Web Hosting News

In my last post, I talked about making sure you have a clear idea of your budget, specify who your target market is and where they hang out on the web before you ever spend a dime on your media buys.

Yet there’s more to getting prepped for your media buys.

Be sure to comb over your site with a detailed review looking for ways to improve the conversion process BEFORE you begin your campaign. For example, is your checkout process clear – or do you have so many steps your visitors must take in order to check out that they do just that – check out your competition!?

Here’s something else to think about: chances are you may have different target audiences for your products or services. Let’s say you own a web hosting company that caters to school districts, but you’d also like to grab some business from individual teachers. That is a clearly defined niche – educated individuals but perhaps without a lot of technical savvy and certainly price conscious. You should make sure your landing page isn’t just your home page. Instead, you should have a landing page designed specifically for that frugal teacher market. And, while you’re at it, build a landing page for the school district market, too.

As you get ready to allocate your media funds and the reps from the sites you’re considering just eager for you to sign that contract, be sure to sit down with that rep and evaluate your estimated cost-per-click (CPC). Using the example above of targeting individual teachers, you would receive a better return on your marketing spend by placing clickable ads on the “technology” section of www.teachers.net rather than a run of site ad.

We’ll talk about what to do during your media campaign in my next post.

Earlier this week Candice and I had the unprecedented (I say unprecedented because this was the first time theWHIR was on location covering it!) pleasure of attending cPanel’s third annual partner conference at the Westin Oaks Galleria in Houston.

I’ll admit, I was quite surprised about how lush and green Houston was considering I had this silly but steadfast preconception that all of Texas would be dry and hot, with sprawling ranches and *cough* cowboys in 10-gallon hats. But, I digress…

Considering this was our first time covering cPanel’s event, we weren’t quite sure what to expect, although through the company’s announcements I knew it was supposed to be “more in depth with more advanced topics than in previous years.”

I later found out this meant much more technically detailed seminars (not so much business oriented) and a particular focus on security through its sessions “Security Concepts and Strategies in 2008″ and “Systematized Threats to web hosting security.” One of the attendees I spoke to, David Meservy from Gem3, tells me the second one alone was worth the price of admission.

Upon arriving at the conference’s opening networking shindig on Wednesday evening, which you can see pictures of here, there were two things I immediately noticed: the crowd was significantly smaller (and more intimate, mind you) than other events we had been to and the room was full of faces I had never seen before; this is almost always the case with partner events though.

On Thursday, the conference began bright and early at 8:45 a.m. with some opening remarks from cPanel’s operations manager David Koston. He skimmed over the itinerary for the event, outlining some little changes in the scheduling, and shared some general trends about the industry and how it was relevant to cPanel’s current and future initiatives. Namely, he talked about the growth in application hosting, the increased use of virtualization technologies and Netcraft’s month-to-month evidence that Windows-based Hosting was growing significantly and cPanel was embracing this with its upcoming Server Suite for Windows offering.

One thing Koston said that stood out was cPanel’s hope for a “true” open standard for application packaging. Now, we know Parallels has aggressively been touting its APS Standard and cPanel has its cPAddons standard (for around three and a half years, apparently) but both met with Koston’s criticism for not being a truly “open” standard. Koston says the APS Standard is good, but was “created without industry input” and was presented as a standard rather than adopted as a standard while cPanel’s cPAddons standard was sufficient for cPanel customers but not great for the industry.

“The goal is to have an open standard, one that isn’t driven by control panel companies, though we contribute to it, but is open and available for hosts and ISVs. One that’s created for every application,” said Koston during a one-on-one discussion at the event. “For it to truly be a standard it has to be worthwhile to everyone to adopt it. When you define something and tell people it’s a standard, if they don’t use it, there’s no value.”

In an effort to remedy this, Koston says cPanel has met with some web hosts and ISVs to collaborate on what everyone would want from an open standard and they’re hoping to build some momentum soon. So far, Koston says they’ve put together some preliminary schematics. He’s also encouraging interested companies to contact him directly to discuss more.

The event wrapped up today and cPanel says it is making its presentations available here.

Also be sure to stay tuned for some WHIRtv coverage of the event and some interviews in the coming weeks.

The 2008 cPanel Conference is winding down today with fewer sessions and a more relaxed final day of the event. Anastasia Tubanos will soon provide you with a full recap on her WHIR TV Blog so stay tuned. In the meanwhile take a look at this industry event in photos. You can also view more on theWHIR Flickr stream.

The cPanel team at the Day 1 networking reception.

TheWHIR table at the cPanel Conference on day 1

The TrustWave table at the cPanel Conference on day 1

Attendees rocking out on night 2 of the Microsoft sponsored dinner and mixer. The xBox 360 game Rockband provided lots of entertainment for all in attendance with many trying their hand at the drums, bass and guitar. A good time was had by all.

Thank you cPanel and all the event sponsors for an educational and enjoyable experience. The entire WHIR team is happy to have been apart of it.

As has been widely reported, three of the nation’s largest, ISPs have entered into an agreement with New York’s Attorney General Cuomo in which they will begin blocking certain sites alleged to contain child pornography.  While it’s unclear why these ISPs agreed to cooperate (although given A.G. Cuomo’s past law enforcement efforts, it’s certainly easy to assume that a certain amount of arm twisting was involved) the way this agreement will be implemented is quite illuminating. 

The press release issued by the A.G.’s office makes for interesting reading.  It appears that the State of New York will begin building a library of objectionable images and assign these images hash values.  This will allow the State to identify images across multiple networks without having to re-identify them.  The ISPs will also use lists of illegal images compiled by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to administer the program and remove data.  In addition, in the release, we learn that the A.G.’s office “uncovered” a “major source” of the content, “known as news groups.” 

What is missing from the release is how these programs will be administered.  Predictably, this minor issue was not included in the press release, nor in reporting by major news outlets.  However, reporters from “Mashable” did some digging and found that each of the ISPs were going to approach the issue differently:  TimeWarner is blocking all USENET access; Sprint the alt* hierarchy; and Verizon different newsgroups on a case-by-case basis.

So what does this mean in a broad context?  In general, I believe it reflects a dangerous trend of placing law enforcement tools in the hands of private, or quasi-private, entities.  Make no mistake, child pornography is illegal.  As I point out in almost every presentation I make, U.S. child pornography laws are “strict liability:”  you violate the law when you view the content, no matter how noble your intentions.  However law enforcement tools exist to combat this material.  Agreements such as this reflect the thin wedge of private Internet censorship.

When I read this warning flags shot up all around.  Other entities are already trying to implement similar schemes for other types of content.  Indeed, the RIAA, MPAA, NAB, and similar organizations are currently lobbying Congress to rewrite Intellectual Property laws to require certain types of content screening.  Last year former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales embarked on a campaign to eradicate all pornography on the Internet.  Taken together, these events should alarm hosts and other Internet Infrastructure providers.

Hosts sit at a particularly unique point in the Internet Infrastructure.  Because such a substantial amount of Internet traffic must ping their servers, it is incredibly easy to use this fact to control content.  This fact already results in hosts receiving a significantly higher number of criminal and civil warrants and subpoenas.  Hosts simply have the information. Moving the policing of illegal and objectionable content from law enforcement and requiring private entities to assume this task is likely to sharply increase the cost of doing business and significantly raise the risk profile of hosts.

While we all take great pains to make it clear that child pornography is objectionable, and its content irredeemable, the simple fact is that this agreement results in two major ISPs blocking access to a part of the Internet that is of great utility for other uses.  Similarly the organizations representing copyright holders have argued that P2P networks should be shut down because they can function as conduits for piracy.  It is not a far stretch to speculate about a future in which new methods of content dissemination are studied not for their effectiveness in moving Internet traffic, but for their potential to offend.  A chilling development indeed.

So I've been dedicating a good bit of my time lately brainstorming a new product.  This has made me think about how I go about providing hosting to the very small number of people I do (some friends and family that need a business presence on the web and that is about it).  I loathe the idear of finding a one stop shop for all my offering needs as it were.  It is my opinion that the companies that have the resources to provide every possible tool and utility one may want to offer to their customers also have the resources to box those same people in.  By box in I mean that you don't get the source to the products you are running and you have no idea where to go if you have issues execpt through their tech support.  This may be good, it may be aweful and that almost assuredly will depend on the mood of the support person you speak with as well as your mood (don't ever forget how much your mindset and what you project going into a tech support call will effect the outcome of the call).

 Many shun open source products because they don't come with some level of tech support.  For a number of organizations this is just, they don't have the resources to bring on a full time admin or to dedicate a full time admin to one particluar task.  It may make sense to put the burden of support somewhere else. This area is so grey, really.  There are so many software vendors out there who provide only one product.  This may be email, this may be web services, this may be anti spam or anti virus protection, but in my opinion, these individual vendors are who we need to be looking to to provide a bundled product to our customers.  This takes careful consideration and the decision should not be made over night.  If you really need something right away, at least make sure you aren't getting locked into something you can't get out of if you change your mind in a month (or even a week). Then spend some time as you can and really dig into a few things that are options and re-evaluate your decision.  There is nothing wrong with changing your mind and your customers will understand (especially if your decision provides them with a better product).

 OK, this has kinda been all over the place.  The reason for all of that drivel will become apparent in the next couple of weeks.  I've been cooking up some real world scenarios on hosting solutions (mostly geared towards the would be hosting provider) that focus on the paradigm of convenience and secuirty.  I'll start on Friday with what I would do if I were starting from scratch and going to start up a small hosting company on my own.  The first one will be based on convenience.  What works best and is easiest to set up.  The second one (in a couple of weeks) will be based on security.  More to follow…..

jb