What made this particularly interesting is that the email address NextTree spammed one of my clients through was my own, completely unrelated to this particular site entirely & never having been associated with it. The greeting read ‘Dear David’, as though it were addressed to me but it referenced another website and client in the subject line entirely. Completely baffled by this, I immediately set out to figure out how NextTree would have confused myself and one of my clients. I dug through older whois records, left no stone unturned on google and still came up with not a single link associating my own completely unassociated email address with this particular client.

With still no luck in figuring out where they obtained the contact, I’m left wondering if Jason Matheston is possibly using old Netfirms whois database data to do the web web design related spamming. I did happen to take a few moments to call Jason but beyond stating that he couldn’t disclose where he obtained the contact details, he didn’t have much else to say. I suppose what’s truly disheartening about it all is how someone with previous experience at companies like Netfirms (as large as they are) and even including a positions titled ‘Marketing Director’ and ‘Marketing Manager’ really need to sink as low as spamming my clients. Boo, can’t you guys come up with something better?

Here’s a copy of the email that I received below, along with Jason Matheson‘s contact details, he seems to be a massive fan of unsolicited email so I’m sure he wouldn’t mind receiving some from you, all of your friends and that persistent Nigerian prince who wants to adopt you as his red-headed stepchild.

Dear David,

Have you ever wondered why some websites perform better than others? (Spamvertising, maybe? Or Ci4l1s!)
Some websites were designed by NextTree!

NextTree is a full-service web development company with a passion for spamming, creating highly usable, results driven websites. We’ll make your business look better and perform better than the competition. We’ll make your business shine.

Visit http://www.nexttree.ca/website/ to discover how we can help you launch a brand new website or put a fresh face on an old one. (Lipstick on a pig?) NextTree can you give your website a professional edge!

Sincerely,

The NextTree Web Design Team spammers.
($10 discount off your next design if you can guess which cereal box we got our website out of!)

http://www.nexttree.ca/website/

–
NextTree is a registered trademark of NextTree Inc.
2-112 Petra Way Whitby ON Canada.
We are 100% Canadian eh?!

Luckily they’re 100% Canadian, since spamming is illegal in the United States & CANSPAM is a $50,000 fine per unsolicited message. Luckily, our server infrastructure also resides in Chicago.

A few of Jason’s email addresses, say hi:
mathesonj@mtonic.net
jmatheson@room100.net
jasonmatheson@HOME.COM

Luckily we’re 100% bootstrapped and flush with investments from people who actually matter to us: Our clients.

The past

During the past few years we’ve rather quickly scaled the wall in the web hosting world. By any comparison we’re still extremely small in the hosting ecosystem but we’re continuing to grow despite the often quoted concerns of a recession: What recession? Luckily we’ve had an exceptional group of people who we’ve worked with (again, our clientbase is fantastic) on a daily basis that have touted the Fused ‘horn’ despite some of our shortcomings: At points I’m sure they’ve had more faith than myself!

If we really considered all of the speedbumps we’ve endured this would be referred to as ‘offroading to success’ instead of the road to success. Nonetheless with perseverance and our noses to the grindstone we’ve successfully kept things in working order & for the most part flawless.

I was about to write that our past would be considered easier in comparison to what we’re up against as far as planning & development go and then I recalled the days when I ate with cardboard cutlery and ‘soup’ and ‘soup’ were the two choices to decide between for lunch & dinner. Okay, so the past was rather arduous if anything but the days ahead will be short of easy.

The present

We’re currently spending every waking moment on the hiring process. I recently made the move out to Vancouver largely to take advantage of the bigger ‘geek’ crowd and open-source friendly ecosystem out here. If the size of the ‘vanlug’ crowd is any reflection of the teeming applicant pool, we’ll do swell. I’m currently parsing through over 250+ applications for a recent support & system administrator position at Fused Network. Now’s the time for us to invest in infrastructure, backend and begin really working on client acquisition once we’ve filled up some more positions. At this point I’ve held off on advertising to allow us to continue to offer the same level of service without overloading our existing team.

Although it’s not the sole issue we face, finding applicants who fit the description of the type of people we want working at Fused Network is difficult. There’s a very rare breed of people that we’re willing to hire and sifting through the hundreds of resumes is probably the most difficult task I’ve ever been delegated. I’ve spent years building up this clientbase and even though I can be my own worst enemy at times, there’s a level of service I want to retain on a permanent basis. Luckily (if it can be defined as that) there’s a lot of highly qualified people out there looking for work and we’ve just got to find them.

The future

We’ll be opening a bunch of new points of ‘presence’ in the future that you can look forward to wielding, alongside a small content delivery network we’re slowly building. In 4th quarter 2009 we hope to open up additional infrastructure in Vancouver, Toronto and potentially a second location in Chicago. The intention is to migrate most of our Los Angeles equipment to Vancouver initially, with the latter points being opened shortly thereafter with new gear primarily for shared hosting & some virtualized offerings we’ll be adding to the mix.

Right now our goal is to add significant amounts of infrastructure in Canada: As much as we’re a global company, having the infrastructure within a quick flight will make expansion significantly easier. I’m the ‘hands-on’ type of guy when it comes to ensuring everything is perfect and often want to be on-site for even the smallest changes and construction. You would be surprised at how well I can micromanage a team, just ask Matt!

With the future comes a number of new projects & endeavors. Our areas that we’ll be concentrating on in short order are support, launching additional documentation and working on building additional ‘community’ measures. Once those basic facets of the foundation are out of the way we’ll begin working on new services, offerings and completing upgrades to our existing infrastructure.

We’ve got idle hardware awaiting some MySQL clustering functionality and within two months we should have some dedicated SSD machines online serving 100% MySQL only to open up some extremely delicious performance for databases. The days ahead are looking mighty fine from a technical standpoint.

Last but not least I want Fused Network to be one of the most socially conscious firms on the planet. Our ‘together’ program has been moving along swell but more backend needs put in place to truly make use of your referrals for the greater good. The intention at this point is to add the ability to ‘forward’ payments to a community group on Kiva so we can begin offering microloans to those out there that need it, of course the people the funds are delivered to will be decided by you that contribute with your referrals. Even better, we’ll be sponsoring some additional local charities, open source projects and food banks with more funds than ever. There’s tonnes of need and we’re going to do every little bit we can to continue ensuring it’s met with your help.

All-in-all, Fused Network is in a great position despite a couple of small bumps. There’s no one else I can thank more than each and every one of you as clients for continuing to support us, have faith in us and be there every step of the way. A big thank you from all of us at Fused for being there, we’ll continue to do the same for you.

Want some additional insight on the ongoings of Fused Network?
Follow @davidandgoliath on twitter (my personal account) and our @fusednetwork account otherwise you’ll miss out.

Enjoying what we offer thusfar?
Post a review of our services on Hostjury, GigPark and tell some friends about us. It goes a long way toward helping us keep your services rolling without a hitch and allows us to continue building our team.

The downside of this contraction
The downside of an economic contraction like the one we’re undergoing now isn’t that it’s necessarily a bad thing, in fact for the most part it’s great. Inflation tends to decrease and goods return to their affordable pricing, rent tends to remain the same and we go on with life. In this particular instance though a large part of the contraction is directly the result of a housing bubble bursting — things will be slightly different this time around. We haven’t seen rent prices decrease as rapidly as they should have been because people are still locked into mortgages and financing that’s priced higher than the property they own; As a result they need to retain similar pricing structures for rentals as they had prior to the ‘burst’, inflicting significant amounts of pain on their own tenants whose clientbases are dwindling slightly. Many tenants are simply walking away or stepping out when their lease expires instead of continuing onwards — they can’t get their landlords to agree to decrease on the price and the landlords simply can’t afford to reduce it any further.

But, despite all the bad..
Despite the slight squeeze in the economy, a large number of businesses are wielding the recession to their advantage. Winter has always meant downturns and slower growth in most industries but that doesn’t have to be the case — with the internet, local community and a hint of advertising your growth can still steadily increase. I recently read of a coffee shop that had increased their business several thousand percent by using twitter and other ‘community’ driven tools. In this particular case, they allowed their regular clients to make orders online before they’d arrive at the shop. Their business skyrocketed and they began to become a local ‘hub’ for all sorts of events & gatherings. A win-win, for both the clientèle and company owners.

There’s a number of great tools you can use online to really begin to increase your business. A number of them are considered ‘hyperlocal’, that is extremely targeted sites towards local businesses. A few that come to mind are Yelp* and citysearch– and although both are largely geared towards restaurants, shops and brick & mortar places they can still easily be wielded to garner additional traffic.

Online and offline, one and the same.
Something we often forget (myself included) is that online and offline businesses are truly all the same. Although both may differ in physical locations they largely depend on the same variables in order to decide whether they’ll sink or swim. A large part of any business is word of mouth and reputation, both of which are truly dependent (Offline, especially) on your community whether it be nearby or afar. Negative reviews or comments made online or through word-of-mouth can spread like wildfire and damage any business. I’ve learned this firsthand with some of our own clients that weren’t 100% satisfied but even negative comments can be wielded to your benefit. Remember that it’s always best to ask your clients what they think of your services first before they have the opportunity to tell you (negative or positive).

I’ve seen cue cards left about coffee shops asking clients to leave reviews on Yelp* and other locations, and although it may not seem ingenious those extra few comments left on the web could easily bring in thousands of new visitors each month. In colder climates in particular, many people (at least outside city centers) don’t often roam about without a purpose — it’s key to wield online communities and sites to your benefit and get as many content clients to them as possible. We’ve lucked out ourselves in that sites like Hostjury and Gigpark allow our own clientele to leave great reviews about us. Would you believe that 65% of our clientbase has arrived from either of these sites? We wouldn’t either, until we checked our statistics.

No news is bad news, online
Realize that not every review or peep you’ll hear about your company is going to be a positive one, but with some savvy and quick reaction you’ll be able to always explain yourself and your side of the story. The beautiful part about online communities is they often allow you the ability to respond to any negative commentary (or even positive) left about your company. The more people talking about you often garners more business though, whether positive or negative. You can interact on a whole new level where your clients were once inaccessible, you can be ‘real’ to them.

Local, yes. But don’t box yourself in
Remember that you’re not just a provider in your local community, don’t just offer a service or product. Be involved, get involved — and be local. I’m not saying buy local, in fact I believe in helping neighbors near and afar — especially as a company with clients in more than 45 different countries. Remember that as a retailer of any sort you have the ability to expand beyond your local community and start offering services to the world as well — it’s especially easy and there’s no reason for you to solely target your local market. I’ve seen companies go from a single employee to over thirty just by launching an online store and selling toys of all things. Their local targetmarket only had a few thousand consumers but their global reach was millions: They succeeded and there’s millions of other niches that your own products could easily fill as well. As much as you should think, act and be ‘local’, don’t forget there’s a market just within reach that consists of the entire planet. Don’t limit yourself to the few passerbys, sell globally.

If you are considering launching a retail store online, consider a few of the developers below who are happily hosted at Fused Network:
Sage Media
Peapod Studios
16Toads

Global market, local economy. Two birds with one stone.

Matt Mullenwag at Wordcamp Toronto

Matt Mullenwag delivers his ‘State of the Word’ address in front of a crowd of developers, designers and regular old wordpress users at Wordcamp Toronto. The event was a success and I’m looking forward to tomorrow. The lunch Fused Network sponsored at the event (as well as tomorrow’s) was excellent. It was a great opportunity to meet some faces involved in design, development & open source — worth a visit

Photography by Rannie Turingan

After having spent about a week considering how to open up this blog post, waning from idea to idea a client gave me something to write about. Adii, a wordpress theme developer & self-proclaimed ‘Superstar’ wrote a blog titled Support: There’s a bulletproof way to do it.

Of course, with a reference to support you were bound to see our name listed somewhere. Although when I had initially started reading his post the ‘bulletproof’ part set reminded me of days gone past when I was working for other web hosting providers. At those providers we took bulletproof very seriously — given that we had clients threatening to kill us on a daily basis..

I’ll freely admit that things are a lot less nerve-wrecking around here. No death threats just yet.

I’m going to be taking a look at what support & customer service really have to offer in todays world. In a society of grab-and-go, does support still matter? Recently a branding specialist over at The Blake Project recently wrote of customer service being dead.

I, on the other hand, disagree. Support-centric companies have shaped their entire offerings around customer service & ensuring that customers are satisfied. It’s not in tune with what most web hosting providers would have to say — their company mantra tends to be “volume, volume, volume”. Sadly, in most cases, not only applicable to the number of sales but their cancellations & how loud they have to turn up the music to ignore their clients too.

Support & what it offers.

Support & customer service isn’t just something we offer for fun. We are our clients lifeline & in an increasingly technical world we need to realize that. Despite there being a firm movement towards diminishing support, outsourcing & turning every query into a copy-and-paste answer — real support is always going to be necessary.

So what is support?
Support is the ability to get a real answer, real fast. In the web hosting industry specifically, there’s a large percentage of clients that are simply used to asking questions about anything technical. Over the years they’ve learned to rely on friends, acquaintances and family to get answers — it’s no different here.

Despite the capacity for a wiki, FAQ system or knowledgebase to get a precise answer out quickly, most won’t use it. Not only do they want the reassurance of knowing someone is there behind the scenes but they want to interact with them. Whether it be via e-mail, phone or smoke signals — they’re going to try to get in touch with us when there’s a problem or question.

From an end-users perspective, they want to get in touch with someone. The added reassurance that there is someone handling infrastructure adds a value that no system can compete with.

So, what’s in it for us?

Us, being Fused Network. Well surprisingly despite customer service being the most expensive resource on the planet (and more scarce than oil, I might add) it offers us the chance to differentiate ourselves from the other companies. Again, given the technical nature of our industry there’s very few ways we can really segment ourselves from our competitors. Inexpensive ways that is, until we get a full-time MBA on board.

So offering thorough support is actually in our best interest. Not only does it give us a face-to-face interaction that gives customers a chance to get to know us, value us & cherish us but it allows Fused Network to stand out. It’s double-plus good!

But.. but.. isn’t automation cheap?

Well of course it is. Self-checkout lines in the supermarket, automated librarians & web hosting knowledgebases are always going to have a place in the world. The truth is that nerds have always been very expensive. Intelligent help isn’t going to come cheap & in order to make up for that — companies should be implementing wikis, knowledgebases, FAQs & as many automated help methods as possible to reduce overhead. At the same time however, that doesn’t mean they should be reducing support overall!

In the end…
The additional support methods like wikis, FAQs cannot come at the expense of quality.

They should be additions, not substitutes. Great support will allow you to differentiate your company from the masses & allow you to sell it to the masses.

There will be a part-2.

In a sense, it’s true but there is a lot more to business than simply being the fastest. In web hosting for example, there are a great deal of companies tweaked purely for sales performance. Their entire sites, teams & communications are tweaked entirely to increase sales, conversions and growth rate. Marketshare and penetration plays a large role in company valuation, thus a lot of companies (most likely with the intention of selling out later) are booking sales faster than they can keep up.

In essence, drowning in their own wake.
High affiliate payouts, low prices & insane resource offerings..

The Underlying Problem: Idiots at the Helm
The underlying problem in the web hosting industry (Not with us, mind you. Although I am utmost certain I’m an idiot) is that nerds simply have zero marketing expertise. They needed sales, growth & expansion but had no skills to market themselves properly so they began to have others do it on their behalf.

Thus arrived affiliate programs. Affiliate programs would put the ‘marketing’ in the hands of those who knew what to do with it. The only way to lure people in to sell on your behalf was to offer them some incentive. First came prizes, free hosting & groping. When the affiliates got a bit greedy they started asking for more — cold hard cash. The web hosting providers gave in & started offering ‘competitive’ affiliate programs with $20, $25.. $50 & even higher ‘payouts’ for sales leads. With payouts as high as $100 per sale when your hosting package for the year is only $50 you have a slight problem: You’re losing money!

And that’s where it all went downhill…

The Price Wars: The End of Common Cents
Earlier this millennium, a number of companies began what we now know to be ‘price wars’ within the web hosting industry. A random (A company to remain unnamed) provider began to offer lengthier (1-2 year) package terms with higher discounts to lure in new clients. The gimmick at the time was to show the low, low prices in their advertisements — e.g. ‘Hosting from $4!’

The thought of being able to purchase a hosting package at a highly discounted rate ($7 a month or lower) at the time was very alluring to consumers. At the time average pricing of web hosting was hovering around $10 a month & when these $3-4 offers began to flood the market… consumers poured in.

A great deal of companies, uncertain of their own ability to keep up followed suit. They of course wanted to partake in the sales as well — growth is almost always a good sign! Soon enough more companies began to dive into the feeding frenzy.

The problem is the majority of companies involved simply didn’t have a large enough clientbase to cover their growing affiliate fees, overhead & additional marketing expenditures to persist without getting massive amounts of sales so they continued to drop pricing until they could no further. Pricing for web hosting began to hover around $3.95* a month (With 800 year purchase, $3,000 cancellation fee & zero support…) rather than the rates of ‘old’, just a few months earlier prices & resources were hovering at $15 a month for most packages. What a sudden change!

With such massive affiliate schemes in place (paying out as much as $100 per sale) the hosting companies involved had to keep sales coming in quickly.. or they would perish. Prices were as low as they could go but companies had to ensure sales continued due to their overhead costs, affiliate payouts… the resource wars began.

Web hosting prices had already hit “rock bottom”. There simply was no further down these companies could go (Although some still try to go even lower) without bankrupting themselves, they had to find another way to compete. Remember, they’re not trying to compete based on support quality, uptime or any other ‘norm’ we would gauge providers on. Rather they’re competing solely on the rate of growth of their companies.

Ignoring the pleas from their technical support teams, chief technology officers & technical management…

The Resource Wars: The Beginning of the End
With web hosting being such a high-tech offering, the consumers involved generally only have a few options to compare web hosting providers. In most cases their first instinct is to gauge a company based on pricing. They shop around looking for a price that is ‘smack dab in the middle’ (unless they have a strict budget) & will choose a hosting provider that lies in that pricing range. Consumers generally won’t go too high or too low because they see these offers as potential rip-offs. Human nature, I suppose.

When the bulk of web hosting providers had dropped their prices to obscenely low rates the providers ran out of options to compete on. With a large percentage of their revenue immediately being dispersed out to affiliates, overhead & marketing they needed a new plan of attack and fast.

Resources became the new ‘price’ in web hosting. Resources being offered suddenly began shooting up from 10 gigabytes to 100 & now hovering in the terabytes range just to stay competitive. Again, remember competition to a number of these other companies isn’t about being the top quality provider — their bottom line is ‘sales, sales, sales’. If they’re not selling, growing or expanding at the waistline they cannot survive with the affiliate payout overhead they’re drowning themselves in.

*audible sigh*

The problem with insane resource offerings is that they’re simply not feasible to offer to ‘everyone’. While you may be able to afford to offer it to a few clients at a time you have to impose strict limits to ensure that most users can’t use it all. Fraud, at the bare minimum is what most web hosting companies are pushing these days.

Even worse, due to the massive affiliate payouts is that the ‘budget’ providers have such a marketing reach that they’re considered ‘standard’ by the majority of consumers. With payouts as high as $250 per lead it is hard for a marketing firm (or anyone) to disregard the payouts and refer based on quality alone. The result is that 3.5 terabytes of space & transfer can be had for $2 a month — or at least according to a google search it can.

In reality though it isn’t a feasible offering and it couldn’t include actual support, uptime & any sort of performance at those prices let alone resource allocations. Consumers expect to receive what they’re told they have though – so they flock like sheep to each of these companies. Sadly, the situation that the entire web hosting industry has dug itself into isn’t something we can easily escape.

On the brighter side, large budget providers are actually handling all of the marketing for top quality web hosting providers out there. We haven’t advertised anywhere (Minus a few forum posts here & there, a couple of sales to reward signups and thank existing clients..) & don’t need to: Clients find us because they’ve been bounced around from budget company to budget company looking for something half-decent.

It’s not a pretty situation but at least we get to pick up the pieces one client at a time. I’m reminded of another of Aesops’ fables about the goose & the golden egg. The owner of a goose that laid one golden egg a day wanted to get rich quick. He got greedy & decided he would cut the goose open and just pull out all of the eggs. Inside he found nothing & his precious goose was lost.

Thorough growth is best, this isn’t a race despite what those may tell you.

The End Result: Buyer & Buyout Beware
The end result of all of the price wars, resource wars & insane monthly affiliate dues is going to be a lot of buyouts. The large providers in the industry have set themselves up to be ‘worthy’ to acquire. The numbers ‘look good’ on paper: Hundreds of thousands of clients, $xxx millions in revenue – how can it not look pretty for acquisition!

The problem of course is that the companies looking to be purchased simply haven’t been keeping their house clean so to speak. In order for them to continue growth they’ll either have to overhaul their entire backend & concentrate on offering higher quality support, phone support, prompt effective communication & stability.

Otherwise the only way they’ll continue to get sales is by offering high affiliate payouts. There’s a great deal of ‘massive’ companies running these sort of ships: I can’t say I agree with it, I’ve always been taught that slow & steady wins the race. Why anyone even got involved in the affiliate, price & resource wars I don’t know — anyone can grow, but it’s growing with a loyal clientbase that really matters.

And to get that you need high quality support, stability & a team behind you with ethics. Nothing more, nothing less.

“Better be wise by the misfortunes of others than by your own.” – Aesop

When they have 50 odd other friends & need their billing data, records & information retained.. well, migrations aren’t fun. On the other hand it is an exceptional experience to be able to work with additional clients. Something that has always given me much pleasure is ensuring needs are met — great or small. It’s a mixed result of caring & ethics but in the end all I see are smiles: It’s wonderful!

Within 2 weeks we’ll be launching a couple of new things including a ‘clients’ section of the site where we’ll be providing client case studies, a client list (Want on it?) & some more testimonials. Shortly thereafter I will be personally setting up a client showcase.

A client showcase has been in the works for a long time. In total, I’ve sent out 3 different thorough client interviews, none of which have been returned mind you! The client showcase is going to be a great opportunity to get your site some additional visibility (Fused Network receives over 5,000 uniques a month — what they do here, I’m not certain but they definitely don’t comment on the blog!) and give us the chance to get a ‘behind the scenes’ view of each clients’ operation.

We’ve hosted a great deal of smaller fortune 500 companies (Is there such thing as ‘small fortune 500 companies’?), design firms, charities, faith-based organizations & all sorts of excellent clients and I want to give everyone a chance to meet them all even if just on-line.

Beyond that.. Semi-dedicated (I will see to it!) will be officially launching shortly. Especially now that we’ll be bringing our second semi-dedicated server online, it’s probably time to actually let people know about it. Oops.

Time may not be on our side but persistence does in fact pay off. Since April of 2007, we’ve quadrupled our revenue. I must say I cannot even begin to fathom just how large of a blessing the entire clientbase has been.

Many, many different people have stepped forward with their words of gratitude only fueling our fire even further to be successful. I have heard countless horror stories of how things were at their previous providers & how they were eternally grateful to have found us.

Well, finding us given our size is probably the equivalent of having to eat all of the hay & come across the needle .. ahem, after the fact. Painful to say the least. After a slight hiatus on the blog I’m ready to get back to business, there will be several new announcements made shortly and we’re well on our goal of reaching 500 clients by December.

Tell your friends & I’ll give you a cookie

The packages themselves will be impressive upon arrival. The Semi-Dedicated nature of the plans allows much greater bursting & resource usage than any shared packages available on the market these days. Overall I’m satisfied with the offering & can’t wait to get it launched.

Earlier today we made the initial arrangements to purchase the first Dual Xeon that will be utilized to serve out the pages. Sadly, we’ve already got a full plate of 4 users going on it so there won’t be any available for sale just yet. The second batch of systems is slated for arrival later this weekend & we’ll have a public launch shortly afterwards.

The packages are still being finalized but will be similar to the following:

Fully Managed on AMD Opteron System
Less than 10 clients per system (Average of 5)
99.9% Uptime Guaranteed
cPanel / Linux / Apache / MySql 5 / PHP 5
Custom software installations available (Shoutcast, other streaming applications)
Shell access

The systems will be available in our Chicago facilities.

Our pricing starts as follows:
50 Gigabytes of space / 500 Gigabytes of transfer: $125 Monthly
35 Gigabytes of space / 350 Gigabytes of transfer: $100 Monthly
20 Gigabytes of space / 200 Gigabytes of transfer: $75 Monthly

There will be an additional fee of $5 per domain hosted on each account. These packages are primarily developed for sites that have large resource requirements, not reselling purposes. The additional resource allowances & minimal amount of users on each system allow users to use quite a bit ‘more’ without having any effect on other local users.

Our shared packages will be slowly ‘evolving’ into reseller style packages shortly. WHM access will be available to all users on our shared hosting service who have multiple accounts.

Expect additional updates soon… our semi-dedicated packages will be live before the weekend is over!

I am impressed to see all of the satisfied faces. During the week ahead I’ll be adding some more thorough notification systems in place for voicemails left on our phone system. We’ll be adding a PBX with a few different options for callers to be routed through soon. In the meantime the best method of obtaining any emergency support is via e-mail, nonetheless our phone system is evolving to handle more of our communication.

Newsletters will begin to play an integral role in the development of Fused Network as a company. I’m surprised at the overall satisfaction level regarding our e-mail communication though — with the amount of e-mail we tend to send on a weekly basis there’s bound to be complaints, but none have arisen yet.

There are plans in the works…
An arrival of a secondary affiliate program is on the horizon. The second affiliate system would be for the capitalists in the mix. For each referral we’ll be providing 25% of the amount paid on yearly, 100% of the amount paid on monthly.

Payments for the program will be made 30 days after the initial user’s signup.

Fused Together
On the other hand Fused Together is going well. There is some ambiguity about the project as a whole so there will be some additional pages of information launched on it soon. The number of users partaking in the program at this time is astounding; I appreciate all of the effort everyone is putting into each of their campaigns for their charities. It is refreshing to see people contributing to help others.

And here I had no hope in humanity!

We’re growing & finally I believe we’ve taken our first few ‘baby steps’ as a company. More than a year ago after many, many months of preparation we rebranded into Fused Network. Since that day we’ve experienced growth in leaps & bounds.

Every single day we’ve been gaining multiple clients and it’s only speeding up. Just recently we’ve surpassed 150 active clients for shared & dedicated services.

Our initial goal of ~1,000 shared clients within the first year wasn’t met, however at the current rate of growth we’ll be at ~750 before this year is complete. I suspect that by year’s end with our new features & products being launched we’ll easily surpass all expectations.

It’s not easy street though, with hundreds of thousands of competitors in the ring all clawing for the limited amount of clientele entering the market we’ll need to set ourselves apart further from the crowd.

During the past few weeks I have been busy meeting a few higher profile (potential) clients & with that development on our backend has slowed a tad but we’re still on target for a number of releases. I have a number of posts for both the blog & newsletter ready to roll and you’ll be hearing about the upcoming features soon.

Expect a few updates in short succession.

The announcement sent out detailed some basics regarding our recent implementation of cPanel 11, upcoming network modifications & the possibility of adding Ruby on rails. The first topic I’d like to lightly touch on is Ruby on Rails.

I’ll quote Wikipedia and get started:

Ruby on Rails is a web application framework, released in 2004, that aims to increase the speed and ease with which database-driven web sites can be created and offers skeleton code frameworks (scaffolding) from the outset. Often shortened to Rails, or RoR, Ruby On Rails is an open source project written in the Ruby programming language and applications using the Rails framework are developed using the Model-View-Controller design pattern.

Implementation of Ruby on Rails is something that I’ve been considering for a long time. While I don’t foresee RoR being the ‘next big thing’ I do feel that it would be an excellent offering. We’ve always been massive open source supporters here at Fused Network & that won’t change anytime soon.

With the implementation of Ruby on Rails there’s another whole ‘world’ out there that we can access. Not only would we be able to support additional open source projects that are utilizing Ruby but other users who are developing projects on Ruby could find a home at Fused Network.

The problem is of course that I’d have to learn to wield it in the meantime & any further employees added would need to do so as well. The other side of that is without sufficient support from our current clientele it isn’t something that I’d want to unleash some more time into. Time, while not exactly worth ‘money’ is limited

The other announcements that I lightly touched on in the e-mail was our upcoming network changes. Recently our network service provider alerted us that they would be removing nLayer from their offerings & replacing it with MCI (UUNet).

It’s a change that I consider to be very impressive. During my past several years in the hosting industry I have primarily utilized MCI (UUNet & friends) & couldn’t have been happier with it’s performance and amazing uptime. The addition will allow me to take Fused ten steps higher with our dedicated & shared offerings.

Last but not least the release of cPanel 11 has added some additional features & fixes that are impressive. Admittedly I’ve never been a large fan of cPanel’s offerings but with it’s latest release I believe they’re taking a step in the right direction.

I’ll have more on our additional upcoming offerings soon…

On average the free projects utilize about 60% more server resources per month & oddly enough more than 80% of the tickets submitted are from our free hosting clients. There are some odd numbers to consider in the long run! At this point the project will be phased out within thirty days to allow the users sufficient time to choose an alternate provider.

There are a number of projects slated for removal and those that are will receive notice within 48 hours. Depending on the size of each project there will be different time allocations provided to migrate.

I do appreciate your support over the years but time has arrived to concentrate on furthering Fused Network & our clientbase.
I wish you all the best of luck in the future!

Style Smooth enhances the look of your default CPanel or DirectAdmin installation by replacing those tired dull tones with a brand spanking new interface complete with a shiny silver finish, electric blue highlights and smooth rollovers.

Stylesmooth is an amazing cPanel & DirectAdmin skin that we’ve just started using recently. Not only did we start using Stylesmooth but Stylesmooth started using us. About a month ago Stylesmooth chose Fused Network as their web hosting provider of choice

We’re happy to have them onboard as both a client and provider of our amazing new skin. Thank you Stylesmooth & team!
Link to stylesmooth official site

RoundCube Webmail is a browser-based multilingual IMAP client with an application-like user interface. It provides full functionality you expect from an e-mail client, including MIME support, address book, folder manipulation, message searching and spell checking. RoundCube Webmail is written in PHP and requires the MySQL database. The user interface is fully skinnable using XHTML and CSS 2.

We’ve just recently (last week) finished installing Roundcube on our systems for the second time around. I prefer the system to some of the more readily available clients out there like Horde, Neomail & Squirrelmail. Although renowned for their stability (At least horde and Squirrelmail) they’re both very ‘hindering’ compared to the available clients out there like gMail and Yahoo’s.

Roundcube evens up the fight and was installed late last week after nearly a year of being turned off.

Welcome back Roundcube!

e107 is a content management system written in PHP and using the popular open source MySQL database system for content storage. It’s completely free, totally customisable and in constant development.

For over three years now Fused Network has been the premiere web hosting provider for e107 sites and even the official site! Jalist (The founder of e107) originally selected Fused Network (Saygeek at the time) for reliability and uptime. Nothing has changed

These days e107 is hosted on a dedicated dual opteron system. Reaching nearly 100% uptime each month (Except when Streaky accidentally reboots it ) with exceptional speeds: They’ll be with us for awhile!

I personally have been using e107 for years for my personal projects. It’s my content management of choice when I need a new website created. Try it out

Official e107 website

We’ve recently added Shuzak to our long list of clientele. Shuzak is a social network for geeks. The community looks as if it’s going fairly quickly. After spending most of Thursday evening migrating their data to one of our servers, the DNS switched and it went live!

Shuzak strives to nurture and network the combined intellect of the individual members. A social network for geeks is an idea wherein the community is internally networked through seamless communication among like minded intellectuals rather than through friends.

There have been quite a bit of internal discussions going on concerning consolidation of all of our hardware/development into one single location: Toronto

The final decision was to continue company development outside of Toronto for now but allowing some minor growth to take place here where we’re from. We’re not against having the entire shop/stop setup here but for now it’s not financially viable to increase our expenses threefold solely to have hardware nearby.

We’ll keep you on the up and up.. you’re in the know