HostEntrepreneur

The other day I blogged about tynt.com’s tracer program and how to stop it from annoying you while browsing. The idea behind it makes sense to a lot of web publishers. You don’t want people ripping off your content. But the post the other day pointed out how easy it is to get around these measures.

Google has a feature called Google Alerts, http://www.google.com/alerts, which lets you find content and emails it to you. I strongly recommend that you set up alerts for your domain name, and company name at a minimum, and get them emailed to you as they happen. This lets you keep on top of what people are saying about your company.

It would be trivial to include a fairly unique phrase into pages you are wanting to try to protect. Then setup an alert for that phrase and have Google email you. Sure you may get some false positives, but provided the phrase is unique enough, it should be few and far between. Remember to use double quotes, like “this is my phrase” so that google doesn’t match “this website is not the same as my website, even though it has the same words as my phrase“. See how all the words are there, but it’s not the phrase.  And it could miss a copied page if they did enough editing on the copied content. But since these people are basically lazy, they won’t edit the page much if at all. So it should catch the majority of them.  Catching the others probably won’t happen with the other “solutions” either if they’re modifying the content that much.

I’ve been watching the forums for a product we’re interested in… the next version is supposed to include a feature we’d have to have to be able to use the product. So I’ve been checking back pretty frequently to see when the next release occurs.  But here’s the problem… on the 2 main computers I use (home and office), both anti-virus programs consider a javascript file from tynt.com as “malicious”. I’m not really positive it is, but the fact that every page I go to in the forum pops up a warning, both claiming the code is “high risk”.

Tynt if you’re not familiar with it watches for people copying your content to another site. While in theory, this isn’t a bad thing. I trust the 2 a/v program manufacturer’s to judge safe vs. not, more than what a company is claiming they are doing (or not doing). So I’m not willing to make an exception in the a/v program for this site. This means my options are 1) stop going there – which is an option. There are alternatives to the product, and if they are unwilling to listen to the (potential) users, do I want the product? I have to wonder what’s “measures” it contains as well.  Or 2) I have to find a way to stop the annoying pop up without endangering my pc.

So here’s how to do option number 2 in this case. Since this javascript it being pulled as a linked file, it’s a normal http get request. All we need to do is get rid of the ability to resolve the hostname for it. In this case the host is wau.tynt.com   This is an XP machine so I go to c:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc  and edit the file named “hosts”, adding the line:

127.0.0.1  wau.tynt.com 

Save the file then from the command line, ping wau.tynt.com   and the address should come back as 127.0.0.1  which should ping fine as it’s the local loopback address. But any request for the file shouldn’t work, unless you happen to have a web server running on your local machine and it happens to have that file in that directory which would just plain be wierd.

Now to get the browser to pick up the change, close ALL of your browser windows and reopen them. If you typed the url into the browser window, you should get an error message that the page is not displayable.  You should now be able to surf without the annoying popup.

For Windows Vista and Win7, the fix is basically the same, but there is a gotcha on it. You won’t be able to edit the file directly as the directory is protected. You will need to copy the hosts file outside of the system tree, to say your Documents folder, edit the file and then copy it back.  When you copy it back, it’s going to complain, and ask you if you really want to do this. Since you are really meaning to change the file, it’s ok in this case. Normally, unless you’re specifically meaning to make a change to Windows like this, you’d want to say ‘No’.

There is another way to do this was well… Turn off scripting in the browser. This has an unfortunate side effect of stopping some features of some sites as well. The above is easy, and works fine, so that’s my choice (until I hear back on their thoughts about the reasoning behind using tynt anyway).

Considering how easy this is to get around, it’s really not protecting much. And it’s a major inconvenience to the users (not to mention how it looks to them)… And finding your content isn’t hard… embed your domain name, name phrase, etc. in the content portion. Then use Google’s Alert feature, http://www.google.com/alerts, to find it. I’d think twice before using it.

One of the best services I’ve found for finding expired domains that are cheap is http://freshdrop.net. This one site lets you search several domain dropping services at the same time and sort them based on all kinds of criteria. The only “issue” with it is that it provides so much information that it can be overwhelming. But there are a couple to pay particular attention to… The PR column is just that, Google’s pagerank. But notice the column next to it, “Fake”. This flags domains that may have suspicious pageranking going on. Realize though that once Google sees the site change, it’s likely to redo the PR anyway.

Next look at the ‘age’. Since you’ll pick up these domains on their way out, the age stays with it. It’s one way to make a site appear older than it really is… but that leads to some ethical questions that this isn’t the place to discuss.

Move on the GR and GRN – these are Google search results for the domain with and without the extension respectively. Related to those is GIDX which is the number pages in Google’s index for the domain. GBL will give you the number of backlinks on other domains pointing to that domain.

Similar to all the Google colums, there are columns for Yahoo, Altavista, Ovation, etc. And over on the right there is a very complete search filter section.  You can filter of TLD (TLD is the top level domain – com, net, org, etc. or a country like .us, .ca, etc.) as well as looking for domains with certain terms in them, or excluding, or with based on any of the columns listed. And you can do compound searches: .COMs containing “host”, excluding “adult”, with 10 to 500 Google backlinks, for example. It’s really quite powerful.

The price you see listed is on top of the regular annual registration fee, but considering they have many that start at $5 it’s quite reasonable compared to some services.

When choosing a hosting partner, what is the most important thing to consider? Price? Feature? Disk Space? Bandwidth?  I’d say it’s none of these… the single most important feature you need to consider is partner themselves. You should be asking: Are they open with their customers? Do they treat their customers like numbers, or partners? Are they honest? Most importantly… Is this a company you are going to want to stay connected to for the long term?

All the other questions, bandwidth, price, features, etc. are details that can be addressed. None of them should factor into a decision to partner with them or not, provided none of them are out of line. But then if they are out of line with industry norms, they’re probably not going to measure up well with the other questions anyway.

Things to look for include checking that they have (and update) a customer news/announcements site or forum. You should also ask the support crew a question or two before signing up. It doesn’t have to anything special or even difficult. What you are looking for is a timely, courteous and accurate answer. One of my early customers asked a question he already knew the answer to… JUST to see if we’d be straightfoward in the answer. And they’re still a customer today.

One of the things you may need to develop, and we probably all stand to improve it some, is time management. This is true even more so for small business owners. There are many methods or techniques to explore, and I plan on going through some of them with you, but today I want to show you the method I like best. It’s commonly referred to as the “Eisenhower method” after the President who used this technique.

It’s a simple method, and works well for managing many aspects. Divide everything up based on the above table into 1 of the 4 quadrants.

1:  Important and Urgent – These are the fires! Put them out right away!
2:  Important but Not Urgent – These are important, but don’t need addressing now. Schedule them for later.
3:  Not Important but Urgent – Delegate these to someone else. Have them do them now.
4:  Not Important and Not Important – Iif you can’t do everything, these are the ones not to do.

Your attention as a small business owner should be on the tasks in boxes 1 and 2 primarily, and sometimes on 3. The 4′s are the ones to ignore for now. They may be “nice to haves” or “nice to dos”, but the time they take is taking away from the more important and/or more urgent matters. Leave them on the list for a while, but don’t be afraid to let them go if need be.

Also realize that items can move from one quadrant to another, especially between 2 to 1, 4 to 3, and 4 to 2 . But they almost never go from a 4 to 1 directly. They almost always go over only 1 direction at a time, either between Urgent and Not, or between Important and Not. Often things move from one to the other because of being neglected, at which time they become either more important or more urgent, and rarely both.

So you may ask yourself, if I’m focusing on the 1s, why not just ignore the rest? Because almost no task can be completed in 1 session. Often you will find yourself blocked by some outside force that limits what you can work on and actually make progress.  Don’t work on something that you’re not going to be able to move forward on, just because it’s a 1.  If you can take care of a 2 or a few of them, you’ve moved forward more than working on a 1 and not going anyway with it.

What is “premium bandwidth”?   If you’re searching for hosting, vps, dedicated servers, colocation, etc., chances are you’ve run across the terms “premium” and “mixed” bandwidth. But what does it mean? And what if it isn’t premium or mixed?

Basically there are 2 recognized levels of bandwidth: premium, and not – which we’ll call “value” bandwidth. Often value bandwidth is Cogent. They provide a lot of bandwidth to a lot of providers and do it at a very reasonable rate.  Cogent is huge… not that the other’s aren’t. But they are the number 1 name that pops up talking about value grade bandwidth.

Permium bandwidth, on the other hand, is made up of Tier 1 providers like: AT&T, Sprint, Saavis, Level 3, etc. These are the REALLY BIG boys with large international networks at very high speeds.  Look into these networks if you ever want to put your home cable or even FIOS in perspective.

So that’s 2 types… Premium and Value, but you often see “Mixed” as well. Simple, it just a combination of the 2. Done right, it can be the best of both worlds, better pricing, and better connectivity as well.  Typically, if you’re seeing either a dedicated or shared unmetered connection it’s probably going either be or at least have come value bandwidth in there, if not all. I’d look for a mixed bandwidth connection unless you absolutely need 100% pure premium bandwidth, and if you had read this article to find out what it was, you don’t.

There are a couple ways of getting charged for bandwidth. You could by an “unmetered” connection rated at a given speed, say 10 or 100mbps. Sometimes those lines are shared so you won’t really be able to use it all, but that’s another discussion. But if you’re buying an “unmetered” connection, be absolutely sure to ask if it is shared with others. If it is, you’re at their mercy.

Also available are x GB or x TB of “bandwidth”. Technically it’s not really bandwidth, but traffic. Again that’s another discussion… But you’ll see it either way. The question to ask there is it incoming, outgoing or combined. You want to know ahead of time depending on what you’re doing.

Lastly is probably the fairest of them all, but also the scariest for smaller providers when buying… it’s called “95th percentile” billing. In this case you will typically have a port speed (10,100,1000mbps for example) as well as a “committed rate”. That committed rate will be how much you’re paying for every month regardless of usage. So if you commit to 5mbps, and only use 1, you still pay for 5. But the more you commit to, the less you pay generally per mbps. Even though you commit to say 5mbps, your connection is burstable all the way up to the capabilities of the line – 10,100,1000mbps (minus ethernet overhead, bottlenecks, etc.). 

That great in that if you get slashdotted, or digg’ed, your might be able to keep your site up… assuming you server, etc. can handle it. But you bandwidth is going to spike. The 95th percentile method computes the bandwidth usage as how much line is required to handle the load 95% of the time.  That is to say if chop off the top 5% or the usage TIME wise, that’s how much you need. There’s about 720 hours in a month (30 days times 24 hours a day),  5% of that is 36 hours. So if we chop off the peak 36 hours, how big of a line would be needed to handle the rest… THAT is what you’ll pay.

Using the normal logs, you can usually tell how much traffic you sent in and out. Or at least get a good estimate. That works for the “x GB / x TB” scenarios. With the “unmetered” scenario, you don’t really have to care provided you’re getting all the bandwidth you need, as there’s no overage charges… thus why people like them, even if they are shared as they often are. But (and it’s a big hairy one), your website logs are almost useless for telling what your 95th percentile usage is… Almost. It can give you an idea if you should get worried, but that’s about it. Think about it, anything less than 36hours at the full 100mbps and < 5mbps the restof the time, and there’s no overage charge with just a 5mbps commit. But 36 hours and 5 minutes (a common sampling rate) at 100mbps, and you suddenly have a 95mbps overage charge. Even if it’s $10/mbps (a pretty decent rate for mixed, excellent for premium) and you have a new $950 bill to pay. Scary huh?  The key is that any provider selling to you at 95th percentile should (and I’ve not seen one that doesn’t) provide you with real-time stats of usage.

First, let me apologize for the late post… I thought I had a post scheduled for today but missed it. I’ll try not to do that again… but no guarantees – life happens!

For new hosts, this is probably not on your list of high priority items, but it should be! Every host, or every business for that matter, should have a stated refund policy.  Plus that policy should be publicly available. The reason being is it makes the issue when (and it is when not if) a refund request comes up, you can simply refer back to the policy for how to handle it.  You should put some thought into it now, and not have to think about it when it finally does happen. And actually as a newer host, it is more likely to happen sooner than later. 

Of course there will always be exceptions, and you should account for that in the policy itself… for “unusual circumstances”. It should not be your way of getting out of giving a refund without cause. But if you say that there’s a 30 day money back guarantee, you should honor it. But personally if the user knowingly abused the service, and your Terms of Service permits it, a refund is not warranted. But notice the TOS reference… your stated refund policy should reference accounts terminated for TOS violations and how they will be “normally” handled – if there is such a thing as a “normal TOS violation”.  Ideally it should be a part of the TOS itself. So that customers explicitly agree to it on sign up… You are having them agree by checkbox, or other method right?

Having a stated refund policy helps build trust in your new hosting company. It shows the customer that you are thinking things through… That you are flying by the seat of your pants… You have a plan, and are working it.

One of the other benefits is when a customer leaves, voluntarily or not, when they want a refund and start the threats, etc. You can refer to your refund policy. If you don’t have one, you’re at somewhat of a disadvantage should it go any further than the threats. Payment providers will want to know the terms that the customer agreed to, and if it’s not spelled out, it may mean that you will lose any challenge.

So go ahead and start working on your refund policy if you don’t have one already. Or review the one you have… You want this in place sooner rather than later.

The more you can make your customers self sufficient the less time you need to answer the same questions over and over. That leads to more time available for other things such as building services, finding new customers, etc.  That’s why we all start working on Knowledgebase (KB) building pretty quickly. But some people aren’t good at visualizing. That is they don’t take written instructions and mentally translate that into what they will see and do. Others do… For the ones that do,  knowledgebase articles work great. I’m one of those people. I’d rather a short KB instruction and then I can go do it… Others need to be shown. That’s where DemoWolf hosting video tutorials comes in.

DemoWolf has over 3600 ready made tutorials for practically any hosting related subject you’d want. Not only are there the normal cPanel, WHM, DirectAdmin, etc. but other subjects such as PuTTY, Paypal, and transfering domain names. They have tutorials that are textual with pictures (think pop up video  but instructional not comical) as well as with voice-over.

I highly recommend DemoWolf tutorials… We’ve just recently started to use them ourselves and are getting positive feedback already. Check out their site at http://www.DemoWolf.com   and check out the bundles and save 50% or more. If you have questions, I’m sure you will find them most helpful as well.

On this installment of “Step 1a – Write a Business Plan”, we’re going to look at what a Business Plan is exactly… I’m sure everyone has heard of one, but how many of us have written one before. I’m sure there’s a few of us, but I bet the vast majority of people looking to get into webhosting for the first time are starting it as a side business. They have probably never written one before, and many probably have never seen one either.

So here’s an overview of the parts of a Business Plan.

• Executive Summary -  THE most important part of the plan. Who you are, what you do, and where you are and where you are going at a high level overview written in everyday terms.
• Market Analysis - A description of the industry including size and target market, growth rates, etc.
• Company Description -Another high level description but in more detail than the executive summary, this time specifically about your business and what needs you’re going to meet, and who the target is for those needs.
• Organization & Management – Profiles of the key players in your organization and the roles they will be taking on. Also should detail the overall structure and how those players fit together.
• Marketing & Sales Management – Descriptions of sales force, management, and how they will go about getting business.
• Service or Product Line -What you will be selling and how you will distinguish yourself product/service-wise.
• Funding -  Regardless of if you are requesting funding, this is where you will say how much you need and/or have, and for what it will be used for…
• Financials – Historical and Prospective financial data. One of the later sections to complete.
• Appendix – All the extra stuff that will be needed based on what you’re going to do with the plan. For example, if you are requesting money from a bank, etc., they will want credit information and resume’s on key management.

Today’s was only an overview of what each section encompasses. Begin to read over them and start thinking about each section, and start making notes or outlines for each section.  Next week, we’ll start going into each section one by one and get down and dirty with it.

Last Week: http://hostentrepreneur.com/2009/08/13/step-1a-write-a-business-plan-part-1/
Next Week:  Coming soon…