I’m often amazed how some will complain about not being taken seriously or referred to as a “kiddie host”, those hosts stated typically by teenagers that get into hosting thinking they’ll make millions sitting at their desk while doing homework. There are some great hosts started by young people, HotGator was started while Brent Oxley was in college. He dropped out and went to work full time for his company. So, yes, even ”kiddie hosts” can be taken seriously and make a success of it.

I suspect that part of the problem is they manner in which younger folks will communicate in their day to day business dealings.  If I was looking for a provider and started a chat session, and got something along the lines of “How r u?”, I would say that it would be hard for the company to regain the trust that they were a serious host that they just lost.  You may be thinking that it’s “not fair”, or “shouldn’t matter”, but the fact is that it does. There’s no face, no intonation in the voice, no firm handshake so to speak with purely internet based dealings. So any little reason is brought to the forefront.  In this case, if they’re too lazy to type 4 extra keys, one begins to wonder what else are they too lazy to do?

You may not agree with this thinking, and that’s fine. However, others are going to judge you and your company based on your writings in chat, forums, company website, and emails. So you need to adjust your thinking and take the time, and care, to represent yourself and company in a professional manner if you are wanting your new hosting business seriously. I’m not saying you have to be a “grammar nazi”, there’s no need for that. Minor mispellings, slightly off grammar, and some incorrect capitalization isn’t going to have the same effect as using “u” instead of you, “r” for are, or a sentence in an ad like “hi come try our services we r the bestest in world we beat all pricez wit unlimited space and traffic we hav l33t h0st1n t00″. That would be fine on some forums, perhaps some frequented by the apparently intended market, but on the more respected forums such a WebHostingTalk, that ad just isn’t going to fly.

LiveZilla setup was a little different than I expected. I’m accustomed to setup the server and then the client. Or more often the server is the client as they often use webpages as the client interface. But LiveZilla comes as a Windows app. I had a little trouble installing it on Windows 7. But selecting properties and telling it to use Vista SP2 compatibility mode, and run as administrator allowed it to install. To be able to save settings, you do need to run as admin I was later told by the program.  Since I don’t use FTP (I SFTP over SSH), I had it create the server files locally and sent them with WinSCP. Then comes the usual fun … I had to log into the control panel and create a database and user. Once I did you let the server admin client create the files and validate the server. I also decided I wanted to use my existing images, so I went into the images options and told it what to use. And lastly I replaced an include file with the old crafty syntax code with a new LiveZilla version… and poof it was running.

I’ve been testing it out, and hopefully will have an update to this article shortly. Thus far it does the job, albiet not too quickly. In completely unscientific testing, there’s a signifigant delay from the time either the operator or the use types in a line, and when it is shown on the other’s screen. Changing the settings to 1 second each (3 for operator, 10 for visitor) has not had much of an impact. I’ve watched the client side refresh repeatedly when a reply has been posted, and there’s no update for many cycles. I’m going to load it on another server just to see if there’s something going on with that particular server.

One note:  A nice feature of LiveZilla is the GeoIP mapping of where the visitor is located. But to use this you need to go into your server config, and enable it per server. It’s off by default.  Once you do that it works, and is pretty “neat” if nothing else.

You can download LiveZilla and try it out yourself at http://www.livezilla.net/home/  — it’s free, so what have you got to lose?