Or pay $10/month.
Or pay $12.50/month
I got a call the other day, from someone who had two websites with two hosting companies, one of which was AmishHosting. He wanted to move his other website to our servers.
Sometimes, it goes the other direction. It's a pain having to deal with multiple servers that work different ways. You win some, you lose some, and we know we're not the only good hosting company in existance. Lately, though, we've been winning a lot more than we're losing, and that's worrisome, in a way.
Insurance companies worry about "moral hazard". Moral hazard is the insurance equivalence of "insider trading". Insurance is about managing risks, and if the other guy knows something is bound to happen, the insurance company doesn't want to take the fall for it.
The same thing happens in other businesses. It's normally a compliment to have a customer give you more business, but it's always a worry that the customer knows something you need to know.
We get customers who don't realize that their spamming is evil ("But I was just trying to let people know my website exists." There are people who have infringing music or images on their websites. ("But I got it from such-and-so's site, and he didn't create the music, so it must be OK to use.") There are people who write scripts that forget to exit when they are done, tying up server resources. ("Well, after all, I'm not a programmer.")
When I investigated, I found out that much of the new business came from customers of a cut-rate hosting company. They'd been having a lot of downtime lately, and, well, the owner doesn't display much grace under the pressure of criticism.
Late in the last decade, I wasn't in the hosting business; I was a customer, with a number of sites at DreamHost. I did business with them for years, so it'd be foolish of me to assert that they're bad people to deal with; they're not.
On the other hand, they rented webspace to someone who figured how to gain root access. This criminal left things in shambles. He deleted a number of websites, destroyed a number of MySQL databases, and worst of all, managed to destroy many of their backup files. They rushed their hard drives to a data recovery specialist and at great expense, managed to recover some sites. Other sites went away forever.
Being a belts-and-suspender guy, I had my own backups and could have uploaded our sites in a few hours - but it took them days to get our server back into service. My regular users were undoubtedly wondering if our site would ever be up again - and were looking about for alternatives. We were wondering when our server would ever be available - and were looking about for alternatives.
And I could see other customers on their forum, customers who didn't have their own backups. If I was concerned, they were frantic. Normally, one of the owners would be on the forum daily, answering questions, there was nothing, nothing, in the way of forthcoming information. There is no way, I decided, to keep disasters from happening, and management was obviously engaged in recovery, but recovery isn't just a technical matter. It's a customer-relations matter as well. Failing to spend 10 minutes at a time, four times a day, posting notes providing information updates and assurances that they hadn't given up, probably would have been saved them $10,000 or more.
At that point, I decided that if I were ever in this business, I had to keep communications open with customers, no matter what. Customers deserve to be treated with respect - and if you disappear, they will assume the worst.
It does happen. A few years ago, I knew a web hosting company owner who started off offering hosting from his home, using a cable modem. That certainly kept his costs under control. There are several problems with that, however. He eventually got a T-1 line, trying to keep the server in his home, but costs are him alive. He shut down the business without notice, and refused to talk to anyone at all, leaving customers without access to their data - or to their domain names.
One of the problems with web servers in the home is that cable internet and DSL internet are asymmetrical services. You can pull data from the internet at a great rate of speed, often 6 mbps or 8 mbps, but data going from the computer to the internet (which is more than 90% of the traffic for a web server) is typically capped at 256 kbps or 384 kbps. That 20-to-1 ratio really affects server performance.
Second of all, when your server is in a bedroom (or, as pictured, in a bathroom), you're way off the internet backbone. Server speed is governed by both bandwidth speed and lag. If it takes several extra hops to get to backbone before heading to the user, that really slows things down. Furthermore, it leads to reliability problems. If a backbone router fails, it'll be replaced within an hour; if a router on the back roads of the internet fails, it might be the next day before anyone gets told it's down.
The other problem with cable internet is the cable companies. The cable industry is relatively young, and top management largely consists of entrepreneurs who went into cable systems after selling used cars and aluminum siding. Their technical skills don't make it easy to manage even a system originally intended to broadcast the same signal from one source to many destinations, a relatively simple task.
The internet, however, is not broadcasting. It consists almost entirely of two-way point-to-point communications. That's something that telephone company engineers struggle to optimize. The technological wizardry of the internet's founders (Al Gore not included) makes internet networking simpler than a phone system, but even so, used-car salesmen are disinclined to compete for top notch engineers that can make it happen. Many consumers (including me) have switched to satellite television because the cable systems do not even reliably provide good television signals.
So it is inevitable that someone who starts out with a server in his home will eventually move it into a data center, if for no other reason than to save money on connectivity. The chart shown here is for one of our servers over the past 24 hours. At peak, this server was delivering 3.559 mbps - about 8 times as fast as a cable modem would deliver - at about a tenth the cost of cable bandwidth.
And there are other benefits as well. In a data center, our servers are protected by halon fire suppression systems, armed guards, webcam security cameras, a building that's good for Category 4 hurricanes, and emergency generators backed up by more emergency generators. We manage our own servers, so if one really craps out without warning, I may have to work the next 24 hours to rebuild the software systems from scratch, but if there's a simple hardware failure, there's staff on duty 24 hours a day with an ample supply of repair parts to handle anything.
I have an emergency generator in our basement here, and more than one computer, but what if a drunk driver hits the wrong utility pole? I could go across town to a friend's house to manage my servers, but any computer in the house might be offline for several days.
I've been called an old fogey, a "senior technologist", for my conservative ways, and I readily admit that I'm constantly looking over my shoulder, as Satchel Paige recommended. As we age, we learn that it's not just important to look both ways before crossing a railroad track, but to keep an eye on the sky for watermelons falling out of airplanes. It only takes one to really ruin your day.
William Shakepeare was an entrepreneur in his own way, and in an era when authors had no copyright protection. Instead of creating intellectual properties and licensing them to others, he had to stage performances for audiences - and that may be one reason his works have survived the centuries. They appealed to the intellectuals of the time, but they were also lowbrow enough to keep the masses entertained.
If you look through Shakespeare's writings, you will find much wisdom for the entrepreneur. Was it original with Shakespeare? In many cases, no. Others were free to steal what he wrote, and he freely stole from others as well, but he stole from the best.
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Shakespeare's insistance on integrity wasn't some namby-pamby do-gooder advice. It was pragmatic. If he disappointed those who attended his plays, he wouldn't have customers sending friends to him - and returning for his next play.
Similarly, when John Cash Penney opened his first store, he called it the Golden Rule Store. Later on, Penney had a reputation, but at the start, he wanted customers to know that he knew that his success depended on keeping customers happy.
Whether you call it the Golden Rule, or you call it integrity, taking proper care of customers is critical. That's the reason we got a toll-free telephone number several years ago.
I was scared that the toll-free number would be unaffordable. That has turned out not to be the case. Perhaps it's because many of our customers were, like me, raised in an era when calling long distance was almost a sin. Dad would drive 13 miles to the tractor dealership, to see if the parts he needed were in, rather than call long distance to ask. It was cheaper!
At this point, however, I try to encourage customers to use the toll-free line, not because it makes us look generous, but because we can often resolve something in 5 minutes on the phone that would otherwise take a manhour of time, sending multiple emails back and forth.
The problem with emails is that you ask a question, and it may be two days before you get an answer - and then you have to figure out what the question was, and why you asked it. A five-minute phone conversation lets us figure out what needs to be done, and often we can solve the problem while the customer is still on the phone. Even if we figure out time at minimum-wage rates, it's email, not toll-free phone calls, that now looks horribly expensive.
But it's the nuisance calls that are really useful. A customer called us several days ago to share some gossip. She was the one who explained to us that customers were rushing to us from another hosting company because they'd had so much downtime recently - and that the owner was displaying poor customer relations skills.
What's more, she revealed that he was moving his hosting operation from his residence to a data center some miles away. This had some customers concerned, because he had always boasted that his servers were especially secure because he had physical access to them.
He's got him a medal he won in the war
Weighs five hundred pounds and sleeps on his floor
It's as if a gay-bashing evangelical preacher were discovered to have a homosexual lover. It's an integrity problem. It's not the homosexual lover that's so much the problem, as it is the hypocrisy.
We're constantly casting about, trying to find new ways to do things, ways that are better for our customers, and ways that are more profitable for us, as well. One of the problems we face is that no matter how easy a Content Management System is to use once you know it, it can be difficult to get over that initial learning hump. The toll-free telephone line is a tremendous aid when customers are willing to use it - but how do we take care of the customers who won't?
The answer may be a wiki. Since CMSes change often, having documentation that can easily be updated is important. On the other hand, wikis are problematic. Some pages on Wikipedia, for instance, are great. Others are full of misinformation, and the content of those pages is fiercely guarded by those who like their misinformation. We want users able to correct errors in the documentation, and able to contribute tips, tricks, and traps, but we need to be careful about users introducing accidental errors - and vandals deliberately introducing errors.
The other thing is, it's a lot easier to use documentation if it's well-organized. We can't just create a wiki, call it "Building a Drupal Site" and expect it to grow into something valuable. We need to provide a good skeleton first, that can be fleshed out by users. That takes a lot of time - and we have to wonder, are we helping our customers, or will our efforts make it possible for users to get our great support, yet buy their hosting for a buck less at another hosting company?
We don't know - but we're working on it, anyway. It's all part of that "integrity" thing. It's possible that users, knowing that we are generous in giving assistance to non-customers, will turn to us for hosting, figuring that we will be helpful when they need specific help in a hurry. We can hope so. And if it doesn't work out that way, well, we can use the karma anyway.
Take a look at your business. If you're not walking the walk, the day will come when your customers find out. If you find you're in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging. If Reverend Haggard had slowly moved from condemning homosexuality to frowning on homosexuality, to tolerating homosexuality, to approving homosexuality, to practicing homosexuality, he might have convinced his followers to stay with him - but giving them whiplash is always a bad move.
