The Planet Blog

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.

After reading our last few posts, you know all about “the cloud” now, right? Well, yes and no. You know about the cloud in a general sense, but when it comes to current applications of the cloud, we need to drill down a little deeper.

The hosting industry is abuzz about cloud computing and cloud storage. Based on some completely fictional research*, 7 out of 10 hosting customers do not differentiate between the two. *The numbers may be fictional, but based on my experience working with customers, the sentiment is entirely true.

Virtualization and Abstraction

Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s take a quick trip down memory lane … back to the days of virtualization. Why? Because the work put into developing virtualization has been a springboard for cloud technologies – specifically with regard to abstraction, the ability to present computational power and/or storage space without theoretical limits. Through abstraction, a single physical server can be divided into several distinct virtual servers, which function as independent physical servers that have their own dedicated resources.

Cloud computing and cloud storage take the principle of abstraction and tweak it. Instead of taking one physical server and creating several independent virtual servers, the development of the cloud takes multiple physical servers and creates virtual servers that freely move between physical machines as though they were all a single server. Naturally, that’s attractive to a hosting customer.

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing allows access to theoretically limitless computational resources. A user can scale from one Web server and one database server, to five Web servers and three database servers on the fly, with no upfront capital expenditure. Cloud computing essentially makes one large virtualized server that spans the entire available hardware infrastructure. Instead of having 20 servers with 4GHz of processor power each, the cloud shows 80GHz of processor power.

Cloud computing customers purchase a part of that cloud computing platform, and if no other customers are using resources on a given installation, that customer has the can use all 80GHz of process power one minute and scale back to almost nothing the next minute. The technology is in its infancy, but it’s helping to redefine the concept of a server: It’s not a black-and-white matter of physical resources anymore.

While the hardware abstraction is impressive, the greatest potential benefit of cloud computing is its use in Software as a Service (SaaS). It’s revolutionary to have an office application that scales from 10 users to 10,000 users and also available to anyone or any device with a network connection.

Cloud Storage

Cloud storage can be an amalgam of SaaS and HaaS (Hardware as a Service): Straightforward user interfaces combined with a solid hardware storage infrastructure. Because a cloud storage installation is dedicated to access, protection and serving data, the key component is hard disk space. Being able to pay for the space that meets your specific needs at a given time has significant advantages over a traditional solution like building out a storage area network in your local office. Your storage can be available to all of your satellite offices in London, Asmara and Santiago. Moreover, your company isn’t responsible for repairing file systems, replacing drives, or dealing with Nick Burns (your company’s computer guy). Brilliant!

We’ve launched a very successful cloud storage solution, and if you’re interested in seeing what the cloud can do for you, you can sign up for our Storage Cloud Test. On the cloud computing side, our team has been evaluating the most powerful, reliable and cost-efficient cloud computing solutions, and we plan on launching a computing platform as dominant as the storage platform in the near future.

Cloud computing and cloud storage have come a long way in the past year or two, and with the hosting industry’s focus on the development and enhancement of the platforms, the sky is the limit for the clouds.

Pun intended.

- Chris

Life is on demand these days. With RSS feeds, DVR, Domino’s Online Pizza Tracker, Hulu, Kindle 2, Netflix and the iPhone app store, you’re in complete control of your world … Why should The Planet’s blog be any different? Lucky for you, we came across a great WordPress Poll plugin this afternoon that puts that power in your hands.

Unlike that perfect black dress I bought on sale from Banana Republic last September, we aren’t going to let this plugin hang in our closet for six months with the tags attached … we’re putting it to work immediately. Take a couple seconds to vote on the content you most want to see from The Planet’s blog:

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If you think we missed anything, be sure to leave us a comment with your recommendation and we can update the poll to include it.

Now I wonder how I can follow suit and unveil that dress …

-Katie

Do you remember how you felt as the school year came to a close and summer peaked over the horizon?

For me, it was a strange combination of exhilaration, anxiousness and terror. The catalyst for those emotions was always a singular nemesis: the report card.

Being a bit of a nerd (please keep the commentary about this to a minimum, thank you), my report card was generally regarded as my life’s unequivocal barometer of success. My two or three months of summer could be made or broken by that piece of paper, and I have to admit that I didn’t always do well:

Yes, that is an A-. No, it is not a typo. An entire class boiled down into a single grade. How arbitrary and unfair can you get? … The other three grades were clearly thoughtful and accurate. What’s was the International Finance professor’s problem?!

No, I’m not actually that vain.

That’s an actual excerpt from my college transcript, and the grades weren’t arbitrary … I worked hard and prepared for class day-in and day-out, so my benchmark validated the time and effort I invested in each class … even International Finance.

It turns out grades are often directly correlated with preparation, and they can be extremely useful in personal development and business development if you ask the right questions.

Over the past few months, The Planet has been working with Microsoft, SmallBizTechnology.com, Nine Lives Media Inc., SMB Nation, Small Business Trends, HostSearch, Yankee Group and Georgia’s Kennesaw State University to put together a survey tool aimed at asking the right questions to small- and medium-sized businesses.

Welcome to the ITEI

The Information Technology Effectiveness Index (ITEI) is a survey that evaluates the effectiveness of an SMB IT infrastructure.

The vast majority of research from analyst firms focuses on large enterprise-type organizations with deep pockets and vast IT resources to support their businesses. In contrast, SMBs are largely ignored, despite the fact they drive our economy.

After taking the survey, you immediately receive your grade, along with prescriptive guidance and recommendations on how you can improve your IT effectiveness.

With questions about everything from business continuity and disaster recovery to change management and budgeting, the ITEI is has been built to provide relevant, helpful feedback and best practices to the SMB market.

As we gain critical mass, you can receive research on how they compete against others in your peer groups and in comparison with other types of SMB companies. We will run the survey throughout 2009, issuing periodic news on what we learn. In December, the partnership will issue an annual report about the state-of-the-state of IT effectiveness.

The survey is 12 questions long and only takes about 10 minutes to complete. So what are you waiting for?

Go get your ITEI grade!

-Kevin

Given the ever-evolving social media landscape, it can be difficult for a company to evaluate if, how, when and where it should participate.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been throwing around a few ideas about how we can communicate with our customers more often and get feedback.

Enter twitter: A community-driven platform built to communicate what different members are doing in real-time. It starts a new conversation.

Follow us on our official twitter page – @theplanet – where we will regularly answer the status-centric question, “What are you doing?”

If you are not a part of the twitter community yet, now’s your chance to sign up and join the conversation. We also want to learn about you!

I apologize if this announcement post seems a little disjointed. I wanted to make sure each one of these entries was exactly 140 characters.

-Kevin

Edited: Our official account was previously @theplanetdotcom but has been updated to @theplanet.

The Planet hosts more than 25,000 customers worldwide. Right now, I am looking through an abridged customer list — with about 5,000 of the thirteen million-plus Web sites we host — and I am blown away by the diversity of our customer base, both geographically and functionally. We’ve got customers from Houston to Dubai selling web hosting, running video game leagues, offering online marketing solutions, hosting high-traffic forums, and building new social media platforms.

The basics of web hosting are simple: The Planet provides knowledgeable tech support, data centers, servers, power and bandwidth. Our customers have businesses, Web sites and ideas that require quality IT infrastructure — from colo to dedicated to partially managed to fully managed solutions (check out The Power to Choose for a look at that spectrum). The most surprising dynamic is how customers build from our services. It’s not uncommon to see two customers with identical hardware configurations running completely different businesses … One might be hosting a 5,000-attendee conference call while the other is consolidating information from social networks and personal e-mail accounts to deliver regular updates to 150,000 users.

If you’ve got a few minutes, I highly recommend you read a few of our Planet Alpha customer success stories and Planet Northstar customer success stories or check out our video testimonials to get a sense of the broad spectrum of business we host every day.

Because this blog is a great avenue to share with you what is going on inside The Planet, it is also a perfect place to share what’s happening on The Planet’s servers on a day-to-day basis. Enter “The Planet Customer Spotlight” series. Every other week, we plan to feature a different customer who is using our service to change the face of the Internet. I’ve got the first few “Spotlights” planned, and I’m looking for nominations to continue the series indefinitely. If you’re interested in getting a little face time on The Planet blog (and some Page Rank link juice), drop a comment at the bottom of this post or shoot me a quick e-mail (khazard AT theplanet.com), and I’ll be in touch.

All Customer Spotlights will be approved by the featured customer prior to posting. We want to use this venue to share your message with the rest of The Planet’s community, so you can be as involved in the process of drafting as you’d like.

After a long summer break, your favorite television shows are finally starting new seasons, and you are prepared: You have a 15-gallon bucket full of Kettle Corn ready for your prime time couch-potato enjoyment; you’ve made space on your Tivo by deleting old episodes since you’ve got them neatly stored on the last season’s DVDs you just bought; and you’ve set recurring calendar appointments to remind you of your “commitments” (Yes, we know that “Go to the gym” means “Call in an order at Domino’s and watch the pizza tracker like a hawk.”).

As your incessant withdrawal symptoms are approaching unbearable levels, I’ve got a treat for you that will temporarily satiate your desire for entertaining content: The Return of This Week* in Vending.

It’s been almost six months since you joined Christian and I on our taste-test of the vending machine chili cheese dogs, so your mouth is either watering for more or your stomach has finally settled … either way, you’ll enjoy this installment.

This week’s victim participant is Planet Northstar’s Development Manager Clayton Spivey, and he is forced gets to try a vending machine cheeseburger. Making a cameo in the episode: our first vending survivor, Todd Mitchell. (Editor’s Note: Make sure you watch Todd’s reaction when Clayton takes the burger out of the wrapper.)

When we finally get down to the meat of the interview (very punny, I know), you’ll have a chance to learn about Planet Northstar — The Planet’s Managed Hosting division — and the development work required to create systems to accommodate the division’s ambitious goals.