Paul Hirsch

Scaling Technology On-The-Fly

Tuesday was an historic day in the U.S., the day President Obama assumed the duties of the Oval Office. Most of us set aside everything and tuned in as Barack Obama was sworn into office, thinking little of our work lives and professional responsibilities. However, a few people spent that time attempting to support an insane surge in Web traffic, and there were casualties!

The New York Times reported on this issue in its article Online Video of Inauguration Sets Records. Many viewers were denied access to Web streams due to systems overload, and the numbers clearly indicate why. During a nine hour period of time, CNN provided more than 21.3 million video streams, at one time supporting 1.3 million concurrent connections. Akamai's not crying any tears for CNN; they fed seven million+ concurrent streams, which they report is a record day. As you can see in the article, there were more than a few problems associated with these traffic levels.

As I read this article, it occurred to me that this same problem is relevant to Web hosting customers of all sizes. The Slash Dot effect is well documented, and is the stuff of nightmares for Webmasters and server admins alike. It's one thing to plunk down a few hundred bucks for more capacity any given day, week or month; no one likes to do it, but most SMBs can weather a traffic storm without too much difficulty. It's another thing entirely to have to plan for and fund an unprecendented traffic surge for a single day. Even with months of planning time and every indication that Web traffic would be this high or higher, networks were still underprepared, which leads me to believe the answer isn't as simple as "throw more money at the problem."

Frankly, I'm at a loss to come up with a better plan for scaling technology on-the-fly in situations such as these. Coming from the Web design world, I would love to hear from some hosting professionals on this matter. How to you prepare for traffic you cannot anticipate, and how do you handle the economics of scaling to these extremes over such short periods of time? Please share your thoughts!

The End of an Era

Hello everyone! After a well deserved break, I'm back and blogging once again. Ok, so it wasn't a break so much as it was a whole heck of a lot of work squeezed between three holidays, but you get the point.

Unfortunately, this post comes in the wake of a tragedy of sorts. It is with great sadness that I pass along a piece of news that will make many a seasoned Web developer weep. Last week, Tom Drapeau, a former principal software engineer and now the director of Propeller Social News for AOL, Announced the end of life for Netscape Navigator in his blog.

(Read his blog post here.)

Think what you will of Netscape Navigator. Lord knows it's had its ups and downs. It's been highly regarded as a vehicle for Web innovation, And more than a few Web designers have cursed its existence over the years too (NS4.x, your memories haunt me to this day). But Netscape is an institution, and its passing comes with much sorrow.

That being said, I know I'm not the only one who has a less-than-favorable opinion of AOL (I have personal reasons), and one could argue AOL's purchase of Netscape eight years ago is really when the browser began to die. Honestly, it's been a long time since I've cared about Netscape and its browser, but that doens't mean it doesn't have a place in my heart. Sure, Netscape has been dead for years, but its name has always lived on as a symbol of the Internet in its infancy through today. Sadly, not through tomorrow.

R.I.P. Netscape. You'll be glad to know your legacy is thriving in Firefox. You will be missed.

There is no place for manners in customer service

That's right - you heard me. If you want a truly effective customer service organization, ideally, you should not base any portion of your hiring or training on the your (potential) employees' manners.

Now, in order to get you to drink my Kool-Aid, you need to understand and agree with my definition of manners. For the purposes of this post, we're going to consider definition 2b of Dictionary.com, which I believe is the most applicable definition to the customer service environment: "ways of behaving with reference to polite standards; social comportment."

(Definition 3 applies pretty well too.)

Some quick background: two days ago, I had the pleasure of missing a connection flight in Atlanta Int. airport in transit from Ft. Lauderdale to home. What ordinarily would have been a 45 minute lay-over turned into a three hour wait. No problem - my wife and I were coming back from a little cruise R&R, and we weren't in a rush to get home for any reason. However, our extended stay in Atlanta meant getting some dinner, a book, a travel pillow for my wife, that sort of stuff. During those three hours, I noticed something very interesting. The people working various stations in the airport had no manners whatsoever! They never smiled. I never once heard a single "thank you" or "your welcome," even in response to such courtesies extended by customers.

At first, this bugged me a bit, but very quickly it dawned on me that the employees I observed had traded in manners/courtesy for honestly. They weren't thankful, and so offering a "thank you" to a customer would be a hollow, insincere sentiment at best. I'm guessing most people would be put off by the lack of manners, but I came to understand it and even respect it.

Here's what I decided: manners are an excuse to pretend you care. An employee in a customer service role can only pretend to care for so long. Once they stop caring, a predictable and costly cycle plays out - dropoff in production, firing, search for new applicants, and new training for your new, "well mannered" employees.

Does that mean you should employ rude people? Of course not. I'm not suggesting the behavior displayed by the airport staff was proper. I'm suggesting they hired the wrong people.

Instead of hiring people who display good manners, look for people who are genuinely gracious, where words of kindness and gestures of pleasantry are not motivated by a need to pretend, but by the innate character of the individuals who extend them. The overt result (at least in the beginning) might look identical - the differences between good manners and genuine caring might be very subtle, but in the long run, you'll cultivate a more positive, more efficient work environment for your employees, with results your customers will notice in a very good way. Customer loyalty goes up, costs associated with maintaining a workforce (large or small) go down. Bottom line - everyone wins!  Manners are an excuse to lie and falsely represent the character of your company.  Genuine caring is simply...genuine.

I'm sorry, are you asking how to tell the difference between manners and caring when interviewing potential customer service representatives? How should I know? C'mon now - I can't solve all of the world's problems for ya :)

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Creative Web SaaSplication

With all the recent discussion surrounding SaaS, I thought this would be a perfect time to highlight a creative use of Web application technology that fits squarely into the SaaS definition without competing with the traditional software licensing model.

Google is great. Why? Because love 'em or hate 'em, they give us something new to talk about almost every day, and that makes a blogger happy! It's latest innovation is a natural extension of a service it has been perfecting for a while now.

Google Maps is coming to a gas (petrol) station near you! Google is licensing (or providing free?) software that allows gas station owners to set up monitors on their pumps, connected to Google Maps, which patrons can use to locate, well, anything the station owner wants them to be able to locate, while they pump their gas.

The genius is in its simplicity, both how natural it was to do this and how well it works for all parties involved:

1. Someone at Google realized gas stations are likely the most common place people ask for directions. That same person realized Google has an application that helps people get directions. Duh!
2. Service stations that offer Google maps are more valuable to customers, most likely drawing a larger customer base.
3. Because the gas station owner can program points of interest into the system, he/she has additional revenue opportunities.
4. Google might charge for the software, or it might use advertisement deployment to profit from the system (I don't know the pricing models for this, if they've even been released yet). If the gas station makes substantially more money as a result of the system, the cost is justified. Is the additional income is less than licensing costs, ad deployment could make the system free, and all additional revenue is strictly profit.

Here's the best part: no other map sites or PC software vendors were harmed during the production of this system. Kudos to Google for putting 1+1 together before anyone else, particularly since they're one of the last mapping companies to go live with a stable service. Mapquest could have done this seven years ago. Maybe they never thought of it? Maybe they thought of it, but didn't think it could work? I guess you don't become a pioneer in an industry unless you...well...pioneer something, eh?

SaaS at its finest, folks!

### ==========[ MORE ABOUT PAUL ]==========PaulHirsch.com . International Web Developers Network . Web Hosting Talk . Equentity Host

Google goes WHAM with the right hand!

Wait for it...........I told you so!

Google has made a major algorithm tweak, and a whole lot of Webmasters are seeing red over it. Page Rank is dropping all over the place, in places people were certain it would stay strong, most notably, directories. Now, in my WHIR blog offering regarding SEO last December, I made a statement about purchasing links and link farms, specifically, it was probably not a good idea, and the results would be uncertain.

Uncertainty is no longer an issue. Directories have taken big PR hits. Blogs (typically those that sell links) have taken a hit as well. Who has come out of this unscathed? Why, those of us who paid attention to the Google endgame - that's who. I've been saying this for the longest time; search engines are most interested in producing results that reflect how the human brain works. They determine relevance through site content. They determine importance through external recognition in the form of links. When you purchase or even just exchange links, you are tainting the part of the algorithm that determines importance. Your site become more important based on how much you spend to make it so.

This is directly in conflict with Google's ranking philosophy. Google doesn't even give a boost to its own advertisers! Why did people think doing SEO in conflict with Google's ranking policies was a good idea?

So, how much was your site affected by the shift? Does your company rely on backlinks from directories, blogs and participatory sites? Did your SEO company sell you on a purchased backlink scheme? I'll bet it worked for a while, and I'll bet that strategy is going fail a little more every day.

For what it's worth, my own Web properties either stayed the same or went up. My personal site was the only when to go down, from PR5 to PR4, but I was getting organic backlinks (people attributing stuff to me within their site content) from a few sources that had sold/exchanged an abnormally large number of links. They went down a few points, which will naturally trickle down to other sites like mine.

If you haven't noticed, I'm not terribly stressed about it. Page rank has much less value than most people give it.

### ==========[ MORE ABOUT PAUL ]==========PaulHirsch.com . International Web Developers Network . Web Hosting Talk . Equentity Host