SOPA/PIPA Update: We are Winning!

Today PIPA was dealt a crushing blow when Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) pulled his planned cloture vote on the bill, agreeing to go back to the drawing board. The original vote was planned for Tuesday, Jan 24, but today he announced “In light of recent events, I have decided to postpone Tuesday’s vote on the PROTECT I.P. Act.” In a later statement, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) said his committee wouldn’t take up SOPA until “there is wider agreement on a solution.” “I have heard from the critics and I take seriously their concerns regarding proposed legislation to address the problem of online piracy.” “It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products.”

This shows huge positive progress on both PIPA & SOPA!

The fight isn’t over. These bills are not dead, they’re just not coming up for a vote right now.  But that doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate our remarkable accomplishment! Read more

What I Learned at CES: PIPA is the New SOPA

SOPA seems to be breathing its last!  Although Rep. Smith has indicated that he’ll remove the controversial DNS blocking provisions of the bill, we’ve heard that the bill is so poisoned, hearings won’t resume, essentially killing the bill.  That’s a huge victory for the Internet industry. This bill had big money interests behind it, and we in the Internet community were outspent to a ridiculous degree — but at the end of the day our voices were heard. Victory, right?

 

Not so fast! Read more

SOPA, PIPA & CES: First Reactions

I just arrived back in Virginia after three days at International CES in Las Vegas, where I was spreading the word about the dangers of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) on behalf of the Internet industry.

I had the opportunity to speak in front of large audiences about PIPA and SOPA, and I believe that our message resonated. Along with many other key legislative and industry stakeholders, I was able to meet with Senator Ron Wyden and Rep. Darrell Issa — and I got to engage in a lively and spirited debate with a Director from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

I have stories to tell, insights to share, and legislative updates to pass along. I’m in the middle of a few “catch-up” items of business back at the ServInt ranch, but I hope to get everybody a detailed CES report on Monday.  Please check back then, and thanks for your support!

Christian Dawson is the Chief Operating Officer of ServInt.

Hosting for the Holidays

With the holidays upon us, I thought I’d step back a moment from our insight-heavy “actionable intelligence” and ponder the season and our place in it.

The holidays are a busy time for all of us. Whether it’s buying presents and visiting relatives, or getting those end-of-year projects complete at home and at work, it’s definitely a time of high stress and manic energy.

But in the midst of the holiday shopping season with its black Fridays and no payments until the new year, the spirit of the season can get lost pretty quick.

That’s why I’m so happy to be working in an industry that doesn’t have to capitalize on the season the way so many businesses must. Hosting is not an impulse buy. It’s a long, thoughtful decision process—especially at the high end of the hosting market where ServInt lives. So, no matter what time of year it is, buy-now short-term advertising gimmickry really has a very small potential impact on our sales. And that’s not the kind of company we are anyway. Read more

What is SOPA and PIPA?

I just finished listening to 12+ hours of day one of the House Judiciary Committee Markup of H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and I have the scars to prove it. It was a brutal day of legislating. Four Congressmen, Reps. Issa, Lofgren, Polis and Chaffetz, stood out as having a firm grasp on the Internet and its complexities, and spoke eloquently about the dangers of SOPA. They weren’t being listened to by the Chairman, who is intent on bringing this dangerous, job-killing, security-killing, and frankly terrible bill to the House floor.

At the same time, I got to announce that the Save Hosting Coalition sent a letter to the Senate—signed by 275 Internet executives—opposing PIPA, with a similar letter on its way opposing SOPA. Both of these letters were huge accomplishments for a normally fragmented industry.

In the wake of all that, I wanted to get back to basics and try to give you an easy-to-understand overview of what SOPA is, where it is, why you should care and what you should do to stop it from becoming law. I tried to make it “non-technical” so if you are reading this and you are technical, pass it along to your friends who aren’t, but want to better understand the threats at hand.

Our story begins… Read more

SOPA, PIPA and the Fight to Save the Internet

Yesterday I got to be part of something huge. I spent the day on Capitol Hill as an advocate for small business on the Internet, and met with Congressmen and Hill staffers to discuss the impact of two pieces of legislation currently making their way through Congress: the PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House. And today I get to report huge progress in our fight to protect a fair, competitive Internet in America.

As the story is always told, it’s impossible to beat big money in politics, and SOPA and PIPA are most definitely backed by big money — very big money. But with no funding whatsoever, we have been able to get our message across, and we’ve been able to bounce a few painful rocks off of Goliath’s noggin on this one. He hasn’t fallen over yet, but we managed to get him reeling a little.  For those who want the breaking news, I’ll cut to the chase right away.

The status of PIPA, as of yesterday, was that it was likely to pass in the Senate if it were allowed to come up for a vote, but that Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon was holding it up through procedural means, something he couldn’t keep up alone forever. Yesterday, among the people we addressed were Senator Jerry Moran (R – KS) and senior staffers for Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA). We explained our major concerns about what PIPA would do to the Internet economy. Sen. Moran was a former sponsor of PIPA, but he listened intently to our concerns. Today I am extremely proud to announce that Moran, Cantwell — as well as Senator Rand Paul (R – KY) — have issued a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid joining Ron Wyden in his hold on allowing PIPA to come to a vote in the Senate. That doesn’t end our battle, but it is a huge bipartisan step in the right direction!

Read more

Desert Bus for Hope Charity Event

November is in full swing and that means that once again it’s time for the annual Desert Bus for Hope charity gaming marathon. I genuinely look forward to this event all year!

Our friends at the sketch comedy group LoadingReadyRun created this event back in 2007 to raise money for Child’s Play, a charity that donates toys and games to children’s hospitals. Every year since it’s gotten bigger and bigger, and I’m thrilled at the role ServInt gets to play in it.

The gaming marathon centers around playing Desert Bus, a mini game within Penn and Teller’s unreleased 1995 Sega game, Smoke and Mirrors. Marathon gamers play the intentionally cruel and inane game in which players simply drive a bus from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas in real time, on a perfectly straight highway, with no passengers or other traffic, at 45 miles per hour.

Read more

Customer Service in Hosting, Part 2: The Scope of “Support”

In the world of hosting customer support, “supported software and applications” is a phrase on the minds of many potential—and current—customers. Does my host support the software I am running on my server? Will they help me if it’s not working?

Truly supporting applications doesn’t simply mean supporting the software itself, though. It means managing the complex interaction between disparate software. This is way more important than any simple list of software that a web host can back away from in a pinch.

Let me give you an example: A lot of our customers use WordPress. At our suggestion, many of them install a caching plugin such as WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache. Caching engines basically optimize server requests—decreasing the time it takes a page to load—on websites high in dynamic content by serving up flat data that looks dynamic. In our example, the client is running WordPress with WP Super Cache installed. So far, so good!

A few months after initial setup, the customer sees his traffic increasing, slowing down the server. He reads independently about the benefits of the PHP caching software APC and installs it himself. Not only does the site not get any faster, but it is now throwing up fatal errors left and right. So what happened?

In this case, the client didn’t realize that the default configuration for WP Super Cache does not interact with APC. He needed to configure both of these caching engines to work together. Also, months ago, he was worried about his PHP code being stolen so he installed Zend Optimizer, not knowing that APC and Zend Optimizer are completely incompatible. We’re now talking about the interaction of four pieces of software and how they work together and against one another on a server.

So: what’s ServInt’s responsibility here?  Who “owns” the problem?

Read more

LEED versus PUE

At ServInt, we take our commitment to the environment very seriously. If you read the ServInt Source you’ve seen me periodically write on our green initiatives, and I am happy to report that some of the efforts our industry is making seem to be having a positive effect. EPA predictions of data center power usage made back in 2007 have not come to pass. This is in no small part due to increased efficiencies in data centers and server technology.

It is perfectly reasonable for people to be skeptical of green initiatives in data centers. The phrase “lipstick on a pig” is practically custom-built to describe data center efficiency initiatives. Energy consumption is a growing environmental and geopolitical problem, and data centers just plain use an incredible amount of energy. But let’s get real – if something new gets built these days and it creates jobs and commerce around it, the chances are good that it’s either Internet based or has a large Internet component. That requires infrastructure. And for those of you thinking that ‘the cloud’ is going to solve all that I hate to burst your bubble, but ‘the cloud’ is still computers plugged into power outlets living in a datacenter, just like before. And an incredible number of additional computers are getting added every second.

So since data centers aren’t going anywhere and are just getting bigger, it’s better that infrastructure folks focus on efficiency and on doing what they can to make their footprint as small as possible. But how do customers know their servers are housed and powered in facilities as Green as hosting providers promise?

When people think of green initiatives in data centers within the United States they usually think of the LEED program, run by the U.S. Green Building Council.  LEED stands for “Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design”. The USGBC people who run LEED have done a great job of getting their names out there, and you see a lot of building projects these days that tout Silver, Gold & Platinum LEED building projects.

USGPC does some great work, but people have started using LEED certification as shorthand for whether data centers are ‘green’ or not, and that’s really a mistake.  LEED programs have historically only certified new construction. So if you’re building a brand new data center, LEED is great and provides a set of guidelines to aspire to, but if your servers are housed in a facility that was retrofitted as data center space—as many data centers are—then LEED certification does not apply. USGBC is trying to fix this with their LEED for Existing Buildings rating system, but LEED-EB only works for certain types of buildings and ends up being—along with LEED as well—fairly process- rather than results-oriented.

Simply put, LEED is a set of green building best practices, but does not measure the actual environmental impact of the data center after it is up and running. That’s why I don’t tend to pay attention to LEED, as cool as it is. Instead I go straight to the PUE number for a data center space and the efforts taken to lower that number.

PUE stands for Power Usage Effectiveness and was developed by an organization called The Green Grid.

PUE is a results-oriented metric that quantifies how efficient a data center is when it comes to cooling and infrastructure. And aside from the electricity used directly to run the servers, when we’re talking about power usage in a data center, we’re talking about cooling.

We get asked whether we’re LEED certified in our data centers. We’re not, simply because our data centers are housed in facilities that predate LEED. But a good PUE-optimized data center in a repurposed building can trump a Gold certified datacenter if it’s done right. This is part of the reason we have partnered with Coresite for our main private data center builds in Northern Virginia, DC, and LA. Every Coresite facility maintains a low PUE number with some as low as 1.3.

There’s nothing wrong with LEED, it just doesn’t measure everybody. And it’s an indicator of process, not results. For results you need to ask about PUE.

Photo by Wonderlane

Privacy, Public Policy, and the Future of Hosting

Editor’s Note: In advance of his appearance at HostingCon 2011 our COO, Christian Dawson, today published the following blog post on the HostingCon blog. If after reading, you want to learn more and find yourself in the San Diego area on Monday August 8th, use the discount code “AssociationPlanMonday” to register for HostingCon and receive $60 off either a full conference pass (with or without lunch) or $60 off a single day pass for Monday. Hope to see you there.

The hosting industry in the United States, and the security of private data in general, is under threat. Legislation that is making its way through Congress represents a sea change in the way our government has regulated data in our country. HR 1981 – for instance – would dramatically increase the logging and data retention rules for hosting companies, allowing the government access to the online habits of countless Americans.

The status quo up to this moment is represented by 1998′s Digital Millennium Copyright Act and 1996′s Communications Decency Act, which are not without problems, but which have been generally very beneficial for our industry.  Throughout its history the hosting industry has mostly been allowed to operate under fairly business-friendly legislation, including of course 1998′s Internet Tax Freedom Act, which is up for renewal in 2014.

It’s easy to see how lucky we were to have had Internet legislation forged in a period where lawmakers saw the tremendous potential of the Internet economy and were able to develop pro-Internet business policies to foster and protect the industries that were propping it up and giving the Internet economy life. Lawmakers didn’t sit down with hosting providers, but they were careful not to over-regulate the industry, likely out of fear that if they did the Internet would never realize its great potential.

Fast forward to today and you can see that the landscape has changed. What do most people think of when they think of the Internet? They think of Amazon, Facebook and Google and companies like that – hardly the small mom-and-pop that needs to be protected from over-regulation. And indeed today we are older and wiser about the real threats that the Internet poses regarding security, privacy and the management of intellectual property. It isn’t 1996 or 1998 anymore.

But the hosting industry isn’t made up of Googles and Facebooks, it’s made up of small to medium service businesses.  So as new bills hit the floor of Congress, such as last year’s net neutrality bills or this year’s PROTECT IP bill, we need to start getting worried – because we have no voice at the table.

S 968, the so-called PROTECT-IP Act, contains Safe Harbor provisions for the credit card and advertising industries, but no Safe Harbor for hosts. This means that even if hosts do comply with the provisions of the bill, they still may be sued. Further, the bill uses words like ‘expeditiously’ that are so open to interpretation they are simply invitations to litigation. And other bills, primarily security breach bills, don’t take into account the hosting industry at all, and as a result create regulatory gaps that will likely lead to significant confusion about enforcement and enforcement targets.

Those of us in leadership positions within the web hosting industry must come together and find ways to make our voices heard, or we will have only ourselves to blame when legislation gets passed that destroys our businesses.

But could that really happen? All we really need to do is look at what has happened already, both here and in other countries.

In the United Kingdom web hosts actually have a solid collective voice in the public affairs arm of the London Internet Exchange, or LINX. When Parliament implemented the Data Retention (EC Directive) Regulations of 2007, they used their collective voice to explain what role the hosting community could play in the government’s data retention efforts without setting a prohibitively expensive bar to providing hosting services within the UK. The law as originally written could have put most web hosts out of business. Not only were the web hosters able to help walk back an untenable piece of legislation, but their success in doing so is being used to shape the EU’s efforts in data retention as well.

It’s not hard to see government regulation coming in and resetting the bar so that only those with deep pockets could fund a web hosting operation. I’m not saying we’ll end up with a hosting landscape that looks like Australia’s broadband market with Telstra at the top and everybody else regulated out of existence, but we do need to be careful. Cloud in particular has lots of lawmakers worried, especially because it promises to untether data even from a physical location. One reaction is likely to be regulation designed to foster data protection.

While there’s definitely a need to talk about data protection or even data retention in a legal context, I’m afraid those charged with the task of regulating our industry simply don’t understand us well enough to do so. That’s why I firmly believe that we need to come together with a collective voice so that we can weigh in on these issues that will so greatly affect us.

I’ve been in the hosting industry for well over a dozen years now, and I’ve been a vocal public advocate for and against various pieces of legislation in the past. This year, I had the honor of being asked to testify on Capitol Hill. Google invited me to come and speak out against the proposed COICA law that was then making it’s way through Congress. I was sadly unable to attend, but for a moment I was pleased that somebody was out there advocating on our behalf.

But here’s the thing – big guys like Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon have their advocates lobbying Congress. Their voice is being heard. What happens when their business interests don’t align with ours? And what will come of that?

From August 8th through August 10th the web hosting industry will have its big yearly conference down in San Diego – HostingCon. On Monday, August 8^th at 10:00 AM I will be moderating a panel discussion, “Small Business & Big Government: Public Policy and the Hosting Industry.” We will be discussing public policy and the future not only of the hosting industry but of the freedom of content on the Internet.

I am excited to have 3 fantastic panelists who will join me for what I think will be an enlightening hour for all attendees:

David McClure – President of the US Internet Industry Association
Suzy Fulton – General Counsel for Softlayer
Abigail Phillips – Senior Staff Attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation

These people know the threats that are in front of us, and it should be a great talk.

Directly following the panel discussion, I will be facilitating an open discussion in a meeting we’re calling “Help Found A Hosting Industry Association” at noon. This will be the start of the ‘Save Hosting’ movement, an idea that I look forward to debuting there at the show.

We’ve already seen a ton of early interest in this meeting, and I hope that everybody will show up and join the initial working group to get things off the ground.

The hosting industry is important. It is one of the most overlooked engines for our global economy, driving business productivity and visibility. But we’re invisible right now on a national political stage. That’s why I think the time is right for a hosting industry association to make sure that we don’t become victims of the continued growth of the Internet economy as others with deep pockets step in to make sure their voices are heard.

So what hosting providers should do, honestly, is come to my panel at 10 on Monday, August 8th at HostingCon and then to the working group later that day at noon. Get involved and help us get this started. I hope to see you there.

-Christian

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