Archive for: Internet

Hosting: Common Misconceptions

It is tough trying to decide on a hosting service to go with when there are so many “review” sites out there. Like a product or service you always see people venting about bad experiences with a company, on the internet, rather than positive ones and so you don’t know who to trust. You can’t please everybody all the time, but some companies definitely try more than others. Being a freelance developer myself I have worked with many different companies in the past (Godaddy, Dotster, Bluehost, HostGator, IcdSoft) including the one I currently work for now.

(Full Disclosure – I work for Ecommerce, Inc which is the parent company for IX Webhosting and have a website with them http://www.mashingthenet.com and working on developing another http://www.thestandardrec.com).

Most companies offer the same features and requirements you are looking for. Unfortunately, the hosting industry gives out statistics like uptime % for marketing purposes. It is nice to have expectations, but not unrealistic ones. 98% of all statistics are made up. There are many factors to consider with uptime like resource hogs on shared hosting who should be moved to Virtual Private Servers or Dedicated Servers, hardware failures for equipment that is still under warranty that takes time to recreate from backups, Terms of Service Violaters, or customers who are victims of ddos attacks, etc. For me, other than uptime, the biggest deciding factor is customer service and tech support. You also have to consider while cheap is good it is relative. I am reminded of the old saying, “You get what you pay for.” In my eyes the bigger the company the cheaper the price and more brand recognition with regards to competitive strategy, but it doesn’t always equate to great customer service when things go wrong. It depends on where operations budgets are being focused on: R&D, Marketing, Operations, Customer Service. The two best ways you can decide is word of mouth and have a test account on with a short billing cycle so you can do “trial” runs. The great thing I like about IX currently over other companies is the direction they are headed with operations and customer support. They want to get away from the customer settling for average expectations. They have a 99.999% uptime guarantee, 24/7 US based phone support, 24/7 ticket and live chat support and all the other of the requirements you are asking for including affiliate sales for you to receive commission on (http://www.ixwebhosting.com/index.php/v2/pages.affiliates).

Here are some blog posts on where the company is headed: Custom Control Panel:

http://blog.ixwebhosting.com/2009/09/introducing-imperia/

http://www.redhat.com/promo/summit/2009/awards/ecommerce_vizuri.html

Customer Service:
http://blog.ixwebhosting.com/2009/06/how-will-we-blow-you-away-exactly-part-1-of-3/ http://blog.ixwebhosting.com/2009/07/how-will-we-blow-you-away-exactly-parts-2-and-3/

Here is the status blog to make customers aware of persistent issues on their servers that take more than an hour to fix or other operational moves that they email customers ahead of time if they are affected: http://status.ixwebhosting.com/

If you have any other questions about IX Webhosting or any of the other hosting companies I have worked with I would be happy to answer them for you.

Paradigm Shift – Problems with Social Media Overload

I do believe there is a saturation now that Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook have hit the mainstream when everybody, legitimate marketers and otherwise, is trying to ride the wave of those not yet on board. Like everything the saturation is due to buzz makers who use the tools in the wrong ways or at least unethical ways, IMHO. There is a right way and a wrong way. The good news is that with social media we are now the gatekeepers and can tune out the garbage in garbage out content. For real revenue generation we have to learn from the past mistakes of traditional marketing that quantity vs quality doesn’t work anymore. It is the offline activities that are the most successful. I believe they are valuable tools getting a bad rap from people who don’t necessarily know how to use them and are being taken advantage of by those that feel the need to spam. +Continue Reading

Establishing a Personal Brand through Rich Media

I would like to say I think the most effective way to establish a personal brand is relative. There are things that you have to take into consideration like what industry/market are you trying to pursue and to drill it down even to a niche in said industry/market and build from there.

In today’s social media world building a personal brand means doing “all the above.” If I had to make a choice I would have to say blogging because you can always integrate podcasting and viral videos in to that. That being said blogging is more of a platform in which to distribute your content via podcasting, viral videos, etc. +Continue Reading

The Social Media Marketing Resume

The obvious to me are the ones with links to their social networking profiles and when checking their profiles that they are consistently active in those communities while advocating in a niche market or industry. They also have to be cognizant to social media marketing trends (vanity urls, social media tools, etc.) and the implementation of those tools. If they truly know what they are doing besides existing on social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook and using social media tools like Twitter they are also writing about it in their blog and creating Slideshare presentations on a regular basis. Are they active and are they staying relevant week to week, month to month, year to year while gaining new followers and building a tribe. True social media “experts” are public speakers who are passionate about marketing in their niche industry and future trends while educating others on they why and the how.

Are they truly active and staying relevant beyond their resume? The great thing about Social Media resumes is that it is easier to go on fact finding missions. +Continue Reading

WordPress: More than a blog platform.

When I started using Joomla a long time ago as a community based membership site I thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. This also happened to be the same time when WordPress was known as just a blogging site. Joomla had good developer support with great plugins to increase functionality of a CMS system that provided easy content and got away from the standard Web 2.0 system (phpNuke, e107, etc.) of a 3 column community site with a forum and a couple other bells and whistles. +Continue Reading