In some respects it is easy for many small to medium sized firms in this space to compete. It is a mass market. It is big. There are a lot of buyers of your services. Like me you have seen dozens if not hundreds of your competitors. These competitors have great web sites, stats from Level 3 or your favorite co-lo facility. Who does not have 24/7/365 security, standby power, flashing lights and 99.998% uptime or whatever guarantee? You do, your competition does, the reseller and the reseller’s reseller do. The power is in the presentation or as Zig Ziglar would say “You sell the sizzle not the steak”. The Internet in a sense starts off with a level playing field.
The first M – Marketing ---- I often hear that “We are great at SEO, our ranking is high.” Have you seen how many SEO and Social Networking marketers there are on Twitter, Facebook et al? What good is marketing if you can't close the sale? It does not necessarily take the highest page ranking or lowest price to grow your business. The question becomes how effective your sales people are. Unless you are dealing in the commodity end where you only deal with web based sales, where pricing and SEO is a major function, your sales people are paramount.
If you play in non-commodity higher end dedicated, managed servers, cutting edge cloud, SAS services you probably need real sales people. You are attending trade shows, pressing the flesh and making quotes, not taking orders. At Parallels in Miami and at WebHostingDay this week there were a lot of name brand firms and want to be name brands, and a lot of sales people. You need closers.
The second M – Money. Here is the rub. You need money. After all on the surface you start with that level playing field, you can check out Go Daddy’s’ key words, there are a bunch of them. On Google it takes $3.25 to get top page position for domain hosting, $7.75 for shared, $12 for dedicated, $15 for managed. With all that competition, if you have the skills you can build a low million$ business using the SEO and Sizzle method. It’s just hard to get beyond that point without funding and aggressive cash marketing plan and closers
Besides all the cloud frenzy, and I like frenzy, there are tons of opportunity in the high end dedicated and managed sector, or should you call it your cloud? See Ziglar. The problem is the cap-ex. Once you have your sales pipe in place, those great closers in place, you need to configure and have those servers in place. That takes cash, a really high credit card limit or an equipment lease agreement line that does not eat your lunch. I like the second M, I like cash.
The second M, Money is also needed to take that rapid leap, acquisition.
The reason there are Go Daddy’s – Rackspace's are these M&M’s. These are the two M’s that are missing in most organizations. So focus on your first M, Marketing first. For most firms this M is the cheapest to implement. For the other “M” Money I recently picked up a business card from Russia Partners Management, LLC they are one of Parallels backers. If you have M&M's take full advantage of them.
Part II of the M&M’s that focuses on how to strategically prepare your company for sale will be released next week…. it deals with the color spectrum.
Its not magical, its not very sophisticated, and it was easy to do. Essentially, we took the best practices of locking down a Wordpress Blog, and automated them. We found that the majority of our clients (wordpress-related) didn't do even the basics of system lockdown.
We designed it so that it only took a few clicks for the changes (like renaming the admin account, protecting a few directories, etc.) to be executed. We feel its important to give your customers/users not just 'how to' articles - which vary widely in quality, quantity and variety. Its important to give them the tools, with a focus on usability and ease of use.
So we wrote the plugin with these things in mind. Simple, searchable from the plugin area of Wordpress.. It installs slickly, and is fairly 'dummy proof'. We wanted it simple and easy.
Oh, and of course, free. We did this as a service to the community and have had hundreds of downloads in less than 1 week! So we feel we're getting a double whammy with this - some name/branding benefits, and of course, helping to secure some of the more prelevant/simple Wordpress issues.
I’m taking a one post break from legal issues to blog about a discussion I had last night during my dinner at Webhostingday. My dinner companions consisted of three men and one woman. Everyone at the table, with the exception of me, was from the Netherlands. We were talking about networking at hosting events. We all felt that it can be difficult to meet new contacts. One of the Dutch men voiced his opinion that women have an easier time in sales because they have a natural advantage breaking the ice since, at least in the tech world, the industry is so dominated by men.
This set off a lively discussion. My opinion is that while women may have a bit of an advantage breaking the ice, this is actually a net disadvantage since the conversation, at least from the point of view of the other party, is based on the fact that the other person is a woman. So, in essence, it is based on sexual attraction. As a result, I took the position that woman actually must overcome that bias in order to make sales, while men, in a heterosexual world, don’t need to do so.
The Dutch men took the position that because sales is based on forming a relationship, any type of relationship, regardless of whether it is based on attraction at some minor, and initial level, created an advantage. They used the example that more attractive men tend to be more successful in sales, likely for the same reason.
So while the majority of our conversation did, in fact, concern issues like the future of the cloud, this issue got me thinking about the nature of sales, and how connections are made at networking events.
As is typical for Webhostingday, the event was quite spectacular, the food good, and the conversation interesting. While I’ll return to my typical blogging about legal issues, I’m interested to hear what you think of this conversation.
In this video Roland tell us more about BackupAgent the company and thier focus on the SMB market as well as why they decided to attend the event this year. Nick was also able to expand on Parallels Automation and how SMBs can effectively utilize the product or any other in the suite of products offered by Parallels to empower small and medium businesses.
This video is less than 5 minutes long. Please take the time to view the video and provide us with your feedback.
The 37th international ICANN meeting wrapped up last week in Nairboi, Kenya, and some interesting, polarizing decisions were made.
ICANN (short for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is largely responsible for the oversight of many key Internet components, including domain names. Most international meetings, which occur three times a year, result in policy decisions that have a significant impact on the development of the Internet. Last week’s meeting in Kenya was no different.
The issue which received the most attention from mainstream media was the .XXX domain suffix. This adult-oriented extension has been discussed since the early part of the decade, and there has been a great deal of back and forth between ICANN and ICM Registry, the private company which whishes to introduce XXX, on whether ICM cleared all the necessary hurdles to get the extension approved. ICANN feels ICM has not, while ICM believes otherwise. The issue eventually went to an independent review panel earlier this year, and the panel felt ICANN did not follow its own policies and procedures when it refused to proceed with the .XXX extension. As a result, next steps were to be diescussed by ICANN’s board in Nairboi.
There were disparate expectations at the conference about what would happen next; some thought (and ICM was certainly hoping) ICANN would enter into an agreement with ICM and approve .XXX in short order. Others thought ICANN wouldn’t budge, as the panel’s judgement was non-binding. In the end, ICANN’s board deferred a decision in order to solicit further public comment. So, this likely means yet another round of discussions and no definitive action prior to ICANN’s next meeting later this year.
Another set of key decisions were made around the new gTLD process, which could lead to the introduction of hundreds of new domain suffixes. Many of those with ideas for new domain extensions feel the process has been moving at a glacial pace thus far (of course, the counter-argument is that it takes a long time to make sure all interests are considered).
In Nairobi, the board resolved to bypass the proposed “Expressions of Interest” process (which would have seen those interested in applying for a new TLD pony up cash and an application in advance), and instead move to another version of its Draft Applicant Guidebook, which the community hopes will lead to new gTLDs being rolled out later this year.
The board also resolved to keep registrars and registries “vertically separated” during the new gTLD process, pending further review. What this essentially means is that for now, the process will move forward with registrars and registries not allowed to co-mingle on registry ownership structures (some registrars had hoped to not only sell new TLDs, but own some of the registries as well. ICANN now wants these two groups rigidly separated).
Although the meeting was a relatively small one due to travel time and security concerns, a number of important decisions were made that will have a significant impact on the Internet as a whole. With a central location and key decisions expected, ICANN’s next meeting, scheduled for late June in Brussels, promises to be an eventful one.
Twitter has exploded as a social networking tool in the last couple of years. There are a number of influential people in the hosting industry that tweet frequently. I wanted to share my list of people I enjoy following the most.
@MSFT_Hosting – Topical and useful information for the hosting team at Microsoft.
@DrBobParsons – Arguably the best marketer in hosting, he has built close to a billion dollar company based on great marketing and making big bets.
@the451group – Great information for those interested in hosting and datacenters.
@Scobleizer – Scoble’s employment with Rackspace was brilliant, his execution in the social media space is flawless.
@laughingsquid.com – Scott Beale has transcended hosting to become a Twitter phenomena with almost 60,000 followers. While his posts don’t focus on hosting, they have built a great business for him.
@LiquidWeb – These guys do social media right, their 16,000 followers are among the largest in the hosting industry.
@theWHIR - The WHIR is one of the “go to” sources for hosting industry information, following their tweets helps me stay up- to-date with the latest hosting news.
@utollwi – William Toll from Navisite is a prolific tweeter and one of the best product managers in hosing. His tweets are topical, insightful and timely.
TheWHIR team is on the way to Phantasialand theme park near Cologne, Germany as I type. If you are attending Europe's largest Web Hosting conference (record attendance is expected) be sure to stop by our booth #307 for a chance to win a Flip Mino HD Video Camera.
hosting.FAIR exhibitor floor plan:
Keep an eye out on theWHIR.com for ongoing live coverage from WebhostingDay 2010 and the live event Twitter stream. We are more than happy to keep you in the loop on industry developments as it happens.
So it used to be the most difficult question I had to deal with when setting clients up with an email system had to do with how to determine what average email was to get an estimate on how much hardware was needed for which services. Now I get this same question, however with a bit of additional complexity thrown in there with "Which of these systems can I run in a virtual environment?". While this is very difficult to generalize we can begin by looking at the benefits of running systems in the virtual environment.
Abstraction of the hardware from the Operating System -- Basically this means you (or your systems administrator) don't need to worry about hardware drivers and firmware when deploying new hardware. This is especially useful as hardware ages and needs to be phased out.
Routine maintenance of virtual host hardware -- While the abstraction I described above makes swapping hardware out easier, this doesn't mean hardware maintenance doesn't need to happen. One advantage with virtual systems is that you can shift your guest operating systems onto different hardware (if even for a short time) and update the firmware, hardware itself or operating system of the host system in question.
Higher Utilization Rates on less expensive hardware -- Utilization boils down to the amount of your server(s) resources that are being used. With the cost of CPUs, RAM and storage these days, one can set up a system running half a dozen virtual systems for a fraction of the cost. This can make quite a difference, especially when one starts looking at high availability.
Easier planning for future growth -- With virtualization, you can more easily allocate systems for testing upgrades in a Q/A environment as well as taking advantage of the tools available for the hypervisors today to plan when it's time to add new hardware to your environment.
These are just some of the advantages of running your systems in a virtual environment. There are plenty of disadvantages to this as well and a very thorough examination of what you are running needs to happen before moving down this road. Remember that virtualization is supposed to be a solution to a problem. If you don't have a problem, virtualization may not be the right answer. It doesn't make sense to add something as complicated as virtualization into an environment where it's not required.
My intention here wasn't to answer the question in the title, rather to open up the door to asking more questions about going down this road. Very few of the difficult questions system administrators have to deal with can be answered simply.
When I look around both the technology industry as a whole and the hosting industry specifically, I see an interesting phenomenon that's become the "norm".
Many of us got into tech and hosting because we liked technology and wanted to use the latest and greatest hardware and that led to an expertise and we monetized that expertise by building businesses in this space.
However most of us are leaving the vast majority of the money on the table and only working for the worst part of what's available in our industry.
See here's the thing, Technology is a Commodity. Hardware gets cheaper by the week, control panels and automation have made it so non technical people can run hosting companies (that doesn't mean they're doing a great job, but they can "fake it until they make it") and competing on the commodity items in hosting Bandwidth, Memory and DiskSpace is a recipe to drive your profits to the bottom.
Our customers want Solutions not Technology.
The only people who care about the underlying technology are other solutions providers.
Every time I meet someone from another technology company one of the first questions they ask is about how our product is built, what it runs on, etc... But I can't recall a single end user (the actual business person buying or approving our product) ever asking us those questions.
Our Customers want to know HOW WE CAN HELP THEM, end of story. I've never gotten someone upset because we're optimized for Linux over Windows, but I've certainly had customers get upset because we didn't warn them of a bad decision we watched them make without jumping in to offer help.
When we forget why our customers are hiring us (hint: It's to help them), we inevitably end up doing a poor job. We focus on the wrong things, which causes expectations to be mismanaged and customers to be left feeling improperly served and the end result is we fight for scraps by cutting our prices to match the decline in the commodity prices we're essentially offering.
Monetize your expertise and help customers navigate through the problems they face in their business using the technology you provide and your margins will stay high, your customers will stay loyal and your business strong since your advertising will be improved because your reputation will precede you.
In 2008 International Science Grid stated that 4% of the world's CO2production was due to Information & Communications Technology (ICT), that this was about the same amount of GHG (greenhouse gases) produced by the airline industry, and that of that 4% Gartner Group says that 25% came as a result of commercial and private datacenters. In 2008 the world's GHG output was, according to the German renewable energy industry institute IWR, 31.5 x109, or 31.5 billion metric tonnes. So, 1% of the world's total GHG emissions amount to 31.5 x 106 metric tonnes (315,000,000 million) and that amount was the result of just one source, private (corporate/government) and commercial datacenters. That's not the whole story though. ICT is increasing at a logarithmic pace and as it increases so too does the contribution to Global Climate Change (GCC) from datacenters. The more efficient we make our ICT devices and infrastructure, the lower the cost to the consumer and hence the greater the demand for those devices (see Khazzoom-Brookes); the greater the demand for ICT, the more load is put on datacenters, the higher the contribution of the industry to GHG totals.
What all that means is that the looming carbon trading schemes, carbon taxes, cap and trade, and whatever else comes into play to lower GHG, will greatly impact the cost of running a datacenter. That cost will be passed on, either directly or indirectly, to the data center's customers. We will deal with specifics in the next post, but you need to know that when one of the world's richest persons, the person most singly responsible for the explosion of the ICT industry, Bill Gates, expounded at TED 2010 (a gathering of some of the world's most influential thinkers and researchers) on the imminent need for us to get to zero carbon, or when companies such as Exxon Mobile are talking about the need for carbon taxes, then these shifts in the way business is done are coming and they will affect you. Whether that effect will adversely affect you or not will depend on the mitigation process you start now. The single biggest step, with the greatest positive ROI, that you can take, is to commit to a datacenter that itself is committed to green energy and green practices. Identify the leaders in that field and move your ITC infrastructure into their facilities while you can. The demand is growing, the field is small and space is and will continue to be, limited. The question to ask yourself is, "Who will make he move first, you or your competition?"
Parallels has produced a series of very cool videos surrounding their recent Parallels Summit 2010.
This one features Parallels Chairman and CEO Serguei Beloussov in a Hawaiian shirt, hanging with bikers and getting a tattoo on Miami Beach. If you want to see more videos from Parallels visit the YouTube Video channel and Summit Videos channel.
Also look out for more video from WHIR tv from Parallels Summit 2010 in the coming weeks.
Today's video is our second installment in our on-going video feature series about the SoftLayer and Citrix partnership.
WHIR tv's David Hamilton trekked down to Santa Clara California to visit the Citrix offices and chat to a few executives. For the purpose of this video, Hamilton caught up with SoftLayer CTO Nathan Day and Citrix VP of product marketing, Sunil Potti. The threesome begins by discussing NetScaler, security and partners, specifically SoftLayer.Citrix has created a virtual appliance through VPX and virtualized the network. What does this mean? Potti goes into great detail while Day continues to tell us what kinds of advantages this holds for SoftLayer. Check out the video and be sure to stay tuned to WHIR tv for our third installment in the Citrix/Softlayer series on March 24th, 2010.
The first M – Marketing ---- I often hear that “We are great at SEO, our ranking is high.” Have you seen how many SEO and Social Networking marketers there are on Twitter, Facebook et al? What good is marketing if you can't close the sale? It does not necessarily take the highest page ranking or lowest price to grow your business. The question becomes how effective your sales people are. Unless you are dealing in the commodity end where you only deal with web based sales, where pricing and SEO is a major function, your sales people are paramount.
The second M – Money. Here is the rub. You need money. After all on the surface you start with that level playing field, you can check out Go Daddy’s’ key words, there are a bunch of them. On Google it takes $3.25 to get top page position for domain hosting, $7.75 for shared, $12 for dedicated, $15 for managed. With all that competition, if you have the skills you can build a low million$ business using the SEO and Sizzle method. It’s just hard to get beyond that point without funding and aggressive cash marketing plan and closers
ICANN (short for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is largely responsible for the oversight of many key Internet components, including domain names. Most international meetings, which occur three times a year, result in policy decisions that have a significant impact on the development of the Internet. Last week’s meeting in Kenya was no different.
