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!

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Thinking of Building a New Web Site?

Today, as you may have noticed, ServInt unveiled a brand-new web site — one that we hope will be easier to use, more pleasing to the eye and more valuable to our customers and prospects.

The deployment of our new web site, in and of itself, is probably of modest importance to readers of the ServInt Source. But it occurred to me that sharing details of why and how it was built might be useful, as the challenges we faced before and during the redesign are fairly common ones. So, following are some thoughts, observations, and rules of thumb that may be of use to you:

1. When your customers tell you it’s time for a change, it’s definitely time for a change. Face it: the attractiveness and usefulness of your web site is way down the list of priorities for your customers — so when they take the time to tell you it looks out of date, or is hard to use, it’s probably a bigger problem than you think it is.
2. Building a brand-new web site takes less work than propping up the old one. This one may seem hard to believe, since there is no doubt that the process of building a brand-new web site takes a lot of time and effort. But when you measure both the extra work your company has to undertake on a day-to-day basis to make up for your site’s lack of effectiveness and the big-picture process issues you can fix by implementing a new web site, the value proposition becomes crystal-clear. Bottom line: it’s worth it.
3. Make your web site a mirror facing outwards, as well as inwards. It’s tempting to see your web site solely as a reflection of who you are, or perhaps who you wish you could be. It’s just as important for your web site to accurately reflect who your customers are. Your prospective and current customers need to feel like they’ve arrived at their online home when they arrive at your site — a place where they’re understood and appreciated. Our customer base skews very heavily towards “value purchasers” — people who don’t have time for marketing fluff. That’s why our site was designed with a visibly minimalist style. Our overarching goal was to provide an extremely efficient path towards the information our customers seek.
4. Show, don’t tell. ServInt is fortunate to have a loyal customer base that is willing to tell the world how much they like us, and why. If your customers are similarly willing to compliment you in public — let them. A basic rule of thumb is: if your customers are willing to say nice things about you, there’s no need for you to say those things yourself!
5. Pick a designer who understands you. As mentioned before, we had a clear mental image of what this site was supposed to look like before we started building it. We actively searched for designers who understood the minimalist aesthetic we were after, and why we were seeking it. When we found them, we were able to set them loose to do what they do best. This made things much easier than simply “buying talent” and arguing with them over The Vision Thing. When you and your designer clearly understand the brand strategy you have in mind, as well as the design style that’s going to get you there, you can step back and let them do their job.

We hope you like it!

When the Internet means life and death

Recently, my wife and I helped friends of ours move.

In the past when we had to get rid of a whole lot of furniture, we put up ads on Craigslist and consequently sold it all for reasonable prices in an extremely short window of time. In short, Craigslist was amazing, so we encouraged our friends to do the same. We went ahead and helped our friends put a number of pieces of furniture up on Craigslist to sell.

This past Friday my wife noticed that our posts hadn’t gone ‘live’. She tried again, but they wouldn’t let her post duplicates. She went to the Craigslist online help forums and made no headway. She’d send an e-mail asking what went wrong and get a canned response. She called Craigslist for help, but got no answer. She even tried posting all new ads with all new text. Those disappeared too. By the end of the entire frustrating weekend nothing had been achieved…and the furniture needs to be out of the house by tomorrow!

Craigslist was so reliable — so good at achieving our goals in the past that there was no real backup plan. We expected it to work — and when it didn’t we were in trouble.

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No One Follows the Dull: The Case For Good Social Media

OK, friends – time for some blogging about why we’re blogging!

The other day I discovered that Verizon had been over-billing me for months – an extra cable box and the ‘Filipino package’, neither of which I ever requested. I thought about jumping onto Twitter to complain in public. I didn’t. Instead I started thinking about why and how we use social media, and a light bulb went off. Now I think I have some answers, and I’m ready to share.

I’ll tell you why ServInt got on Twitter in particular – because people were talking about us, and we wanted to be part of the conversation. It was an opportunity to engage with clients who were talking about us anyway – generally because they were particularly happy or particularly not happy with the service they received.

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Dear Asia, We’d Love Your Business

Nearly half of our customers are overseas.

That’s pretty staggering when you think about it. After all, we don’t do a tremendous amount of advertising, our ad campaigns are fairly modest compared to some of our competitors. In fact, we began advertising earlier this year after nearly a decade of going ad-free and focusing entirely on support and word of mouth referrals.

Needless to say, we’re proud that folks around the world love our service. In light of this, I thought I’d make a few points about why Asian entrepreneurs should consider hosting with a U.S. provider, and especially us at ServInt.

More after the jump…

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Outrage in Search of A Problem

The “internets” have been abuzz about a recent bill being pushed through the US Congress that many reports claimed would allow the President of the United States to “take control” of the internet in a national security emergency. This would be incredibly alarming, if it were true.

News outlets as prestigious as CBS were reporting the inaccuracy, helping to stoke the flames of Right-leaning bloggers everywhere while simultaneously trying to inject some adrenaline into what was clearly a slow news week.  Nicholas Thompson of Wired wrote an excellent blog post on the subject, categorically shooting down several issues that have helped degrade the conversation and in the process revealed the true fault of the bill.

This recent set of events got me thinking about a few of the other core issues that seem to drive heated policy conversations within the tech community in America, and presumably elsewhere in the world as well. Net Neutrality, that great, not-yet-realized threat in the sky has been an enormous rallying cry for concerned bloggers and web companies for years now.

The threat, as explained by proponents of net neutrality is thus: without legislation specifically preventing it, internet service providers will eventually create a tiered internet whereby individuals and corporations who pay for a higher tier will have higher priority over individuals and corporations who pay for a lower tier. Higher tier packets move faster through the tubes, and lower tiered packets wait their turn.

Let me be clear here, if this were true, it could severely damage innovation on the internet and create a de facto caste system in ecommerce.

But it’s not true, and it hasn’t happened in the U.S.

The web is a terrific way to disseminate information, but that doesn’t mean it get’s disseminated accurately. There is no need for net neutrality legislation for the same reason we don’t need anti-dinosaur legislation…it’s legislating a problem we simply don’t have. Likewise for the outrage, pundits are getting worked up for nothing.

In America, there is an inherent distrust of the government. Depending on who is currently in control, the level of paranoia shifts from right to left and back again. From a political and cultural level, this is to be expected.

I don’t mean to slight those countries where there have been truly atrocious policies pushed by ISP’s, there are indeed many. But the webhosting industry prides itself on innovating our way out of a slump. When the world needed connectivity the Internet came to prominence, when the Internet needed structure the World Wide Web came to the rescue, the chain goes on and on.

The tech world, be it the software developers, hardware engineers, service providers, or open source community will not allow seismic shifts in the prioritization of information. It just doesn’t flow with the way business is done.

The increasing urge to have the government step in as a mediator before there is conflict is counter-productive. Conflict, from a technological standpoint, is a good thing, why would we stifle the ebb and flow of economics to avoid “problems” that aren’t even problems yet? Even worse, the argument is being muddled and warped as we speak.

What was originally a 1st amendment issue with the prioritization of packets has now become a metering issue with people arguing over whether they should be charged more for using more bandwidth. That’s not net neutrality, and that doesn’t infringe on anyone’s rights.

So everyone take a deep breath, relax, and keep on keeping on. Don’t base the priorities of your business on hypotheticals.

But if you do, I have some dinosaur insurance to sell you.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Eric Morales.

Photo by pdxdj.

The Elevator and Twitter Pitch

We recently sent a couple of new employees out to an event at the Greater Washington Board of Trade designed to teach the basics of social networking — the physical, in person kind of social networking as opposed to the Twitter-kind. The employees were asked to come up with an elevator pitch that described the work their company did. The goal of an ‘elevator pitch’ is to fit enough relevant information into a 30 second soundbite to explain in a basic fashion what the company does, but hopefully with enough of a ‘teaser’ that the listener will want to know more.

I debriefed the team when they came back and listened to what they came up with. Each one of the new employees did something interesting. They tried to explain the concept of a VPS in 30 seconds.

That surprised me, because in my mind ServInt isn’t a VPS company. Yes, it’s true that our most popular products are VPSs, but the Virtual Private Server is simply today’s best, most reliable method for providing managed hosting to our customers…it isn’t necessarily the only avenue we use to provide that service. Thus, ServInt is not a VPS provider. We are a provider of Enterprise class managed hosting. We use VPS, and Enterprise level servers and server clusters, as envelopes to provide that service.

The pitch you give to colleagues and competitors alike is one that clearly sells the idea of your company — e.g. managed hosting — as opposed to a simple product — e.g. VPS.  That comes later.

With the advent of microblogging and social networking sites like Twitter and Friendfeed the elevator pitch has been — pardon the expression — elevated even further by the often empowering constraints of 140 character tweets.  The elevator pitch is an old-school and eerily efficient way to spread the message about who you are and what you do.  Perfecting it’s length and content is key, using 30 seconds or 140 characters is an excellent way to maximize the effectiveness of your message and ensure your communicating as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Here’s ServInt’s:

For nearly 15 years, ServInt has provided fast, reliable, award-winning managed hosting to companies ranging from small startups and blogs to large multinational corporations. Our 24/7/365 support is famous, and our reputation is peerless. We measure our uptime in years, not months or weeks, and we have the customer satisfaction to prove it.

That was 23 seconds, give or take. Great for an elevator, bad for Twitter.  Let’s try that again with a 140 character limit!

For 14+ years ServInt has provided fast, reliable, managed hosting to clients ranging from tiny startups to big corporations

This leaves us with about 16 characters open. You can add a hashtag to steer people towards a larger conversation, include a friendfeed link to an ongoing discussion there, or throw in a shortened URL to steer people to your site or company blog. The possibilities are endless and the constraints challenge you to better refine your message day in and day out.

What’s your elevator pitch?  Let’s hear it in the comments or on twitter/friendfeed, use the hashtag #elevatorpitch!

- Christian

Photo used and altered under Creative Commons License, courtesy of flickr user splorp.