As a frequent conference attendee, I hear this keynote often.  In other conferences the keynote has been entitled, alternately, “How to compete with 1and1 and Microsoft,” “Withstanding the entry of the giants,” and so on, and so forth.  Depending on the audience, the theme always seems to be “specialization and customization”

I wonder, honestly, how specialized and customized companies can get and still make money.  Early on in my practice, one of my clients had the idea of creating different brands for different segments of the hosting market.  The CEO called this the ...

Possibly you have seen the TV drama NUMB3RS (CBS Friday) and met Charlie Eppes. He is that ex-child prodigy that riddles off obscure math theories and saves the day for the FBI and that guy from Northern Exposure.  There is always an algorithm in the mix, you know the stuff you and I write in the mist on the shower door.

Enter stage left is Julie Bellancam a real life Charlie Epps, but in the guise of a mild mannered MIT grad. That Julie Bellanca the Product Design Director for Cleversafe. Julie Bellanca  the articulate, intriguing and driving force leading a Cleversafe team of almost 40 (probably also MIT grads) that have written some great algorithms that may have the chance to reinvent the data center industry

She actually used the word “slice and dice data”……when she told me “Our technology, called Information Dispersal, works similarly to TCP/IP packets--that is, we store information on data slices, storing these slices on a network of local or remote servers. So, information is, well, dispersed.” Words actually from the website but it sound just like Julie.

So what is the big deal? This is how I understand the magic…Lets say you are a data storage firm and have three big data centers (you don’t have to be big but I like big number3s). These three data centers each have 33,334 servers. You own 100,002 servers. 50,001 of ...

The article by Guy Masono I’ve referred to in the past describes the last two of the 4Ts as Transact and Track. I’m going to discuss in more detail what I believe these two mean for your marketing campaign.

Transact, Masono writes, “refers to opening a two-way communication with customers and prospects based on the nature of an inquiry.” For example, your website has a lead-generating form that visitors may fill out in order to receive more information about a product or service.

The “communication” results when you or one of your employees replies to that inquiry. How quickly do you respond? Do you respond with an automated e-mail reply? With a phone call? If you don’t hear back from the customer, do you respond again? If so, how? With another phone call? With more information sent via e-mail.

Follow-up is key. It really is more than key – it is critical. Do your salespeople know what your marketing department is doing so that they may respond appropriately when a marketing campaign begins? Does your fulfillment manager have the tools, ...

I know of two more tools for analyzing web site traffic - Google Analytics and Alexa. With Google Analytics, the site owner puts a script (provided by Google) in each web page to be analyzed. The script sends Google the visitors data for analysis (hence "Thinking outside the box"). Alexa takes an "Outside looking in" approach - PC users install the Alexa Toolbar, which collects data on their browsing habits. Alexa then uses this data to estimate the number of users that go to each site.

Google Analytics offers a granular view of site traffic, how/where it originates (searches, referrals or direct visits). Reports show what visitors are doing when they come to the site. All a site owner needs to do is open a Google account and paste the script in the pages (I included the script in PmWiki's CSS file's header section).  Google Analytics offers free, powerful reporting features, which can be accessed on line, or emailed at preset times to selected individuals. This service is a win-win to both user and Google. I get an incredible amount of data on my users without spending a cent, and Google gets first hand user data, which they can use for world domination.

Alexa approach is to track where people who have installed the Alexa tool bar application are surfing. From this data, Alexa can tell how visits to your site rank relative to other sites, or ...

Customer support is undoubtedly a topic in our industry people can get very passionate, dare I say, "fanatical" about.

So when a company, like Bobcares, dedicates its entire business to providing outsourced support as a service - and currently boasts a clientele of over 3.5 million websites - passionate could arguably be seen as somewhat of an understatement.

Serving the hosting industry for almost a decade, Bobcares says it offers support plans for dedicated administration facility, server administration plans, helpdesk plans and telephone support plans.

WHIRtv recently caught up with Amarjyoti Krishnan, co-founder of Bobcares, and gained some insight into the philosophy behind the service and where he envisions the company going in the next few years.

Virtual private data centers, or VPDCs, are a new paradigm for data centers that we've been hearing quite a bit about in North America through companies like Layered Technologies and 3Tera.

In Europe, Q-layer has been offering a fully virtual private data center since 2005, enabling service providers to compete with next generation hosting offerings such as Amazon S3 and EC2, using the private virtual datacenter concept: utility-based provisioning and billing based on actual usage.

WHIRtv recently spoke to Niko Nelissen, VP of business development and co-founder of Q-layer, and gained some insight into his company's vision with VPDCs.

So I've been reading and trying to keep up with what's going on with Sun and MySQL these last couple of months.  Seems like this has the potential to become another fantastic open source project that is moving towards closing some of it's source (some of the most wonderful parts of it's source).  While this has ovbious consequences, it also shows potential for much needed growth.  While we may loose some of the most wonderful things about MySQL availabe to us now as an open-source project, we very well may see some fantastic developments in how databases work and what we can do with them.

Personally, I'm not a huge fan of closing the source on a project like this, but I'm also a fan of progress (a term used very loosely in mixed company such as this ;-) ), however there are a number of good things we may see.  Remember many of the applications (email, shopping carts, groupware colaboration and most anything with advanced dynamic content) rely heavily on a relational database for the backend to work.  While we have a couple of other open source projects to use for this, none are as popular as MySQL.

Just some stuff off of the top of my head for now.

jb 

The folks at Peer 1 are at it again and as noted earlier this week in theWHIR News they have added a $10,000 contest to make things even more interesting.

Episode 2 of the "Growing Pains" video series is also humorous although not as funny as the first episode I must say. What I would have loved to see is a quick recap of the first episode at the beginning to refresh my memory.

To win the $10,000 grand prize which consists of 12 months of managed hosting at PEER 1 ($6,500 value), an Apple MacBook Pro 15-inch 2.5 GHz Laptop (approximate value $2,500) and a Sony HD Camcorder HDRSR10 (approximate value $1,000) you would need to upload your short video and share your web hosting growing pains, funny dealings in running your online business or troubles in getting it off the ground. If you video is selected you could be a winner.

I have noticed that folks in the Web hosting industry tend to be a little shy so I do hope to see some interesting and laugh out loud funny video entries. Good Luck to one and all and let us know if you submit a video, theWHIR readers would love to give you a preliminary review.

What do you think of this "Growing Pains" episode?