From the CEO

One of my good friends works for a major marketing firm specializing in SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Well “works for” sounds like he grabs people who know what they are doing coffee. No, this guy more or less runs the SEO division of his company and is in constant high demand. (Parents take note: if your college kids are marketing majors and you want to do them the greatest favor of their lives, steer them in the direction of SEO.) Well onto my point. “Gilbert,” as we’ll refer to this guy, showed me this diamond in the rough which, well for lack of my ability to use certain less than FCC approved words, caught his goad.

Behold: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22504312/

Now Gilbert is a somewhat opinionated guy when it comes to this stuff. Somewhat in the way Rush Limbaugh is opinionated when the name “Clinton” is brought up. For entertainment purposes I’ve copied and pasted a post from his personal blog with about 30 edits to bring it up to FCC standards, Enjoy!

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I was going to save my response to this article by Gene Marks (who has to be the most misguided scribe in the history of journalism) for the company blog, but found myself unable to coagulate my thoughts into words that would be acceptable for company fodder.

Never mind the fact that Gene's [insert word that refers to lack of intelligence] seems to know what an RSS feed is, but didn't get the memo that there's such a thing as an RSS Reader to read the 'endless stream of meaningless items displayed in an overly large browser window' , this editorial is a shining example of the attitude that just [bleep] kills small businesses. But just for fun, here's a few other gems that this whiny little [word referring to a lesser man] doled out:

"Let's face it: You're not going to eliminate spam in your business."

"But I do know the current group of antivirus software applications don't do the job for small businesses." (NOTE-I have a gut feeling Gene's small business is a conduit...no, gateway for any and all sql worms)

"If you don't have something new to say each day, no one's going to bother to stop by and check out your blog. It'll be, like, so lame. And if you do have something to say, just be careful you don't give away too much information."

"I forked over a bunch of dough to a firm in California that promised to get my company's name on "all the major search engines" when someone was looking for products that we sell. How did they plan to do this? I'm still not really sure, but it had something to do with spiders, black hats, and link farms."

"Mobile applications will be a great thing someday. Just like hovercrafts, telepods, and renewable energy. "

Well Gene, don't ya feel better now that you got that off your chest? Now excuse me while I build a mobile gadget for my clients that integrates with the RSS feed. Since most of 'em found me on Google because I optimized my site for a few choice long tail words, I want to preserve the niche as much as possible.

I could go on, as this article literally reads like a giant punchline. I'll say this much, the way your customers find you on the internet has and will continue to evolve. The way you communicate with them will change which is demonstratable. This is just plain disinformation by and large.

Seriously, go manage a Wendys or something and leave the discourse on web marketing to the grown folks you [negative description of said author].

Many people look at the Holidays as quite simply the most joyous time of the year. Who can blame 'em? Bright flashy lights, free candy, parties, family.the list goes on and on. And there is the other half, the ones who look at this season as one of the most stressful of year.

Well add CEOs to the second list.

First, there's an incredible amount of political jockeying that goes on internally - who gets the cards, who gets the wine baskets - wait, do we offend someone by sending out wine? Uh oh, Chanukah was earlier this year. That means for some of our customers, cards will be arriving too late anyway. Wow, is it easier from a customer relations standpoint just to disregard this season altogether?!

Next, there's that obnoxious un-written rule that says on an executive level anything I need to get wrapped up by year's end better be done by Dec 21th. Post this magical date, we enter the "dead zone" that seems to exist until a few days into January while every decision maker and C-level exec is on their extended Holiday trip. Despite this dead-zone, it never fails that some overly obsessive individual has a pressing need to get something done on the 26th, or even worse, on New Year's Eve day!

So somewhere in all this we've got to reward what I consider to be the most deserving staff in the managed hosting industry. Okay, so that means planning a party. Try getting 45 people, all with family or friends to agree on a single date. Not happening. So which conflicts do we chalk up to "tough luck," and which do we make accommodations for? While we're on the topic of 45 in agreeance, let's we talk about the venue for the event. Sorry Mark, Hanna Montana concert is out this year, hate to disappoint the girls.

It is at this point that I'll perform the least stressful task assigned to me by wishing everybody a wonderful holiday season, and all the best for 2008!

Buzz words/phrases are fun. Usually they have some sort of abbreviation that you can use to make yourself sound knowledgeable in front of others. In fact, some terms have so many acronyms that some individuals will choose the most obscure one possible to present an aura of superiority amongst their peers.

Now don’t get me wrong, saying “software as a service” ten times fast isn’t exactly the simplest of verbal feats, but my question is - why am I saying this in the first place? Software has been offered as a service for quite some time now, yet this particular buzz phrase hasn’t been around nearly as long. Just a few short years ago we used the nice, simple descriptive phrase “application hosting”. Those of us that provided the service were simply “application service providers” (ASPs).

Web 2.0 is another one of those fancy terms. Be honest with yourself, w/o doing a quick Google search, mentally list off all the features of Web 2.0, and give a brief description of exactly what Web 2.0 is. This audience tends to be fairly up to date on such buzzy words, so I’d guess many of you did just fine. But do your customers really have a clue? Paul Hirsch, co-owner of Equentity Web design firm, has a rather humorous article in the May issue of the WHIR. He writes that, when responding to customers who will sit down with him and ask for a Web 2.0 site, many times he’ll offer instead to create a Web 5.3 site. What exactly is Web 5.3? Well he doesn’t exactly know, “but it sounds even more advanced than Web 2.0 with that larger number.” Like SaaS, many of the technologies that comprise the Web 2.0 platform have also been around for years.

When FastServers recently announced that we were introducing fully managed dedicated Exchange hosting I was congratulated on jumping into SaaS. Coming from a rather knowledgeable source, I was a bit taken aback that he would have been so quick to be caught-up in this lingo, all the while failing to realize that we’ve been “involved” in SaaS for years now. I guess we just didn’t label it distinctly for him. Another industry insider recently asked me if we were soon going to be getting into VoIP or other SaaS services. I explained that for the past three years we’ve actively supported numerous customers who offer various business platforms, such as Salesforce, and others that have been utilizing our dedicated product for their own VoIP offerings. This gentleman replied with, “Okay, so FastServers stays on the cutting edge of technology by having customers that are on the cutting edge of technology.” Obviously the humor of that reply was insinuated, but it made me step back and really think – in this era of “buzz words” a provider could legitimately be offering all the latest and yet not be applying the current trendy tag to it.

In reality, FastServers could have many more sub-sections: VoIP servers, Salesforce Servers, OpSource servers, Web 2.0 servers. We could even charge extra and guarantee our customer base that these servers have been specially optimized for each of the above-mentioned services. If we traced back to find the earliest deployments of these onto our network we could even decorate our web site with the line “Pioneers in SaaS & Web 2.0!”

If you ask sales engineer Shane Reisner, he’ll tell you that Memorial Day weekend is the official kick-off to the boating season. A few weeks back in Chicago, LaSalle Bank’s “Shamrock Shuffle” was the official kick off to the running seasons. I’m not sure when the golf kick off is, but the last two courses I played didn’t even have a food/beverage cart out and about so I hope that event hasn’t taken place yet. Well, in the spirit of these kickoffs, the Chicago office had its own kickoff to the summer last Friday night.

Yeah we’re a bit early, but it’s been such a frustratingly long and cold winter, that we had to jump at the first few days of 60-80 degree temps and dive right in!

Our staff works their tail end off on a daily basis and last Friday had a chance to let loose in the confines of our own office while the Cedar Falls group was kind enough to cover for us. Of course I waited until the last minute to ask a friend to bartend only to discover that both he and his girlfriend were scheduled at their real bar tending jobs that night. No problem; I took a couple refresher courses, stepped behind the bar myself, and went to town. Our original 7:30 finish time ended up coming closer to 10ish, but a great time and plenty of socialization was had by all!

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HostingCon 2007 is coming up sooner than many realize – make sure to get registered early for the FastServers.Net/Tophosts.Com Business Networking Cruise. http://www.hostingconcruise.com

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Speaking of HostingCon, ISPCon is officially upon us. VP of Sales and Marketing, Aaron Phillips and I will be in Orlando for the event (May 23-25). If you’ll be at the show as well and would like to meet feel free to e-mail.

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Finally, make sure to keep tabs on our website over the next few months. We have a lot of exciting announcements and changes upcoming. The WHIR has already helped us make one such announcement with their article regarding our new Velocity Exchange offering. The official launch is just nine short days away; however, information is already available.

Morning routines, most people have them, some more consistent than others. One thing that’s very consistent about my morning routine is first forcing my overweight Lab off the covers so I can escape the bed. Then I proceed to the computer. I quickly glance at e-mails, and pending verification that nothing blew up over night, I visit the online sports sections of the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press. (For those of you reading from the twin cities, The Dean and Shooter columns, specifically).

Why am I reading those columns? Well, here in Chicago, the Minnesota Twins and the Minnesota Vikings information is not easy to come by. As an avid fan of both, I want to know what’s going on with my favorite teams first thing in the morning. Two weeks ago I came across an article about a potential starting pitcher by the name of Sidney Ponson. At that time, Sydney had not yet reported to Spring training. Now this guy’s on a pretty short leash as is; not showing up to Spring training is a bad idea, especially if he wants to resurrect his career.

Before I tell you why I am even mentioning Mr. Ponson, first I need to fill you in on another topic that is closely related. There is a heated debate raging here in the United States about immigration. While the debate mainly centers on illegal immigration, it’s impossible to talk about the illegal side of it without also looking at the legalized side. Some people in the US favor a guest worker program that allows citizens of other countries to legally enter our country. They enter the country for a certain period of time to “perform work Americans are unwilling to do.” Then they return back to their home country once the seasonal work has been done. Strangely enough, this all ties into both my Twins pitcher, Mr. Ponson, who did not show for training camp, and tech companies, who need to hire people from other countries to do the work “Americans are unwilling to do.”

Sidney Ponson hasn’t made it to Ft. Myers, Florida for Spring training because he’s a citizen of Aruba. He has yet to obtain a visa to travel back to the US from his home country (punching a judge on a beach tends to cause those sorts of problems). Ponson is not alone. A very large percentage of baseball players, as compared to workers in other industries, are in fact either citizens of, or were born in countries outside of the States. None of these individuals have problems getting into the US to do their work. But unlike the debate currently raging about allowing people into the country that are doing jobs that Americans are unwilling to do, the foreign born baseball players are here doing jobs that American’s are unable to do! Twins two-time Cy-Young winning pitcher Johan Santana of Venezuela has a change up that as of today, no American born pitcher can match (yes I realize some baseball fans out there might argue that point, but you are wrong!). As a result, we have no problem letting him come here to “work.”

Well, there are industries outside of the sports and entertainment world that can utilize the services of foreign residents. They can be used to perform duties, that as a whole, most available in the American workforce are unable to perform. Highly skilled workers gain access to this country via means of the H-1B visa. The H-1B visa is provided to workers with a minimum of at least a bachelors degree equivalent in education. These visa holders are sponsored by a company that can show why it is extremely difficult to find an American who can perform the same job functions.

While it’s estimated that over ten million immigrants currently reside in the US illegally, they may eventually be able to gain legalized status through a series of tests, fines, and time. The government currently only issues 65,000 H-1B visas per year. Think this sounds like a lot? Well, think about how many people are employed by Microsoft, DELL, John Deer, Dow Chemical, and any other tech company, not just communications companies. Most of those companies I just mentioned employ more than 65,000 employees – each. When it comes time for companies such as FastServers.Net to try and sponsor an employee via an H-1B visa, well you guessed it, no such luck. I’m not going to argue in favor of or against additional H-1B visas, but I am going to provide some points that you should think about that factor into your own personal opinion.

Two years ago FastServers.Net spent a lot of time and money on the process to attempt to gain access for a “would be” employee from India. This particular employee was both native to that country and could provide administrative services on various server platforms (which we needed at the time). Since we have a large amount of customers from that region, this individual could have proven to be a very valuable asset to us. Finding someone with experience in multiple server administration platforms is hard enough. Add fluent natural language skills and knowledge of the Indian culture, I’d say we have what’s qualified as a job that an American can’t perform. FastServers.Net is not alone in this concept.

Tens of thousands of companies like ours have a multitude of reasons to hire people from outside of the US for very selective tasks. From what I have presented so far, it’s very easy to say the US should increase the amount of visas being given each year. After all, outsourcing is a reality in the technology industry. Think about this for a second. Would we rather send our dollars overseas, or bring the overseas talent into the States and reinvest those dollars into the US economy. And that is exactly the point of the current debate going on in our country. Regardless if you’re a recent graduate in the technology field, or if you’re a long-term veteran of the “Telco” days, an increased amount of H-1B visas directly threatens your own personal job security.

My most recent blog post demonstrated some issues regarding the linguistic “disconnect” between companies and their outsourced support staff. An increase in the amount of H-1Bs will not fix that. Nor will these work passes into the US make the labor costs of outsourcing a technology department to another country any less advantageous. Regardless, the high-tech industry in the US sends billions of dollars each year overseas. Sometimes it’s due to corporate greed. Other times it’s due to lack of available resources. So the real question that politicians have to balance is does restricting legalized skilled labor from overseas damage qualified Americans’ ability to get jobs, or does it instead bring tax dollars into the country that would otherwise be sent across the ocean.

All opinions aside, there are a few basic facts I should share with you:
• Every year countries such as India continue to make quick advances in the sciences, thus increasing the amount of highly skilled workers in their population.
• Every year the amount of companies outsourcing IT jobs continues to increase.
• If this country opened legalized immigration to skilled workers, select American jobs would be lost.

As a country, our choices are easy to decipher, yet not so easy to evaluate from an overall impact standpoint:

1. We can continue to limit the amount of H-1B visas and watch billions leave the country while losing the opportunity for a brain import as opposed to drain. This however, will also give thousands of US citizens opportunities to obtain jobs that might otherwise be taken by individuals, whom as immigrants to the country, are willing to accept for much lower compensation.

2. We can start allowing universities in other countries to educate their citizens (not costing our government a dime) and then allow those that choose to immigrate to the United States become some of our most brightest and productive citizens. This can be done while keeping money in this country. The downside to this argument is what stops companies from outsourcing cheaper labor overseas anyway and cherry picking the people they want to import into their US offices?

Bill Gates has provided his opinion on this publically. You can read about it at the following web site:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/473893dc-ccde-11db-a938-000b5df10621.html

Many of the CEO heroes in the industry have spoken up about it as well. And a quick Google search will give you a review of their thoughts, opinions, and overall views on the subject. No matter where you stand on this debate, it is impossible to ignore. Perhaps higher education institutions in India will start teaching the curve ball to all graduates. If that were the case, there would be nothing left to debate!

UPDATED NOTE: Much of this blog was written seven days before publishing. As of publishing Sidney Ponson has obtained his visa and has pitched in one Spring training “B” game. “Cheer for the Minnesota Twins today!”

Technical Information On The H-1B Visa:

The H-1B is a non-immigrant visa category provided for in the Immigration & Nationality Act, section 101(a)(15)(H) that allows American companies and universities to temporarily employ foreign workers who have the equivalent to a US Bachelor's Degree. The basic quota was left at 65,000, but with an additional 20,000 visas possible for foreign workers with US advanced degrees. Of the 65,000 total, 6,800 are initially reserved for citizens of Chile and Singapore under free trade agreements with those countries, however, if these reserved visas are not used under the agreements, they go back to the general pool. Outside of the 65,000 quota, another 10,500 visas annually are available to Australian citizens under a similar but more flexible program, the E-3 visa program.

Okay, how often do you see the CEO posting a blog about a particular department in the company, much less any aspect of the company? Sure, it’s rare, but I have to admit, when I think of a “blog,” I think of informal information that is typically presented in a humorous manner. There are plenty of blogs out there that are serious and contain very useful information. Normally you would have to search deep into a knowledge base to find the information you want. My blog post today will not be technical in nature, but does contain a lot of humor. Trust me when I say this, you will want to continue reading. It has to do with outsourced support to, well, you just have to keep reading to find out.

First let me tell you that FastServers.Net offers a two hour hardware replacement guarantee. The guarantee ensures that if any component of your dedicated solution fails, one of our in-house DELL certified technicians will replace it. Turn around time – less than two hours. Since we only provide 100% DELL server solutions, it made sense to go ahead and hire a full team of DELL certified technicians. And, they are staffed in all three of our data centers. It gets better. We also maintain a component locker that is always stocked full of every single part of your server, should it ever need replacing.

So what’s the point in telling you about our two hour replacement guarantee, our DELL certified technicians, and our fully stocked component locker? Well, here’s where the humor kicks in – because our staff has access to every part they need, on site and readily available, they do not have to have painful conversations with outsourced technical support representatives, just like the chat transcript you are about to read. The chat transcript is both humorous and ridiculous, all at the same time. As you read the transcript between a friend of mine who owns a technology company, and he is a DELL certified technician, you too will probably get just as frustrated as my friend Chris did during the experience.

Support Chat Log - PDF

Support Chat Log - TXT

Assuming you read the full transcript of the chat between my friend Chris, and an apparently unprofessional outsourced support team, you can quickly grasp the concept of why it’s important to have a full in-house staff of DELL certified technicians. I believe having an internal team available in all three of our data centers provides that extra layer of certainty; knowing that you can call, create a ticket, or email FastServers.Net support, and receive nothing but the highest quality in customer support. It’s vital to the success of our company and it is something I have been focusing on since the very beginning – back in 1996 when we first started. I hope this has been both a humorous and educational blog post. You will be seeing more posts from me in the future.

If you have a particular topic you want covered in the next edition of “CEO Says:,” please contact Ian Andrusyk at ian@fastservers.net

At HostingCon 2006 I had the unique opportunity to attend as both an exhibitor and as a panel member in a keynote round table discussion. Our interactive “Jeopardy-style” game show was an overwhelming hit and earned two out of three awards from TopHosts.com, including Best of Show. A more in depth look at the convention and our booth itself, as well as a fun overview of after hours partying, will appear in an upcoming blog.

This update is going to be my chance to speak about topics which most of the industry generally agree on, as well as some notable points of debate. Our friends at WhirTV were on hand and now have video of the entire round table online.
You can find part one at: http://www.thewhir.com/tv/aug202006/.
Part two is located at: http://www.thewhir.com/tv/aug272006/

A general theme at HostingCon was the quality of customer and technical service. No one will ever claim that impeccable service is anything but an absolute necessity, but I believe FastServers goes about offering that service differently than many others in the industry. I was the only CEO on the panel who is the head of a dedicated-only company, which in our particular case has always been a plus. We’ve been able to redefine the exact way dedicated server customers are able to obtain whatever levels of support that are appropriate for their particular strengths and limitations. At FastServers.Net, we’ve always felt that if we expanded our scope of hosting options, our ability to pinpoint exactly what support is appropriate for this particular segment of the market would decline.

A point of strong disagreement I had with some individuals at HostingCon, including a few on my panel, was the commoditizing of the industry as a whole. As with any industry in existence there will always be a commoditization of sorts to cater to customers who base their buying decision solely on price. While these customers could theoretically contribute to our revenue stream, it would be extremely hazardous for the remainder of our customer base, which is paying for, and receiving high-end service and support. There is simply no good way to commingle bottom feeders into the exact same support system as our customer base who have come to expect our enterprise level service and top notch support replies and response times.

My final area of disagreement with others at HostingCon this year was the notion that virtualization was going to sweep the industry and be the hottest product for years to come. There are instances where a VPS solution will work and many times work well -no arguments here. As you our valued customer very well know, most of the solutions that FastServers deploys are both very inappropriate for a VPS solution, and very necessary to deliver the end needs of our customers. The ability to share resources and infrastructures is always a vital necessity for any type of hosting, that argument was absolutely correct. A fact that often times gets overlooked is that the cost of delivering a server with enough resources to handle a few VPS accounts could many times be more than the equivalent dedicated boxes translating into similar resources per server. While we never rule out future offerings don’t look for a major VPS push from FastServers any time soon!

Although we didn’t have the exact same ideas for all existing and future industry trends, it’s always amazing to hear how similar most of our stories are as we grew up in this industry. It’s also very refreshing just how much we all do agree upon, and at the end of the day one statement is very safe to say. We’re all working towards a continued evolution and respect of the hosting industry itself both in the tech sector and corporate world alike. Our philosophies as a whole are far more similar than they are apart and that can only be a positive for this industry.