The Planet Blog

If you weren’t able to attend the cPanel Conference 2009 last week in Houston, you missed out on a great show. With all the networking events, educational sessions and vendor booths to visit, it was pretty tough to keep up as a participant, so the cPanel team deserves a high-five or two —physical or virtual — for having everything so well prepared.

As you may have heard, I led a session about “Disruptive Technologies: The Road from Disruptive to Sustaining.” Instead of copying the bullet points from my presentation into this blog post, we recorded the whole session on a Flip MinoHD. If you’ve got a little time and you’re interested to hear my take on the effects of the Cloud and Virtualization on hosting, go grab a bag of popcorn, turn up your computer speakers, sit back and enjoy:

I opened the floor for Q&A in the session and for additional follow-up after the session after we ran out of time, so I want to do the same for you: When you watch the video, if you’ve got any questions, please post them in a comment below and I’ll be happy to respond.

-Todd

On a lonnnnng international flight from Sydney, Australia, I sat next to a small business owner who was flying from one of his offices to the other. I’m not usually much of a plane talker. Neither of us were very tired, and we were both far from “economy-sized” guys in economy-class seats, so it would have been an awkward 15 hours of thinking, “I hope this guy doesn’t hog the armrest,” if we didn’t at least acknowledge each others’ existence. So we got to chatting.

He asked me what I did, and after the standard follow-up questions about what in the world a Web Hosting Evangelist does, he started telling me about his business. He owns a growing sunscreen company that does a good amount of business online. He wasn’t a technical guy, but he had a high-level understanding of how his business was using technology.

To begin, he asked me what kinds of facilities we operate. Then he rattled off a lot of other questions like how we ensure that servers stay online; what we do in the event of a site going down; how much servers cost; how we could scale his infrastructure; and how he could be sure support is available when he needs it. After a few minutes of evangelizing, he seemed pretty impressed with how well we were prepared to accommodate the needs of small business owners, but he didn’t say much.

I could tell that he was thinking about something, and after a few minutes, he revealed, “As you were explaining all the safeguards you have in place and the precautions you take, the whole thing seems too good to be true. I was just thinking that I am completely owed good answers to all of these questions – that you need to convince me why I should trust you with my data. Then it struck me … Why should I trust me with my data?”

It’s reassuring for business owners to have complete control over every aspect of their operations, but that control might come at the expense of not getting the efficiencies, expertise and pricing third-parties can provide. He explained that if I asked him the same questions he asked me, he wouldn’t have a single response. But the fact that he could see his hardware and touch his server was the subconscious reminder that he was in control.

His site is hosted on a shared server with a company in the U.S., and his offices in both countries operate from a centralized accounting platform. The server hosting the platform … an administrative assistant’s workstation in one of the offices. This setup worked very well as long as 1) the admin didn’t need to use the workstation while the accounting system was being accessed; and 2) the office’s power and network connections kept the server online 24×7. While he wasn’t setting any records for uptime and speed, his system worked the way he needed it to, and he didn’t have access to any other ways of doing it.

That’s how a lot of small businesses operate: a sort of “just get it working” mentality. The fact that you are reading this blog would suggest I might be preaching to the choir here, but if you’re holding back on a decision to make a change in the way you manage your IT until you get all of your questions answered, make sure you’re concurrently asking yourself the question, “Why do I trust me with my data?”

To make sure this mid-air observation wasn’t a fluke, I posed a question on Twitter this morning: “What do you think is the most important aspect of a business relationship?”

The first response: “We don’t think there is one lone aspect that can be singled out. There are many important aspects. Trust would be considered one.”

Many thanks to @hightekhosting, @complexgeek, @pratt, @pacoblue, @bill1282, @fborrero, @undefined and @buxombbws for the responses and ReTweets!

-Kevin

P.S. I’m including the picture from Sydney so that I can try to expense the flight.

Today, we announced the availability of a new report from market research firm Stratecast which supplies conclusive evidence that The Planet’s enterprise-grade hosted IT infrastructure reduces operating costs for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) by 51 percent over a three-year period.

Naturally, this report is monumental for small business owners — especially in a period of economic uncertainty. Understanding that I couldn’t do the significance of the report justice, I decided to get a little help from the United States of America’s forefathers … A Hosting Declaration of Independence for the Small Business Owner:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for small business owners to establish presences online that will connect them with their customers and to assume among the powers of the hosting industry, the separate and equal station to which they are entitled as a competitive company in this day and age, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation from hosting their infrastructure in their closets.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all businesses are created equal, that they are endowed by their owners with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Cost Savings, Infrastructure Flexibility and the pursuit of Competitiveness. —

That to secure these rights, hosting companies are instituted among Men and Women, deriving their powers from the consent of their customers, — That whenever any Form of Hosting becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the Small Business Owners to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Hosting Paradigm, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its business in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their Budget and Peace of Mind.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that In-Home Hosting Models long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while their current environments are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the hosting to which they are accustomed.

But when a long train of paying too much and worrying about downtime, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such a Hosting infrastructure, and to provide a new Platform for their future security. —

Such has been the patient sufferance of many Small Business Owners; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Methods of Hosting their Servers. The history of the present Do It Yourself Hosting Model is a history of repeated delays, overpayments and outages, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these Small Businesses.

To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world:

SMBs can dramatically cut IT costs by more than 51% when comparing a DIY infrastructure with a hosted option.

A hosted infrastructure offers elements that characterize an enterprise-grade data center, one that meets best-practices criteria for data backup and storage, as well as provides a robust business continuity plan in case of disruption of service. These elements would need to be added to the costs for a DIY data center.

Hosted IT infrastructure places more control into the hands of the SMB. For many businesses, on-site proximity to IT infrastructure and in-house dedicated or contracted personnel provides a comforting sense of control. The truth is the physical location of IT infrastructure is immaterial to users, reputation and credibility are paramount to hosted IT Infrastructure providers, and application control remains in the hands of the business organization.

An IT infrastructure provider brings experienced and trained personnel responsible for choosing infrastructure equipment and suppliers on behalf of all of its subscribers.

Hosted IT infrastructure solutions reduce business risk for the SMB. The hosted provider’s business size, years in the hosted business, and diversity of subscribers that represent multiple vertical industries will, in many instances, exceed similar measurements of its individual subscribers. Also, subscribing to a hosting provider offloads SMB spend and attention to non-core but mission-critical functions.

In every stage of these Oppressions Small Business Owners have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A DIY solution, which is thus marked by every piece of evidence that may define a Poor Business Decision, is unfit to be the hosting infrastructure of a business.

We, therefore, the Representatives of The Planet, in The Planet Blog, Assembled, appealing to the Internet At Large for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good Customers of this Company, solemnly publish and declare, That the Small Business Owners are, and of Right ought to be Free to choose a hosted infrastructure, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to their Legacy DIY Solutions, and that all business connection between them and their server closets, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent Customers, they have full Power to choose their Services, conclude Peace of Mind, contract Alliances with Hosting Partners, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent Customers may of right do. —

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Service Level Agreements, we mutually pledge to give our businesses Enterprise Hosting Environments, to Save Money, and to enjoy the Freedom and Flexibility that hosting provides.

- Kevin Hazard (but mainly these guys)

To download the full Stratecast white paper (sans US History positioning) and to learn more about how hosting can save you money, visit http://www.theplanet.com/Hosting-Reduces-Costs/.

-Kevin

A few days ago, I read a great article by Smashing Magazine explaining 9 Steps for a Happy Relationship with your Hosting Provider, and I was inspired to respond with “9 Ways your Hosting Provider Should Make you Happy” article. Instead, I thought a much more entertaining post would be to share an experience I had last weekend. We could call it something like “9 Signs Your Hosting Provider Ain’t No Good.”

The Problem: One of my friends has an old server that he needs to pull data from. The server itself is moving beyond its usable life, so putting it into colocation for a day to access that data once doesn’t really make sense. His predicament: he only uses laptops at home, so he doesn’t have a monitor or a keyboard to make the configuration changes necessary to enable access to the server on his home network. But I do.

Instead of bringing the components to his place, he decides that it would be more efficient to bring the server to me … forgetting that it’s heavy and awkwardly sized. After rigging a rolling duffel bag to accommodate this monstrosity of computing power, the server is lugged to my door, in retrospect like a lamb to the slaughterhouse.

The “Solution”: My desk became a makeshift server room.

Pay close attention. If your server room looks anything like the picture, you need to make a change. A word of warning: for those of you who value quality hosting infrastructures, you may want to avert your eyes … the image might be a little too graphic and disturbing.

1. Server Seating. Your hosting provider says “A comfortable server is a happy server, so instead of going with racks or cabinets, we’re moving toward faux-leather seating for all servers in our fleet.” Move your business now.
2. 100% Power. Your hosting provider says “Rather than provide an SLA agreement for power, we’re going a step further by dedicating a whole outlet to your server.” Move your business now.
3. Server Security. Your hosting provider says “Too often, DC personnel rely on screws, rails and ‘bread racks’ to keep servers in place. We’re more confident in the armrests of the aforementioned faux-leather seating.” Move your business now.
4. Cable Management. Your hosting provider says “Too often, cable organization can get overcomplicated with colors and labels. The new wave: use only black cables and let them hang as precariously as possible.” Move your business now.
5. Efficient Airflow and Cooling. Your hosting provider says “Some of our top engineers have been focused on airflow and cooling strategies and they’ve come to a surprising consensus: rather than isolating hot and cold air in the server area, just position the server so half of it is not encumbered by racks or cabinets.” Move your business now.
6. Inventory Management. Your hosting provider says “We don’t need a dedicated area for our parts inventory … We just keep everything laying around to make it easier to access.” Move your business now.
7. Contingency Planning. Your hosting provider says “We don’t think inclement weather should affect your service, so we’ve got dedicated umbrellas for every server in our fleet to keep it online rain or shine.” Move your business now.
8. Accessibility. If your hosting provider says “KVM units allow for remote access to your server’s keyboard, video and mouse controls … we think offering the real thing is even better,” move your business now.
9. Safety First. Your hosting provider says “Because this server room configuration is a little non-traditional, it’s important that the operations folks performing ‘remote hands’ work on your computer are equipped for safety. Hard hats are also useful in physically hitting a server that needs a metaphorical kick start.” Move your business now.

Click on the picture above to see a larger version of the nightmare. Are there any other red flags you notice that you’d point out?

-Kevin

P.S. Again, if your server room looks anything like the picture you see above, call us now. Right. Now.

It’s been a whirlwind of a month already. We released several new server promotions, launched Alpha Professional “managed dedicated” services for private and virtual racks, had company-wide kickoff meetings in Houston and Dallas, and to top it all off, we pushed out a brand new Web site.

Just writing down the rundown of the first 23 days at The Planet this year makes me yearn for a George Costanza-inspirednap-friendly desk. A few weeks ago, I could have caught some shut-eye in my “seasonal office,” but now that my area is unwrapped, I’ll just power through this blog post … full pot of coffee in tow.

Avid blog readers will have already seen and loved Steve’s post about the new Web site, so I’m going to ride his coattails and focus on the message we built our site around: “The Power to Choose.”

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but I’ll try to boil it down to a few: The Planet offers an unrivaled hosting product and service continuum. If you are in the market for any flavor of hosting, you can find it at The Planet. In that service spectrum, you see our primary lines of business: colocation, dedicated servers, managed services (monitoring, security, backup, migration) and fully managed hosting. With that foundation, we are able to incorporate new products and services like our Content Delivery Network and Storage Cloud offerings.

Now for a fun little interactive game: Click on the above image to get to our Hosting Solutions page where you can go through our “Which hosting solution is right for you?” wizard … Don’t worry, I’ll be here when you get back …

See. I told you I’d still be here. If you’re in the market for a specific kind of hosting, the wizard probably told you exactly what you already knew … unless you just clicked through it with a few “what if” answers to see what our super-secret, proprietary and complex artificial intelligence would suggest for you. Maybe that was just me.

The power to choose is central to our hosting message, so if you can think of anything we should add or change to include in that message, let us know!

-Kevin

P.S. If you’re interested in learning more about our continuum of products and services, head to our Hosting Services page to get a detailed comparison of our colocation, dedicated servers, managed dedicated servers and managed hosting offerings.

Hi there. It’s me again. I’m still in the trenches, trying to find a decent Reuben sandwich in the tunnels.

Daylight saving time ended last month in Texas, and as I changed my clocks, I dutifully replaced the battery in my smoke alarm, just like the public service announcements advised. As I balanced on a chair on top of my coffee table, I pondered: Why is the smoke alarm running on a battery and not, say, plugged into the wall?

Well, in a fire, power can get interrupted, so it’s best to have the smoke alarm running on an independent source of power that you can test and replace when necessary. In a way, this applies to your server, too.

Since my previous post, I’ve counted up a total of 18 incidents where a customer did not get notification of an update to a ticket or a critical message regarding a change to our services. Every one of those missed communications could be traced to an e-mail address residing on the affected server. Each one of those customers suffered downtime because they either didn’t receive an alert in a reasonable amount of time or they didn’t respond to a technician who was ready and waiting to assist them.

And those incidents were just the ones that I fielded … there’s no telling how many folks out there have their “server smoke detectors” hard-wired into the wall.

It’s critical that you keep your contact information up-to-date in Orbit and that you provide us with an external e-mail address. Same thing goes with the monitoring system: Use a contact address that will work if the server goes down.

The best solution I’ve found is to use a third-party provider like Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo Mail, and forward those contacts/alerts to your primary mailbox (which can be on your server). By setting your contact address to a third-party provider first, you can ensure that you will always be able to access any important notifications. If you use a mail program like Outlook or Thunderbird, you can have the program check your third-party mailbox in parallel with your primary mailbox, eliminating the need to set up an auto-forward rule.

My advice: Do both.

Yes, I know that means you’ll get two messages for every one delivered to that emergency line, but in the end, isn’t it better to be over-notified of a potential emergency than to not hear about it at all?

-Laurence

Technology permeates our lives. We rely on GPS to take us to Grandma’s house; we stay up-to-date on friends we haven’t seen since high school via Facebook; and we are far more connected to the world around us than we ever thought possible. The fact that you are reading this blog, in one form or another, means you’re a part of this technology revolution. But it begs the question: Do you know how you are interacting with the world through the Internet?

I’m utterly unqualified to discuss an answer to that question metaphysically or philosophically, but I can take a crack at a crash course in hosting that will begin to answer the question literally. It’s the elephant in the room: In the simplest terms, how does the Internet work?

I’ve seen that there is steep learning curve for people outside the hosting industry when it comes to a general understanding of the technical answer to that question. The answer is not overly complicated or obscure … The sentiment is that by the time someone needs hosting, they’ll know how hosting works. The fact that you are reading this entry on The Planet’s blog would suggest you already know a fair amount about what hosting is and how the Internet works. So please bookmark this blog post as a resource to reference when your less-technically-savvy friends ask you to explain what you mean when you say you work online and host your own website.

I’m suggesting all of my friends read this post, so when anyone happens to mention Web sites, e-mail or computers, they can amaze their associates with their stellar understanding of the infrastructure and the behind-the-scenes goings-on of the Internet. Trust me: When you pass along this explanation as your own in the “real world,” everyone in earshot will be in awe.

If, as a rule, you don’t associate with non-technically-savvy people, please feel free to stop reading this post here.

The Internet: Under the Hood

1. You access a device connected in some way to the Internet. This device can be a cell phone, a computer or even a refrigerator. You are connected to the Internet through an Internet Service Provider (ISP) which recognizes that you will be accessing various sites and services hosted remotely. Your ISP is a network connected to the other networks on the planet (which is where we get the term “Internet” or “inter” “network”: Activity travels across multiple networks).
2. You enter a domain name or click a URL (for this example, we’ll use http://www.google.com).

3. Your ISP will see that you want to access “www.google.com” and will immediately try to find someone/something that knows what “www.google.com” means … this search is known as an NS (name server) lookup. In this case, it will find that “www.google.com” is associated with several name servers.

4. The first of these four name servers to respond with additional information about “google.com” will be used. Domains are typically required to be associated with two or three name servers to ensure if one is unreachable, requests for that domain name can be processed by another.
5. The name server has Domain Name System (DNS) information that essentially maps “www.google.com” to an Internet Protocol (IP) address. When a domain name is purchased and provisioned, the owner will associate that domain name with a specific IP address by creating DNS records. Think of DNS as a phone book that translates a name into a phone number for you.

6. When the IP address you reach sees that you requested “www.google.com,” it will find the files/content associated with that request. Multiple domains can be hosted on the same IP address, just as multiple people can live at the same street address and answer the phone. Each IP address only exists in a single place. (There are some complex network tricks that can negate that statement, but in the interest of simplicity, we’ll ignore them.)
7. Depending on what content you are accessing, the response from the server can be very simple or very complex. In some cases, the request will return a single HTML document. In other cases, the content you access may require additional information from other servers (database servers, storage servers, etc.) before the request can be completely fulfilled. This process is typically transparent to you as the end user, but it’s important to note when you are trying to understand the complexity of what seems like such a simple request.
8. When the requested content is located (and generated by other servers if necessary), it is returned to your browser in HTML code.

9. Your browser takes that code and translates the formatting and content to be displayed on your screen. Often, formatting and styling of pages will be generated from a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) referenced in the HTML code. The purpose of the style sheet is to streamline a given page’s code and consolidate the formatting to be used and referenced by multiple pages of a given website.

10. The HTML code will reference sources for media that may be hosted on other servers, so the browser will perform the necessary additional requests to get all of the media the website is trying to show. In this case, it needs to pull in the Google logo from this location: http://www.google.com/intl/en_ALL/images/logo.gif

When the HTML is rendered and the media is loaded, your browser will probably note that it is “Done,” and you will have successfully navigated to “www.google.com” in 10 easy steps! I know it seems like a daunting and complex process, but it happens in a matter of milliseconds each time you use the Internet.

Pretty crazy, huh?

-Kevin