdown draws near.

Beware.

So when you think of Mother’s Day and all its festive trappings, admittedly Web Hosting probably doesn’t immediately come to mind. Luckily, I’m here to defend a web hosting package as a perfect (or at least highly reasonable) gift for mom by presenting my first ever list of Things Web Hosting Makes a Better Mother’s Day Present Than:

1. Gift Cards to Chain Restaurants

While Applebee’s, Bennigan’s, Olive Garden and all their glorious ilk provide a delicious dining experience, the scrumptious and entertaining dreams they provide are, sadly, all too fleeting. On the other hand, web hosting is both delicious and long-lasting.

2. Pocket Digital Photo Albums

Why carry around thousands of digital photos in a 1 inch x 1 inch key-dangler when you can just upload them to your own awesome web space?

3. A Cool New Cell Phone

Cell Phone companies seem bent these days on convincing the general public that a new cell phone is the perfect gift for Christmas, Easter, Graduation, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day and other obscure holidays cell phone companies will probably soon invent. When, in fact, it is a horrible gift for almost any occasion. Mother’s Day is no exception and they have ads featuring candy-coated cell phones dropping from flowers and are repainting old phones weird colors all to get your hard-earned M-day money. Don’t fall for these corporate tricks. Just sneak her phone away long enough to spray paint it hot magenta and opt for the much cooler gift of a year of web hosting: it’s a double whammy of appreciation! Not to mention you’ll be showing Big Cell Phone what’s what.

4. Homemade Coupons

(Unless they’re homemade coupons for web hosting.)

5. Thunderheart on DVD

Not until there’s a 3-DVD collector’s edition, at least.

6. Flowers

Ah, yes. While technically the perfect Mother’s Day gift, flowers are just so cliche. Why not go with a more timely and impressive gift - one that shows your caring Mom just how in touch you are with modern technology and the magic of The Internet?

7. Grand Theft Auto IV

Just kidding. This one’s a tie!

8. Richard Simmons’ “The Complete Collection of Sweatin’ to the Oldies” Volumes 1-4

I got my Mom the sequel volume of this Richard Simmons fitness masterpiece as a Mom-Day Gift when I was 5, back in the Sweatin’ craze of the late 80’s (on VHS… before DVD’s even EXISTED.) Although I’m sure I meant well, my 5-year-old self really missed the mark on this one. SttO, while providing an awesome core workout, is really just a terrible gift and probably potentially offensive in subtext on multiple levels. Grab this gem for yourself, but leave Mom out of it.

9. Stuff That Says World’s Greatest Mom on It

This stuff is currently only cool if worn or displayed ironically. Hip youngster wearing World’s Greatest Mom vintage t-shirt? Hilarious! Mom? Sadly not with the times.

I could keep going, because web hosting is pretty much better than everything. But in all seriousness, we wish the best to all the mothers, wives, grandmothers out there and their families. Enjoy your holiday (and probably a new copy of GTAIV.)

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.

Note the teaser image and beware!

Site5 is need of a CSS/XHTML/interface ninjas. We are currently looking for individuals and firms specializing in CSS/XHTML and front-side interfaces/websites to join in future efforts for the next iterations of Site5’s various interfaces and web properties. If you consider yourself a css, xhtml, progressive web design and web standard enthusiast please contact us and provide a link to your web portfolio.

Site5 has always been recognized in the hosting industry for having a pleasant user experience and we are looking to make a much-needed leap into the future. We have several interesting projects coming up in the future and are looking forward to hearing from enthusiastic and talented people.

Positions would be contractual and time-sensitive depending on the project and not a full time position. We are really looking for individuals, firms, teams - even recommendations if you happen to have them.

If interested, please contact us at: ninjas AT site5.com.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

We couldn’t agree more!

Site5 Marketing Guru and Sales Team member Taylor Hawes was recently browsing website templates to get some ideas for the next major revision of our homepage when he came across an auction for a hosting template. It wasn’t the template that caught his eye. See if you can catch it:

Do you see it?

The plan specs, the reseller specs and text, the affiliate text.. straight from our homepage!

We don’t mind; it’s great to see the influence we have out there.

Payout Levels

• For your initial account referrals, you will receive $85.00 each.
• If you refer 20 or more accounts in a month, you will receive $100.00 for every referral (including your first 20).
• Your minimum payout amount is $85.00.

So let’s do a little deep-thinking for a bit..

With just one affiliate commission, you could do any of the following:

• Donate to the March of Dimes, American Cancer Society, Susan G. Komen, or Make a Wish Foundation.
• Purchase $85 worth of toys for the US Marine Corps Toys For Tots campaign.
• Buy a full tank or two of gas (depending on your locale).
• Be 21.3% closer to buying an iPhone.
• Buy that allusive artwork you’ve been wanting for your home art gallery.
• Have $85 to put towards those pesky holiday bills many of us receive in January.
• Purchase a vBulletin leased license good for one year.

What are you waiting for? Add the updated banners located within Backstage to your sites today and start making some cash! If you’re not already an affiliate, c’mon and get with the program!

Vince was promoted to the position this week and will now be overseeing a great portion of our day-to-day technical and service operations fleet-wide. This basically means he will be staying up all hours of the day and night to make sure our servers stay online and running smoothly. As you could imagine, this will be quite a task - but Vince is very excited to take it on and we can’t be more excited about having him in the position. In addition to having one of the cooler-sounding names on the team, Vince is our most senior employee, having been with the company almost as long as the founders (myself and Mr. Matt Lightner.) He was previously serving as our most senior Level 3 Administrator.

Besides maintaining obsessive levels of fleet upkeep, Vince is enthusiastic about continuing to help keep our service platform on the cutting edge by taking the lead on some updates to our control panel back-end, server configurations and feature upgrades, among other things - so make sure to look for some big improvements in the future.

On behalf of the founders, we congratulate and welcome him to the new position. If you have any suggestions, wanted to congratulate him or just wanted to say hello, feel free to drop him a line at vstratful (at) site5 dot com.

What, specifically, does the world-renowned and highly-respected Site5 Senior Systems Engineer do? It’s hard to nail down specifically, because all SSEs wear many hats. All of the hats, however, involve 31337 technology stuff. Here are examples of things a Senior Systems Engineer might find themselves doing:

• Recompiling kernels
• Building RPMs and deploying them across our fleet
• Tracking down and fixing bugs in our control panel software (only kidding, our software doesn’t have bugs… it just develops “unexpected features”)
• Providing support to our Systems Administration and Customer Service teams by handling issues needing higher-level attention
• Locating and fixing performance bottlenecks
• Automating various tasks and ensuring consistency across all servers in the fleet
• Planning and implementing system and network infrastructure upgrades
• Designing and evaluating new hardware configurations

That’s all a bit ambiguous, but the point is that you will no doubt be called on to handle any manner of high-level technical task. While you may not know the answer off the top of your head, you should have a strong enough systems administration and development background that you can figure it out relatively quickly.

Not sure if you’re the right candidate for the job? We’ve put together a list that might help you figure it out. Without further ado, you might be a Site5 Senior Systems Engineer if…

• You find yourself writing scripts to automate any tasks you have to repeat more than once.
• You routinely find yourself short on monitor space because you have a dozen or so terminals open at any given time.
• You have ever told someone that your first language isn’t English, but rather Bash, Perl, Ruby or some other language adored by sysadmins.
• You have found yourself wanting to pipe real-world conversations through grep to extract relevant content.
• You’ve been using vi since before you were potty-trained.

A Senior Systems Engineer is half super systems administrator and half developer. The job involves not only maintaining but improving upon our hosting platform, so a solid programming background is a must. You needn’t be a computer scientist or professional software developer, however you should be very comfortable using a higher-level language (preferably Ruby, but Perl is also acceptable) in a *systems administration* capacity (no, writing a website in PHP doesn’t count).

Ready to apply? Excellent. To get started, make an HTTP POST request to http://sseapp.site5.com/how-to-apply.cgi with your name as the “name” parameter and your email address in the “email” parameter. Further instructions await you there…

David Felstead, our Chief Software Architect, ran through the challenge in well under 10 minutes (which included helping me find a couple bugs in the system). How does your time compare? If you’re anywhere close, congratulate yourself–he’s one of the best developers around!

Want to skip the test? Completing the above challenge will let us know that you’re serious about this position. It should only take 10-20 minutes for the right kind of applicant, and it will give us some level of assurance that you’re up to the challenge that a Senior Systems Engineer will face. That being said, if you get stuck or simply don’t have time to complete the challenge, we still invite you to apply by sending your resume and cover letter to tests-are-not-my-bag@site5.com. Be sure to explain why you didn’t complete the test!

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.

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.