Yes, that was a terrible pun in the title. My apologies. After a certain amount of working on the title of one's blog post, one begins to suspect that one is wasting one's time, if you see what I mean.

Anyhow, I suspect that as the editor of a technology position, I'm in more of a position than most to witness the wealth of communication that precedes "Cyber Monday," but I'm not quite certain how widely observed the occasion is.

I understand that "Black Friday" is an event. It's in the calendar. Perhaps not literally, but it's a widely accepted cultural and media (and shopping) event. The ceremonial kick-off to the "holiday shopping season." Not always the classiest of occasions, as I'm sure you've heard.

Cyber Monday, we're told, is the day when we all search for online bargains at the office instead of working. There seems to be some debate as to the truth of that. I'm not exactly "skeptical," but let's call me "curious."

The Washington Post's Rob Pegoraro acknowledges the skeptics in this "Cyber Monday" post. And the comment section seems to have attracted more spammers interested in the event than shoppers.

My suspicion is that Cyber Monday is more of a semi-realized marketing idea than the full-blown cultural event Black Friday. But online retailers can try, and shoppers seem to respond.

From a hosting standpoint, the question (asked in a thousand emailed story pitches) is "how equipped are online retailers to weather the spike in online shopping that will accompany the holiday season?"

Application performance monitoring company Gomez sent out a press release today saying it had monitored the performance of some of the top online retailers during the period from 6 a.m. to 12 p.m. Easthen time on Cyber Monday, and pointed out that some of them experienced downtime.

According to the release "Gomez measures the duration (response time) and success rate (availability) of a typical online shopping experience, from home page to product search to shopping cart and checkout."

The company reported trouble with the sites of three retailers: Victoria's Secret, Williams Sonoma and Dell.

- Victoria's Secret home page is running well but shoppers trying to place items in the shopping cart receive a site unavailable page and are unable to proceed. The issue started at 10am ET and is still continuing.

- Williams-Sonoma's website experienced slowdowns at the shopping cart/view payment pages with a typical transaction slowing from 26 seconds at 6am ET to almost 50 seconds between 7- 9am ET. The site returned to a steady 24-second response time at 10am ET.

- Dell's website returned an error to returning shoppers between 9.40am-10.15am. Shoppers were unable to retrieve pre-populated account information, meaning they had to start-over filling out forms when checking out. The issue was quickly resolved.

I guess that amounts to a tangible impact. I'd love to know if any hosting providers are seeing that work its way into their business.

Have your customers selling online increased their capacity in the last week?

Forgive me for being a few days late with this, but I was on vacation last week and didn't really have a chance to put together a blog entry about this.

As you may or may not be aware, November 23 was the Grey Cup, the Canadian Football League's equivalent of the Super Bowl.

I don't imagine it gets all kinds of play south of the border (for Canadians, that means America, not Mexico), but the Grey Cup is definitely an important sporting and cultural event up here. In the interest of undermining my own point, I should probably admit here that I only turned on the game right at the end.

Anyhow, somebody pointed out to me that there had been at least one Go Daddy ad run during the game, a situation that recalled for me the company's well-known experience with the Super Bowl.

In terms of audience numbers, the Grey Cup doesn't compare to the Super Bowl (last I checked, nothing does). But as I said, it's big-event TV. And I was curious about Go Daddy's approach to the game - whether it fit into the regular scope of the company's TV advertising and whether the company was focusing any marketing effort on Canada specifically, given its recent foray into the market for the .ca domain.

I got a few comments via email from Go Daddy's VP of marketing Teri Dhooge. She says Go Daddy is moving "full speed ahead" with international expansion efforts.

"As part of this strategy, a Go Daddy-produced commercial was broadcast in the first quarter of Canada's popular Grey Cup," she says. "The spot is called "White Light" and features Candice Michelle, the original Go Daddy Girl."

According to Dhooge, Go Daddy's marketing team sees the Grey Cup as a prime opportunity to reach a Canadian audience, and Go Daddy spots broadcast in the country specifically include a mention of the .ca domain offering.

"We started advertising in Canada," she says, "around the time NASCAR's Ron Fellows won the NASCAR Nationwide Series race (NAPA Auto Parts 200) at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in Montreal, Canada, driving the GoDaddy.com No. 5 Car, which was designed by Dale Earnhardt, Jr."

By the way, regardless of how you feel about the CFL in comparison to the NFL, you've got to admit, it does have a way better trophy.

I noticed the other day that we'd been receiving announcements of hosts launching "semi-dedicated" hosting services over the last little while (let's say two months) with increasing regularity.

This week saw a few at once. It was mentioned, in passing, in the announcement from Frontpages about DoD compliance. And SSA Host launched a semi-dedicated offering. In the latter case, the emerging service distinction lent a little extra spice to an otherwise somewhat less compelling "small web host adds a new hosting package" story.

The point is that the repetition caught my attention, and got me to wondering about just how new and just how significant the emergence of "semi-dedicated hosting" is.

So according to the obvious "Google test," my ignorance might be something to be embarrassed about. My search for "semi-dedicated" hosting turned up about 135,000 entries. A search for "dedicated hosting," by way of comparison, turns up 2,280,000 entries. But still, 135,000 is a lot of mentions for me to have missed.

I should point out here that I wasn't completely clueless. But my information was pretty limited to that which related directly to the few stories we had done.

In the case of this week's SSA Host story, for instance, the company was using the term "semi-dedicated" to refer to a step between VPS hosting and dedicated hosting. Specifically, one that places a limit on the number of virtual servers per physical server, and guarantees access to a certain amount of system resources.

I sent an email to Dan Garon, whose Press Advance service was responsible for at least three of the recent "company adds semi-dedicated hosting" announcements and half-jokingly asked if "semi-dedicated" was purely a semantic distinction.

He said the exact definition depends on the company; that, for example, another one of his clients had a different technology on the back-end of its semi-dedicated offering than that supporting its VPS hosting.

It seems that semi-dedicated, like "managed hosting" or "green" or many of the other distinctions in the hosting business, is pretty nebulous. It means a lot of different things, depending on whom you ask.

I dug through a few old Web Hosting Talk threads, and it seems like the cynical answer is that semi-dedicated is "glorified shared hosting." If there was a semi-dedicated offering before virtualization became a big part of hosting, then it was probably an effort to answer some of the needs addressed by VPS hosting (or some of the shared hosting shortcomings).

It seems like the spread of VPS hosting is changing the meaning of semi-dedicated somewhat. Now that just about everyone offering dedicated hosting has a VPS offering, maybe "semi-dedicated" is evolving into an effort to address some of the shortcomings of VPS hosting.

I'd love to hear some feedback on this one too. Anyone offer a "semi-dedicated" hosting package? What is it that makes it what it is? What kind of customer is it aimed at?

HostingCon was last week, I'm aware. But by the end of the show I had talked to more people, and absorbed more information, than I was able to blog about. So I-ll be filling in a few holes this week before all is said and done.

Normally I'm not one for hosting conference swag. I already have a stack of memory sticks I don't use, and enough t-shirts to go jogging every day from now to eternity without doing laundry (note: this is a slight exaggeration).

But when I stopped by the MailChannels booth at HostingCon last week to set up an interview with CEO Ken Simpson, I was surprised to find myself coveting their swag. I filled out a quick survey, and I walked away with one of these. The WHIR office is now considerably more rad.

MailChannels showed up at HostingCon with a veritable armory of Nerf weapons, and they were a hit - gone long before the show ended. As it turns out, this was one part of a confluence of facts that enabled the company to walk away from the conference with considerably more interested that it had expected.

According to Simpson, MailChannels- Traffic Control product was never designed as a product for the hosting business. He says a customer with a deep understanding of the anti-spam market got in touch with him, and let him know that the product was "perfect for hosts."

The Traffic Control solution uses "traffic shaping," which prioritizes and slows down suspicious traffic before it reaches the mail server. Some of the results of this is that bot-nets attempting to deliver spam tend to move on from the slow or unresponsive connections, and the slow-down gives more traditional filtering technologies more time to react, which massively lightens the mostly-spam workload of email servers.

I'll get more into the technical aspect of the application in an upcoming WHIR feature (and there's plenty of information - and a download link - on the MailChannels site), but some of the effects are massive reductions in the amount of email server hardware required, and (for hosts) enormous drops in the volume of support calls received about email and particularly spam.

This was enough to generate genuine interest from just about every hosting provider that stopped by the booth, according to Simpson. And on top of that he had a more hosting-oriented revenue-sharing model devised for hosts that want to incorporate the service as more of a paid-for offering to customers.

Assuming they threw away my survey (me being useless to MailChannels as a sales lead), they still walked away from HostingCon with something in the vicinity of 300 solid leads, said Simpson. And that, out of a field of roughly 1,500 attendees, was much more than satisfactory.

Apparently a very big stack of excellent swag and a genuinely intriguing proposition are a recipe for a successful HostingCon. Hopefully that-ll lead to the availability of more excellent stuff in years to come.

Also, by way of a further update, apparently the Nerf-related promotions aren't over for the company, which sent out an email last week following up. According to MailChannels, you can upgrade your "spam cannon" (which was how they were describing the toys they were giving away) to a THIS, via a couple of methods.

One of those methods was "attend a webinar next Wednesday at 12pm Eastern," which is my real reason for discussing the email.

That "Wednesday" it mentions is tomorrow. Sorry for the short notice, but if you-re interested in MailChannels or Traffic Control you still have time to check it out.

We ran a bit in the latest issue of the magazine about the new appointments in the marketing department at Verio, and the new marketing strategy ushered in across the company by that move.

The new faces are Ken Giffin, director of marketing, and Wendy Pearson, director of makerting and communications. While Giffin focuses on the Via Verio partner program, Pearson will focus more on the company-wide marketing effort.

Yesterday I met with Wendy Pearson to discuss some of the content of that revamped marketing effort, or the part of it that is complete at this relatively early stage in the redesign.

The new blood in the marketing department starts with Steve Renda, who was made VP of sales and marketing in January of this year. And he brought many of the company's new faces on board.

But the shift, says Pearson, comes from a mandate at the company to reinvigorate a business that has been not quite stagnant but certainly coasting for a period of a few years.

Verio is one of those hosting companies that deals with the small to medium-sized business market, which can be a pretty broad and vague term when you start to really think about the kind of business that describes. Part of the process at Verio in the last 60 days, says Pearson, has been to really narrow the focus within that realm, partly by trying to characterize those hypothetical customers.

At the very high end of a chart she drew that described the importance of IT to a given customer and their competence with IT, she identified a sophisticated, demanding customer that Verio has acknowledged that it just isn't the customer it is best suited to serve, or most interested in serving.

At the low end, they've identified the basic domain-name-and-one-page-website customer that also isn't really in the mould of what they're best suited to, or most interested in, serving.

The customers they're looking at targeting are the kinds of small businesses that are looking toward growing online, changing positions on that chart to move toward more importance of IT, and in some cases a higher rate of competence.

It's an interesting discussion, this idea of a host narrowing its focus and, if not getting rid of certain customers than at least admitting that "these aren't the customers we're interested in serving."

For Verio, the next step in this process - now that it has really polished the notion of what it means by "SMB" - is identifying the means by which it will target these better-defined SMB customers.

Speaking of Tucows (I was speaking of Tucows and its OpenSRS rebranding in an earlier post, which you have almost certainly read already, but which you can reach by clicking here), I sat in on a presentation by Adam Eisner, the domains product manager at Tucows, this afternoon.

Full disclosure - I like the guy, so I had a bit of a rooting interest going into this session, but it was pretty commendable in a couple of ways.

First and foremost, it was only just barely an ad for Tucows, which is always nice to see in this kind of venue, where presenters far too often veer into sort of shameless self promotion.

As much as I appreciated the delivery, the content of the session was nothing really cutting edge. That's not a criticism of the content, really. To his credit, Adam's angle in presenting it was basically "I'm surprised more hosts don't get this."

Anyway, to paraphrase the presenter, I suppose, I'm surprised more hosts don't get this.

His advice for building a buyer friendly hosting business was mostly tips for designing your website, messaging and strategy to produce an offering that speaks to the kinds of problems that the people that buy hosting are trying to address.

For example, a chart listing features and pricing doesn't really speak to a small business owner that wants to bring their business online.

He also expressed surprise that hosting providers don't put the tools for domain registration (and discovery) front and center. As kind of the platform on which just about every hosted service sits, it doesn't make sense for the domain name function at a web host to sit anywhere other than first on the agenda.

And not having a full suite of services like SSL certificates and email hosting (all of them available from private-label partners like, say, Tucows) just makes it necessary that each of your customers that needs one of those services has to go buy them from another provider that is probably going to try to up-sell them on the other services they provide, which may cost you a hosting customer.

No earth shattering revelation in any of those - just a lot of common sense. But it's surprising the number of hosts that appear to need to sit through that kind of advice.

On top of all that, he made a couple of points that resonated in particular.

First, that hosts in general seem to be inclined to sell to a selection of customers he summed up by saying "webhostingtalk.com." Those are the customers (and the general audience for the popular hosting message board) that buy based on capacity and pricing and almost nothing else, and would probably be attracted to the kinds of numbers-and-features marketing that fails to address the real customer problems. Those capacity-focused customers, should you succeed in attracting them, are almost certainly going to leave your company as soon as someone else offers them a better deal on bandwidth.

Secondly, it's surprising how many hosts' domain name search function punish customers for not using the proper url syntax in typing in their search, and completely ignore the possibility of steering those searchers in the direction of aftermarket domains, or a functioning domain suggestion tool.

That last point, I'm certain he made in a presentation at last year's HostingCon. But I'm surprised that with all I hear about the growth of the domain aftermarket, there are a lot of hosts who haven't got around to building those functions into their offerings.

That's sometimes the thing that strikes me most significantly about HostingCon each year. Not the amount of repetition that seems to be going on, but how necessary that repetition seems in a lot of cases.

The first panel I attended this morning was the marathon two-hour marketing forum that ran from 9:00 a.m. until 11:00 a.m. and featured six panelists along with a moderator.

Specifically, those panelists included Amy Armitage of Lunarpages, David Dunlap of WebHostMagazine.com, Ben Fisher of TechPad Agency, Aaron Phillips of Layered Tech, Hartland Ross of eBridge Marketing Solutions and Derek Vaughan of HostMySite.com. The moderator was Brett Tabke of WebmasterWorld and PubCon.

Given the all-star cast and the monster time slot, the session got off to a pretty slow start - a bit of a repetition of an almost-the-same session with almost the same cast from last year's HostingCon.

Partway through the discussion, though, things got hung up on this "social media" issue. That is, it veered away from questions like "how do you divide your budget between PPC and organic search?" and started to focus on how these companies incorporate things like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, LinkedIn and all of the many various things that fall under the social media umbrella.

There was a split over that question, with several people (particularly Tabke) singing the praises of Twitter and urging hosts to use these new tools to drive traffic, and several panelists (particularly Vaughan and Phillips) saying they don't see the returns from this kind of effort.

I'm not going to rehash the conversation wholesale here. But it seemed like a good jumping off point for some discussion of some of the big social media tools and their possible marketing impact on your business.

First of all, there are certain things that might not fall under the general umbrella of "social media" but that do effectively serve some of those functions. Blogs and forums are great ways for companies to interact with customers and maintain and strengthen those relationships. Sure. This much is pretty much a given. But I'm skeptical about the extents to which those efforts need to be expanded to include every possible venue for pursuing that kind of contact.

Is Twitter cool? Maybe. It's definitely popular. But it's probably worth noting that some of the most successful hosting folks in the room (Phillips, Vaughan and HostMySite's Lou Honick) were all pretty vocally skeptical of its importance.

The community building features of social media seem, to a certain extent, to enable a hosting company to market in a somewhat new, somewhat interesting way to its existing customers. Whether that turns into a real tangible ROI is where I have my doubts.

On top of that, there's a real question of how genuine these efforts by Web hosts to involve themselves in social media might be. Do customers really crave "Facebook friend" style access to their hosting providers? If these hosting providers just pay lip service to their social media efforts, there's not much value in that at all.

I think that's an important point, too.

I ran into Ben Fisher in the hall a couple hours after the presentation (he mentioned, by the way, that the session was organized largely by TechPad and that they purposely set out to sort of pit the marketing company people against the web hosting company people). And I told him that I wished they'd given the proponents versus opponents of social media disagreement a little more room to grow. But he pointed out that companies like LunarPages and DreamHost have carved out a real niche as companies that embrace these kinds of technologies - that there's an actual market for companies that make a genuine effort to use this stuff.

That's part of it, but there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg question there. LunarPages and DreamHost are companies that are appreciated specifically for their efforts to be transparent, and to be engaging and to make themselves available to customers in a personal-relationship sort of way. I think their success, and their niche, is more a function of that attitude than of any particular tool being used.

One more thing I took away from that conversation, however, surprised me in that it left me feeling more positive than I expected about the marketing potential of these social media tools. Basically, I started thinking "why not?"

Why not make yourself available via LinkedIn? Why not create a Facebook group, even if it's just for those few people who want to engage with your company in that specific way? Why not use Twitter? None of these things is particularly difficult to do, or requires an overwhelming amount of investment of labor to maintain. It might be pretty simple to create a return on investment when the investment is so small.

I might not be 100 percent convinced, but I'm not quite as dismissive as I was this morning.

I'd be pretty interested to hear if there are any readers out there that have had really positive experiences trying to market their hosting businesses with social media tools. Post in the comment section if you have.

On my most recent peek at the budding exhibit hall, I noticed an exceedingly colorful display I hadn't seen before. It turned out to be the in-construction Tucows booth or, in this case, the OpenSRS booth - a bit of a monument to the big branding move the company is making starting today.

The look of the booth coincides with an announcement the company sent out over the wires this morning about the re-launch of the OpenSRS brand, though it has been the name of the company's domains platform for years.

I'd heard a bit about this, but today was the first official word on it. According to the press release, the company is announcing "the return of the OpenSRS name for its wholesale reseller services group," which as far as I understand it is the large bulk of Tucows business.

Along with domains, the OpenSRS brand now covers SSL certificates and email, along with its new "personal names" service. That is, as far as resellers are concerned, Tucows is now OpenSRS.

Tucows seems to still be operating the same software download site at tucows.com, but the reseller.tucows.com domain is now redirecting to the nice-looking new site at opensrs.com.

According to the posting on that site, the company feels "we feel this name best captures our heritage as a provider of services to hosting companies."

As you can see from the pictures, the imagery involves a cute little milkman type character and an old-fashioned looking logo. It all seems intended to evoke the company's history and reputation among resellers, as well as a sort of friendly service approach. The press release says it's meant to recall a 50s-era company and "a time when service mattered most."

The character they describe in the press release as "iconic" might actually be a little bit more generic, but it's a nice looking booth. I like it.

I'll have to find somebody and ask them today, but I also get the sense that we'll generally be referring to Tucows as OpenSRS from now on.

Justin Lee is going to be talking to Tucows tomorrow about the change, so we'll have a more informed discussion of the change up.

One quick thing before I head over to the Navy Pier for the start of the sessions.

I'm staying at the W hotel, as are a lot of HostingCon attendees. It was one of the venues with reduced rates for people attending the event.

This is no doubt why we received the "welcome to HostingCon" information page - which was a pretty helpful touch - when we checked in.

I pretty promptly locked my key card in my room and had to head down to the front desk to get it replaced. Interestingly, what I got was this:

It's a room key with a HostingCon specific ad for HiVelocity Hosting, understandably aiming at resellers and encouraging me to "visit our booth for a free VPS." Very cool.

Hopefully I'm not too far out of touch here, but I've been to more than a few conferences, and this is the first I've seen of anything like this. The back of the card had a tiny URL for the company PLI, which claims to be the "nation's largest plastic key card manufacturer." So it's possible this is old hat for everyone but me. I hope not.

Not everybody seemed to have one, but a few other people did. That's not to say I think they were set aside for anybody in particular, but probably that they were shuffled into the regular mix of cards being given to HostingCon rooms.

As marketing efforts go, I think it's pretty unique, and a great way to set themselves apart at an event where that can be difficult (old standbys like throwing a party, giving away something great and having some kind of unique booth are good, but you're definitely not going to be the only person doing it).

I'm going to leave it at that and head over to the conference. More to come.

This week, Bob Parsons had Go Daddy’s new spokesman Chad Johnson as a guest on his Internet radio show, the recently renamed Go Daddy Live.

 

Assuming you concern yourself with such things, you’re probably aware of Johnson’s position – flashy Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver. Johnson is a perennial challenger for the league lead in receiving yards, always scoring more than a few touchdowns, and more often than not celebrating those touchdowns in exceedingly theatrical ways.

 

Johnson is regularly fined by the league for his behavior, a fact that was discussed on the Parsons program. He says it doesn’t bother him though. He tries to put a positive spin on it by matching the league fines he faces and donating them to the Feed the Children foundation, a charity with which Johnson does some work.

 

He even said he’s trying to talk the league into making sure the fines themselves go to the same organization.

 

Parsons piped up at that point, promising a donation of $50,000 to the foundation if Johnson were to perform a “Go Daddy dance” as his celebration after a touchdown. Johnson, of course, said he’d try to work it in.

 

All very straightforward, except I was left wondering what exactly I was looking for. What exactly does a “Go Daddy dance” look like?

 

As if they were reading my mind, I received a press announcement form Go Daddy on Friday that, among other things, explained what I’d be looking for:

 

“Chad would be doing the same dance made famous by the original Go Daddy Girl Candice Michelle.

   

"You may recall the GoDaddy Girl commercial was pulled by FOX during the 2005 Super Bowl because the spoof on the Janet Jackson ‘wardrobe malfunction’ was not ‘in keeping with the tenor of the game.’  It aired only once during the 2005 Super Bowl."

 

I do, in fact, recall that dance. For those who don’t, Go Daddy explains:

 

“If you see Chad Johnson highlights after Sunday's game and notice him celebrating with both arms up and his hips swirling... that means the www.FeedTheChildren.org organization will receive a $50,000 donation in Chad's name.”

 

Full disclosure: the Bengals happen to be playing the Seahawks as I write this. And the Seahawks happen to be my team. With all due respect to the children, I’d personally prefer Chad keep his swirling hips out of the end zone until next week.