Blob 2.0

Image via Wikipedia Fianna Fail recently moved their hosting to where i work (hosting365) and it got me thinking about the other political parties and where there hosted. Surely the political parties of this country would want to support Irish jobs and in turn the Irish economy especially in the technological sector , the sector in which most parties use as a sound bite for the “knowledge economy” they claim to be striding for, not so however. Most surprisingly is Sinn Fein the party who like to think of themselves as the most Irish of parties host their website in the states.

As of today only fianna Fail and the Labour Party host their party website in Ireland

Full Breakdown of where each political party is outlined below.

Continue Reading »

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Image via WikipediaAs this is an area i have been actively involved in for the last seven years i have seen a lot of hosting companies start and fade away in that time. I thought i’d finally
jot down some observations i have made over the years.

Who Are your competitor’s / Understand your market

You need to understand the market that you are entering , you need to research your competitor’s and see what they offer , what they charge and more importantly what is the distinguishing factor between them and your new business.
You need to know the customer base your are targeting or else you cannot compete.

Don’t treat it as a a Hobby

In the ultra competitive market of web hosting you need to dedicate your full time efforts into offering the best services ,features and support. Only checking support tickets in the evening or only adding new services a few months after everyone else will result in slow sign ups rates and high turnover of customers.
If your serious about your hosting company and its growth you need to work at it full time.

Automate Automate Automate

Hosting is a costly business with tight margins and high overhead , in order to maximize your profit you need to reduce the manual workload involved in your systems and empower your customers to have the ability to make any changes they need. You need to provide your customer with the ability to manage every aspect of their account online which will massively reduce the need for  manual intervention for simple repetitive tasks.
“Automation” should be the key word for every system and product you look to use or sell.

Research your Data centre

The most important part of your hosting business is the data centre that contains your servers which are your business , if your data centre goes down your business goes down. Always meet your data centre partner face to face and tour their facilities , ask to see their UPS , their back-up generator , what back-ups they offer , have redundant their network is , what disaster recovery procedure they have in place , what SLA’s they can offer you. What solutions they offer for off site replication. Look at a few and then decide , don’t always go for the cheapest as the loss of your servers will end up being more costly in the long run.

Money

If you are committed to setting up a hosting company and working are it full time , financials become the be all and end all of your business. Sit down and make out a realistic business plan , just because your business is online does not make it any less of a business than a hotel or shop. You need a business plan to act as guidance and provide a blueprint for where your business is going and how its going to get there.
Make realistic projections in terms of turnover and profit. Invest in your core system and in customer service as this is where the word of mouth will come from , investing in fancy add-ons or services your not sure will sell can wait until your established in the market and have capital in which to do it. Most importantly if the figures don’t add up , walk away.

Marketing

Now that you have everything in place is a matter of getting your name out there.Adding a blog to your site is the cheapest and one of the best ways of advertising what you do but more importantly  , putting a face to your company. People want to know who they are doing business with and what your background is. Print advertising targeting specific IT magazines  , Google adwords , monthly newsletters , posting on public forums , attending conferences and industry events all can help reinforce your brand name in the public consciousness.

If i can think of anymore i will add them later , or feel free to add.

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Topeka, KS - High school sophomore Brett Tyson was suspended today after teachers learned he may be using PHP.

“A teacher overheard him say that he was using PHP, and as part of our Zero-Tolerance policy against drug use, he was immediately suspended. No questions asked,” said Principal Clyde Thurlow.   “We’re not quite sure what PHP is, but we suspect it may be a derivative of PCP, or maybe a new designer drug like GHB.”

Parents are frightened by the discovery of this new menace in their children’s school, and are demanding the school do something.  “We heard that he found out about PHP at school on the internet.  There may even be a PHP web ring operating on school grounds,” said irate parent Carol Blessing.  “School is supposed to be teaching our kids how to read and write.  Not about dangerous drugs like PHP.”

In response to parental demands the school has reconfigured its internet WatchDog software to block access to all internet sites mentioning PHP.  Officials say this should prevent any other students from falling prey like Brett Tyson did.  They have also stepped up locker searches and brought in drug sniffing dogs.

Interviews with students suggested that PHP use is wide spread around the school, but is particularly concentrated in the geeky nerd population.  When contacted by BBspot.com, Brett Tyson said, “I don’t know what the hell is going on dude, but this suspension gives me more time for fraggin’.  Yee haw!”

PHP is a hypertext preprocessor, which sounds very dangerous.  It is believed that many users started by using Perl and moved on to the more powerful PHP.  For more information on how to recognize if your child may be using PHP please visit http://www.php.net.

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Robbed from Damien Mulleys Blog , one of the funniest YouTube videos i have seen in awhile

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Image via WikipediaManaging Director Stephen outlines the reasons for this Here , fundamentally what this strategic sale will allow us to do is concentrate on being what we are , which is a data centre providing high end managed IT services. With our full efforts been now used to concentrate on this area of the bussiness it will allow us to launch some really cool products that we have had on the long finger.

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Anyone else have the same problem in always changing their blog skin depending

on what mood their in? Anyone know of a wordpress plugin that will rotate them automatically

on a weekly/monthly basis?

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well i found it funny

Full source code …

/*

GNOT General Public License!
(c) 1995-2007 Microsoft Corporation
*/

#include “dos.h”
#include “win95.h”
#include “win98.h”
#include “sco_unix.h”

class WindowsVista extends WindowsXP implements Nothing
{}

int totalNewFeatures = 3;
int totalWorkingNewFeatures = 0;
float numberOfBugs = 345889E+O8;
boolean readyForRelease = FALSE;
void main {

while (!CRASHED) {

if (first_time_install) {
if ((installedRAM < 2GB) ||
(processorSpeed < 4GHz))

{

MessageBox(”Hardware incompatibility error.”);
GetKeyPress();
BSOD();

}

}

Make10GBswapfile():
SearchAndDestroy(FIREFOX|OPENOFFICEORG|ANYTHING_GOOGLE);
AddRandomDriver();
MessageBox(”Driver incompatibility error.”);
GetKeyPress();
BSOD();

}

//printf(”Welcome to Windows 2000″);
//printf(Welcome to Windows XP”);
printf (“Welcome to Windows Vista”);

if (still_not_crashed){

CheckUserLicense();
DoubleCheckUserLicense();
TripleCheckUserLicense();
RelayUserDetailsToRedmond();
DisplayFancyGraphics();

FlickerLED(hard_drive);

RunWindowsXP();

return LotsMoreMoney,

}

}

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Talk to Tom.

Cix is a nice set-up , and the first data centre to open in Cork , i have no doubt
it will perform well. Its a great chance for someone with spare cash to jump in at the right time.

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It seems Letshost have switched over to digiwebs IP range and are now advertising Irish based servers on their website.  Have digiweb purchased letshost along with novara as part of their consolidation of the irish hosting market?

Or is it a matter of letshost simply moving their servers from the states back onto an irish IP range and into Digiwebs data centre?

Only time will tell.

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Well it looks like one of the worst kept secrets in the hosting business is out , Irish ISP Digiweb have completed the takeover of Irish hosting company Novara , i am sure we’ll see the official press release in the next week or two. This announcements echo’s a recent post by Stephen with regards the larger hosting providers in Ireland looking to consolidate the market.

It will be interesting to see how novara’s customers re-act to the takeover and to see if they will be moved to digiweb’s cheaper hosting plans, or if digiweb plan to use it as an up sell opportunity for their other products mainly their broadband.

Novara looks like they intend to move in a whole new direction with the registation of the domain name Omniserve.ie , if they intend moving into the web design space it could be far too late as they are a lot of more established players in that sector and not having a history of design skills will make it hard to attract custom.

I can see more and more acquisitions between the tier 2 hosting providers as the small to medium sized hosts realize they can no longer compete on pricing and service with the larger hosts. Should be an interesting couple of months ahead.

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