by Liam Eagle - Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Our WHIR Webinar schedule is picking up again this week, with our first session of the year. Thursday, January 20, from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. Eastern Time, we’ll hold our first session, sponsored by Logicboxes.

If you want to skip straight to the sign-up page, here’s your link.

Earlier today we went through a test-run of Thursday’s webinar, “Demystifying ICANN Accreditation,” a presentation aimed at helping service providers to understand some of the challenges and opportunities involved in the process of becoming an accredited registrar for domain names.

The session, which will include a presentation by Sandeep Ramchandani of LogicBoxes and its Accreditation.com service and Tim Cole, chief registrar liaison at ICANN, will attempt to clear away some of the confusion and mystery surrounding the process of accreditation.

Included in the presentation will be answers to the questions of why a company would seek to become an accredited registrar; what is required of an organization in order to achieve accreditation; and the cost and brand advantages associated with becoming accredited.

Finally, the presenters will talk about how an organization like Logicboxes, and its Accreditation.com business, can help service providers – specifically including hosting providers – to become registrars.

I’m very confident that the subject matter is something that is of a lot of interest to a lot of WHIR users, since we’ve already seen an excellent number of sign-ups. But in case you haven’t already signed up, I wanted to post a blog reminder, just to give you another opportunity.

Of course, this is something you can watch in the archives after the fact, but I also have no doubt that this is going to be one of those sessions where you’re going to have questions. And attending the session live means you’re going to have the opportunity to put those questions directly to the presenters as the webinar happens.

Head over to the signup page to register for this Thursday’s webinar, and I’ll see you there.

by Lou Honick - Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Many years ago, the good people at HostMySite.com came up with their own Pillars of Customer Service.  These were our guiding principals for many years.  While I have moved on to credit card processing and merchant services , these pillars are still central to how I do business on a daily basis. I am listing them below, each pillar followed by a description created by the employees of HostMySite.com detailing what each pillar meant to them.

HostMySite’s Nine Pillars of Customer Service

Compassion – “We identify with our customers and convey a shared

sense of understanding and empathy to create the building blocks for a

strong customer relationship.”

Credibility - “We overcome daily challenges confidently and provide

truthful answers consistently with no room for uncertainty. We build and

maintain our integrity so customers know they can count on us.”

Exceed Expectations – “We delight customers by being proactive and

going above and beyond what they expect from a Web host to give the

most complete and comprehensive solution.”

Never Say No – “We never respond negatively and continually remain

positive when interacting with customers. Customer satisfaction is our

ultimate goal, so we always find a solution when working with a customer.”

Ownership – “We personally address customer issues, exhausting all

resources to find a solution no less than the best. This ensures every

action leads toward an ideal solution and takes full responsibility for the

result.”

Reliability – “We give consistent, accurate, and timely solutions to

customers. Our 24/7 presence allows us to devote our full attention to

each and every customer issue.”

Respect - “We demonstrate empathy, courtesy, and professionalism in all

of our interactions and solutions by valuing the feelings and interests of

our customers.”

Empowerment - “We have authority, ability, and power to use at our

discretion for any situation where we need to please our customers at any

cost.”

Communication – “We use patience, enthusiasm, and thoughtfulness to

provide customers with accurate, timely and honest information.”

by WHIR Happenings - Monday, January 17, 2011

This coming Thursday January 20th is our first networking event of 2011 in Los Angeles CA. It promises to be a very good time.  We wanted to extend the invitation one more time in case anyone wasn’t sure if they wanted to attend.  It will take place at Bardot Hollywood.

Take a look at the video from our last event in Vancouver, B.C. here if you have never attended a WHIR event before.

If you are, or plan to be, in the area, please come out and join us for a great time. These events are fun, laid back, and a great opportunity to do business and meet with decision makers and vendors in the web hosting industry – and not just with those in the local market, although there are plenty of those.

While you’re at it, there will be free food and drinks, courtesy of some very generous sponsors.

We’re holding the event at Bardot, Hollywood. The venue is both an outdoor and indoor space and promises to impress.  

More information on the venue itself, including directions on how to get there, are available here. The event is free, but does require an RSVP.  Feel free to bring guests.

If you are from out of town, and are looking for a hotel, please contact us for information on availability at the W Hollywood.  

Another perk of attending theWHIR networking events is the prizes. 

Here is what our Sponsors are giving away:

Afilias: PsPGo

Parallels: $100 gift Card Amazon and Parallels iPod Shuffle

RioRey: Wii system

e-onlinedata: Kindle

ResellerClub: iPad

To find out more about our title sponsors click here.  Keep in mind you must bring a business card to be eligible to win a prize, don’t forget to tell your guests to do the same. Have your business card ready at the door for registration.

There are still sponsorship opportunities.  For more information take a look here.

Don’t forget to RSVP and bring your business card.  See you on Thursday night.

by David Snead - Friday, January 14, 2011

CES included a very detailed track discussing “Content in the Cloud.”  While there are a number of interesting new ventures that were discussed during the panels, one nagging issue kept popping up:  intellectual property rights. The presenters felt that the cloud, and particularly video in the cloud, presented a great opportunity to learn from the past.

Again and again presenters mentioned both the difficulty in securing the rights to distribute content through the cloud to end users, and the possibility of piracy. I would argue that it’s the fear, not the reality, of the last issue that is creating the problem. At base, most content owners are almost paralyzed with fear over the prospect of their content being used in unauthorized ways. This causes them to impose draconian licensing terms on distributors or require use of technology that makes use by the end user of the distributor’s technology very difficult (Hello Silverlight!)

Several presenters made the point that it is likely the difficulty inherent in securing rights to creative content that is fueling piracy. There is a significant disconnect between what consumers see in creative content, and the rights underlying the content. Consumers see a piece of music, or television show, as a single piece of work. However, underlying the work is a complex web of rights. Because the businesses who create these works have not figured out how, or unwilling, to restructure these rights, end users are employing new technologies to enjoy “their” content on connected devices without waiting for the creative community to figure out who is going to make what money.

At base, end users want to enjoy their content, not be educated, or subjected to complex business models necessary to sustain outdated rights. With the exception of one presenter, the panelists each agreed that the success of iTunes, and failure of PressPlay, shows that if rights holders embrace, and work with, new technologies, end users will pay for correctly licensed content.

So how does this relate to the cloud? By providing an easy, flexible, and potentially inexpensive, source of computing power, the cloud offers end users the ability to consume creative content in an almost unlimited manner. In particular, the use of the cloud to store and consume video creates a large market for cloud providers and content creators as well. Rights owners and cloud operators and the cloud operator’s customers need to be proactive and discuss how, together, they might make business models work. It is to everyone’s benefit to engage in businesses that people want to pay for.

The potential the cloud offers is a very large market with end users actually consuming more content than they do today. This gives rights owners the ability to increase the consumption of their individual content. However, it will also require some creative thinking, and possibly a reduction in individual fees. The likelihood of a larger market will actually result in a net increase in those fees. Most importantly, it will require the rights owning community to stop saying to the technology community: “here is a license, you figure out your business model.” The collapse of the CD market indicates that this strategy is a loser. The cloud offers the video industry the opportunity to learn from this mistake.

by Tom Millitzer - Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Somewhere around late late Summer early Fall I received calls from several prospective clients considering selling their hosting companies by the end of the year. It had dawned upon them that the Bush tax cuts were about to expire and it could cost them buckets of bills. They also wanted the best or market price for their company. Generally three months to prep a company for sale, get it on the market AND achieving a full market price AND lining up all the legal and closing ducks, well usually not reasonable.

At HostingCon I also met a potential client that is currently building a great business. He felt it would take 12-18 months to build the business to the point it will have the critical mass, he has been growing at 50% a year and he should continue this trend. We are strategizing  an exit that today looks like the Summer of 2012.

As what should be the closing paragraph, those “last minute calls” dodged the tax bullet…yes most of the tax rates were extended for two years.

Every year I mention to clients that the topic of selling your company needs to be addressed every year….no not necessarily to sell, but to keep a focus on your business. To take those fifteen minutes or an hour to discuss personal goals, standing back to analyze your business, considering tax ramifications, changes in your family, health, retirement. Well its just practical. You will know when to take it to the next level, your account, attorney or other business advisor.

Also…sometimes we need to read the handwriting on the wall. Very tough.

Most of the owners reading this, 90% plus, are small businesses. I bet most of your net worth is invested in your business. You look at it as your retirement, nest egg, childrens education, for a future business or other personal needs. An important exercise.

Starting 2011 0n 0n this 1/11/11

Later – Tom

More about Tom: NCC International – the Hosting Business Broker   Twitter: TomNCC and NCC WebHostBusiness

 E-Mail Tom Direct

by David Snead - Monday, January 10, 2011

The last twenty minutes of the Innovation panel was a presentation by Gary Locke, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce.  While much of his presentation was standard cabinet level patter, he did have some interesting points.

From my perspective, the most important was his statement that by focusing on the “glory days” of the U.S. economy, the late 40’s to 60’s, the U.S. has failed to invest in maintaining its global market position.  He believes that over the past decade, no country has done less to improve its competitive position than the U.S.. 

To improve this statistic, the Obama administration has set a goal to invest 3 percent of GDP in R&D, create a more efficient system to commercialize government and educational research, and pour 90 billion dollars into clean energy. 

He echoed the Innovation panelists comment that the U.S. patent system is broken.  While not committing to “patent reform,” he did state that Commerce is committed to making the current patent system more efficient.  In particular he stated that the current three year wait for patents is unacceptable.  He feels that this wait is hampering the U.S. economy because investors are unwilling to lend to new ventures if they can’t prove that they “own” the technology.  As a result, he is trying to get patent review process down to 1 year. 

Like most speeches by high level officials, there wasn’t much new news.  However, what small new news there was, gives a small amount of insight into how the Obama administration plans to use scarce governmental resources to improve competitiveness.

by David Snead - Friday, January 7, 2011

During the Digital Music in the Digital Age panel at CES, Johanna Shelton from Google asked about the recent ICE seizures of domain names associated with music blogs and a torrent search engine.  Mike Masnick of TechDirt had some very strong opinions about the procedure that went into these seizures. 

While limiting his comments to the seizure of the music blogs, he pointed out the extreme involvement of the RIAA and other industry organizations in the seizure.  He noted that ICE simply downloaded 5 songs from one of the blogs, presented them to an individual at the RIAA, and asked “was this download authorized?”  When the RIAA’s response was “no,” this was taken as the sole and exclusive evidence of infringement. 

This is important because there are a number of ways the blogs may have received the content.  Further, the blogger may have reasonably expected that the release was authorized by the rights owner.  Many artists and their promoters routinely send bloggers copies of their material, fully expecting that the blogger will release the material.  This expectation is based on the nature blog itself, and not on any infringing intent.  As a result, the lack of thought that went into the ICE seizure, and paucity of judicial oversight, is a disturbing development. 

It seems reasonable to me that a blogger who receives a copy of song from a promoter, or an artist, should be entitled to believe that release is authorized.  It should not be the blogger’s obligation to sort through the tangle of ownership rights often inherent in that type of intellectual property.  Rather, it should be incumbent on the owner of the rights themselves to ensure that their employees or agents – the promoter and artist – do not act against their interest.  Indeed it is suspicious that the rights owners would target the distributor, knowing full well that both they, and their agents, benefit mightily from the distribution of the material to the blogger.

Interestingly Samantha Murphy, a singer, songwriter, and music blogger, knew about this potential issue.  She pointed out that record promoters likely know that they are encouraging infringement when they provide bloggers with material.  Prior to releasing that type of material on her blog, Ms. Murphy requires the promoter to sign a release.  Many times the promoter refuses to return the release, indicating that they know that the release of the material by Ms. Murphy would infringe the rights owner’s copyright.

by David Snead - Thursday, January 6, 2011

I spoke on cloud contract issues at the Storage track of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and have stayed on to attend some of the educational sessions that have followed.

This morning I attended a panel on “Accelerating Global Innovation:  From Rhetoric to Results.”    Based on the time spent by the panelists, there are two big topics that hamper U.S. innovation:  human capital issues and regulatory reform.

The largest human capital issue involves including non-U.S. individuals in the tech economy, and providing them with the ability to succeed in the U.S.  The panelists focused on two sub-issues:  immigration reform and K through 12 education.  While there wasn’t much agreement on what can be done in the educational space, the panelists agreed that there was a need to focus on aspects of immigration reform. 

Brad Feld of the Foundry Group pointed out that it is very difficult for someone who is not a U.S. citizen to be an entrepreneur in the U.S.  Lesa Mitchell of the Kauffman Foundation agreed and pointed out that there is significant statistical evidence that first generation immigrants create a significant number of jobs.  Michael Petricone of the CEA echoed this and provided the statistic that 60% of startups in Silicon Valley are created by new or second generation immigrants each year.  He pointed out that today’s entrepreneur doesn’t HAVE to come to the U.S., he can shop around between the U.S. and other countries.  This led to a great discussion about the need to disentangle the human capital immigration issue from the controversial immigration issues.

The panelists then tackled regulatory reform.  The panelists disagreed on where to place emphasis.  There were two sides to this debate:  those who focused on restricting the ability of federal agencies to regulate, and those who felt a focus on the effects of regulation was more appropriate. 

Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute took the first position.  He feels that there is a need to recognize that the regulatory side of what comes out of Washington deserves the same amount of scrutiny as the taxing and spending side does.  He would like to require Congressional approval of “major regulations” including net neutrality, or impose a freeze on regulation altogether.  He stated that there are over 4,000 rules coming out each year.  These rules push over half the federal budget each year.  If Congress were required to approve “major” regulations, say those involving an expense of $100 million or more.  His view is that only about 100 rules would be affected by that. 

Ms. Mitchell took a different view.  She pointed out that it depends on what vertical you exist in, and what industry.  A freeze or a dollar threshold is a “one size fits all” answer to the regulatory reform issue.  She believes that how a regulation is implemented may be more important than the regulation itself.  Rey Ramsey of TechNet, bridged the gap between the two stating that even if you could create a perfect world, Congress still needs to exercise oversight and make sure that legislative intent is fulfilled.

What I came away from the panel with was the impression that there is a significant disconnect between the Oracles of the world, and the SME tech industry.  Larger companies tend to have the ability to focus on issues like Congressional regulatory reform.  While SME tech companies may have a stronger interest in keeping a large company from using their clout to claim a license in an open source software program, or who need one key employee from outside of the U.S.

by Stacy Griggs - Tuesday, January 4, 2011

SAS70 Type II Audits have become a requirement for high quality hosting, cloud computing and colocation companies over the last several years.  Unfortunately, SAS70 Audits are inherently flawed because the audited controls were determined by the company being audited.  So the usefulness of SAS70 audits varies tremendously based on how many controls are audited and how topical these controls are to the organization’s customers.  Standards for Attestation Engagements (SSAE), number 16 (SSAE16 for short) was developed by The Auditing Standards Board (ASB) of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) (wow these guys love acronyms) to help rectify these issues. 

What’s New?

SSAE16 implements two additional areas of control over the SAS70 audit.  The first are controls based on the organization’s “system”, the system includes a description of the services provided, plus the supporting processes, policies, procedures, personnel and operational activities that constitute the primary activities of the organization.  This information was often absent for SAS70 audits since organizations individually selected which areas were audited.  The second major difference is the SSAE16 requires a written management attestation that these controls have been implemented effectively and are used to manage the organization.

My Take

Overall these are positive and needed changes for a system that included too much wiggle room for individual service providers.  The best case scenario would be to have specific control templates for each type of managed services company.  So cloud computing or colocation companies would be all audited on the same common set of organizational controls allowing a true head-to-head-comparison of the effectiveness of an organization.  Since SSAE16 does not become effective until June 15, 2011 I expect it will be mid-2012 before we start to see a rush of press releases from newly certified SSAE16 hosting companies.  But this is a big step in the right direction.

CODA

Thanks to Jeff Uphues my new colleague from Cbeyond for pointing this out, I am always looking for good material for my blog.

by Lou Honick - Monday, January 3, 2011

So, how can you prevent chargebacks and make sure you get funded properly for every transaction?  Fraud prevention is essential.  It starts with making sure your order form is secure and uses CAPTCHA to prevent automated entries.  You also need to use AVS (at least a zipcode match) with every transaction.  Those are the basics.  Beyond that, you should look at the IP address placing online orders.  If it is a non-US IP address with a US based physical address, that is an immediate red flag. 

It is helpful to match the IP address of the end user to the state they are ordering from, but as we all know, that doesn’t always match.  Most companies that successfully mitigate fraud implement a scoring system to determine whether or not a transaction can be automatically processed.  If you have large tickets (i.e. dedicated servers) then you can and should probably put more scrutiny on each transaction.  If you have smaller tickets (i.e. domains, shared hosting) then it gets harder to stay on top of these without a good system, particularly when volume is high.  

As I know from being in the business, we don’t want to miss a valid transaction just to prevent fraud.  Instead of declining the transactions it is good practice to accept them and to have a live person follow up.  Probably the most important part of any fraud screening process is to have a person assigned to auditing new accounts.  There are some things a live person can identify in a screening process that a computer might miss.  Not only will that help reduce fraud, but it can help improve your automated processes.  I don’t know how many times, for whatever reason, fraudsters put “do the needful” in the comments field of a bogus order, but odd comments were certainly a strong indicator of fraud.  A good analyst can help you identify these patterns, keeping chargebacks to a minimum while maximizing your acceptance rate of legitimate orders.  Your merchant services provider can help analyze your transactions and work with you to develop a strategy to reduce fraud.  If they can’t or won’t do that, well, I know one that will.

Happy New Year to everyone and I hope it is a prosperous 2011 for you.  For all the readers that left me voicemails over the holiday regarding my offer in my last blog post, thanks for the call and I’m working through them as quickly as possible (more than I expected).  Also, I’m sure you all read about the interesting Goldman Sachs investment in Facebook today.  I’d like to point out that I’m not a big enough fish in their pond to get access to that investment, although they did tell me that as an exclusive perk I’m welcome to use Facebook any time I’d like.

by Stacy Griggs - Monday, January 3, 2011

Commtouch recently released an interesting study denoting a 30% decline in SPAM activity in Q4.  With the improvements (and proliferation) of consumer SPAM detection tools, as well as the blacklisting of IP space by organizations like  Spamhaus and SpamCop, I believe that SPAM may be starting a much-welcomed death spiral.  Don’t get me wrong SPAM will always be around, but I think it will be much less prolific in the future.  SPAM has been a problem for the web hosting industry since the beginning, in recent years the growth of SPAM has reached epidemic status.  While SPAM is inconvenient for consumers, it’s expensive for web hosting companies and IT departments.  According to Ferris Research the worldwide cost of SPAM was $130B in 2009 (the bulk of this number is lost productivity).  Roughly 15% of these costs are the IT costs associated with fighting SPAM.  That’s $19.5 billion dollars spent annually by hosting companies and IT departments to combat SPAM.  Less SPAM is a welcomed and financially positive trend for the web hosting industry. 

The real question is why is SPAM dying now?  I believe the “death” of SPAM can be attributed to three main factors.  First IPv4 space is more valuable than ever, the few rogue hosting companies that specialize in SPAM have been cut off from getting additional inventory and the inventory they have is effectively sullied by its past activity.  Second, increased regulatory pressure and criminal prosecution have taken some of the large players out of the industry.  Finally, the vast majority of spammers are doing this to make a profit; increasingly these profits are no longer easily achieved.  Think about it… with today’s technology we no longer see SPAM in our inbox, the few that do get through are almost completely ineffective, where’s the profit in that?  I believe spammers are largely moving to other more profitable nefarious activities, which will present a new set of challenges for the web hosting industry.

by WHIR Happenings - Thursday, December 30, 2010

We thought we owed it to the title sponsors and give you all a better idea of who is buying your drinks at 2011 at WHIR Networking Events - which, by the way, you can RSVP to now in advance here.

Afilias

Afilias were a regular supporter of WHIR Events in 2010, sponsoring half of them. 

As a domain registry and DNS service provider, Afilias acquired the .mobi domain registry dotMobi earlier in 2010, hosted the .INFO awards (including WHIR editor Liam Eagle as a judge) and were also groundbreaking this year in producing the first public demonstration of an email message between two internationalized email addresses in the Arabic language, using Afilias’s new IDN email technology and the IDN TLD from the .jo registry.

Keep an eye out for John Kane, VP Corporate Services at Afilias, who has so far attended almost of all of the events they’ve sponsored so far. He’s quite tall and easy to find.

Parallels

After only a handful of event sponsorships over the last few years, we were thrilled to bring Parallels – a long time WHIR supporter and leading software vendor to the hosting industry – on board as a title sponsor for next year’s events.

This is an exciting time for a Parallels, no doubt, on the heels of their long anticipated Plesk Panel 10 release in early November and the annual 2011 Parallels Summit just around the corner in February next year.

We expect Jon McCarrick, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Parallels, to be at a lot of the events next year.  And if he’s not, just scan the room for red shirts to find another Parallels team member.

RioRey

RioRey have been regular attendees of WHIR Events throughout 2010, so we were pleased as punch when they signed on to throw their weight behind all the 2011 WHIR Networking Events.

RioRey is a hardware company that is in the business of dedicated DDoS protection. They tout that regardless of your network size, architecture or demands, RioRey have the solutions you need to effectively defend against the threat of DDoS.

Keep an eye out for Dan Vertrees from RioRey at WHIR Events next year.  If you’ve been to any of our 2010 events, chances are you’ve already met him. 

e-OnlineData

Our final WHIR title sponsor just signed up before the holidays. We’re pleased to announce e-OnlineData as the 4th title sponsor of WHIR Events in 2011.

Another regular attendee of WHIR Events, e-OnlineData round out a nice selection of sponsors as a leader in online payment processing for ISPs and web hosts.

Marci Gagnon, Director of e-OnlineData, has been a regular attendee of WHIR Events in 2010 and we hope to see her at all of the events again next year.

WHIR Networking Events 2011 Schedule

Los Angeles, CA – 01/20/2011

Dallas, TX – 02/17/2011

New York, NY – 03/10/2011

Chicago, IL – 04/28/2011

Toronto, ON – 05/19/2011

Atlanta, GA – 06/16/2011

Montreal, QC – 07/21/2011

Scottsdale, AZ – 09/22/2011

Washington DC – 10/20/2011

Houston, TX – 11/10/2011

RSVP to WHIR Networking Events today to ensure your spot at the hottest events in the web hosting industry.