ServerBeach Blog

I had the opportunity to attend the Dallas WordCamp 2008 this past weekend. Aside from the drive from San Antonio to Dallas, the weekend was great. Cold, but great. WordCamps brings the largest gathering of WordPress bloggers, podcasters, designers, programmers and aficionados to teach, learn, eat, drink and generally have fun with one another.

In the opening segment on Saturday March 29th, Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic and founding developer of WordPress spoke about WordPress 2.5 and the changes that were made from previous versions. The poor man just had his wisdom teeth removed and was in a little pain that day, but he was a trooper! While he spoke, he displayed the changes in WordPress 2.5 on the big screens. A couple of changes included a new Dashboard (many people learned of WordCamp 2008 through the Dashboard widget), new Gallery Features - upload feature: set thumbnail sizes, proportions of pictures, extracts all photo information from your digital camera (date, time, pixels, camera type), comments in 2.5 - editing has been completely re-designed, cookies are now encrypted and a couple more added security features.

The Mayor also popped in for a few minutes to thank everyone for coming, that was a pleasant visit.

Lunch was catered in from Rudy’s BBQ, thanks to Find My Host who funded it. It was the perfect opportunity to mingle with other bloggers, podcasters, and the like.

The majority of the event, we sat and listened to bloggers and podcasters speak about tips and tricks, how to drive traffic, security, and best practices. These people have done their homework. I was really taken in by some of the tips they were giving, things that had never crossed my mind. Did you know that Google Analytics only tracks people who have Javascript turned on? If someone has Javascript turned off (I generally do), they’re not being tracked - skewed numbers, not good.

After Saturday’s event, many people got together afterwards for a night out and had a great time. Sunday was a jam packed day full of a lot of Q&A and the weekend in general was a very good learning experience for all bloggers and podcasters. John P. moderated the panel and asked very real questions that companies face when looking at building a blog presence. Why should businesses have a blog? What if my employees post something bad? What if my customers post something bad? These are questions that companies have to take into account when making a decision to have a blog - just as ServerBeach did. One of the panel members, Liz Strauss, was dead on when she said, “a blog can turn the faceless company into real humans you can relate to.”

All in all, it was a great event. The city of Frisco, TX allowed WordCamp to use their city council chambers. Many thanks to those who made this possible and I look forward to attending many more in the future.

You can see some of the photos taken at WordCamp 2008.

We’ve reached the 10,000 servers mark! This is a big milestone for ServerBeach and we want to thank you for helping us get here! Below is part of the official press release that went out late yesterday:

The company has reached this milestone through its dedication to providing the kind of control and flexibility that customers expect, in order to grow their businesses and web presence.

“We are very proud to reach this landmark with our strong customer loyalty and support,” said Fabio Banducci, president and CEO of PEER 1. “This milestone also reflects the company’s continuous growth in the very competitive self-managed hosting arena. We strongly believe this has been accomplished in part because ServerBeach has maintained its commitment to go above and beyond what other self-managed hosting companies provide, with much needed resources and support that help our customers succeed.”

Unlike competitors, where service often ends once the server is connected, ServerBeach is focused on providing its customers with continued support as their businesses grow. ServerBeach offers 24/7/365 customer service and automation tools that make self-managed hosting as simple as possible.

Automation tools include Rapid Reboot(TM) and Rapid Rescue(TM), which are powerful self-management tools optimized in-house by ServerBeach and available to customers free of charge. Rapid Reboot(TM) enables customers to restart their web servers instantly and on-demand, without having to wait on a technician to reboot them. Rapid Rescue(TM) is one-of-a-kind, allowing customers to rescue their dedicated servers from potentially fatal errors without waiting for assistance from an onsite technician.

Strategically located across the U.S., in California, Texas and Virginia, ServerBeach takes advantage of the high performance, fully redundant PEER 1 network, with 15 state-of-the-art data centers in 12
cities and 20 network points-of-presence across North America and Europe. Customers can expect reliable service, minimal latency, disaster recovery, and geographic diversity.

“I tried and quit several hosting vendors before discovering ServerBeach,” said Mike Mitchell, CIO at Winnovate.com. “I’ve used ServerBeach almost exclusively for over 4 years now and am very happy with their pricing, reliability, and support. Finally, a web hosting company I can count on!”

A couple of weeks ago, someone got hassled by airport security - they couldn’t make sense of his MacBook Air. Because the MacBook Air does not look like your every day laptop, it grabs the interest of security personnel, according to the TSA’s Blogger Bob. Why? Its solid state drive. Which means any notebook with a SSD could cause a delay for you if you’re traveling.

Blogger Bob states -

We were able to get our hands on a MacBook Air and run it through the X-ray in our lab. My suspicions were correct. The MacBook does look completely different than your typical laptop or DVD player. I can’t get into specifics of course, but there were a couple of areas on the X-ray that could pique some interest for TSOs.

Read more of his blog post here.

According to A List Apart, “sign-up forms must die“. Now, when I read that my first thought was - I agree. I find myself often going to a website just to browse around or read an article but find that I cannot do so without filling out a sign-up form. What does that prompt me to do? It makes me move on to the next website and browse elsewhere.

To quote the author of this website -

I’ll just come out and say this: sign-up forms must die. In the introduction to this book I described the process of stumbling upon or being recommended to a web service. You arrive eager to dive in and start engaging and what’s the first thing that greets you? A form.

We can do better. In fact, I believe we can get people engaged with digital services in a way that tells them how such services work and why they should care enough to use them. I also believe we can do this without explicitly making them fill out a sign-up form as a first step.

I certainly agree with the above quote. I agree that showing a potential customer or visitor what services you have to offer, if nothing more than a sample, will entice them more to stick around if interested and be more than willing to fill out a brief form to sign up.

The article, “Sign Up Forms Must Die” is a very interesting read. The view is mainly from a user standpoint and does not really discuss the views or impacts from a business perspective. One comment (#10) in the discussion forum from the article makes a very good point from a company perspective -

I notice that you are giving opinions from the user perspective only and thought I could give a company perspective on this. A web application I created a couple of years ago (www.ausrackid.com) went through this thought process. Ausrack ID allows IT pros to configure 19” racking systems in a visual way, save print out the results, and get quotes from the company I work for. I chose having no sign up until the user decides they want to save, at which point you are asked for username and email address, if they want a quote for items they get asked for more details. This is quite a way through the process. I was advised to put in a signup process at the front end to allow us to collect information on the users which we could potential use for emailing info. I resisted this at the time, and still do today. However, for the first year, the site was getting significant traffic, and significant usage, but very few people were saving their design, or asking for a quote. As the site needs to fund itself, it was very difficult to justify it’s existence at this stage, and the whole project was almost pulled. I think the moral of the story is that your user details have a value, and giving those to a website you use may be the only way they can stay afloat. Think of YouTube, they can justify their existence by the data provided by the number of users. That is why Google bought them. At the smaller scale my advice would be if they ask for it, and you want to use the service, give them your details, it might just help them survive in a competitive world.

Great point. So how do you create the ultimate user experience, get the data you need to remain competitive, and create a win-win for all?

Read the full article here and share your thoughts.

Microsoft Corp. yesterday warned of a critical vulnerability that affects users of Word running on Windows 2000, XP and Server 2003 SP1 — several weeks after one security company first reported an exploit and a day after a second vendor confirmed ongoing attacks. In an advisory posted Friday, Microsoft acknowledged “public reports of very limited, targeted attacks” that exploit a bug in the Microsoft Jet Database Engine, a Windows component that provides data access to applications including Microsoft Access and Visual Basic.

According to Symantec Corp., however, the attacks Microsoft described used malicious Word 2000, 2002, 2003 and 2007 documents, which in turn call up the vulnerable Jet .dll (Dynamic Link Library file).

For further infrormation on this, head on over to ComputerWorld and read the full story. You can find the Microsoft Security Advisory here.

Since March 13, customers of two large Internet providers, Cogent Communications Group Inc. and TeliaSonera AB are unable to contact each other through the Internet, unless they have backup connections from other companies.

This means, for instance, that some U.S. Web sites hosted by Cogent customers are inaccessible to surfers in the Nordic countries, where Sweden-based TeliaSonera is the largest telecommunications operator. It’s like Cogent and TeliaSonera customers are on different Internets.

“Basically, parts of the Internet can’t talk to each other,” said Earl Zmijewski, general Manager of the Internet data division at Renesys Corp., which keeps track of how carriers route traffic over the Internet.

It’s not the first time this has happened: Now and then, Internet companies indulge in what Zmijewski calls playing “chicken.” If they’re fighting over a contract, they disconnect each other, and wait to see who blinks first. The number of irate customers each company faces will probably determine who does.

Check out the full story here.

A new kind of flash memory technology with potentially greater capacity and durability, lower power requirements, and the same design as flash NAND is primed to challenge today’s solid-state disk products. Fremont, Calif.-based Nanochip Inc. said it has made breakthroughs in its array-based memory research that will enable it to deliver working prototypes to potential manufacturing partners next year. Three investors, including Intel Capital, recently put $14 million into the company, which has been developing the technology since its founding in 1996.

“It’s a technology that doesn’t depend on Moore’s Law,” says Gordon Knight, CEO of Nanochip. “This technology should go at least 10 generations.”

Read more about this technology at ComputerWorld.

ServerBeach is now home from the SXSW events. We attended the Interactive Festival on Sunday and remained there until yesterday. We had such a great time and had the opportunity to meet many of our customers and learn more about their business, while they had the opportunity to get to know some of our employees.

Monday night, March 10th ServerBeach co-sponsored the South by Northwest (SXNW) Geek Fest Party at the Iron Cactus in downtown Austin and wow was it an awesome night! There were so many people lined up outside waiting to get in we opened the doors early so we could get the party started and enjoy the rest of the night (well…night through early morning!).

We’ll definitely be looking forward to doing this again next year! You can view pictures of the events here.