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.

                        

Doing business on the Internet is fraught with peril in a lot of ways, and chargebacks are probably one of the biggest problems that internet companies face. So, what’s a chargeback?

A chargeback is the return of funds to a consumer, forcibly initiated by the consumer’s issuing bank. Specifically, it is the reversal of a prior outbound transfer of funds from a consumer’s bank account, line of credit, or credit card. This is what you do when you, the consumer, have tried to work out a solution with your vendor, and you were unable to do so – if you feel you have a claim against the company, a chargeback can level the playing field and force the company to negotiate with you.

This isn’t a general post with regard to tips about avoiding chargebacks. This is a post about how we avoid chargebacks, and the possible ramifications to your account if you choose to use the chargeback as your first resort as opposed to the last resort its meant to be.

When You Should initiate a Chargeback against DrakNet

Never. You should never, ever initiate a chargeback against DrakNet unless you’re ready to have your account nuked.

Ok, to be honest, obviously we’re not immune from screw ups, but we do work pretty hard to make those right. Obviously, if you submit a ticket outlining issues and we don’t see it your way, by all means, use the tools available to you as a consumer. Realize, though, if you intend to stay here, the chargeback may not be your best course of action and if you’re going to do it make sure that you have your files, and your domain, and be ready to go somewhere else.

In the event of a dispute (in which the a credit card holder disputes a charge against us), the bank that issued the credit card will initiate a chargeback against us – what this means is your bank pulls the funds from that sale from our bank without notifying us and then sends paperwork a few weeks later. That in and of itself, for a small company, does kinda suck. We won’t kid you.

That’s not our top concern, though.

Our top concern is that when you charge back your fee, we get hit with a $40 chargeback charge (which, on a $10 chargeback, is a pretty big problem). It’s also goes into our chargeback ratio, and too many of them and we can get our merchant account yanked. We take that very seriously, and work extremely hard to outline our refund policy, when they’re done, and to keep the lines of communication open if someone can’t wait. Our chargeback ratio is much lower than our industry’s average rate because we work very hard at keeping it there.

We’ve very, very rarely gotten chargebacks because we’re very, very, very careful to leave people with options and choices with regard to how they pay. For those that choose to leave a card on file, its expected that you know who we are and when you get charged. We do everything but beat you over the head with it, up to an including full page billing explanations. If you’re not comfortable with when we charge, take the card off and pay manually.

2010 has greeted us with a couple of chargebacks that should not have been done, so we want to outline these situations so that you understand our view of your responsibilities as a consumer, and a client, and what our policies are with regard to chargebacks due to the consequences we can face when you do them.

Gosh, I just didn’t recognize the charge! Please put my site back up!

We’ve had two of these this year. Both were long term customers who had been here several years, and both folks didn’t actually want to leave – they didn’t want to leave so much that when we informed them of their chargeback and their accounts would be closed, they got extremely aggressive in demanding we re-open their accounts.

The answer will absolutely always be no.

When you do a chargeback for a charge, your bank often has paperwork outlining that you assert that you attempted to work out the problems with the vendor – in both of these instances, we never heard from them. This certainly puts the client/vendor relationship in an adversarial light, as you are claiming to our merchant account that you tried to get your money back from us and we refused.

If you are a client, and you haven’t tried to contact us for a refund, and you process a chargeback without calling the phone number printed on your credit card statement or without Googling who we are on the Internet (if you Google “draknet”, we’re the top return), and you claim that you did, we have a pretty hard time trusting you again. We certainly aren’t going to gamble our reputation with our merchant bank that you won’t report us if who your host is slips your mind again.

In neither of these cases did anyone try and contact us before processing the chargeback. In both of these cases, we let the chargeback go through, and terminated the accounts, blacklisting them from having accounts with us again. In both cases, the people involved were furious and unhappy and demanded their accounts be reopened, and in both cases, they were told no.

What happens when you do it anyway

A chargeback will:

1. Get your account terminated.
2. Get you reported to chargebackprotection.org
3. Get you blacklisted from having an account at DrakNet ever again.

We’ve yet to see a chargeback where it was an actual dispute with our services which is in and of itself pretty impressive and we’re pretty proud of that. Chargebacks are supposed to be for consumer protection so that a consumer will have an ability to redress a grievance that’s not getting addressed, and we’re all for that aspect of it.

Though while we’re all for consumer protection, what it seems like chargebacks have also become is a way for consumers to to completely avoid their merchant, dialoging with the merchant, or trying to understand (or even remember) that they actually have a relationship with their merchant.

The policies that we have in place and the seriousness with which we take chargebacks should get across the fact that if you’re leaving and really want a refund, obviously, you’re going to get one if you ask, so ask if you feel you can justify it. There’s very few instances where we are going to risk the fees and headache and reputation hit on the possibility of a chargeback.

If you’re here and you do a chargeback even though you’re intending to stay here… well, you’re leaving anyway. There’s no debate after that – we take a chargeback as a cancellation, and it signals the end of the business relationship. Since chargeback ratios can lose merchant accounts, if you did it once, we assume you could do it again, and we won’t risk it.

How to properly attempt to get a refund

If you are seeking a refund for something, you should email into the support desk or create a ticket to document your grievance. Don’t call us, email us so there is a record – before doing so, check the terms of service and make sure that the terms of service didn’t allow for the charge – if it did, you’re really going to have to justify to us in as many ways as you can why we should reverse a legitimate charge. If you have a good enough reason, we might do it.

Realize that if it was a legitimate charge, unless you come up with a really compelling story, the likely answer will be “no”. If it wasn’t a legitimate charge, we’ll reverse it without a problem. If you’re not sure if it was a legitimate charge, ask us to explain it and we’ll be happy to.

If you reverse a legitimate charge, realize we’re going to terminate your account the same way you would likely terminate if we just decided for no particular reason to take your site offline for a couple of weeks just because we felt like it.

If you are canceling, fill out the cancelation form – it gives us information on how to properly shut down your account and gives us an overview of what you want to happen to other services on your account that might be portable, like domain names. Charging back the renewal fees will potentially lose you your files and/or your domain name because once you do that, we won’t take a reversible payment from you for anything.

If you do a chargeback and realize its a mistake, some banks will let you take the dispute back and some banks won’t let you take the dispute back. If you can take it back, and you do take it back, we might reinstall your account in some cases.

If your bank does not allow you to undo the mistake, however, we will not allow you to continue hosting here.

                        

As of this morning, cPanel logins are forcefully blocked from being used as FTP logins across all servers.

While we’ve stated for years that you shouldn’t ever use your cPanel login to log into FTP unencrypted because the login and password is stored and passed unencrypted to the server putting the administrative login (or the “super user”) at some risk of being compromised, due to a rash of compromised logins that we’ve seen of late, we are now forcefully preventing you from doing it.

If you are going to use FTP to transfer files, you should login to cPanel and created an FTP account for that purpose.

If you are unsure of how to do this, please visit

http://www.drak.net/support/#cpanel

and watch Movie #17, Creating an FTP Account.

SFTP can continue to be used with cPanel logins (and, in fact, can only be used with cPanel logins as SFTP actually operates over SSH and not FTP even though the name implies that it does). If you wish to use SFTP to transfer files to your account, please note you must write in to support for the SSH Port Number on your server. SFTP will not operate on the standard FTP or SSH port for security.

Please note that this change will not prevent your web site from being compromised if your computer is infected with a virus and bots obtain your logins in order to upload trojans, redirects, and so on. All this does is prevent your cPanel administrative account from being further compromised if you are infected and keeps your administrative logins from being obtained as easily as they were before.

Always store your passwords in encrypted databases, always surf the Internet with continuously running firewall and virus shields, and share your logins and passwords with as few people as possible.

Later Update:

We’ve added the SSH/SFTP port number in your cPanel under “news” for your server, right beneath the support chat button. If you are using an FTP program that supports SFTP, you only need to change 2 things, the protocol (which should go from FTP to SFTP) and the port number (which will not be the default for SSH/SFTP as we randomize them).

                        

So, what is “open source” software? For the average person not “in the industry”, open source software means is its free.

Open Source actually means a lot more than that. From The Open Source Initiative (OSI):

Open source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in.

Ok, and its free.

Designing

While OS content management systems (software that lives on your site so you use your site to manage and create and design the public facing area of your site) have become more and more prominent, some people do still like to design on their computers.

Lucky for you, there are a number of open source software packages that will allow you to do just that, with a snippet of the description taken from the respective web sites.

http://www.kompozer.net/

KompoZer is a complete Web Authoring System that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing capabilities found in Microsoft FrontPage, Adobe DreamWeaver and other high end programs. You can use it on Windows, Mac OS X, and GNU/Linux.

http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

Notepad++ is a free (as in “free speech” and also as in “free beer”) source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

http://selida.camelon.nl/selida.html

Selida features a very effective WYSIWYG editor, Code Completion and a complete HTML 4 reference. Selida was engineered to be complete and capable – all with the decidedly best price on the planet – $0 ! (Windows)

http://www.w3.org/Amaya/

Amaya is a Web editor, i.e. a tool used to create and update documents directly on the Web. Browsing features are seamlessly integrated with the editing and remote access features in a uniform environment. (Windows, Mac, and Linux)

Transferring Files

Even if you have an FTP program built into your software, its a good idea to have one that’s handy. These two are extremely good open source alternatives.

http://filezilla-project.org/

FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface. (Windows, Mac, and Linux)

http://www.coreftp.com

Free Windows software that includes features like SFTP (SSH), SSL, TLS, IDN, browser integration, site to site transfers, FTP transfer resume, drag and drop support, file viewing & editing, firewall support, custom commands, FTP URL parsing, command line transfers, filters, and more.

Templates

Believe it or not, there are designers in the open source community, and they’re just as happy to release their work as software developers.

http://csstinderbox.raykonline.com/

Open Source Templates that provide a very basic layout and framework for you to build off of.

http://www.opendesigns.org/

Over 1500 free and open source designs for you to use as is or change to suit your needs.

http://www.oswd.org/

Over 2000 free and open source designs for you to use as is or change to suit your needs.

Downloadable Documents

http://why.openoffice.org/

Open Office is a an office software suite similar to Microsoft Office, only free and open source. If you need to create PDF files for download, you can do it with Open Office.

                        

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?

                        

In February, TechCrunch brought to light a paper that outlined that 1/3rd of Americans don’t have fast Internet (which translated to 80 million adults and 13 million children either still using dial-up or not using the Internet at all at home).

So, what does that mean for your site?

Years ago, compatibility and speed was a major consideration – does it work on all three browsers? On both operating systems? Ugh, where is that darn table close that’s breaking the table? Well, guess what? Even though the major buzz now goes to SEO (or what I like to call trying to fool the Google) and social media, cross-compatibility is still a major factor in a web site, possibly even more so than when site compatibility was all the rage.

Just in my house, I can view my site on: a desktop with Windows XP, a desktop with Linux Mint, on a Wii, on a Playstation 3, on a Blackberry Curve, on a Blackberry Pearl, on a Macbook,  on an LG Vu, on a computer with a large LCD widescreen and one with a non-widescreen monitor (that flips to portrait!) And probably more that I can’t even think of right now.

Designing for more than your set up is still imperative. Some things that are becoming very important to keep in mind:

1. Flash – iPhones can’t see it, iPods can’t see it.

Actually, that’s probably the big one.

Ok, while that was meant to be a bit of a joke, it does illustrate the problems web site owners have in trying to design one site that looks good on all platforms, in all browsers, with various capabilities. Trying to do it becomes exceedingly difficult – but you still have to try.

A Case in Point

I’m a big buffalo eater (sorry, my vegan friends). I really enjoy steak, and I really enjoy cheeseburgers, and I really wish they weren’t so freaking unhealthy for you. A few years ago at the Austin Pow Wow, I had Buffalo Chili on Fry Bread and I was hooked. When I came home and did some research, I found out how much healthier it was than beef, and I set out to find a Buffalo supplier.

After comparing prices, I found Elk USA (which is Grande Meats)– they had a Bargain Barn for meat that had been frozen a bit too long, was still good, and it was a great price. One problem – the web site was designed a heck of a long time ago and it was designed to work exclusively in Internet Explorer. Two or three times, I gritted my teeth and fired it up, and placed an order. They were wonderful folks, the food was wonderful, it was a small business. My only complaint was the site.

Eventually, they lost my business strictly because of their web site. Ordering was an unpleasant experience, it was difficult to navigate, and I was using a browser that made me feel like I was walking through a back alley alone and unarmed on a moonlit night. I switched to High Plains Bison for no other reason than the ordering experience, and that it seriously bugs me when someone forces me to switch a browser just to buy with them.

Tools to help you keep as much of your audience as you can

So, we try to lecture or opine, and then point you to some places that can help you. Some of my favorites include:

http://browsershots.org/

Linux, Windows, Mac, and BSD operating systems are represented, as well as various browsers including IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari – no Chrome yet, though. You can change the resolution, and change the capabilities, and you’ll get a screenshot at the end showing you what your site looks like with the various options you choose.

http://crossbrowsertesting.com/

Free 5 minute test session if you register for the free trial, this rather professional solution’s lowest paid cost is $19.99/m, which is probably awesome for professional designers but a little pricey for someone just handling one or two sites.

http://www.browsrcamp.com/

Mac-specific testing so that you can check out your site through the eyes of a Mac using various browsers and settings. Free and paid versions.

http://www.testiphone.com/

iPhone browser simulator to see your site through the eyes of an iPhone. Free.

http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/tools/emulator.html

The Android Emulator will allow you to download and install an emulator so that you can preview your site on Android. An overview of how to get started with this is located on this great blog post.

http://www.webpageanalyzer.com/

Free web site speed test to improve website performance. Enter a URL to calculate page size, composition, and download time. The script calculates the size of individual elements and sums up each type of web page component. Remember – 1/3rd = dial up, and there is some indication that site speed may soon play a role in Google ranking. This is still really important.

How do you tell what everyone is using?

http://www.google.com/analytics/

Google Analytics (which provided the graphics in this post and are real metrics from visitors to our own site) continues to be our favorite stats program, which is kind of a given since Urchin used to be our favorite stats program until Google bought them and turned them into Analytics. It’s simple to set up, and free, and provides an amazing amount of information.

http://www.woopra.com/

Woopra is growing popular and giving Analytics a bit of a run for its money. It gives you most of the info Analytics does, as well as some other configuration options with alerts and so on. Woopra is free for sites with page views up to 30,000 a month, and starts at $4.95 a month for sites with traffic above that. The costs go up to $179.95 a month for sites with 10,000,000 page views.

None of you are there yet.

Trust us, we’d know.

                        

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and internet marketing itself, is often divided into two different camps: white and black hat.

Now, before we get started explaining the two, let me point out that the spammers who constantly post garbage on your blogs, exploit the holes you don’t patch, and who try and squeeze a viagra link anywhere you let them are doing black hat SEO – so keep that in mind before we offer some explanations that get you all excited about rocketing up the Google Page Rank charts.

Whitehat SEO, the more ethical of the two forms of SEO, relies on strictly and accurately following the terms of search engines and website directories, largely by generating links organically. Blackhat SEO, on the other hand, is less ethical, significantly less effective as a long-term business strategy, but often valuable for its speed.

To distinguish between the two different forms of SEO, it is worth going back to their roots.

White and black hat are not divisions that were thought up specifically for SEO (or hacking), but ideas that originated in western movies. Drawing inspiration from the John Wayne styled heroes of the past, ethical SEOs branded themselves as “whitehat” after the type of cowboy hat the western hero often wore. In contrast, the blackhat SEO world embraced the villainous style – dark clothing and a distinct black cowboy hat.

Blackhat SEO is lucrative. There is no doubt about it – if it wasn’t making someone money, people wouldn’t do it. From spamdexing to indirect and somewhat stealthy blog commenting, there are hundreds of ultra-effective ways for blackhat SEOs to boost their websites’ online influence and search engine rankings. Blackhat-powered websites typically grow rapidly, gaining hundreds of indexed links within days, and occasionally hundreds of thousands within just weeks.

This is generally carried out through the use of automated software – you didn’t think all those comments were done manually, did you? From forum spamming applications to blog auto-commenter tools, the blackhat world has developed its own ultra-lucrative software industry. Of course, as the actions are generally automated and carried out in bulk, blackhat SEO tends to have little long-term value as search engines can easily pick up on the traces and linking footprints and de-index the offending website.

Whitehat SEO, while having only a fraction of the rapid growth potential that blackhat SEO boasts, is more valuable to online marketers and businesses that are focused on long-term internet goals. While blackhat-powered pages tend to climb through search engine rankings relatively quickly, they are forever at risk of being permanently removed from the search engine results altogether.

While this is not a concern for hit-and-run style online businesses (which doesn’t apply to any of those of you hosting with us, I’m sure), it most certainly is for businesses that are focused on long-term branding and internet marketing (which should be everyone hosting with us).

If your business values long-term clients, customers, and branding efforts, it is clear that whitehat SEO is the right choice to make. Despite the longer climb up the ladder and slower movement through the ranks, it is the only choice that offers long-term security.

                        

This is the Internet. At some point, there’s downtime. I know, I know… we’re not supposed to talk about it, but there is. When you are at your computer, you go to your site, and it simply isn’t there, most people automatically assume that their server is down.

Often, that’s not the case – but again, we know what everyone assumes.

There are some tools at DrakNet and on the general internet that you can use for free to monitor what’s going on with your site and try and decipher why you’re having a connection problem, and we’ll outline some of them here.

What to check when “down”

First thing most people do is check drak.net, and assume that if DrakNet’s up, there’s something wrong with their particular site. This would be an incorrect assumption, so lets go over what our set up is so you’ll be a bit more familiar with it.

Just because you can hit our site doesn’t mean that your server isn’t down – we have our own server here, and we’re not in the same data center as you are. We do that specifically so that we can stay up and be in communication in the unlikely event of a catastrophic failure at the main data center.

All shared servers are at the Liquid Web Data Center in Michigan, and there are 6 of those currently, along with the few dedicated servers we manage for established clients – if you host with us, that’s where your site lives. Our server and main DNS is at the Wired Tree data center in Illinois, and the backup mail server and backup DNS are at Virtacore Systems data center in Virginia. The set up is geographically redundant, and all systems tie into one another and work together seamlessly.

The first thing you should do if you site is not responding is check our Network Status Page. That’s located at http://networkstatus.drak.net/ – this page will tell you if the server you are on is up, or down. This is why its important to remember which server your site is housed on. If the status column is green next to your server, Apache is responding and web sites are being served. If there is a problem, its in red and says “DOWN”.

This page pulls in the data from an outside service and is not internal monitoring, and the uptime you see is real uptime – we don’t turn off the monitoring for scheduled maintenance, Apache restarts, or anything else. We want those numbers to truly reflect what someone can experience hosting here. The long term averages are real, and not able to be edited by us to reflect a reality other than… well, reality.

While you’re on that page, check the Twitter Widget. Often, we perform something quick that may cause a blip but it doesn’t really call for a full post explaining what we’re doing. If a notice can be gotten across quickly, a note will be there about what’s going on.

So, its green, we didn’t tweet something – what do you do now? Well, check a little more. Occasionally, our monitoring service is a bit slow on the uptake.

http://www.checksite.us/

CheckSite.us will attempt to access the URL provided and report back on whether it was able to access the website or not, and can give you feedback from yet another place, at no cost, to confirm whether the site is up or its down.

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/

Is a very simple checker that will tell you whether they find a site up, or down. If its up everywhere but not for you, it could be a local issue, or you could have firewalled yourself. If you firewalled yourself, get your IP address of your computer, and email in a support ticket with your IP in it so we can check.

And folks, when we ask for your IP in a ticket we don’t mean the IP of your web site. We actually know where your web site is at all times – it’s you we’re none too sure about, and that’s why we’re asking.

If you don’t know how to find it out, go to

http://whatismyipaddress.com/

and it will tell you.

How to Monitor Your Own Web Site

You can monitor your own uptime with us. While we feel we have to plug our own uptime service (cough http://monitoring.drak.net/en/ cough), we also want to share with you the free resources that are available to document and monitor your site’s uptime.

http://mon.itor.us/

This service will, free of charge, monitor your web site 24/7, and report to you when its down. It is a distributed website monitoring service, which means it monitors your site from more than one geographical location.

http://pingdom.com/

Pingdom’s been around for a long time, and has a free version of its service that allows you to  sign up for a free account that will track one site or one server and send up to 20 SMS alerts if you’re down.

And while a quick search for the phrase “free web site monitoring” will turn up dozens of places, those are the two that we personally recommend.

                        

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.

                        

When you fill out an order form with DrakNet, we ask your information – your email address, your phone number, your name. All of this information is important, and is used to identify you so that when you contact us, we know who you are.

If the account is an individual account, this is relatively easy – who you are doesn’t change. Your email might change, your phone number, your address may change but who you are remains a pretty good constant that we can count on. (And if your name changed, you can usually fax us the name change and establish the name changed, though that would only need to be done if you locked yourself out of your billing.)

With companies and organizations, this can become a little more complex.

What matters on the order form

When an order form is filled out for an organization or a company there are two pieces of information that are provided to us, the company or organization name and the name of the individual placing the order. When that’s done, the person listed as the individual placing the order is then listed as the representative who is authorized to make all decisions the account. Their information is the information we look to when we confirm that someone has rights to an account.

If that person leaves the organization, that person is still the person authorized to make changes on the account, close the account, or make requests. Someone that is not listed on the account, even if they are internally appointed to manage the account by the company or organization, does not have standing with us to make any changes or have any access because we have no idea who they are. In the interest of protecting the site and account, they will not be allowed to make changes.

So, what happens when the authorized contact is a position that’s kicked around like a soccer ball?

Please note that these are only for sites that are held in accounts that have a company or organizational name. Individual accounts are individual accounts and transfer of ownership cannot be accomplished this way.

Change Contacts The Easy Way

The easiest way to change a contact on an account is for the old contact to give the billing login to the new contact so the new contact can login to the account and change the information in billing (Name, Email Address, Phone Number), as it is this information we look to when we confirm someone’s identity as a person authorized to work with us on behalf of the account.

This is simple, quick, and takes relatively little time.

Change Contacts The Hard Way

The hard way happens when the original authorized contact leaves in a huff, refuses to hand over the site, refuses to allow access to the legal owners, or simply disappears with the keys.

Changes become more complicated if a handover did not occur.

Because we have an authorized contact that cannot or will not contact us or the company or organization’s behalf, we have to have hard documentation that we are handing the site over to the legal owner or the organization or corporation. Essentially, you need to prove to us that you should have the site.

In these cases, DrakNet required a signed, faxed letter on company or organizational letterhead that states:

1. who the previous contact was
2. why the previous contact cannot or will not contact us to make the change
3. who the new contact us, with their name, phone, and email
4. a specific request to drop the old contact
5. a specific request to add the new contact
6. what the role in the organization or company is of the person writing the letter, with a copy of that person’s ID on the latter itself.
7. A dated signature

and the fax must be accompanied by some official documentation showing the person sending us the request is affiliated or associated with the organization or company, and in what capacity. It could be a copy of an official bill, a dba, a contract, the incorporation papers, corporate minutes. Just something official and legal in some capacity.

We will make an attempt after getting the fax to contact the current contact and confirm the information and if we cannot confirm it, the change will be made as long as the information indisputably shows the person who signed the paper has the legal right to make the change.

The Moral of the Story is

We do the absolute best we can to keep the server secure, and the accounts secure – and part of that is knowing who’s on the server and who’s supposed to be talking to us. If the person that calls or chats or emails us isn’t an authorized person on the account, we don’t discuss things with them as a precaution against social engineering.

We assume that if you host here, we know who you are.

If you don’t host here, you don’t need to know what our random ssh port numbers are, and we don’t care if you swear up and down you are on the Board of such and such and its your account – if you hosted here, you would have known our ports were not on 22 and that firewall wouldn’t have happened. If we don’t know who you are, if you have no information with us on file so that we can substantiate who you are, we can’t tell you anything and we certainly can’t unblock you manually.

If you don’t know that, then you have had a failed changeover, and you need some help to become aware of our system, and our policies, and your site. We’re happy to help you with that – after we know for sure who you are.

It is very important for organizations to maintain their information, and for contacts to maintain current information. Have a pass through book, have more than one person as a contact, share the billing login with the Treasurer or President so problems can be dealt with easily.

If that doesn’t happen, we are going to require that you make changes “the hard way” because that’s the only way we can be absolutely sure that the account belongs to you or you have rights to it.

It is for the safety of your site, the safety of your company or organization’s web presence – and its also because we at DrakNet really don’t want to have to try and figure out who’s telling the truth in a dispute, or explain why we handed over a site to a rival faction bent on nefarious deeds to our client, or in court.