~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“The latest edge build of Installatron has been updated with
fixes for all issues. We’re just finishing up testing and aim to
issue a new relase build this week.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

For the past several weeks we’ve had Installatron disabled on all of our servers. Customers that have attempted to access Installatron from within cPanel have found themselves staring at a paragraph of text which states that it has been temporarily disabled while the vendor works to address some issues.

Some customers have asked if we knew when it would be reenabled. We, too, have wondered the same thing. One week ago I updated my ticket with the vendor, asking them to provide us with the status of the fixes, along with an ETA of the next release. The vendor has gone silent on us.

Below you will find the timeline of our communication with the Installatron team:

============================
11 Apr 2010, 7:07 pm – Day 0
============================
The ticket was opened with Installatron, asking if they would be interested in learning about vulnerabilities in their software.

============================
12 Apr 2010, 7:05 am – Day 1
============================
Phil from the Installatron team replies stating that they’re “definitely interested in discussing any vulnerabilities”.

============================
12 Apr 2010, 8:02 am – Day 1
============================
I replied to the ticket, stating I would need some time to put all of the information together in an acceptable format (my notes were a little sloppy up to that point).

============================
12 Apr 2010, 8:11 am – Day 1
============================
Phil replies stating that Installatron version 6 may actually address these issues, but that they would wait for my reply (the bugs are for version 6).

=============================
12 Apr 2010, 12:20 pm – Day 1
=============================
I sent complete details on how to reproduce 4 of the 8 issues, stating that if they felt that the issues would be obsoleted by the next version of Installatron, that I wouldn’t feel it necessary to send information on the remaining 4, and that I needed to know when Installtron 6 was going to be released.

============================
13 Apr 2010, 4:45 pm – Day 2
============================
Phil’s response: “We’re going through and verifying/creating fixes for each of these.”

============================
13 Apr 2010, 7:45 pm – Day 2
============================
I updated the ticket with the remaining 4 bugs.

=============================
19 Apr 2010, 11:14 pm – Day 8
=============================
Phil replies: “We’re still considering our reply and working on fixes.”

=============================
27 Apr 2010, 2:40 pm – Day 16
=============================
I asked for an update on the status of the fixes and an ETA on the next release that addresses all of the issues.

====================
05 May 2010 – Day 24
====================
No response has been received to our request for an update. However, according to the twitter.com/installatron account, on 1:23 PM Apr 22nd, Zen Cart 1.3.9a was added to Installatron. On 3:15 AM Apr 29th Joomla 1.5.17 was added to Installatron. In the past day or so, Zen Cart 1.3.9b was added to Installatron.

These are the bugs that were reported to Installatron:

BUG #1 – cPanel users can overwrite any file on the box
BUG #2 – cPanel users can execute commands as root
BUG #3 – cPanel users can view /etc/shadow
BUG #4 – cPanel users can obtain a directory listing
BUG #5 – resellers can execute commands as root
BUG #6 – resellers can execute commands as root
BUG #7 – resellers can execute commands as root
BUG #8 – resellers can execute commands as root

None of those bugs have been fixed, but the latest version of Zen Cart has been added to Installatron since they were reported. Twice.

As a paying customer, I think it’s a fair question to ask where Installatron’s priorities are. If you have Installatron installed on your server(s), these are the risks that you face:

Installatron 6.0.9, 6.0.7, and possibly prior view /etc/shadow (BUG #3)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNI-V0Y3Aa8

Installatron 6.0.9, 6.0.7, and possibly prior view any directory (BUG #4)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92B2lW5UCn0

Installatron 6.0.9, 6.0.7, and possibly prior local root exploit (BUG #8)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5MMacCFhfM

Note that while the videos listed above demonstrate the action of taking advantage of the vulnerabilities, they do not provide the level of detail necessary for anyone viewing the video to take advantage of the bugs. The goal here is to raise awareness, and to motivate Installatron to fix these problems.

If you’re an Installatron customer and want root exploits fixed NOW instead of Zen Cart updates next week, then please let your voice be heard:

Installatron helpdesk: https://secure.installatron.com/tickets?user=Guest
Installatron forums: http://installatron.com/forum/
Installatron twitter: http://twitter.com/installatron
Installatron sales: sales@installatron.com

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.

But it’s that time again as the week begins winding up to get back into gear. We finished up the week before the holiday’s as a sponsor of an event in Toronto, a success! The event HoHoTo raised over $25,000 (We contributed 10% of the total) for the daily bread foodbank in downtown Toronto, making the event one of the largest donations this year for daily bread. I can’t reiterate enough how great of a cause supporting local food banks are no matter the time — but especially relevant today with the slugging economy.

One of the more well-known Toronto bloggers, Mark McKay (And a future fused network client, right Mark? *poke* Especially as your other host is down as I write this!) clipped together a small video that I thought everyone might like to peek at. I did happen to get a quick kind word in (I’m the nerd in the red shirt) partway through the video. Luckily, for all of us, Mark did some decent editing and removed most of my embarrassing moments. Included in the video is a thank you from some extremely cool people on the internet (How can someone be cool on the internet, anyways) like Matt Mullenwag of WordPress, Biz Stone of Twitter, Toronto mayor David Miller and Cory Doctorow, my internet hero.

I can’t even compile into words how great it is for such an awesome IT community to come together and help out, we’ll make certain that the daily bread is always in our prayers & on the top of our together charity list.

Before I’ve even had a few moments to dig into it after upgrading about sixteen installations of it manually, I’m taken aback by just how thorough of development Automattic has put into the interface and every aspect of the backend. I’ll have more shortly but if you haven’t yet, upgrade!

Wordpress 2.7 Akismet statistics

If you have, what are your thoughts?

As of 15 minutes ago, Magento — one of the most often requested scripts for Installatron has been added to the mix of available installations. We will have many additional ones to come shortly but for now this should appease the masses. Magento is literally my second favorite script behind WordPress, I’m more excited than most of you about it.

Magento is a feature-rich, professional open-source eCommerce (shopping cart) solution that offers merchants complete flexibility and control over the look, content, and functionality of their online store. It was launched in 2007, and is the fastest growing eCommerce platform on the market with over 500,000+ downloads to date.

Future scripts will include e107 and a number of other ones so keep your
eyes peeled.

For now, read more about Magento on their official site at http://www.magentocommerce.com and the feature list available here: http://www.magentocommerce.com/features

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

I myself have been using WordPress since early 2004 after abandoning the blog services Livejournal, Blogger and several other content management systems that simply didn’t make the cut. WordPress is extremely easy to use, has a user-friendly instalation system and upgrading and managing are even easy for my technically inept blog-wielding father whom has been managing several sites using it ranging in topics from the United Nations to Christian music concerts. The beauty of wordpress isn’t that it just makes blogging and contributing to the web easy — rather, that anyone can use it.

An example of that would be this video.

I say that it’s changing the face of the web because with millions of users, from fortune 500 companies to regular joes like myself use it to speak through the web: Anyone Everyone is able to contribute and use the web no matter their skill-level. It’s free speech. Hosting providers like ourselves offer easy to install systems to setup WordPress in just a few clicks which really lowers the entry barrier even further.

Now where it gets extremely exciting for someone like me is in the ease at which I can modify the design and frontend of WordPress to fit my needs. The blog we’re using right here on Fused Network for both our status blog and this one is WordPress, of course!

There’s hundreds of sites out on the web where you can download different themes to use in conjunction with WordPress like one of our very own clients’ sites, Themeshaper, Adii, Woothemes and many others.

If you haven’t yet, give wordpress a try using our Installatron system within your control panel. If you’re not a client, signup to Fused Network using the coupon fused25off to get a 25% discount so you can start using WordPress now.

During a recent discussion on webhostingtalk (linked above) several statements were made about how “green datacenters” were the equivalent of fuel efficient dragsters. Rightly put — we’re not part of a very ecofriendly industry to begin with. In fact with all of the cooling, airflow and electricity needed to power the datacenters the shared, dedicated and backend (backup, monitoring, etc.) servers that your sites rely on this industry could be considered less than healthy for the environment.

The discussions however in my opinion didn’t hold much water. Sure, page-zone brought up that recycling wasn’t helping much (Kudos a’la Penn & Teller — careful there’s some choice language) but something we need to take into consideration is that first-phase stuff might not be all that helpful. Really, in actuality, we haven’t been properly recycling more than 15 years here in North America. What makes a difference isn’t necessarily the act of doing so (rather, according to the video it’s actually more harmful but I’ll leave that one for the management to clean up) but being more conscious of our eco-footprint.

Simply being more conscious of our eco-footprint will result in more ‘eco-friendly’ choices being made when it comes to conservation, waste and what we use to power our homes, work environments and sooner than later: even our servers. I’m not exactly Dr. Destruction when it comes to the environment myself. My Rollerblades and feet get more mileage per year than my car ever would. I skimp on the plastic bags, try to avoid packaging as often as possible and even make my purchases based on which products use less packaging!

Does it have any effect? I would hope so — even if my decisions are only impacting the immediate surroundings — in the end they’ll have an impact on companies, friends and family and maybe even neighboring countries as my (and your) purchasing decisions and living styles effect our consumption.

While according to Penn & Teller — I might just be wasting my time — or “feeling good” about it but in the end I may not be saving the environment now — but my offspring sure will be.

There’s several pieces of community software that I have built sites on these days. Most of which I have actually used here on the web hosting community forums as well, albeit temporarily.

There’s a few that I’m going to be detailing today including phpBB, Vanilla, punBB and SMF (SimpleMachines). Each piece of software has it’s benefits and drawbacks, hopefully you’ll find this post remotely useful.

Starting with the one I’d consider the underdog…

PunBB
PunBB is a fast and lightweight PHP-powered discussion board. Its primary goals are to be faster, smaller and less graphically intensive as compared to other discussion boards. PunBB has fewer features than many other discussion boards, but is generally faster and outputs smaller, semantically correct XHTML-compliant pages.

Success.
And they succeed at their mission. PunBB is very lightweight right out of the starting gate & for a basic community. The PunBB site features a great set of addons, plugins and frequent software and security updates. One aspect that I especially liked was a feature on their site named ‘SpinkBB’ which allows you to easily create a custom color scheme with minimal effort.

The underlying drawbacks I found about PunBB though was that it was almost too minimal. Many basic features seemed to be lacking but if the forum wasn’t for my business site, I would have continued to use it for personal use. PunBB does a great job at what it intends to do: lightweight ass-kicking.

PunBB Official Site
Official PunBB Forums

The next forum up is one of my favorites despite my inability to use it, at all.

Vanilla
Vanilla is an open-source, standards-compliant, multi-lingual, fully extensible discussion forum for the web. Anyone who has web-space that meets the requirements can download and use Vanilla for free!

Vanilla is one of those forums that you simply want to use. It’s minimalistic, absolutely stunning and basic enough that anyone can wield it. There’s a massive range of extensions and an absolutely gorgeous site for fetching them. The man behind Vanilla is Canadian as well, maybe that’s why I have some odd inextinguishable desire to have Vanilla’s babies.

However that’s where the love stops. Actually, that’s right where the abuse started. Vanilla is great if you wish to continue using it in it’s vanilla form or with any of the ‘released’ themes. Customizability, though?

Vanilla drawbacks
Vanilla has a stunning plugin system, a diverse range of themes developed for it but it’s theming and template system is absolutely horrendous. I have used many, many forum systems prior and had no problems making minor tweaks, fiddling and all-in-all surviving in the code (despite having zero coding ability). Vanilla on the other hand, despite reading the documentation and spending a few days digging around on the official forum left me dazed and confused.

It may be far too advanced for me or things are just in general obfuscated. I couldn’t get even the smallest changes implemented without an outright desire to drive myself off the nearest cliff. Since I’m in Toronto the trek to the nearest cliff would be several hours. Nonetheless, I was willing and ready to make the trip.

Vanilla is one of those systems you want to love but know you’ll end up in ruins as an alcoholic after attempting to wield it for long. A ten in my book.. for the masochist.

Get Vanilla
Official Vanilla Forums

Onwards!

phpBB
Millions of people use phpBB on a daily basis, making it the most widely used opensource bulletin board system in the world. Whether you want to stay in touch with a small group of friends or are looking to set up a large multi-category board for a corporate website, phpBB has the features you need built in.

phpBB is hard to deny in the open source community. It’s one of those forums that have been around and is older than rocks, it’s frequently updated and there’s a gigantic plethora of addons, plugins and themes available for it solely due to it’s age. It’s great, usable and the latest version really does have a lot to offer as a forum.

One of my own problems I have with phpBB though is my security concerns. As a piece of software it’s been around for such a long time that with all of it’s past, I simply can’t trust it to build a community on. With the past phpBB team’s delays and insane amounts of exploits being released for it… ah. But it’s hard denying such beauty — the latest version of it had an insane amount of effort put into it and is one of the most usable pieces of forum software out there today.

Even if you don’t consider using it on a long-term basis I would recommend at least giving it a try.
phpBB Official Site
phpBB Community

SimpleMachines
SMF can trace its roots all the way back to a perl powered message board, YaBB. After awhile, there became a demand for a php coded version of YaBB. So that is where YaBBSE comes into play. While YaBBSE was getting bigger and bigger, there were certain aspects of it that just needed improvement and reworking. The decision was made that it was best to separate from YaBBSE because it was a lot different from YaBB and it was best to start from scratch. At this point, SMF started being developed. On September 29th, 2003, the first beta of SMF was released to charter members, SMF 1.0 Beta 1. While this was a huge milestone for SMF, only charter members had access to use it. But on March 10, 2004, SMF made its public debut with the first public SMF release available to everyone.

Last but certainly not least, SimpleMachines. SimpleMachines or SMF for short (Simple Machines Forum) is my favorite of all of the available software out there today. It’s a great mix of usability and features, all the while still offering easy customization and addons.

While I admit I do find it a bit bulky and the ‘default’ template leaves a lot to be desired, I love it. Best of all? The community behind the system. Recently I had the opportunity to spend about 48 hours on their forum while a few of their team members made great efforts helping me move data from one old version of another forum (IPB) to SMF.

The process was not easy by any means and as it was one of my first times really digging into simplemachines from a technical standpoint, quite frankly it went horribly. Nonetheless their team was behind me 100% and even offered to help dig in on their own and spend their own time getting it up and running: To me, that tells me they’re both confident with their software and care about the community enough to help get new folks using it.

Kudos SimpleMachines.
Official SimpleMachines Site
Official SimpleMachines Community

Building communities isn’t the easiest thing to do but with free, open source software out there like the ones detailed above it certainly takes a lot of weight off our shoulders.

Thank you for all of the great work developers!
Keep it up

Service, at least on the internet, has become almost free. Daily I see advertisements for web hosting for mere pennies a month (See: Reality check for web hosting clients everywhere) that include 24×7 support, promises of hand holding, a free carwash and millions of dollars in google ad credits!

What a deal! At least you believe so, initially. The trouble with these sorts of providers is they’re either really selling themselves short, thirsty for market share or that’s really all their services are really worth. Eek, on thoughts of the latter.

Not so long ago I was contacted privately by a client who truly concerned we were selling ourselves short — after all, how can such great service be had for mere pennies? (32 cents a day, if you’re on our fused1 package in fact.)

Quite frankly, I would agree with him and his concerns. Service most certainly isn’t free and quality support requires constant investment and sacrifice. In essence the price our clients pay isn’t for the hosting. Still our pricing model is considered very inexpensive compared to a large amount of the providers out there and we’ll be making modifications soon to correct that substantially.

No, prices aren’t rising but we’ll be launching a new set of packages when we finally find some time!
For now, back to the hiring process..

Rich wrote an interview for me to fill out about open source and it’s role in Fused Network and my own life. I happily obliged and wrote a thorough response, the final version you can see here: An interview with Fused Network’s David McKendrick.

He also took the time to write up two exceptional articles on finding a new web hosting provider:
Finding a good webhost
Finding a good webhost: Part 2, Fused Network

I also did an embarrassing interview with Webhostingunleashed and I’ve learned my lesson about keeping my mouth shut when I’ve got nothing good to say: Interview with David of Fused Network

(Okay, so it’s not that bad.)
It’s more fun than writing ticket responses at the very least

As surprising as it is we were just short of hitting one of our goals this year — we were just short of our goal of hosting 1,000 domain names by January first. Instead we arrived at a nice even 800, up by about 600 since the beginning of 2007. (Honestly, I’m ecstatic about it nonetheless. I always set lofty goals so even just grasping a sliver of the original target is wonderful)

Now some of you may be wondering where I’ve been! During the past couple of weeks I’ve been hiding out in Florida taking some much needed time off but at the same time solidified some upcoming changes & plans.

Hey, where are semi-dedicateds, David?!
First off, I’m sure a number of you are asking “Where are semi-dedicated packages, you’ve been talking about them since June!”. I’ll admit we dropped the ball on launching our semi-dedicated packages, while they’re essentially available (and we’ve got two servers handling clients for them) we still have yet to launch the packages.

The primary reason is a decent one though, I want to get our site ‘in tune’ with our new offerings before launching them. There’s a number of different key areas that are currently being updated including a content overhaul — the new site will contain more information about our team, infrastructure & what really makes us different from other providers.

The other half of it is that I’ve been absolutely swamped with keeping existing clients satisfied (hey, a 3 minute response time average isn’t something to brag about but it’s decent!) & new ones content with our service. It doesn’t give me all that much time to devote to new development.

There’s a number coming in 2008 though, I’ll avoid tossing out time estimations but we’ve got a new cPanel theme in development, a site overhaul, new packages coming & some other goodies in store.

What’s the plan, stan?
First up on the chopping block are our current packages. We intend on splitting our offering into two different tiers at the moment — both business & personal. I’m also (slowly) getting to work on a new ‘blog hosting’ offering that has been on the backburner for a year. We’re about 6 years late to the blog hosting industry, but better late than never

Second of all we’ve been preparing to hire new representatives. We’re finally at that ‘breaking point’ where we can afford to dish out some funds for some new blood here at Fused. As we continue to overhaul our primary site you’ll see new information going up about our available careers — I’m really excited about the opportunities we’ll be offering soon.

There’s a tonne getting done & just all stewing together. I’m looking forward to it!

On the plate:

• Affiliate program overhaul — Cleaning up the semantics, setting up a more competitive offering & new ‘charity tallies’ so users can see how they stack up against others in the system (optional).
• Site overhaul — tonnes of new information being made available, new tools & hopefully an easy-to-use template system
• Knowledgebase Updates — We understand the importance of our knowledgebase and how unfun it is to use. An overhaul is expected soon.

We’ve also been completing an awful lot of custom development within the control panel. We’ve got new pretty little uptime & trend graphs available (already completed, just waiting to be inputted!) for shared and dedicated users. Once the new control panel theme is ready we’ll be implementing them.

So while I’ve been silent on a number of key development topics as of late (Ruby on Rails, Semi-dedicated packages, etc.) know it’s moving forward. Hopefully we’ll add some manpower before February and kick it into action a bit faster!

There’s lots coming, stick around for the show!

Of course, given my experience in the industry I just had to jump into the pit & toss a few words around. I don’t regret entering the industry myself and I’ve been involved since 2003. It all hasn’t been fun and games though & takes a serious devotion to both your clients and servers.

Despite the thousands of hours sacrificed and countless sleepless nights, overall I’ve enjoyed just about every minute of it — well, minus a few harddrive crashes

I tossed my two cents in the ring over at Freelanceswitch, hopefully I’ve at least helped a few out:

To those of you considering entering the web hosting market because of this post: Stop and do some serious research before you jump into the pool.

First off, the hosting industry is quite saturated. There are companies out there paying up to $200 per sales lead — for a client whose annual revenue won’t even exceed half of that. Acquiring clients isn’t as easy as 1-2-3. While you may be able to convert your freelancing jobs & clients into some additional revenue you’ll also have an insane amount of additional responsibility to them.

Imagine having a design client who you need to respond to within 15 minutes at 4 AM when their e-mail becomes available or in the middle of Christmas vacation, dinner or while you’re stuck in traffic on the highway. It’s not all fun & games — and when clients rely on you for mission critical e-mail, data & security — and you fail? Your reputation has just got kicked down a couple of notches.

I’ll admit upfront that I myself got involved in the web hosting industry back in 2003 as a ‘hobby’ provider. For a few years I operated my own smaller <100 client "hobby shop" until going full-time as a support representative for another company in the industry. It's a cutthroat industry that requires attention to detail. I've worked for some of the largest out there -- HostGator & many more..

Again, it's not all fun and games. The industry is however black and white. You're either all in or you're just waiting to get out. There are some serious benefits to it though as it does offer some potential 'passive' income -- but you've got to ensure your servers are monitored 24/7, that you're available 24/7 and that you have some SERIOUS contingency plans in place in the event of a death in the family, your own death or other emergencies.

If you do enter the market, prepare to spend the next few years within inches of a blackberry or laptop. Here's a few valuable posts I would highly recommend reading -- both written by yours truly, of course:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=480474 -- reality check if you're about to start a web hosting provider.

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=480472 -- reality check if you're a web hosting client.

These days, as of earlier this year I went full-time with my own new web hosting company (started in Feb. of 2006). It's been fun but there has been thousands of hours sacrificed on behalf of clients. The margins? Mmm, not all that fantastic -- but I don't do it for the money. I do it to ensure my clients are satisfied & well fed with support.

If you like ramen, hop in. It's a fun ride where you'll spend more on capital gains than you will on yourself

Freelanceswitch – Should you sell hosting?

You know us though, normal was on one of the pages we tore out of our dictionaries.

We like to do things differently.
So let’s get started. To celebrate the upcoming holidays we’re giving everything away!

During the month of December, Fused Network will be donating 100% of our new-signup revenue to the charity of your choice. In order to take advantage of the offer all you have to do is sign-up & you’ll be given the opportunity to enter your favorite charity in the ‘Charity’ field.

Read more about it on our Biggest Holiday Giveaway page.

Total contributed so far: $589.74
Tally updated last on Wednesday, December 13th at 9:15 AM EST

The Salvation Army

Mission & Goals:

“The Salvation Army is one of the world’s largest providers of social aid, with expenditures including operating costs of $2.6 billion in 2004, helping more than 32 million people in the US alone. In addition to community centers and disaster relief, the organization does work in refugee camps, especially among displaced people in Africa. The Salvation Army has received an A- rating from the American Institute of Philanthropy.”

The Salvation Army exists to share the love of Jesus Christ, meet human needs and be a transforming influence in the communities of our world.

Official Site: The Salvation Army (Canada)

Total being donated so far: $348.73
Total contributing to Salvation Army: 5
Tally updated on Wednesday, 13th of December, 9:15 AM EST

The donation comes from a sign-up performed before the Biggest Giveaway Ever post was on our site. I’m personally quite in-tune with both The Salvation Army’s message and core values though. I see them feeding the homeless daily here in Toronto and to me, that means something.

Doctors Without Borders

Mission Statement:

“Doctors Without Borders, USA awards grants for emergency and medical relief projects to Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) affiliates for overseas operations. MSF is an international independent medical humanitarian organization that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, natural or man-made disasters, or exclusion from health care in more than 70 countries. MSF was founded in 1971 to both provide emergency medical assistance and bear witness publicly to the plight of the people it assists. In emergencies and their aftermath, MSF provides health care, rehabilitates and runs hospitals and clinics, performs surgery, battles epidemics, carries out vaccination campaigns, operates feeding centers for malnourished children, and offers mental health care.”

Official Site: Doctors Without Borders
Charity Navigator: Doctors Without Borders

Total being donated so far: $159.81
Total contributing to Doctors Without Borders: 2
Tally updated on Wednesday, 10th of December at 11:47 AM EST

Our first contribution to Doctors Without Borders comes from a new client in Germany:

“Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontiers, my husband is a pediatrician and my father is a linguist, sometimes translator, living in Southeast Asia. Both have had close contact with the organization and can attest to the challenging and amazing work that this organization does.” – Natalie

Alzheimer Society of Canada

Alzheimer Society of Canada

Mission:
“The Alzheimer Society provides support, information and education to people with Alzheimer’s disease, families, physicians and health-care providers. The Alzheimer Society arranges or refers people to support groups that provide a safe place to share information, thoughts, feelings and experiences. We help people find programs and services they need, such as day and respite programs, home support and help with the difficult transition to long-term care.”

Official Site: Alzheimer Society of Canada

Alzheimer Society of Canada: $80.60
Total contributions so far: 1
Tally updated on Wednesday, 6th of December, 3:38 PM EST

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

“I’m trying to sign up online but can’t figure it out…”
“What part of the signup process are you having trouble with? I’d love to help!”
“Well, it says the NFL sunday package is..”
“Wait one moment.. hm, nope wrong site.”

September Statistics

Random Server / Network statistics

Total Network Bandwidth Usage: 572 GigaBytes
Total Backup System Usage: 312 GigaBytes stored (Clearing some out now!)
Total Mail Sent / Received: 420,000 Mails (Estimated)
Total Spam Stopped: 1.23 Millions messages
Total Server(s) Hits: 160+ Million visitors

Our spam filters are definitely on high alert. A great deal of users have thanked us since we went live with the system in late September. Since then, it’s gobbled up 1.2 million spam messages and based on my math we’ll be at several million for October. Impressive at the very least.

The system isn’t flawless by any means however and there have been two different instances of it picking off legitimate ‘mail’. The problem is the legitimate mail originated from a blacklisted server — the only solution was to whitelist the sender. Whitelisting the e-mail sender is easily done via our online control panel though, so no fear!

Our own site has been beyond popular lately…

Random Fused Network statistics

Total visitors: 5,214
Total # of countries visited from: 101 countries!
Revenue increase: 25%+

This is a far cry from the 1,800 visitors Fused Network was receiving in January of this year. Compared to our statistics from October, 2006:

Total visitors: 1,745
Total # of countries visited from: 59 countries!

It’s quite amazing to see the ample amount of foreign visitors arriving on our sites. A great feeling that we’ve got such a far reach

How about your own sites?