The Infrastructure Manager at Liquid Web Inc. Chris Strandt is a pretty cool guy. As a client that leases servers, we really don’t have any reason to talk to the Infrastructure Manager at our data center much, but our data center is no ordinary data center and when we had some questions, we got a meeting with him and got to hear all about the innards of the DC. We even followed a good half of what the Brainiac from Smartron was telling us.

But this isn’t about the infrastructure at Liquid Web, and its supposed to be about the funny. So, let’s get to the funny.

One of the reasons we actually like our DC is that we actually genuinely like the people there. Despite having just communicated via the Net in both official and unofficial capacities, we actually formed pretty cool net relationships with a number of them and they really make us laugh our rears off.

Since most hosts actually don’t have data centers and lease boxes or space with hosts that do have their own data centers but generally hide this fact or at least play it down an awful lot, lots of folks can’t understand why we “play it up”, so to speak.

If we didn’t, we couldn’t bring you this:

Chris Strandt was going on vacation, and before he went, he played a prank on the Maintenance Department at Liquid Web. He tinfoiled their office, and videotaped his handiwork.

Chris then happily went off on vacation, no doubt snickering at his creativity. He forgot the first rule of office pranks – never play one on the guys that know construction.

The Maintenance Team retaliated – by making his office disappear.

I’m giving this one to the Maintenance Team – Chris’s was good, but theirs was epic.

For more Work Fails and Job LOLs, check out http://mthruf.com/ – no doubt Liquid Web staff will be appearing there soon.

Thanks for keeping up with our blog – we decided to add a new feature here at the DrakNet Blog, so we can take a break from teaching, technologizing (yes, I made up that word, too), and periodically lecturing.

Each Friday, we’ll give you a round up of what we read or discovered or watched or came across or laughed at or used over the course of the week that was interesting, funny, worth mentioning or just plain weird – with our commentary.

Maybe sometimes without commentary. Who knows.

We’ll see how it goes!

The Round Up

Greenpeace’s Hosting: Not ‘Truly Green’ (datacenterknowledge.com)

After Greenpeace bashed Facebook for not being green enough, it was discovered Greenpeace’s hosting isn’t really green enough either, and definitely touched off a debate on what is “green enough” to be considered green. As a host that hosts in a “non-green” data center, but who buys copious amounts of solar energy to offset our grid, this is definitely a subject we tend to watch pretty closely. (MOST “green hosts” green via offsets – there are very, very few truly renewable energy powered data centers at this point, though the fact that this is getting press is hopefully an indication that will eventually change.)

U.S. Declassifies Part of Secret Cybersecurity Plan (Wired)

The fact that the declassification announcement was made by Howard A. Schmidt, a former Microsoft security executive, admittedly made us snicker, but the article and the report were an interesting read.

48 Hours Mystery: West Memphis Three (CBS)

We watched the 48 Hours episode of The West Memphis Three case, a case that we’ve been following for… oh, gosh, it seems like years now. Years longer than we thought we’d be following it. You can watch the full episode online.

Books Should Be Free (booksshouldbefree.com)

We discovered a place to get completely free audiobooks. Rock! All audio books on BooksShouldBeFree.com are in the public domain. This means that no one holds a copy right on these books and therefore anyone including BooksShouldBeFree.com is free to distribute them.

Viacom Ticks Everyone Off by Yanking Comedy Central Shows from Hulu (NoFactZone)

We joined the pre-eminent Stephen Colbert fan site (that we host and read) in being massively pissed about losing The Daily Show and The Colbert Report on Hulu

Same-Sex Marriage Becomes Legal in D.C. (Time)

We watched as yet another location made marriage equal for everyone. Congrats to all the new legal couples in D.C.!

Free Online Image Converter (coolutils.com)

We’re totally in the dark ages when it comes to graphic programs – we’re still using, no kidding, Paint Shop Pro 5 from back when they were still Jasc and Corel hadn’t even bought ‘em yet. It’s so old, the thing can’t even open most modern PNG files, and it sure can’t make ‘em. Luckily, we found a cool awesome image converter online that can take a 4 Meg GIF and make it into a 7kb PNG.  

So, what did you find on the Internet this week that was cool, funny, or just plain weird?

Ever heard the term “lifestyle business”? A post by Hillel at jacksonfish.com came up with a Twitter-friendly definition:

“Lifestyle business” is the patronizing term for businesses unwilling to grow at the expense of the quality of their product or workplace.

Ok, maybe that’s harsh.

A lifestyle business, in essence, a business that is privately held, usually (but not always) held by one owner that is not focused on growth of the business beyond a certain point, usually that point being the owner’s aspired to lifestyle (hence the term “Lifestyle Business”). As Hillel implied above, our businesses are often snickered at a bit (especially in tech), as if we’re the business children sitting down next to the grown ups table – because at the grown ups table, that’s where the real money is made.

Basically, this is the web 2.0 name for a “family business”.

DrakNet is, absolutely, 100% a “lifestyle” business – and we were one before the term became popular. My husband likes to tell me I didn’t really found a business so much as I created myself the job that I wanted that would pay me the salary I wanted. That’s probably closest definition that fits, for me – though I do wish my boss would give me weekends off occasionally.

Soul Shelter’s Tim Clark wrote a few years ago about the difference between Lifestyle-Focused or Family Businesses, Middle-Market Companies, and High-Potential Ventures, reminding us that Lifestyle and Family businesses account for 90% of new businesses. While many associate “business goals” with having an IPO, millions in revenue, and so on, most business don’t ever reach that height. If Tim’s figures are correct, the overwhelming majority of them don’t even aspire to it.

So, if we’re at the kid’s table, our table’s a heck of a lot bigger than theirs. And we probably have better food.

While DrakNet could fall under Middle-Market in that it is an imminently and exponentially scalable business, it has also often been jokingly called a “cult of personality” in that my vision for it is a huge part of what drives it to its success and longevity in what is a highly competitive and highly volatile market. While it could survive should I no longer be the owner, it would likely not really be the “DrakNet” people associate with us and our service.

Contemplating getting into reselling as a lifestyle business can be scary. The market’s saturated with so many web hosts that their advertising noise can drown out everything else in certain corners of the web. And again, there’s the big people table/little people table thing in the web hosting realm…

The Data Centers are the big players, and they’re more important than…

… the hosts that co-locate servers in the data centers, but own their stuff…

… the hosts that lease servers that don’t own their stuff…

… the resellers that have resellers accounts with shared hosts…

Well, you get the picture.

Now, this isn’t about reselling, per se – lots of people resell. Most people are not doing it as their full time job. This is about starting a web hosting service as a Lifestyle Business, getting a reseller account and starting reselling with the intention that you will eventually quit your day job and do it full time. Can you do it?

Sure you can. Not only did we do it, but we know a number of companies that did it.

Some of those companies are, all these many years later, still “Lifestyle Businesses”, supporting their owners lifestyle and sending the kids to college. We actually do server maintenance for a number of these folks who are just as successful or more successful than we are but who have absolutely no aspirations beyond what they have acheived.

Some companies have gone on to become Middle-Market companies that are still privately owned and tightly controlled, but who have exploded in growth. Liquid Web started in the same year we did, 1997, and we have 6 servers in their data center (which houses roughly 10,000 servers across 3 data centers).

Matthew Hill, the founder of Liquid Web was just sixteen in 1997 – again, the year that he and I both started in this industry. (I was… um… not 16 in 1997. We’ll leave it at that.) He, no doubt, had far different goals than I did – when he got slammed with orders, he probably had a party. When I got slammed with orders, I stopped taking them because I had no interest whatsoever in ever having to leave home to go to work. Both of us started in the same place, though, and arrived where we wanted to be. Web Hosting is a fabulous business that way.

Heck, you could even argue that Liquid Web is a lifestyle business – its just that Matt’s lifestyle costs a lot more than mine.

Web Hosting is an excellent choice for a lifestyle business, whether your lifestyle is mine (A Dodge Caravan) or Matt’s (a really awesome Lamborghini). It’s a business that is truly flexible with regards to time, commitment, and “lifestyle” as long as you make the right decisions coupled with great offerings, support and vendors.

The reason I point out Matt’s different level of success is that if you read how Matt started, you’ll see that his story is incredibly similar to how we started, and they really are the two sides of the success coin. Even the industry behemoths started somewhere – and many of them started the same way you still have the opportunity to. If you don’t want to be a behemoth, you can do what we did and strictly control growth, maintaining your time, money and desired lifestyle.

Both places are attainable depending on what you want to put into it, and where you want to go.

The awesome thing about web hosting is that you really generally can steer your own business growth exactly where you want to go if you’re smart about it and if you choose the right vendors, offerings, and educate yourself. If you are willing to constantly grow your understanding of this industry, it can not only turn into a business that you can grow slowly or fast, with no investment from the ground up slowly or with a loan to try and explode, if you do it right it can be extremely lucrative as well.

Deciding to jump into reselling with the intent of creating it as a “Lifestyle Business” can be tough. As a smaller shop, you have to think if a lot of different contingencies, and make sure your vendors are people that you can trust to value your business.

We’ll save that for another time.

So, this year, DrakNet had a pretty impressive year as far as growth – we added the alakazam server in June of 2008, and it filled up and record time. In December, we changed our prices to get out of the “dirt cheap” market and concentrate on our core market of quality vs. quantity, and so far we’re extremely happy with that decision.

This year also marked the start of our official Kiva lending program. Kiva is the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world. Though we started in April of 2008, we set a goal of lending to at least one entrepreneur per month. As we look at 2008, we can count 13 entrepreneurs in the third world that we made a direct difference to, one more than our goal.

http://www.kiva.org/lender/draknet

We also managed to garner 915,345 in our World Grid Team project and contributed our unused computer power to projects like AfricanClimate@Home, Discovering Dengue Drugs – Together, FightAIDS@Home, Help Conquer Cancer, Human Proteome Folding 2,  and Nutritious Rice for the World, which made our computers feel quite useful and philanthropic.

As the year comes to a close, we’re hopeful that despite the horrific economic reality that so many are faced with, a new year and a new administration will bring great changes to come that will benefit not just all of us, but the world. Tonight, we at DrakNet celebrate both an end, and a new beginning.

We want to thank you for choosing us for your hosting needs (some of you for over 11 years now), thank you for enabling us to do such cool stuff as a company, host such cool sites as a company, and we look forward to serving your needs for many years to come.

Happy, joyous, peaceful, and prosperous new year to all of you.

Granted, this is a web hosting company so, for the most part, you expect this blog to be primarily about web hosting. Occasionally, an event takes place and I feel the need to say something about it because to ignore it seems patently ridiculous. George Carlin dying is one of those events.

I don’t know when I first heard Carlin – it seems like I’ve just always known who he was and he’s always made me laugh. I do know I first saw him on HBO, and was amazed that he was saying the things that he was saying. Other people have HBO Boxing Nights where everything stopped for the big fight – I had Carlin HBO special nights, where everything stopped. I would sit with college friends and drink, then later I would watch it on the small screen in my own apartment, and later I would snuggled down before my LED Big Screen with my husband and dog in suburbia. Most of my adult life, Carlin was there to re-phrase the obvious, point out the absurd, and make me laugh about it.

So, screw web hosting for a day.

Today I want to share one of my favorite bits Carlin did which is probably a little lesser well known. The following is “Modern Man”:

I’m really going to miss him, and honor one of the most mainstream radicals we’ve ever had the honor to be touched by.

I’ve been pre-washed, pre-cooked, pre-heated,
pre-screened, pre-approved, pre-packaged,
post-dated, freeze-dried, double-wrapped
and vacuum-packed.

And…I have unlimited broadband capacity.

Most folks know that DrakNet has worked with the Bonneville Environmental Foundation to “green” our company. Well, we’re also on their mailing list and we got an email yesterday letting us know that Jack Johnson has also chosen BEF to green his 2008 World Tour.

Jack’s gone a step further, though and we wanted to tell you about it since it gives you a chance to raise money for BEF just by getting educated – he’s got a number of video ads on his web site located here addressing a number of issues, and if you click this link and watch the video:

Video Title: Bonneville Environmental Foundation Ad
Date Added: 06/11/2008
Community Group: Bonneville Environmental Foundation
Areas of Interest: Climate Change, Ocean / River / Watersheds, Renewable Energy
Video Language: English
Video Duration: 1:51

on his web site all the way through, the Jack Johnson All At Once charitable foundation will donate $1 to BEF.

In addition, any BEF Green Tag orders placed online by September 14 that reference Jack Johnson will be matched by his foundation. In other words, your purchases will have double the benefit to the environment!

For those of you who live in the Pacific Northwest, you can visit the BEF Blog ( blog.b-e-f.org) to learn more about how you can win a free pair of Jack Johnson tickets for the August 20 show in St. Helens, Ore.

Nope, we don’t host Jack Johnson – but we do listen to him an awful lot while working on the servers!

Stop emailing me and asking me for a Dedicated IP address because you read that this utterly fantabuolous guru swears that you can pull one over on Google and make them think you have your own server, it will make your site faster, grant you first choice in resources, and in general just immediately rocket you to PR 10.

After I stop laughing, I will tell you no.

Every domain name that has a web site on it or a computer or network at the end of it has an IP address assigned to it. An IP address is the “real” address of the website or server or computer or network. Domain names came along because it wasn’t exactly fun to try and remember long IP numbers like 123.456.789.101. Most of the time now in shared hosting when there are a bunch of sites sharing one server those same sites will share one single IP address.

There’s a reason that’s more popular, and it’s not “laziness” or “ease” on the part of the hosting companies. IP4 addresses are running out, fast. (See IPv4 Address Exhaustion on Wikipedia for more info on it). The American Registry for Internet Numbers is in charge of doling out those precious IP addresses, and now, they make you justify exactly why you need them.

As SEO (Search Engine Optimization, or better known as “trying to pull one over on Google so Google will like you better”) has grown, there are persistent myths flying around that paying for a Dedicated IP on a shared server will somehow get you better rankings on the search engines. A whole host of completely bogus myths have popped up surrounding the mythical dedicated IP address, and while I can’t say for sure whether Google really cares whether you’re on a shared IP or a Dedicated one since what they use for PR rankings is proprietary and they’re pretty tight-lipped about it, I can tell you that some of the justification and reasoning being thrown around by the “experts” who apparently haven’t got a clue about how a web server functions is just bunk.

This article written in 2007 touches on a lot of the more common myths that are still flying around, and so we’re going to use it as a springboard to tell you why these suppositions are horse pucky.

One of the reasons using a dedicated IP can have a positive influence on rankings is because the engines take into consideration how fast your site loads in comparison to other sites. If you’re sharing your IP with 500 other Web sites, the server, like all good customer services departments, will deliver the files in the order they received them. If there are 10 people ahead of your visitors in line, they’re going to have to wait, resulting in a slower page load times and frustrated users.

If there are ten people hitting the server waiting in line to use Apache to view a web site, they’re going to be in line whether you have a dedicated IP or a shared IP. A dedicated IP doesn’t get you your own Apache server or anything like your own dedicated server. It just gets you your own special number on the same server. You still have to wait in line for services that are shared just like everyone else. The server does not load pages based on whether you paid extra to have your own super special IP address; the idea that it does is a myth that seemingly won’t die.

There’s only one way your own dedicated IP address will get your site priority service on the machine – if your IP address sends people to your own machine where you are the only one on it.

Sharing an IP address also doesn’t allow you to control who your neighbors are. If you’re sitting on the same IP as a gambling site, a porn ring, a Viagra dealer, and a priest, and one of those addresses gets banned by the search engines, you’re banned too. Search engine’s don’t just ban domains, they ban whole IP ranges.

Google removes sites themselves, not IP ranges. The only place that this actually comes into play is with RBLs (Realtime Blackhole Lists) and having a Dedicated IP doesn’t get you out of those consequences, either, since your mail comes off the server’s IP regardless of whether you have your own Dedicated IP or not. The way you avoid this is by not hosting with a host that would host the gambling site, porn ring, and Viagra dealer in the first place – or a host that’s vigilant in monitoring and responding to issues on the server.

Another issue to note is that the slower your server, the fewer pages the spiders will be able to index on each visit (they don’t want to crash it). Fewer pages indexed equal fewer pages in the SERP, which decreases your ability to properly theme your site, which in turn will hurt your rankings. I think the connection is pretty clear.

A Dedicated IP will not speed up the server. If it would, we’d bend ourselves over backwards working to get all of you Dedicated Ips so the server would magically hum and purr, rather than, oh, buying really good hardware and tweaking configurations all the time. A Dedicated IP does not equal a Dedicated server, and a Dedicated IP on a shared hosting server is not the web hosting world’s equivalent of a DisneyWorld FastPass.

If you are on shared hosting, you still have to share. Period. If your server is so poor that crawling will slow down or crash the server, that will happen whether you have a Dedicated IP or a shared IP.

If you find out you’re not on a dedicated IP, we recommend calling your hosting company and asking them to switch you over. There may be a small fee, but it’s nominal and is worth the charge.

Any hosting company worth their salt will not provide an IP to you simply because you’ve bought into the myth that somehow Google will find your content far more dazzling simply because you finagled your way into a Dedicated IP. “SEO” is not a justification to ARIN to grant you a Dedicated IP, and considering the run on IP addresses for legitimate purposes and not because they’re seen as fairy dust that will somehow make your site faster, you won’t get one just because you want one.

The best way to get good ranking with Google is the same as it’s always been – create a good site. Have and offer something people want. Create original content that people want to read. Do it the old fashioned way – tweak your meta-tags, submit your URL, and work at it.

The best way to get your PR up is still the hardest – good, old-fashioned work.

I’d like to thank an un-named source at The Google itself that pointed out that Google has, in fact, openly dispelled this myth publicly back in 2002 in a Slashdot Interview with Google Director of Technology Craig Silverstein.

5) Google and IP address.
by Anonymous Coward

Why in this day and age does google continue to penalize sites that are virtual hosted? With ip addresses becoming harder to get/justify every day why does google discount the relevance of links that don’t come from a unique ip address. Please don’t just deny it, I think the Internet community deserves an explanation.

Craig answers:

I can’t just deny it? What are my other choices? [:)] Actually, Google handles virtually hosted domains and their links just the same as domains on unique IP addresses. If your ISP does virtual hosting correctly, you’ll never see a difference between the two cases. We do see a small percentage of ISPs every month that misconfigure their virtual hosting, which might account for this persistent misperception–thanks for giving me the chance to dispel a myth!

Thanks, Mr. Un-Named Source – I love to be able to publish something from 2002 that makes a whole lot of people that have been selling snake oil for 6 years about, especially when I didn’t know that ya’ll had gone on record saying this was BS.

So, there you have it. It’s BS, says the Google.

I occasionally read The Web Hosting Show and for the most part, I enjoy it and think Mitch has done a pretty good job. I then see a post titled When is a Green Web Host Really Green? and this phrase:

That means that you are environmentally friendly and you fall under what is a scam in my opinion with the whole carbon offset project.

jumps out at me. Ouch, Mitch.

There seems to be a misconception regarding Green Tags (Renewable Energy Certificates) and Carbon Emissions Trading in that some folks seem to think “buying offsets” either through certificates or through cap and trade is the same thing, and that’s not actually the case. For one thing, cap and trade is an enforced trading scheme set up by governments to bring down carbon emissions where companies trade their allotments among themselves, so if you can buy enough credits and someone didn’t use all theirs, you can pollute more – renewable energy certificates are an entirely voluntary program that anyone can participate in.

We purchase our REC’s from BEF, and if you visit their site you can see exactly where the energy that we buy comes from. Again, this is voluntary, and its a megawatt for megawatt replacement, not a “carbon emissions trading” scheme where we’re allowed to pollute a certain amount and then buy more if we need go over. The way this works is that we purchased whatever energy we need (which, since we lease servers, is factored in to our fees to the NOC) and then we buy it again, clean, if we are unable to buy it clean initially – our home office is powered by 100% renewable energy because we pay a premium to do so to our electric company so we don’t re-buy that. Our NOC is not, and so we re-purchase our portion of that energy to be fed into the grid so that someone, somewhere, will use the solar energy we paid for when they would have chosen or had to use non-renewable energy instead.

REC’s are a simply economics game – for every REC that’s purchased, a renewable energy plant gets money to sell the more expensive energy to an electric company without their paying a premium rate, and their purchase price is offset or negated by our choice to voluntarily purchase it. The plant can then charge less for the more expensive renewable energy, and someone else somewhere else gets to pay no more than they are willing for their energy and get the more expensive, premium solar energy we purchased because we paid for it for them. If more people do this, renewable energy demand will go up, prices will go down, and more clean energy is put into the grid to replace non-renewable energy. It is an entirely market-driven solution – those willing to pay more cover the rear of those who won’t, and it doesn’t matter whether you have direct access to an electric company to do it with.

The argument that people can pay more and sin as well is something that perplexes me – for a small company, I can tell you that buying solar to cover just what we have running is not exactly cheap. In addition, we chose solar and not wind or wind/solar combo certificates even though it was much more expensive because we don’t want to feel like our money is going into chopping up birds and if given the choice, we’d prefer solar.

I personally have no incentive to choose more power-hungry servers, or drive more, or pollute more when I have to re-buy the energy again to cover our usage – I would venture a guess that most web hosting companies that attempt to go carbon neutral have the same motivating factor. It’s not cheap to be green, and the less energy you use in general the less you have to buy twice to green yourself, so it has a two-fold effect.

And let me tell you, at a time when paying for oil-derived energy is rapidly rising, it can be a bit un-fun to have to pay your electric bill twice in the same month, which we have done every single month for a year now.

I have to admit I’m surprised when anyone calls Green Hosting a “scam” – even if a hosting company undertakes purchasing Green Tags solely as a marketing angle, and they don’t recycle at home, and the color green and the carbon neutral claim appeared only because of market forces and not because of any real specific desire to help out the earth, that’s not necessarily a bad thing as long as it’s a legitimate and honest purchase. It’s certainly better than the many hosts who are doing absolutely nothing at all.

We personally didn’t do it as a marketing angle – we freecycle extensively, recycle extensively, purchase used whenever and where ever we can so that we don’t contribute more than we have to for what we need. When we go camping, it’s in a tent and not a fossil-fuel burning RV (even though, admittedly, I long for an air conditioner in the Texas heat sometimes), and live in a small house instead of constantly trading up for bigger (and more expensive to heat and cool). We have no offices, and never will – there’s no point. Instead of paying for advertising, we participate in Kiva and we have had a significant and extensive non-profit program since the day we opened. I personally know where our motivations lie, and I’m not really very worried that our clients are going to suddenly question our commitment to the environment. Since our only new business tends to come from word of mouth, I don’t tend to feel that I need to be worried people will think we’re scamming. And if ya do, fine.

What I do worry about is that this idea that green hosting and green tags is a “scam” will become prevalent in the industry and that people who would normally host somewhere that claims green will avoid them if this idea of it all being a “scam” becomes entrenched. It also worries me that other companies will avoid the green designation altogether, or worse, refuse to participate in the REC programs for fear of being branded scam artists by others in the industry.

We grew as a company before we stuck the “We’re Green” badge on our site, and I have no doubt that we would have continued to grow regardless of whether we had done it, or claimed it – the designation seems to make our clients happy, and the fact that we’ve done what we done makes our clients happy. Since it is something we’re doing, and since it’s true, it is something we have a right to claim. Any company that buys their energy twice to support renewable energy deserves to make that claim.

I’ll admit its disconcerting, though, to see people claim it’s a scam because of the wider implications of people rejecting it outright and companies refusing to participate.

So, we’ve been asked a lot of times over the years where the names of our company and our servers came from, and since I haven’t had enough coffee this morning to do a good tip post yet, I thought I’d make a post about that.

DrakNet doesn’t really stand for anything or imply anything all that interesting – in 1996 and 1997, we were essentially a micro-hosting company without a name. In 1998, my son was born, and in the summer of 1998, I decided that the hosting clients and hosting services needed their own identity. Like everyone else, I searched for that very short name that hadn’t been taken yet, and looked for wildly varying combinations of words. I finally settled on drak.net which is simply a modification of my son’s middle name, which is Drake, without the e. It was short, to the point, and an open identity since it wasn’t a “real” word.

Our servers are all named after Pokemon – we currently have Squirtle, Blastoid, Warturtle, and Mudkip. When we upgraded all our servers in 2006, the above-named child was very into Pokemon, and was also taking an interest in the company that was named after him. Since its a family owned business, we decided to let him come up with the new server-naming scheme (which had been mighty boring, with host1 and host2, etc.) and he came up with a Pokemon scheme as well as the specific Pokemon names that would be assigned to the servers.

Yes, for those of you that are Pokemon fans, Warturtle should be Wartortle, and I spelled it wrong. Cut me a break here, he was 7 and I didn’t know squat about Pokemon other than the fact that we have cards everywhere. It sounded like “warturtle” to me when he said it.

As for our logo, it’s a symbolic representation of a dragon – dragons were originally all over our site, but we toned it down over the years. We still wanted a logo that somewhat represented our original dragon-focus, and so we came up with a very simple logo-like triangle.

For accounts, most were not named after something with the exception of the Jaz and Drake accounts. The Jaz account was named after Jaz Gordon, one of our clients, after we asked for input from folks as to what account allotments that would like to see, and she came up with such a complete and exacting list that we used it exactly and she came up with it, and then named it after her. The Drake account was, obviously, named after the kiddo and we thought that it would be the most popular account, being the median specs offered – but it turned out Jaz was more on the ball than she knew and the “Jaz” package has continued to be our #1 package for 8 years.

So, if you ever wondered, now you know!

We’ve got some interesting feedback on the blog – while on the phone. Apparently, more of ya’ll are reading then we anticipated! Apparently, there’s micro-blogging, too, and we’ve been told we should do that. So, we’ll give it a shot.

By request, we’ve signed up for Twitter so you can be subject to even more of our mindless banter… and, well, folks on DrakNet can find each other, or check in with us and see what we’re doing. If we remember to use it. We’ll try.

In any case, follow DrakNet on Twitter here – http://twitter.com/draknet