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.

The Battle over SOPA and PIPA continues at CES

In a few hours, our COO, Christian Dawson, will be speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. This is an important panel discussion involving SOPA and PIPA, but it is also a proud moment for ServInt.

Before I came to ServInt, I spent years in the trenches launching various satellite-powered multimedia technologies — efforts which required me to attend the giant Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas each January.

These trips were a lot of work, but a lot of fun as well — and one of the reasons they were so much fun was because we had some of the coolest technology on display.  Trust me, in the early 2000s, satellites were hot, and it was fun being a “satellite guy.”  Our booths were swamped, reporters called us to make interview appointments, and there were few parties to which we weren’t invited.

Despite the fact that we were too cool for school, there was one thing we never got invited to do:  speak at any of the CES sessions.  That was a gig reserved for seriously important people only.  And that’s why ServInt’s presence on the “Infringement, Rogue Websites, and Copyright Crackdowns:  How to Catch Tuna Without Catching Dolphins” panel is such a big deal.

Today, ServInt’s leadership position in the efforts to stop SOPA, PIPA and other flawed anti-piracy legislation is being recognized by having our COO, Christian Dawson — in his role as one of the leading voices of the Save Hosting Coalition — represent the viewpoint of the internet infrastructure industry.

The battle against SOPA is hitting the mainstream, and ServInt is being recognized for all the hard work we’re putting into it. That’s great—but we still need your help. Make sure you follow ServInt on Facebook and Twitter for complete updates on SOPA and PIPA, and please visit savehosting.org to join the battle against this extremely dangerous and misguided legislation.

We’ll keep you posted on how the panel goes.  In the meantime:  break a leg, Christian!

Fritz Stolzenbach is ServInt’s Vice President of Marketing and Business Development

ServInt, GoDaddy, SOPA and the Fight to Save the Internet

In the wake of a well-publicized boycott campaign against GoDaddy, hosting providers are racing to try to come up with their stances against SOPA. I am proud that we don’t need to do that. Our stance on SOPA, its sister bill PIPA, and the bill from whence they both came COICA, is well known. We have spent much of the last year not just railing against these bills but trying to do something about them.

The well-intentioned goal of SOPA is to go after piracy, which is noble and very important. But piracy is something that needs to be handled smartly, with a laser-focus. SOPA isn’t a laser, it’s a wrecking ball that if enacted is likely to destroy hard-working legitimate businesses more frequently than it does pirates. SOPA allows people merely accused of ‘contributing to infringement’ to have their business taken from them. Pirates will maintain back-up plans in case they get their resources pulled – it’s legitimate businesses that will suffer most. SOPA will be used for censorship and as an anti-competitive tool. It will stifle innovation, and is one of the most dangerous bills I have seen in my two decades in this industry. Read more

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

Running out of CPU: Troubleshooting Slow Servers and Knowing When to Upgrade

Choosing the right size server package—and choosing a package that can be scaled easily—are important decisions in any hosting purchase. Simply buying a server with enough CPU, RAM, I/O and disk space may not be enough for customers anticipating future growth or spikes in traffic. And upping the size and cost of a server package during (or even before) a traffic spike may not always be the smartest use of a company’s money and time.

A website on a fast server on a fast network is going to be fast until the server runs out of something: CPU, RAM or I/O, or something at the software resource level like inodes. The places within your hosting infrastructure where resources are depleted first are your “bottlenecks.”

But server specifications don’t cause the bottleneck. They are simply the place where a theoretical limit collides with a real-world application. The following is a list of the five areas of interaction that can lead to a slow-down in service:
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

The Power of Social Media, or Do You Give a $#!% About Your Web Host?

If you follow ServInt on Twitter, you may have noticed a strange surge in profanity-laced tweeting coming from us and many of your fellow customers—and you may have wondered, what the $%#@! is going on here?

The honest answer is, we’re not entirely sure yet.

Let me explain. About a month ago, I was in a meeting with the ServInt Marketing team, discussing the fact that—while we have a relatively high proportion of customers who will shout from the mountaintops about how much they love us (thanks, guys!)—the vast majority of our customers are silent throughout the length of their stay with us as customers.

This topic was top of mind for us because we were in the process of designing a full-time staff position dedicated to customer outreach and relationship management, and we were frankly wondering how useful such a position would be if, in fact, people didn’t really want to engage with their web host unless something went wrong.

In any case, as we sat there contemplating the depressing possibility that our customers might actually see hosting like they see the electric company (i.e.: the only time you think about the electric company is when the lights go out) somebody blurted out:  “What we really need to know is, does anybody actually give a $#!% about their web host?” There was a burst of laughter, but in the silence that followed somebody said, “We should just ask them.”

Read more

Customer Service in Hosting, Part 1: the Expectation of Service

Editor’s Note: With this post, our Director of Managed Services, Jim Tricarico, kicks off a three-part series on customer service in the hosting industry with a post about customer service from the hosting side. Check back in coming weeks for posts on the meaning of “supported” software and applications and the five things to always remember when submitting a support ticket.

Customer service is a tricky thing. Customers often judge the quality of care they receive based on how little they interact with a service representative. They often think that the quicker their problem is resolved, the better care they must be receiving—and, conversely, that they must be experiencing bad customer service when it takes more than a few hours to bring up a site that has gone down.

The truth may surprise you: often it’s the calls that take hours—or even days—that show you when your customer service team is giving you the best they possibly can. Let me explain, and in the process maybe shed a little light on how customer service in the hosting industry works.

To begin with, here’s a hard truth: sometimes our customers’ problems are so far outside the scope of our normal activities that there’s nothing we can do but say sorry and point them someplace else. For example, as odd as it may seem, more than once we’ve gotten requests from customers to help them troubleshoot the speed of their home Internet connection!

Pointing those customers in a different direction for their answers is easy because it’s clearly the best way to get them a quick solution. The gray area is when customers ask us to troubleshoot third-party software they’ve installed themselves, but can’t get adequate support for from the manufacturer. When these situations come up we try our best, but — well, maybe an example will help illustrate the difficulty of the situation.

I remember a customer whose site kept crashing. He was using a piece of software we didn’t officially support—and the sum total of the help he received from the software manufacturer was, “It’s not our fault, call your host.” We didn’t see the cause right away, but we agreed to work with the customer to troubleshoot the issue and spent a week peeling back one symptom at a time until the root cause was identified. In the end, this ticket took seven days to close out and had a total of 147 comments in it between our MST and the customer and from one tech to another. And yet, because this customer’s foremost concern was simply how long it was taking to fix the problem, he complained loudly about the customer support he had received.

Now, in this example we could have—and maybe we should have—spent more time explaining the causes of his site crashes and all the incremental steps we were taking to solve each one, but this is a delicate balancing act. Some customers want to know everything that is going on all the time, while others just want it fixed. Knowing how much a customer wants to hear when the problem is not yet solved can be tricky in the heat of the moment.

Make no mistake, there are incompetent and lazy hosts out there who run slipshod customer service operations. But you won’t find them by simply looking at how long it takes for them to “fix” your problem. If they’re continually trying new solutions and eliminating possible causes, they are doing exactly what they should be doing.

If you want to know if your hosts’ customer service is superior, ask yourself these questions:

1. How many questions do they ask me when I have a problem? (The more the better.)
2. Am I asking them to fix something that is completely out of their scope of support: unsupported software, issues with connectivity outside of the host’s network, etc? (Have realistic expectations about what your host can and will help you with.)
3. Are they willing to at least look at my problem whether or not all of my applications are “supported software?” (A good host will acknowledge that there’s often no way to know the cause unless they’re willing to at least take a look.)
4. If I ask, do they try to explain why something happened so that I can prevent it myself in the future? (A wise and valuable trait in superior customer service operations.)
5. Have they ever simply told me they can’t figure it out and I’m on my own? (If they said this regarding “supported” software, it’s time to look for a new host.)

Photo by Jeremiah Ro

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