On the WordPress Outage

When I walked into the office today, my various RSS feeds, Twitter apps, and news aggregators were lit up with news of WordPress.com’s outage.

Now, we’ve made our position on the viability of free platforms known before. They’re great if you’re just goofing around, but they’re not so great if you’re trying to make a living. WordPress.com hosts millions of blogs, the vast majority of them being relatively simple “Here’s what I’m having for lunch” fare, and that’s absolutely fine.

However, they host lots of popular blogs and they have a VIP program with some pretty big names including TechCrunch, GigaOM, and a couple of CNN’s blogs. Those are sites that have a lot of users counting on them and WordPress made them look really bad today. With almost no outward communication other than a cheeky 404 page, a lot of businesses were in the dark about why their sites were down.

Outages happen, we get that, and we certainly don’t fault WordPress.com or Matt (Mullenweg, WordPress founder) for what happened without knowing more details. We love WordPress at ServInt – we use WordPress software right here on this blog – and we truly appreciate their contributions to open source. WordPress does not, to my knowledge, have any sort of issue with recurring outages. By and large, they have been extraordinarily successful, historically stable, and until last night their millions of users were probably 100% happy.

But, this outage is yet another example of the danger small businesses have when they rely purely on free services, and it’s also further proof that many of these services simply don’t understand the need for urgency in keeping their users informed. I understand not wanting to jump the gun and announce speculative or preliminary information, but the fact that really nothing was said is troubling.

I know this is going to sound incredibly cheesy but it’s true; ServInt has nothing but VIP clients.

Because we’re accountable to each and every one of our customers, and because we have an exchange of goods and an associated Service Level Agreement, we have a vested personal and financial interest in ensuring that you stay up as close to 100% of the time as is physically possible. As a result, our VPS and SuperVPS platform has an average of five 9′s of uptime (99.999%). We’re not perfect – those five 9′s aren’t a 1 and two zero’s – but we do everything we can to get as close to perfection as possible.

ServInt already hosts incredibly popular blogs like Android and Me, Sports by Brooks, and The Mac Observer, just to name a few, so rest assured that this is an apples to apples comparison. This isn’t so much a criticism of WordPress as a company; after all they make a great product and are a tremendous benefit to the internet as a community. This is a larger critique of companies that treat hosting as little more than cheap, forgettable infrastructure. It’s like building a mansion on clay instead of concrete; you learn – quickly – that skimming costs off of your foundation is a bad idea.

People come to us so they can start small and grow. We’re a service company that manages the foundational infrastructure of the web. Because we do what we do so well, incredibly powerful and complex sites can grow and thrive, make lots of money, and spawn even more terrific sites. When a foundation is solid, success is contagious, WordPress as a platform is a great example of that. Their hosting infrastructure and communication, however, has room for improvement.

I don’t want this to sound vindictive, nor is my aim to “poach” customers or do some sort of “rescue” pitch to angry WordPress clients. Events like this make our industry look bad as a whole, and I’m saddened whenever a company as stellar as WordPress drops the ball.

When real hosts – people who know this business – have a catastrophic outage, they’re communicative, responsive, and as transparent as possible. Companies that take their hosting customers for granted quickly prove they have a lot to learn.

Think I’m way off base? Let me know in the comments, on Facebook, or on Twitter.

Follow Eric Morales on Twitter.

Introducing ServInt’s New Blog Server Line!

Yesterday we told you about SPORTSbyBROOKS, one of ServInt’s most popular blogging customers.

If you didn’t catch it, Brooks talked about the harrowing burst of traffic he experienced when he broke the infamous Tiger Woods story last November. After one phone call, ServInt built Brooks a custom solution that more than quintupled his previous resources, and we did it over Thanksgiving Day weekend!

So, needless to say, we have a great wealth of experience with high traffic blogs.

That’s why we’re excited to talk about our new Blog Server initiative! After consulting with our most popular blogging customers, we built the foundation of what we think will become the premiere blog servers in the world.

Our Blog Server line is a modification of our existing VPS, SuperVPS, and Solo Series products. They each feature the traditional LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack and come pre-loaded with cPanel/WHM. Most of the unique features of this line happen on the backend, making it even easier — not to mention faster — for us to upgrade VPS and SuperVPS customers with popular sites on the fly. This technology also allows us to further optimize the virtual environments on our Solo Series Dedicated servers which combine powerful Dedicated hardware with the flexibility of virtualization.

Because WordPress is the most popular blogging software in the world right now, we’ve rolled out our new line with WordPress in mind. New customers will receive a detailed, step by step instruction guide on getting set up with WordPress along with their server turn up information.

While WordPress is certainly the most popular application, it is by no means the only one. Our Blog Servers are fully compatible with competing software such as TypePad, and can also be loaded with apps like Drupal or Joomla should you prefer to grow your blog in a different direction.

The point is, the choice is yours. Try getting that level of flexibility from free blogs.

What we’d like to make clear with this announcement is that it is, at its core, a foundational addition to our products. ServInt’s Blog Server line is proof of our ongoing commitment to what we believe to be the future of news and opinion on the web, and we’re incredibly proud to be a part of that.

Check out ServInt.net/blog for more info!

Sinking A Birdie With Sports by Brooks: A ServInt Success Story

Generally speaking, sports reporting tends to focus on stats, facts, and predictions.

Sure, there are always exceptions. There are plenty of human interest stories on doping and cheating; but tune into ESPN at any given hour and you’re more likely to get a breakdown of a particular team’s performance than you are the juicy gossip behind the stars themselves.

So its no surprise that Brooks Melchoir, the man behind SPORTSbyBROOKS, found a lucrative niche in sports gossip reporting.

Like all of us, professional athletes have complex motivations for doing what they do, they straddle a line between performing for themselves and performing for the adulation of fans. Because they are so often larger than life, the mistakes they make tend to be larger than life, too.

So, when SPORTSbyBROOKS broke the now infamous Tiger Woods story over Thanksgiving weekend in November of last year, his already incredibly popular site was in trouble.

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3 Lessons We Can Learn from the Resurrection of Palm

If you follow the tech industry, it was hard to miss HP’s recent acquisition of Palm, Inc.

The Sunnyvale based smartphone maker was in serious trouble after its seemingly meteoric rise from a very similar grave in January of last year. Palm was on the ropes, its wonderful webOS platform overshadowed by ineffective marketing and distribution. The company’s audacious reentry into a space dominated by Google, RIM, and Apple seemed to be a lost cause.

Then HP, probably the most bland hardware manufacturer in the world, came to the rescue. The marriage of the two seems like the perfect solution, Palm will invigorate the stale HP brand with a fresh new mobile operating system that is light years ahead of HP’s own offerings, and HP provides the firm with the financial footing and market share to take some serious – and expensive – risks.

So what can small online businesses learn from this soap opera? Here are a few things that stuck out for me.

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The State of the Web According to Web 2.0 In San Francisco

Last week, myself and Christian were in San Francisco for O’Reilly Media’s famous Web 2.0 Conference.

There were some really compelling keynotes, fascinating panels, and the show floor, while small, did its job of showcasing the current focus of the tech industry. What I found most interesting was the seemingly laser-like focus the entire tech industry seemed to have on three key development priorities, and Web 2.0 showcased them handily.

After four days there, I have a few take-aways that I think do a good job of summarizing where today’s developers see the future of the web.

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ServInt: We Support Our Local Police!

A few days ago, ServInt made a donation to the Fairfax County Police Department as a token of our appreciation for all of their hard work. ServInt’s founder, Reed Caldwell, is the son of a police officer and has made respect and admiration for all public servants a part of what ServInt is culturally.

Perhaps more than anything else, ServInt is and has always been a people-driven company. From our ongoing efforts (see here, here, and here) to help those affected by the earthquake in Haiti, to our environmental work to further minimize our effect on climate change, we’re a company that cares about people.

How do you help out in your community? Let us know in the comments, on our Facebook page, and on Twitter!

What Do ServInt Employees Do For “Kicks”?

The image to the left is of a ServInt-sponsored soccer team, complete with ServInt T-shirts. The lovely lady upfront and to the left is none other than ServInt’s own Leslie Molina, our Controller (a bigger picture is available at the bottom of this post).

A lot of folks have an image of webhosting companies being filled with well-caffeinated geeks 24/7.

That image, while surprisingly accurate, isn’t the whole picture. Sure, we have a game room in our Northern Virginia headquarters, complete with a well equipped Denon and Polk audio system, a Sony PS3, and a Nintendo Wii with comfy couches for vegging out. The game room gives the support staff based out of that location a place to relax and unwind when they need to take a break and it gives us a great location for birthdays, anniversaries, and many other excuses to eat cake.

But cake or not, ServInt has made employee wellness a prime initiative company-wide since its founding in 1995. In order to promote a healthy lifestyle (and to help work off said cake), ServInt even offers bonuses to employees who hit the gym consistently over the course of a year!

We also support activities outside of work that promote the wellness our staff, the soccer team pictured above and below is a fine example of that. Here are a couple more great pictures of ServInt’s sponsored soccer team prepping before a game.

Got any work-sponsored extracurricular activities that rival ours? Let us know in the comments, on Facebook, or on Twitter!

ServInt Joins The Linux Foundation

Today, all of us at ServInt are proud to announce that we have become a Silver Member of the Linux Foundation.

For over 15 years, Linux and Open Source Software have been integral components of our products, services, and network. We’re fond of saying that both our products and culture are open source, and as such ServInt is a company that evolves alongside the Linux community, quietly breaking technological barriers every single day.

Our formal membership with the Linux Foundation underscores two key values all of us at ServInt hold dear:

• Our unwavering commitment to the advancement and adoption of open source software.
• A true spirit of community and partnership with our clients and partners.

You can expect the same great products and services that you’re used to from ServInt, and now you have further proof of our commitment to helping build a more open web.

For more information about the Linux Foundation, visit them here.

ServInt Announcement, Linux Foundation Announcement

The Living Room of Rock & Roll: A look Inside Swing House Studios

Editors Note: This is part of our ongoing series of customer profiles right here on the ServInt Source. Want to take part? Tell us your story!

At first glance, there don’t seem to be many parallels between sound recording and webhosting. Indeed, we thought the same thing before we visited Swing House Studios in Hollywood, CA earlier this year. But by the end of our visit, we walked away convinced that Swing House and ServInt were natural partners and we’re ecstatic to have them aboard.

For music recording studios like Swing House, and for webhosting companies like ServInt, relationships are the most critical part of our business. As Swing House founder and President Phil Jauriqui is fond of saying, “If Hollywood is the home of Rock & Roll, then Swing House is it’s living room.” It’s that sense of intimacy that makes them so compelling.

The studio is unpretentious and nonchalant, it knows it’s there to simply facilitate the creation of great music. Each rehearsal room looks and feels lived in. Littered with equipment and style, the facility feels like you’ve stepped into a copy of Rolling Stone Magazine.

With that being said, it’s not surprising that Swing House has recorded some of the biggest names in the business for over 16 years. Despite their esteemed clients like Nine Inch Nails, Ziggy Marley, and Ross Rubin, Swing House also welcomes artists just starting out. Artists from all over the world and from all walks of life have laid tracks there and the studio shows no signs of letting up. As we said in the profile on our homepage, Swing House is a company that lives, breathes, and bleeds rock and roll.

They don’t just confine themselves to the studio either. Whether they’re throwing amazing parties at South By Southwest or diving first hand into the Sunset Strip Music Festival in Hollywood, Swing House is first and foremost about music.

Anyway, the most striking thing about their facility is just how amazing it looks. Descriptions don’t do it justice so we snapped a few photos of their rehearsal rooms, sound stage, equipment, and even their intimidatingly cool entranceway!

Check out the gallery below, and take a look at their site, hosted by ServInt, here!

Sales. Evolved: Georator On Becoming a Web Retailer

Editors Note: This is part of our ongoing series of customer profiles right here on the ServInt Source. Want to take part? Tell us your story!

Here’s a quick lesson in electrical engineering that you should never attempt.

Take an old hair dryer from the U.S., preferably something pre-1985, and plug it into a Chinese power outlet. After a small explosion, you’ll have experienced the difference in international power grids first-hand.

While there are many reasons for this, one of the primary causes of these issues is related to the different voltage and frequency standards all over the world. In North America and Japan, 60hz is the norm, while in much of the rest of the world 50hz is the standard. Large ships such as naval vessels and cruise liners, commercial and military airplanes, and even some small research facilities use the 400hz frequency.

While that might not mean a lot to us end-users, it means a lot to the countries with different electrical frequencies that often produce electrical equipment for export. For example, how many of our consumer electronic products are made in China? Devices that convert one frequency into another are an important tool in the manufacturing process, helping manufacturers ensure the products they are making are safe to use and fully functional when they arrive at your friendly neighborhood electronics store.

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