Keeping Customers After a Disaster
Recently The Planet, a large web hosting company that has numerous data centers, experienced an explosion in their H1 DC. At one point over 9,000 servers were offline. It’s been fun to watch the commotion. I am very happy that I am no longer in the hosting business (with the exception on one non-profit site) since the two dedicated servers I had at one point were located in this DC. No, I never used The Planet, but The Planet bought out ev1Servers.net which used to be rackshack.net.
Anyway, Douglas Erwin, CEO of the Planet, recently announced the compensation for customers affected by the outage. It ended up being two months free service and 10% on new services for the rest of the year. Most customers were expecting one month free, so the second was a surprise. There was a twist though, the second month of free service will be in December. Why would they do that? Why not get it out of the way right now? While some folks were speculating it was to keep their cashflow up in the short term, I don’t think that was the answer. They did it to keep customers from jumping ship! Folks who were looking to leave will stick around to get their free month in December! If The Planet can keep a customer until December, they probably aren’t going to leave. Smart, if you ask me.
If you are still in the hosting business, this should serve as a reminder for the need of local backups, offsite DNS, load balanced servers in different geographical areas, your customers contact data, and lots of caffeine!
Resolution Followup
One of my New Year’s resolutions was to expand my little web development company, Missing Arrow Publishing.
I’ve been struggling trying to decide what I want to focus on, I have a great number of ideas but so little motivation to follow through. The only site that I have really “spiced” up is Scouting News which based on its topic will never be a large money maker. I tried to do some work on Joke It, but unforuntelty the back end which is protected by a zend optimized script is broke, and at this point I don’t think there is anything I can do to fix it short of rebuilding the whole CMS.
Sites I had wanted to develop:
1) Wii Rat - I’ve lost interest in this topic, but will try to build up the blog and sell it. I obviously need to come up with a theme and build up some posts to start getting some keyword interest.
2) CSP Corner - This is the site that I am the most excited about, but will take the most work. I have a coded design, but realized my php skills are very rusty and are slow to return. There is a demand for this niche, I know how I can monetize it, and I would have fun running it. I just need to get the CMS coded so I can start gathering data.
3) Camp Skits - I’ve had fun doing the “research” for this site, but haven’t done much else. I was curious as to how much search traffic I could get with this topic, so I threw up a sample page, and have been amazed at the stats I’ve seen with no promotion. Once again my rusty php skills have slowed me down greatly, which bothers me as this is a very simple script. I thought I had it all set up but I kept getting an error that was frustrating as I couldn’t discover the source, so I stopped work on it for a while.
4) Green Website - yeah, nothing… couldn’t even find a good domain name yet.
So as you can see, things are slow going. I really hope to get some sits set up so I just have to maintain them as I could use the extra income. I know CSP Corner won’t end up being a low time involved site but it is based around a hobby so I’m not too worried about having to dedicate a large chunk of time.
Why did I post this? No, it wasn’t to entertain my large number of readers 
It was to help motivate me to get moving.
Random Things Going Through My Mind…
Filed under: General, In the News, Military, Scouts, Web Development
- Why are we still calling Pakistan a key Ally? It just doesn’t seem right based on current details coming out of Pakistan.
- Will I ever start working on CSPCorner.org? I’ve been wanting to start a resource for CSP Collectors that has the potential to be just as good as The Internet Guide or OA Insignia. I think I’m hoping someone beats me to it, unfortunately I believe all of the sites that started showing potential have since been abandoned.
- I passed the State Social Work exam for my Certification on Friday, now I have to study for and pass the National exam. I’m nervous.
- Should I get a personal trainer to help motivate my change in lifestyle? I keep telling myself I need to get in better shape and I keep having the military tell me I need to get in better shape, but I procrastinate. Maybe I’ll see where I am in December.
- I wanted to buy a couch this weekend, but I refuse to shop during a Veteran’s Day Sale.
Sun Prairie Today
When I lived in Sun Prairie I was always getting extremely pissed at The Star, the local weekly newspaper. It had gone down hill and needed some competition. My hopes were raised when Madison Newspapers added a weekly insert titled Sun Prairie News to the Wisconsin State Journals they delivered to Sun Prairie. The Sun Prairie News didn’t last long and I was back to being disapointed.
I started thinking that Sun Prairie needed a decent Community Website, as that could provide me with the information I needed and give The Star, which didn’t have a website at the time, some competition. It didn’t happen while I lived there but my concerns have been answered.
Sun Prairie Today is a fairly new website dedicated to giving the fine folks of Sun Prairie daily news and community information. After checking it out I must say that I am impressed and I wish the publishers the best of luck. As of right now The Star’s online offering is nothing compared to what they have…