I’m Headed to LinuxCon!
One of the best parts of my job is being able to go places and meet our partners, our peers and our clients face to face, be it in meetings or at conferences, speaking engagements and events.
It’s funny, despite how much closer the Internet brings us, sometimes the tech industry can seem oddly impersonal. Well, we take things personally at ServInt. Our customers come to us in search of a partner, someone who has genuine concern –and in some ways a vested interest — in their success.
After all, few things are as personal as one’s livelihood, and all of us at ServInt take our role in the lives of our clients seriously. Our service and our technology power thousands of businesses around the world. People trust us with the foundation of their day to day lives online and they expect us to take that role seriously.
That’s why I’m proud to be one of the public faces of ServInt. I’ve logged plenty of travel time under my belt to make sure that people know we’re a living, breathing group of caring and hardworking people.
Tomorrow I have a fun stack of meetings up in Boston at LinuxCon, which is run by our partners at The Linux Foundation.
If you’re in town and want to sit down and chat, let me know!
“Oh My God We’re All Gonna Die” – HostingCon 2010
A couple weeks back, I mentioned that I would be speaking at the HostingCon 2010 conference in Austin, TX. I also mentioned that I would post the presentation here for all to see after the conference and I want to make good on my word. The presentation is posted below (after the jump).
The title of my presentation is “Oh My God We’re All Gonna Die”. While the title is intentionally provocative, the message is, I think, pretty optimistic. Our industry is changing rapidly, while we’ll be forced to innovate and compete on a whole new scale, it will mean a leaner operation for businesses and better and more affordable services for end users.
Since there is no video of the presentation (sorry about that), I’ll try and sum it up as best as I can here.
My HostingCon Presentation: “Oh My God We’re All Gonna Die…”
As you may have heard, I’ll be speaking at HostingCon 2010 next week in balmy, beautiful, and weird Austin, TX. I love Austin and am really looking forward to mingling with friends and industry colleagues, but I thought I’d mention something about my presentation before I hopped on a plane to the Lone Star State.
The name of my presentation is:
“Oh My God We’re All Gonna Die: The Future of Webhosting…and What We Can Do About It.”
Now, I admit the title is a bit provocative, but I want to be clear that what I think is going to happen to our industry in the next few years will completely transform the landscape of the web.
What this presentation will spell out are what I believe to be the coming shifts in web hosting and web infrastructure in the next few years. Like the automotive industry more than a century ago, the web is a chaotic marketplace with competing platforms and standards.
Whether it’s Windows and Linux, WebM vs OGG vs H.264, or Open vs Proprietary, the movers and shakers on the web are still arguing over foundational issues. We are only now beginning to see a crystallization of standards, and along with it we’re seeing the entrance of technology behemoths creating and promptly capturing entire segments of the internet economy.
I’ll be out of the office for a few days after I give my presentation, but I’ll be sure to post it here for all to see as soon as I’m back and am looking forward to your thoughts and feedback.
Questions? Comments? Leave a comment below, Like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter!
Follow Christian Dawson on Twitter.
WordPress Reaches Out
Last Friday, I commented on the outage at WordPress.com.
Over the weekend, WordPress contacted us in response to that post. They took issue with a few points and sent us a heartfelt and thoughtful response outlining some of the work they had done to battle their outage. The conversation was enlightening and caused us to reflect differently on the outage.
As you may know, we’ve never shied away from defending a competitor that was doing the right thing. We were very public in our support for Rackspace — one of our largest competitors and industry colleagues — last year during its series of tragic outages.
We’ve also never had a problem challenging those that weren’t. When a new wave of “solar powered” hosts began targeting eco-oriented blogs and lambasting them for hosting with companies like ServInt, we called them out on it and pointed out our own green credentials.
We have always treated our blog as a public facing forum for ideas, we want readers to know that real people with real emotions and opinions work at ServInt. I think it’s that willingness to engage in constructive and frank conversations that set us apart from other people in this industry who would rather play it safe.
So, thanks again to our friends at WordPress for sharing the information with us that they did. WordPress powers our blog and is the cornerstone of our own Blog VPS line, so it goes without saying that we’re fans and love the platform. As an active member of the Linux Foundation and as open source stewards for more than a decade, we love and admire innovative companies that help make software development free and community driven. The WP staff and community have done great things for the Internet and are clearly talented, brilliant assets to the web.
Here are a couple of the responses the folks at WordPress pointed us to:
WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg’s blog post detailing the outage.
Again, we appreciate their reaching out and setting the record straight.
Have something to say? Don’t forget to comment! You can follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
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.
The 5 Worst Sales In Webhosting – Part 1 of 2
We’ve already told you about the 5 worst products in webhosting, here is part 1 of a 2 part series on the 5 worst sales in webhosting.
Everybody loves a sale. The other day I was shopping for birdseed at Lowe’s, a home improvement and hardware store here in the states. As I perused the store, I noticed a sale that just blew me away.
Brace yourself for it — it’s a big one.
WOW! A whole penny off!
The 5 Worst Products In Webhosting
I was talking to a colleague yesterday, and he used the word ‘bulletproof’ to describe the robustness of our services. I responded with “That word doesn’t mean what you think it means.” It got me thinking about buzzwords we use for hosting that sound good but aren’t. I’ve tried to crack the code on a few of those phrases below.
1) Bulletproof hosting
Photo by amayu
What the customer is meant to assume: “I don’t want my sites to go down no matter what happens. So I want them to be bulletproof, right?”
Cracking the code: The host is a haven for criminals. Are you one?
Want to SPAM, distribute warez, pirate Avatar, or stream child porn on your servers? Go nuts!
You can be as illegal as you want and they won’t pull the plug. They’ll hide from the authorities so you don’t have to!
The bottom line: A respectable business doesn’t want “bulletproof” hosting. Period.
2) Unlimited hosting
Photo by Erica Marshall of muddyboots.org
What the customer is meant to assume: ” I don’t want limits on my hosting! Who wants limits on their hosting? Of course I want my hosting to be unlimited!!111″
Cracking the code: I’ve made my feelings on Unlimited Hosting well known.
In the context of these providers, “Unlimited” really means “We’re not going to tell you how well your systems are going to be able to scale, so good luck growing!” These providers bet on the majority of their users simply not using that many resources to compensate for those that do. But believe me, there’s a limit, a responsible provider will simply boot any abuser off their network if they start taking the term “unlimited” literally.
Contrast this with a provider like us who tells you precisely what you’re getting for your hard earn money and I think you’ll agree we have the better business model.
It’s a lazy, lying marketing game to call a hosting product unlimited and I am still disgusted that otherwise respectable hosts use it.
The bottom line: If you want to set yourself up for surprise failure, buy into the hype – go unlimited.
3) Cheap hosting
Photo by ecastro
What the customer is meant to assume: “These guys are amazing! I’ve never heard of them but they say they can host my whole business and give me 100% uptime and rock solid support for a few bucks a month. Of course I want to save the money and get me some cheap hosting!”
Cracking the code: If it’s too good to be true, it is. We’ve been around for over 15 years, and we’ve seen more dead, failed, shuttered hosts than you can imagine.
Many of them were hot for a while before they up and died. Most lie about their infrastructure and experience to get you to pull the trigger.
Experience matters. Transparency matters too.
Learn about who you are trusting your business to, and figure out what you’re giving up when hunting for a bargain.
The bottom line: Going out of business is not cheap. Stay away from cheap hosting.
4) Free hosting
Photo by Lori Spindler
What the customer is meant to assume: “I get to put up anything I want and you won’t charge me anything? Where do I sign up? Of course I want free hosting!”
Cracking the code: Somebody else gets to make money off of the efforts you put in. Somebody else gets to exert control over you if they want to, whether you are doing something illegal or not. Somebody else is deciding what resources you need to grow. And they are getting a big cut of the fruits of your labor, which isn’t very ‘free’ at the end of the day.
Whether they are selling ads based on your content, or whether they are simply taking a cut of your revenue or of the traffic that you attract, that’s money you’re not getting. With a provider like ServInt, you know exactly what you’re getting.
The bottom line: TANSTAAFL. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Know what you’re giving up to get a free resource. If you are popular in the least, I’ll bet it’s far more than what you could gain by taking control yourself.
5) Windows hosting
Photo by Justin Marty
What the customer is meant to assume: “I’ll get the same level of usability, security, performance, and reliability that I get on my Windows desktop! Of course I want Windows hosting!”
Cracking the code: You’ll get the same level of usability, security, performance, and reliability that you get on your Windows desktop! Yikes!
The bottom line: Ok ok, that was mostly a joke. Windows hosting does indeed do some things really well.
But as a general rule, the infrastructure that supports the bulk of the Internet is Open Source and the vast majority of server related applications, and the innovation guiding them, is based on free and open software.
In general, steer clear of Windows hosting unless you absolutely need it for a specific technological reason.
Cracking the code,
Christian
Agree? Disagree? Let me know in the comments, on Twitter, or on our Facebook page!
Photo credits: amayu, Erica Marshall, ecastro, Lori Spindler, Justin Marty.
Fearlessness: 25 Years of dotcom and ServInt’s 10,000th Turn-Up
On Being Fearless
When ServInt was founded in 1995, there were less than 18,000 dotcoms in the world.
That fact, according to an article on CNN.com yesterday, is pretty jarring when you think about it. It truly emphasizes just how much of a frontier the Internet was for entrepreneurs. How so many companies, in the shadow of the giants (at the time) at Netscape, AOL, and others, got started by refusing to believe that innovation was purely a numbers game.
Nearly everyday there are seismic shifts in how we do business online. While the Internet certainly shrunk our world by opening up new, relatively inexpensive lines of communication internationally, it arguably also did the opposite in many ways. The Internet expanded, exponentially, the size and scope of the planet from an intellectual and communicative standpoint. No longer were we limited by continents and language, we were free to do and say as we pleased in a new network of ideas. New markets sparked by young ambition sprang out of tiny packets of 1′s and 0′s traveling at the speed of light. Borders became more and more irrelevant and a new kind of global technologically-centered culture began to flourish.
Yesterday, the dotcom Top Level Domain turned 25 years old. ServInt also recently completed our 10,000th turn-up. These are two very different events with very different scopes, of course, but they’re noteworthy for the exact same reasons.
Being Candid About Being Green
Green is vital, but so is pragmatism
Right up there with “The Cloud”, Green hosting has been a heavily trafficked buzzword in our industry for nearly 3 years.
In 2008, ServInt began retrofitting its data centers and, in combination with a massive investment in reforestation projects all over the world, we became climate positive within one year. We strive to be green because we know we have to, we have a responsibility to do so as a growing business with international clientele who expect their hosting company to understand the impact it has on the world around them.
In other words, we get it and want to do our part for the right reasons.
More after the jump.
Hosting for Haiti
The internet is a market of ideas; a true democratization of knowledge. That democratization has also brought an unparalleled connection to the goings on in the world around us. On January 12th, 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck just a few miles from the capital of Port-au-Prince, ravaging the capital city and killing an estimated 200,000 people while displacing millions.
The web of ideas brought us images of the suffering, social media provided context and stories of individuals and families who have been directly affected by this disaster, and individuals and organizations worldwide opened their hearts to those affected through innovative donation mechanisms and sheer generosity.
However, many of those donations are unable to be distributed for 90 days. That means 3 long months of toil and recovery in the face of frustrating bureacracy. As an industry that truly understands how investment and resources are utilized on the web we knew we could do better and we’re proud to announce this unprecedented initiative.
In an effort to give back as effectively as possible, the most influential players in webhosting have banded together with the American Red Cross to give aid directly to those suffering in Haiti right now. Along with our friends at Rackspace, The Planet, Peer1, and GoGrid, all of us at ServInt are urging our supporters, customers, friends, families, and employees to donate to Hosting for Haiti.
There are no ulterior motives here. YOU can choose precisely how your tax-deductible gift will be used. You can donate directly to the relief fund in Haiti or you can help the American Red Cross’ International Response fund, as we have done. The choice is yours.
ServInt is proud to stand side by side with our esteemed colleagues in the webhosting world in encouraging you to join us and consider making a donation. Every little bit counts and we feel honored to do our part helping this small nation in a big way.
Please visit HostingforHaiti.com for more information.
