by Elya McCleave - Friday, April 20, 2012

“Emotional intelligence (EI) describes the ability, capacity, skill or, in the case of the trait EI model, a self-perceived grand ability to identify, assess, manage and control the emotions of one’s self, of others, and of groups.

The earliest roots of emotional intelligence can be traced to Darwin’s work on the importance of emotional expression for survival and second adaptation. In the 1900s, even though traditional definitions of intelligence emphasized cognitive aspects such as memory and problem-solving, several influential researchers in the intelligence field of study had begun to recognize the importance of the non-cognitive aspects. E.L. Thorndike used the term social intelligence to describe the skill of understanding and managing other people.”

Emotional Intelligence of all staff members directly affects the level of Customer Service your company provides. It’s essential for the leaders of an organization not only to work on themselves, but also cultivate and foster the culture of EI company-wide.

EI is one of the most challenging areas in which an IT organization can excel, especially with most companies choosing to shield their core staff from customer-facing work there by fully relaying on the Service Desk.

It is relatively easy to teach someone about a technology or fact based subjects, but in order to provide a great global customer experience every staff member must learn how to perceive, employ, understand and manage emotions while dealing with the clients. A Customer Service revolution in the webhosting industry is long overdue, and it can start with you.

People ask “How can I build a customer-centric culture?” Answer – it can only be achieved through focused, on-going and consistent practice… the ‘magic pill’ doesn’t exist. If you are in any Service Provider business, I would recommend creating an environment where all of your teams get at least some level of exposure to the customer-facing work. No one should be too important, too smart or too busy to deal with the clients. Fundamentally it’s all about employees embracing the fact that they are in Customer Service, including Engineers, Developers and Executives. Yes, I know the transition is not going to be easy, the benefits however are huge – a culture of empathy across the board, higher organizational EI, improved SLAs and most importantly happier clients.

To speak to the mechanics, I would chiefly look at the “Escalation Procedures” as the starting point. Questions to ask:

• Do our engineers communicate with the clients directly on the cases sent to them? Are they instead fully reliant on the Service Desk to act as a liaison with justifications such as  a) being too busy b) being untrained to deal with clients c) being too technical
• When asked, are our managers available to the clients and happy to take an escalation or they get upset when someone transfers a call/ticket?

If the answer to any of the above questions is “No”, then you have some room for improvement. To ease everyone into the new school of thought, launch “Customer Centricity” training programs. In doing so you can educate all of the departments on the basics of customer service while showcasing the day-to-day challenges the Service Desk is facing.

Once you feel confident that the necessary skill-set was developed, collaborate with the leaders of other departments on escalation handling adjustments. This initiative might not receive a warm welcome, but that’s when you come in with customer satisfaction, retention and loyalty data. If your customers are happy with the service provided and continuously expanding their businesses with you, perhaps there is really nothing to worry about in the immediate future. If however this is not the case, the change is inevitable, and the sooner you adopt the more chances for success your company shall have.

“Change is hard because people overestimate the value of what they have and underestimate the value of what they may gain by giving that up” – James Belasco and Ralph Stayer

by WHIR Happenings - Friday, April 20, 2012

Last night marked our second networking event in Denver, Colorado, which drew a high quality crowd of local tech companies including data centers, domainers, web hosts and developers.

There is definitely a sense of community in Denver – a town small enough where a lot of people ran into familiar faces, but also a diverse enough town where there were a lot of new and emerging companies in attendance. The Boulder start-up culture has a huge role to play with the new kids of the block in the tech sector of Colorado.

Thanks to our beloved 2012 title sponsors Parallels, e-onlinedata, Black Lotus along with Arbor Networks, Afilias and Litle & Co., they gave away some great prizes to some lucky winners.

Parallels gave away SOUL High Definition on ear, headphones by Ludacris to Aaron Watson by digitcert
Black Lotus gave away a Wenger Watch to Alana Kirkpatrick of SOLIDFIRE
e-onlinedata gave away a Kindle to Todd Klement of CLEAR SOURCE
Afilias gave away a Smartphone Controlled Desk Pet & iLaunch Rocket Launcher for iPhone to Clint Pickney of HOSTING.COM
Arbor Networks gave away an iPad 2 with docking station and a messenger bag to Michael R Law of NameTalent
Litle & Co. gave away a $200 Visa gift card to J.R. Jasperson from Go Daddy

We hope to see you at our next event in theWHIR’s home town backyard of Toronto on May 17, and our European tour in the second half of May in Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris and London.

We’ll return to our US events series in June in Washington, DC.

by Nicole Henderson - Wednesday, April 18, 2012

On Thursday, March 15, the WHIR was in Chicago for its fourth annual networking event in the city.

Held at the Rockit Bar & Grill, the event was made possible by sponsors Parallels, e-onlinedata, Black Lotus, CA Technologies, Arbor Networks and WiredTree.

Throughout the event, WHIR editor Liam Eagle spoke with each of the sponsors, including Parallels’ James Raquepau about how hosts can sell services to SMBs, and Shawn Marck of Black Lotus on how hosts can join its new partnership program to offer DDoS protection to their customers.

Eagle also talked to John Gilbert of e-onlinedata on how it works with hosts to bundle services, and Eric Greenberg of CA Technologies on partnership opportunities. Rakesh Shah of Arbor Networks discussed the evolution of DDoS attacks, and Joe Doss of WiredTree talked about how it supports its hosting customers.

The next stop on the WHIR networking events 2012 tour is Denver, Colorado on Thursday night. The free event will be held at Chloe from 7 pm to 10 pm on April 19. To RSVP for the Denver event visit the WHIR events page. The sponsors will be giving away prizes, so be sure to bring business cards for your chance to win. See you in Denver!

by WHIR Happenings - Monday, April 16, 2012

This Thursday April 19th, marks our first return to Denver, Colorado for a WHIR Networking Event. We were in Denver for our first time in August 2010, and had a bigger than expected turnout.  We hope this Thursday will be a repeat success of the last event there.

While Denver is a relatively small city compared to some of the other cities we frequent, like New York, Chicago and Toronto, the attraction the Denver and Boulder area is a high concentration of both start-ups and data center players. For example, RSVPs for this event so far include the likes of SunGard, Hosting.com, ViaWest and Savvis.

If you can make it out this Thursday, you have a chance at winning some great prizes from our generous sponsors:

- 2012 title sponsor of every single WHIR Networking Event, Parallels, is giving away SOUL by Ludacris High Definition on ear, headphones
- 2012 North American title sponsor Black Lotus is giving away a Wenger Watch
- e-onlinedata, also a title sponsor of all our North American events this year, is giving away a Kindle
- Afilias is giving away a Smartphone Controlled Desk Pet & iLaunch Rocket Launcher for iPhone
- Arbor Networks is giving away a iPad 2 with docking station and a messenger bag
- Litle & Co. are giving away a $100 Visa gift card

For those of you in the Denver area, come out to Chloe this Thursday from 7-10pm for free drinks and priceless networking.

RSVP free and invite a guest! We hope to see you there.

by Liam Eagle - Monday, April 16, 2012

This week, we’re launching our WHIR readership survey, a project aimed at gathering feedback from our users, in the interest of improving the quality and applicability of the work we do, as well as the format and context in which it is presented.

At the Web Host Industry Review, we put a lot of attention into serving the web hosting industry as the news and information resource the community wants and needs. It probably goes without saying that we’re only as good as we are valuable to your business.

And that can’t all be based on guesswork. While there are certainly avenues for informal feedback built into the publishing process (Twitter, Facebook, the individual comments sections on stories, even email) we can always benefit from more direct feedback. This is the purpose of the WHIR reader survey – we want to know what subjects and formats appeal to you the most; what you want to see more of; what you want to see less of; what you expect from the publication as a resource and as a forum for discussion.

Obviously, our purpose is to provide service, and not to require anything of our readers in return. However, by participating in our survey, you can really help us to better understand what you want, and thereby steer our content in the direction that benefits you best.

It’s not a long survey, and you should be able to complete it in a couple of minutes. Please rest assured that we’re going to take all the feedback very seriously, and as a mandate to adjust our content and presentation to better represent what you tell us you want to see.

If helping to make the WHIR better and more to your personal taste isn’t a good enough reason to participate in the survey, we’re also running a contest in which the winner will receive an Amazon gift card for $100 US. The winner will be chosen randomly from among those who complete the survey.

So, please do us a favor and help us improve by heading over to fill out the WHIR 2012 reader survey.

The survey will run for two weeks, from 12:00 am G.M.T. on April 16, 2012 and ends 11:59 pm G.M.T. on April 30, 2012. The winner of the sweepstakes will be drawn on May 11.

Full rules for the contest are also available for your perusal.

by Nicole Henderson - Friday, April 13, 2012

On Friday, a judge ordered the parties involved in the Megaupload case to come to an agreement about who will maintain the 1,100 servers storing the frozen Megaupload content. Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Julie Samuels says the legitimate users of Megaupload rely on the maintenance of the servers in order to retrieve their data – a huge project that the EFF has vowed to help the some 150 million legitimate users undertake.

While this case is certainly unique, there are other instances where data can be frozen and users are unable to retrieve it. For example, a web host could unexpectedly go out of business, and decide to delete the content. This is not the most likely scenario, but it could happen. This is where the Archive Team comes in.

In an article on PC World on Thursday, Mark Sullivan interviewed Archive Team founder Jason Scott about his data preservation activism group. When web hosts are about to go down, the team tries to rescue the data before it disappears.

The team, made of up about 250 people, has been around since 2009, and takes a “no-prisoners”, hacker approach. While it would be interesting if the group worked directly with web hosts about to go under, I think it may go against its hacker credo. Still, it may be comforting to know that there is someone ready to “save” your customers’ data if something happens to your web hosting company. What do you think? Would you prefer to help your customers migrate their data to another host, or do you support what the Archive Team is trying to do?

by Derek Vaughan - Thursday, April 5, 2012

As an owner of a web hosting directory several years back I was often visiting large web hosting companies. Invariably the question would arise during the visit. The web hosting company owners would say: ”Would you like to see our data center?” Now for the first 20 or 30 times, it was actually pretty cool to look around these various data centers. There were interesting features for each one, and of course, dozens of similarities. Almost every single data center operator at some point would glance over at a certain aspect of their data center and say, ”That’s our biggest secret in this data center. Nobody can copy that.” Most of the time the ‘secret’ piece of the data center was something I had seen before – and in fact wasn’t a true secret at all. The only reason I knew that and the data center owners didn’t – was because I was visiting the data centers of all their competitors.

A recent Wired article noted that Google is so secretive regarding its data center hardware setups that the company keeps whole sections of a shared data center in complete darkness. Engineers work on equipment using miner’s helmets to see what they are working on. Imagine those lengths that Google is taking to protect its secrets from prying eyes.

So are there really any true data center secrets?

To find out, I polled true data center experts. These are people who have collectively seen hundreds of data centers in a number of countries around the world. Brent Oxley is the founder of HostGator – one of the world’s largest and most successful web hosting companies. HostGator outsources its data center needs and therefore is keenly aware of a variety of data center setups. Simon Anderson is CEO of DreamHost and Patrick Lane is Vice President of data center operations with the company. At over 300,000 accounts and climbing, DreamHost has mastered the art of data center automation. To get an overseas perspective, Daniel Foster the co-founder of Manchester, U.K. hosting provider 34SP.com weighed in. The company currently operates out of two separate outsourced data centers and has a data center in Manchester as well. Here is what these data center experts had to say regarding data center secrets that they have actually seen.

Brent Oxley, founder of HostGator had this to say on the subject, ”I’ve seen multiple data centers with your typical coolness including man traps and armed guards, however I’ve only seen one data center with a full size pool that has regular parties. In my opinion it is absolutely possible to have a unique feature since data centers are constantly evolving to become more reliable and efficient. The best practices of today are not going to be all of the best practices of the future. I would not want my business to be involved in some science experiment and prefer to use the technology and practices tested and proven today.”

When asked if he’d ever seen a secret stashed away in a data center Oxley replied, ”I’ve never been able to catch a data center hiding technical marvels. The whole idea behind a data center tour is to wow your potential clientele which means you’re going to show off as much as technically possible. I have seen many data centers protect the identities of their customers as well as give incomplete tours that skip the cheaper built out sections. One further note, until we build our own data center all I can say is that SoftLayer has been an excellent provider.”

Daniel Foster is the co-founder of UK-based hosting provider 34SP.com. For over 11 years Foster has been working in and around numerous data centers in the UK. Mr. ”Given that I completely agree with the fact that best practices are well established, I’m not certain that I’ve really seen anything that stands out,” he says. “Once you’re inside the data room, one facility is much like another. Some differences lie in the access controls in place before you reach the data room, with biometrics in use in some places and simple swipe cards in others, but all data centers are about achieving the same goal; provide power, space and security to enterprise IT equipment. Most United Kingdom facilities these days use either hot or cold aisle containment to increase efficiency and the particular methods to do this vary but they all provide the same control over airflow. As far as any data center secrets are concerned, in just about all data centers, visitors are only allowed access to the common areas and the particular rooms holding their equipment. From that perspective, the whole place often seems completely concealed.”

Simon Anderson is the CEO of Dreamhost. He directed us to his Vice President of Data Center Operations and mentioned, ”One thing I’d weigh in on is that data center design is as much about the focused details as it is about the big infrastructure. Patrick Lane has innovated with his team to make our power consumption significantly more efficient, by engineering novel ways to connect each server into our UPS. He thinks outside the box, which is essential for a super automated company like DreamHost.”

Patrick Lane who designs and runs the data centers at Dreamhost gave his thoughts on data center secrets, ”Most data centers are pretty similar. I did see one data center however, that worked around a water redundancy issue by drilling a well. Simple thinking for a simple problem, but I’ve only seen it done that one place. One of those moments that make you think, ‘why aren’t more people doing this?’ So it is absolutely possible to have unique aspects to a data center. I wouldn’t say that best practices are extremely well established. Cookie cutter designs are, though, that mostly work for most people. When you get a facility that really starts thinking about their unique problems, you can see some pretty amazing things. One data center I toured built a wall (steel, insulation and drywall) on both sides of all their rows, effectively creating hot row AND cold row isolation. Put a door on each row with a security scanner and now you have custom suites as well. A much more efficient solution than retrofitting with butchers curtains. It also eliminated the need for caging.”

Lane added this advice for any company considering data center space, ”Go dense or go home. If you’re not utilizing higher voltages and modern servers, you are probably spending too much money on OpEx.”

by Liam Eagle - Tuesday, April 3, 2012

The observant among you will likely notice that this week’s Monday Demo is coming out on Tuesday, owing to an especially hectic schedule this week. Apologies for the deviation from what we can only hope is an expectation at this point, but let’s get on with the actual content.

This week’s demo was presented by Robert Priscu of WebsPlanet, a software company that has been providing a pretty advanced WYSIWYG website building tool for years, but has only recently refocused its efforts a little more directly on the hosting service provider market.

Two weeks ago, at World Hosting Days in Germany, WebsPlanet announced that it was offering the Eclipse website builder to hosting providers, following an integration with the ecommerce storefront builder Ecwid (another product we’ll be posting a video demo for in the coming weeks).

WebsPlanet’s Eclipse launch came a little after the recent publication of our feature on five website builders popular with web hosting companies, but it’s a further entry into a market that offers web hosts a lot of choice.

Talk back: comments, questions, concerns? Intrigued by the Eclipse demo? Want to find out more? Let us know in the comments section.

by Tom Millitzer - Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Recently I have been writing about complexity. How that high touch service proposition can bring in big margins for hosting companies. As this M&A guy was researching Cloud, complexity et al, I think I found the quote of the century. it blew me away.  Let’s go to Africa and look at Dimension Data.

“OpSource Cloud, the infrastructure cloud, was tucked up into NTT’s Dimension Data subsidiary and now, in the wake of the acquisition, the company has rolled up its IT services and clouds into an integrated offering and is rolling it out across NTT data centers around the globe” Kaao Caindec, chief marketing officer – Group Cloud Solutions at Dimension Data. That quote is so tight, says so much, I suggest you read it again.

Dimension Data is one of those $5.8 billion firms that few people know. (But see recent WHIR article for additional info) Based in South Africa, a lot of its business is in that other hemisphere. But not for long. This recent Nippon Telephone (NTT) subsidiary wants to take on the cloud, tale on Amazon. L ast year it purchased Silicon Valley based OpSource and picked up an infrastructure cloud provider that had created its own cloud controller, metering, and management stack.

Dimension Data is a real, real  IT firm (see website) . You know those TV commercials where IBM wants to solve all of your Fortune 500 problems. This is what DD does. They have added the cloud to the mix. In looking at the Dimension Data website you its seems that they are using the cloud as its core business. Let me emphasize, its core business.

DD by the numbers: Revenues $5.8 billion, 6,000 customer base, average customer revenues $80,000 /mo, 14,000 employees, 51 countries. Let’s make cloud our core.

It’s interesting how everyone wants simplicity, Apple, but needs complexity in the background, Dimension Data, to really make it happen.

Every IT business (and there are thousands out there) will need to integrate cloud into it’s service mix to be competitive. That is where this M&A guy sees value as this will be a somewhat limited (36  month max? ) where IT firms will find it imperative to add cloud to a mix of services. Where I see need, I see competition, I see value, I see deals.

For some reason I was thinking 2012 could be a somewhat boring year. Thanks Dimension Data, I needed that.

Later – Tom

Find out more about Tom: NCC International  FB

E-Mail Tom Direct

by David Snead - Tuesday, March 27, 2012

At WorldHostingDays I presented a statistic about the percentage of revenues MegaUpload represented to Carpathia Hosting. Although my sources were credible and corroborated, after further investigation, I believe that statistic to be wrong.

I’d received this statistic from a European host I believed had good information on the number and I’d also vetted it with another industry insider who believed it to be relatively accurate. Carpathia strongly disputes the statistic. To ensure that I’m providing accurate information, and out of respect for Carpathia, I chatted with Phil Shih at Structure Research, a person I trust as a source of unbiased information. Phil did some back of the envelope calculations based on publicly available information. His conclusion: there’s no way that MegaUpload represented nearly the percentage revenue I’d been led to believe. Rather, if anything, it is in the single digits.

by Elya McCleave - Monday, March 26, 2012

When it comes to customer care, the hosting industry is in crisis mode. Until a few years ago, many hosters were the only game in town, and didn’t have to prioritize serving the needs of customers. Now, customer churn is a critical concern. Companies didn’t need to care about the customer experience, loyalty, or churn prevention. If a customer left, there were five more to take his place. Now, it’s a different world. Markets have opened up to competition, and customer service advancements in other industries have elevated customer expectations for the hosting experience.

Who manages the customer experience at your company? If no one, it’s time to assemble the team. Small to medium size enterprises can start with one or two people and build on that. Historically, the basic function of such team (let’s call it Customer Experience Management Division) would be cancellations handling. Customer churn indeed has a significant impact on customer lifetime value and the company’s bottom line. Therefore, you have no choice but to go to great lengths to keep your customers on board. Your CEM crew attempts to convince customers not to cancel by using retention offerings such as discounts, credits or free products. This reactive approach is not effective, since by the time customers call to cancel, they have made up their minds or signed with a competitor.

A more effective approach to improving customer retention is to predict customer churn by managing the customer experience throughout a customer’s life cycle, with the goal of turning satisfied customers into loyal advocates. Consider the creation of  “Customer Safety Anchors”

Safety Anchor #1: On-boarding Program

Engage with every single customer from the first day of hosting, ideally even before the account gets provisioned. Not only you can make sure customer ordered the correct account, communicate provisioning SLAs and reinforce the message “Welcome aboard Mister Customer! We are here for you,” but also start building that “one-on-one” bridge of customer communication.  Be careful with up-selling and cross selling at this stage of interaction, however, the first call should be quick and effortless.

Safety Anchor #2: Loyalty Program

An engaging loyalty program is required to keep a certain level of attachment with the customer even when a company occasionally fails to deliver on its customer experience. There are four customer loyalty programs we should identify:

Type A: Membership Program.

Membership programs are one of the best ways to keep customers coming back. Most programs provide special incentives to members as part of their membership.

Type B: Rewards Program.

Rewards programs provide gifts and perk that are “earned” according to the amount of business your customers do with you.

Type C: Create a Community.

Every human has a deep inner need to belong to a community. “Belonging” gives us security and helps us to understand our place in life.

Type D: Create Intertwined Business Processes.

This is not so much a traditional customer loyalty program, but it’s the absolute best way that to guarantee that our customers will keep coming back. This method consists of positioning your business processes deep into your client’s or customer’s business processes.

Safety Anchor #3: Advocacy Program

Identify and encourage your best customers to be your advocates. It’s all about enhancing your relationship with the most active and outspoken clients on the web, growing your viral marketing efforts and increasing sales.

Consider different advocacy membership levels based on the contribution rate, incentives to match those levels and  channels you wish to promote among your customer base.

For incentive you could offer free support, priority support, free hosting, managed services, etc. In addition your advocates could get priory notice about new promotions and discounts. You could also subscribe them to a monthly “Customer Spotlight” newsletter where you showcase your customers’ businesses. Furthermore imagine mentioning your advocates on your social media channels and sending them a special gift for their subscription anniversary every year. This I consider to be true “one-on-one” customer experience management.

With all these safety anchors in place, your customer support crew will be able to retain an increasing proportion of the customers. Each one of these levels must work in tandem to provide a strong network that cushions current customers and prevents them from falling through the cracks to competitors. Working together, safety anchors combine to strengthen the customer relationship over the long term.

by David Snead - Monday, March 19, 2012

A panel of privacy experts, ad one brave sole representing “big data” talked at South-by-Southwest about policy issues involved in the collection processing and use of the massive amounts of data corporations are collecting. The initial issue, like many privacy debates, was about whether there was legally cognizable “harm,” or any harm whatsoever. Further, is there any need to add regulation on top of what is already present with the FTC’s ability to regulate unfair and deceptive trade practices?

Berin Szoka from TechFreedom said that setting the bar at whether consumers “knew” of a use of data in a particular manner sets the bar very low. Indeed, it forces consumers to act in a way that we don’t require them to act now: you’re not required to understand how your car works, so why should you be required to know how a company is using data about you? Lillie Coney from EPIC pushed this analogy further and pointed out that regulation of automobiles didn’t occur until sometime after they came into common use, in reaction to harms that consumers couldn’t reasonably anticipate, or be expected to understand.

So is Gmail a good example of where “big data” is going? Gmail applies a relatively dumb artificial intelligence application to “read” email. While time has proven that this application has been used responsibly, it’s not hard to imagine future applications that are “smarter” that will begin to process data in ways that will violate privacy norms. Current privacy norms were created in the analog age and have been amended in a patchwork manner to try to address the digital age. However, their complexity has made it almost impossible for consumers to understand them, and difficult for companies to apply them to their new products.

The tension over privacy and data collection has gone on for at least a century. Indeed, Justice Brandeis in 1890 wrote in the Harvard Law Review that photography and journalism possibly infringed on a right to privacy. This article now appears dated and quaint. So, will the debate about the processing of personal data and privacy be seen as quaint in 112 years? Stanley from the ACLU said that that would not be the case: what the Brandeis law review illustrates is that it’s important to uphold well understood societal norms when technology challenges them.