We hope that this letter finds all of you happy and healthy this Christmas Season. This has been an eventful year for us, full of adjustments in our first year of marriage. All of it for the good, we are both very happy! We celebrated our first anniversary a little differently than we had originally planned. We had wanted to go back down to Natchez and New Orleans, but in light of Katrina and our crazy schedules, we decided against it. Instead we had dinner with Cotton’s parents at Sonny Williams Steakhouse in Little Rock. Cotton just happened to know the piano man there and he sang us a song.
We both remained active in our Church Ministry as Student Ministry Leaders. We attended a few leaders’ retreats and of course helped out with fund raisers, like Toad Suck Daze and Fireworks Tent. This year at the Fireworks Tent Cotton and several of the youth made bombs out of sparklers wrapped tightly together and blew up things while the tent wasn’t busy, and sometimes while it was… If you haven’t ever seen a sparkler bomb go off, you really should see this firsthand. It is very similar to dynamite and makes a loud bang as it shakes the ground. Cotton had the bright idea of blowing up a 25lb frozen turkey. With the turkey being frozen, it had to sit in the back of Ryan Long’s truck all night to thaw out in the Arkansas July heat. The very next day, with video cameras rolling, they managed to put the Turkey into flight again. The drumstick of the turkey was recovered 125 yards away as was several other unidentifiable remnants. There should be videos on Cotton’s personal website if you are interested.
Off and on during the year we have helped Garth and Melisa Bowman by babysitting their daughter, Arabella. Donna may not always get her way but when it comes to Larashleigh, Bella, and Emma Kate (Trey & Julie Elliot’s Daughter), they have their Uncle Cotton wrapped around their finger. Donna continued to sing on the praise team this year and has sang a few specials off and on throughout the year at church. She still sounds great and with the addition of Odis Richmond to the praise team, they have a sound that is all their own. Cotton has begged for Melisa to let him play the cowbell but she hasn’t let him yet. He does well enough to play the radio. He still manages The Church Alive Website and hosts all of the websites for the Church and helps out as much as he can in his areas of expertise. One such area found him on a mechanical scaffold recently soldering a video line to one of our new projectors in the auditorium. The height didn’t really do him in, instead it was his leg that wouldn’t quit shaking (totally on it’s own) that made he and Garth have to make another run at it to install the church’s new projectors.
Learning to Fly…
Another blessing we have experienced is that Cotton’s business has continued to grow beyond all his and his partners’ expectations. They have an office in Batesville and still maintain all of Mark Martin’s accounts as well as several hundred other clients around the country. As business continues to grow, the demand for the guys to be in different cities across the country has grown. It’s grown to the point to where his partner Kegal, who is a very experienced pilot, has had to fly them from place to place. Cotton has always enjoyed flying but it wasn’t until he and Donna flew to a Razorback Game in Fayetteville with Andrew and Christine Hornacker in Andrew’s Cessna 182, a small 4 seat single engine airplane, that he was bitten by the bug. We made the short trip to Fayetteville in no time and grabbed a courtesy car to eat dinner and onto the game. The trip home was even smoother than the flight down and occasionally we would glance down and see the traffic backed up on the interstate from Clarksville all the way to Fayetteville. Flying is the only way to go. Cotton & Garth started hard and heavy with high expectations but due to their schedules neither one of them has been able to really get on track with their training so far. They have both sat in the pilot’s seat and actually flown the plane but neither has been able to complete the ground school or necessary hours to get their private license. Cotton was able to take off and land with just a little bit of instruction, he now wants Donna to call him “Captain” but she won’t do it. I don’t think that Garth has had any luck either with the “Captain” thing, he was even going to start wearing the Captain’s hat… No respect from our women.
Summer Travels:
In July Cotton and his business partners met in Las Vegas for a Hosting Conference at the Mirage Casino. They had a great time, and made lots of good contacts that have continued to pan out for them all year long. When Cotton landed at the airport he had a limousine take him to meet his partners at Jimmy Buffet’s, he had a blast. One of his partners, Kegal, had been to Vegas several times so he made sure they didn’t miss a thing. The highlight of the trip for Cotton was seeing the fountains at Bellagio. When they start playing “fly me to the moon and those synchronized fountains start going everyone got quiet, it was awesome. He is planning to take Donna out there on their next anniversary so she can see it all firsthand. The weekend prior to Cotton’s Vegas trip, he and Donna flew to Ohio where they got to visit with some of Donna’s family and also see Lake Eerie. Donna’s parents also met us out there with our niece, Larashleigh, who got to tour the Hershey Chocolate Factory. While in Ohio we also attended Jeremy and Jenny’s wedding reception that was held at Holly’s house and when Cotton had to head out Donna got to shop until she dropped in Cleveland with her cousins.
Change of Address…
A few weeks after we had returned from our vacation, our Realtor, Dale Tice, contacted us and told us that she had found a buyer for our condo. We had it on the market the entire time we had been married in hopes it would sell so that we could relocate to Conway to be closer to family and friends and our church. The first deal fell through on the sale and it left the both of us a little heartbroken but we put our faith in God and knew that he knew our hearts so we kept faith that he would bring a buyer our way and like always he pulled through. Our buyer just so happened to be the same person who was unable to secure financing the first time so it all worked out great. So, bright and early on a Saturday morning, Cotton and two of his buddies, Garth Bowman and Trey Elliot, loaded up in a U-Haul truck and headed to Fairfield Bay with Donna and Melisa following behind them to get their condo unloaded. It was an all-morning affair even though everything was already boxed up. There was very little room to spare on the truck; thank goodness we sold the furniture with the condo. Once the trucks were loaded they all stopped for one last Goodwin and Daughters cheeseburger on their way out of town and headed to Conway.
Finding New House & Moving In…
Just when you think things are looking up, you hit a roadblock every time… We had a few new construction homes in mind for when we sold our condo and wouldn’t you know it, they had all sold… Finally one weekend Dustin and Bridgette drove down from Oklahoma City to visit and went house shopping with us. The night prior Cotton had went online and picked out about 4 or 5 listings that he wanted to look at and made arrangements with Mike Bernadsky, a local realtor that they had met earlier, a really nice Christian man who took a personal interest in helping us to find what we were looking for. After looking at two or three homes on the other side of town Mike brought us over to Southwind, a subdivision that is being developed in it’s third phase. We found a 4 bedroom new construction that was exactly what we were looking for. The house wasn’t finished by any means so it was hard to tell what was what but from what we had seen so far we knew that that was the house we wanted. Cotton told the Realtor that he wanted to write a contract that evening because lately everything they had even remotely liked had sold right out from under them. He also threatened to lay down in the driveway and not let other Realtors show the property. Ha. Well, after about three weeks of living at Donna’s parents house we were finally able to close on the new house and get moved in. Donna had already picked out all of the furniture from a store in Helena and it was delivered and setup all in one day. Cotton’s parents followed the guys up and helped out also.
House Blessing BBQ:
Once we had been moved in for a couple of weeks we decided to have a Celebration of Blessings Party for our friends and family that had worked so hard to help us get moved. Cotton smoked about 16 racks of ribs and his business partner Greg and his mother Ilene drove down and managed the grill where they cooked hamburgers and hot dogs for the kids. Trey and Julie Elliot also brought a blow-up bouncy house to setup in the backyard and the kids all had a blast jumping in it and playing x-box in the house. We are not for sure but we think that we had close to 60 or more people show up and have dinner with us. It was a great time and we are thankful for the wonderful family and friends that God has chosen to bless us with.
Christmas Dinner / Celebration:
Christmas this year is going to be held at our new house. We will head down to Helena before Christmas Eve so we can spend some time with Aunt Maxine and Grandma Rohrscheib. Cotton is planning on deep-frying a turkey this year so he has been practicing on our friends who don’t seem to mind too much. He thinks that he has almost got it down well enough to feed the family. Donna has also been practicing her dressing recipe and it has been awesome.
As you can see, this year’s letter is shorter than last years, thanks for taking the time to catch up on what we have doing all year, and we hope to hear back from you as to how 2006 treated you.
Merry Christmas & a Blessed New Year!
Cotton & Donna Rohrscheib
2006 Christmas Letter
Pleth makes Holiday Donation…
The partners and associates of Pleth Networks, LLC, an Arkansas based web-hosting and web development firm, have partnered with The Church Alive in Conway, Arkansas to help make the holidays special for a needy family in their area. The partners of Pleth Networks have purchased various food items that will be used in tandem with other assorted holiday items provided by The Church Alive and disburst to needy families in the Central Arkansas region.
The Church Alive has worked diligently to develop a list of needy families in the area by contacting various agencies that offer assistance to those in need on an ongoing basis. These lists were then passed onto those wishing to offer holiday assistance in the form of food items that could be purchased in addition to items being donated by the Church Alive such as Turkeys, etc.
“We chose a family with small children and was able to also obtain clothing sizes and ages of the children,” said Cotton Rohrscheib, Pleth Networks partner. “We then went and purchased some clothing and toy items for the small children. We chose to do this in lieu of making donations to various national charities because we felt that we could have the most impact right here in our own community.”
The food and gift items are scheduled to be delivered on Wednesday, December 20th, by representatives from Pleth Networks, LLC and the Church Alive to the selected family.
Pleth Networks is a full service managed hosting firm with offices in Batesville, Arkansas and Conway, Arkansas and a state of the art datacenter located in Dallas, Texas. For additional information regarding Pleth Networks, LLC please visit their website, www.pleth.com, or call: 1-888-276-0848.
The Emperor Get’s a New Job…
This is an old YouTube Favorite. It’s a Star War’s Spoof that’s actually pretty hilarious, probably not in the league w/ the Farting Preacher, but pretty darn funny…
Pitching His Tents…
Someone sent me this one a while back, this preacher tries to recover from a slip of the tongue and it never really does happen for him…
Pleth Partners with ScanAlert (HackerSafe)
We recently partnered with ScanAlert, the company that handles the HackerSafe certification. We are now able to offer PCI and HIPAA Compliancy through this partnership for our hosting clients. ScanAlert has created a portal for us here: http://www.scanalert.com/content/webhost/?hostId=5490. (see official press release below)
Conway, Arkansas – August 04, 2006 PLETH, LLC, an Arkansas-Based Provider of High-End e-commerce solutions for some of today’s top online businesses, announced it had signed a channel distribution agreement with ScanAlert of Napa, CA, to resell HACKER SAFE® certification and sponsor ScanAlert’s PCI Compliance services.
Effectively immediately, PLETH’s customers can subscribe to HACKER SAFE, a daily online vulnerability scanning service for Web sites, at reduced rates by contacting their PLETH Account Representative directly. They can join tens of thousands of retailers around the world using HACKER SAFE to alleviate consumers’ fears about the security of online shopping. PLETH customers also can obtain ScanAlert’s PCI Compliance certification services in time to meet the mandatory June 30, 2005 deadline for demonstrating compliance as imposed by Visa and Mastercard.
“In the last 6 months alone, the US Government alone has had 4 hacker attacks that I know of where literally thousands of military families and government workers’ sensitive data was compromised and in one instance posted to the internet. This could have easily been prevented by a service such as HACKER SAFE ,” said PLETH, LLC Partner Cotton Rohrscheib. “By offering ScanAlert’s certification and PCI Compliance services to our customers, we’re helping them demonstrate essential security certifications on time and at minimal cost and disruption to their business.”
“PLETH has a solid position in the e-commerce industry, and HACKER SAFE is the only firm of it’s kind that we considered to bring in as a strategic partner. In fact, HACKER SAFE has also been chosen by the US Government to assist in monitoring the FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, and the Marine Corps. In addition, SCANALERT’s HACKER SAFE branding can also be found on over 55% of today’s top 400 websites,” added Greg Smart, Partner & Co-Founder of PLETH.
“Not only do we provide our clients and their customers with peace of mind, we have also learned that websites featuring the HACKER SAFE logo and certification have noticed a 14% increase in revenue across the board as well as meeting a variety of mandated and recommended government and industry data security standards,” added Smart.
About PLETH, LLC
PLETH, LLC provides comprehensive e-commerce, real estate, auto-industry and small business web development and hosting services as well as providing IT Consulting. PLETH, LLC is currently headquartered in Batesville, Arkansas but has a development studio opening in Conway, Arkansas in the very near future. For more information, visit www.pleth.com , or call toll-free: 1-888-276-0848.
About ScanAlert, Inc.
Headquartered in Napa, CA, ScanAlert is the world’s largest web site security certification company, protecting over 60,000 web sites in 30 countries through the HACKER SAFE certification program. The certification mark indicates that these sites protect the personal data of millions of shoppers every day by meeting the highest federal and industry web site security standards. ScanAlert’s easy-to-use and affordable PCI compliance service is available direct and through channel partners, including acquiring banks, web hosts, and payment gateways. For more information, please visit www.scanalert.com
Nextel Dance Party Commercial
Probably next to the Cavemen Commercials from Geico in my all-time favorite list of television commercials would have to be the Nextel Dance Party Commercial. This is soooooo my business partners and I on any given day. The two guys up dancing would be Greg and I and the dude walking in all serious and stressed out would have to be Kegal. I can see this happening too…
And not for sure if many folks have seen these but they are some pretty good spoofs of the original that I stumbled across on YouTube, got to love YouTube…
Pleth Launches EzCYA Storage Solution…
EZCYA.com, a Division of PLETH Networks, LLC has launched their website and service. At this time the EZCYA.com website offers a simple description of EZCYA’s services and outlines their current pricing structure.
“In the very near future we plan to add total automation to our offsite data warehousing business,” said Cotton Rohrscheib, Partner of PLETH Networks, LLC. “We plan to allow visitors to EZCYA.com the ability to purchase storage space online, and then access their products and services online instantly using the credentials they provide.”
It has been rumored that PLETH Networks, LLC will soon be announcing a strategic partnership with Modernbill, a totally automated accounting solution geared toward Web Hosting Providers. No specific date has been named as the target date for this announcement.
HostingCon 2006 – Las Vegas, NV
Las Vegas was Awesome! Don’t think for a minute that the PLETH guys didn’t work, because we did, we met with every vendor attending HostingCon and sat through a big majority of the panel discussions and seminars they had this year and learned a lot… Not only did we learn a lot but we also left feeling pretty good about our company and where we are at as a service provider…
Even though we worked hard the entire trip we still found time to take in the sites and sounds of Vegas. Thankfully Kegal had been out to Vegas several times, while wearing his other hat as a corporate pilot, and he knew all of the places to go and things to do because I would have been lost. I think that you could probably take the Tunica, MS casinos and set them inside the lobby at some of the bigger casinos in Vegas. Their size was surprising. I couldn’t get past the size long enough to really appreciate the architecture that was all around on the strip.
We stayed at the Mirage, where the conference was being held and it was unreal. You could literally get lost on your way to your room. Inside the casino there are numerous restaurants and buffets as well as shops all over the place. There is a Rolex, DKNY, Swim, etc. all inside the Mirage lobby. Every evening on an hourly schedule the Mirage has a special blast of their Volcano outside. We timed it just right and were able to check this out one night before heading out for Dinner.
Also, just down the strip at Treasure Island, they have an hourly showing of the TI Sirens, which is a realistic battle between two pirate ships. You might have seen this in the movie Miss Congeniality with Sandra Bullock. We made it down to see the show but due to all of the pyro involved they were forced to cancel because of high winds that had blown in. I was a little dissapointed but seeing the Fountains in front of the Bellagio go off while they played “Fly me to the Moon” made the whole trip worthwhile… (These are the same fountains that are shown at the end of the Movie ‘Oceans Eleven’) Since my wife and I are both Sinatra fans I really want to take her back there sometime soon to see this.
We really didn’t make it to any of the big shows there in town, not because we didn’t try… Alot of the ones we wanted to see were already booked, off the night we had time to go, or we were just too pooped to move. The Mirage, where we stayed, had Jerry Seinfeld, Wayne Brady, and Jay Leno signs up the whole time we were there. It is definitely a show town, and they are all big time shows.
The food was also pretty good, I don’t think that we at anything we didn’t like the whole time we were there. Even the omelet’s and biscuits & gravy from the buffett downstairs was good. Probably the best food was the last night we were there when we went to a Brazilian restaurant where it is pretty much all you can eat and they bring you an assortment of cooked meat. It was great and you guessed it I am now on a diet!
HostingCon 2006 – Growing Trends in Today’s Business’s
Another very informative session at the conference for me was the Growing Trends session that was put on by a top representative from Hostway, Inc. They had spent a considerable amount of money this past year surveying their clients and identifying the top trends among todays businesses. I was surprised to learn that 43% of small businesses today still have servers and try to host their websites internally. This figure drops every year but is still surprising to me to learn this. I don’t think that this figure is completely accurate, but that’s my opinion. I find that a lot of the clients we see that have hosted their websites elsewhere have predominately all been in another data warehouse or hosting provider and very few try to manage their own servers, etc. I guess a few of the larger clietns we see today that have a full time IT department might still be hosting internally but I bet that they are likely looking to outsource to cut costs and reduce the workload of their already overworked IT departments.
Another trend that couldn’t be ignored was that Text messaging had become a vital part of a lot of todays operations. There was a lot of talk about how email was still considered by many to be the killer app, but there was no real email solution providers in attendance, other than Microsoft, that I could see. We felt pretty good in learning that messaging was earning it’s place in the service offerings arena because we had already been there for over 6 months with our PLETHWARE product.
Disaster Recovery and Offsite Data Backups also were popular buzzwords during the conference, and PLETH is already in talks with a software firm to create the ultimate CYA (Cover Your Assets) type of software application that will completely automate the tasks of backing up critical and sensitive data such as Quickbooks, Microsoft Money, and Microsoft Outlook contacts as well as a host of other software applications popular to todays small businesses and entrepreneurs. Offsite Data Backups for personal use also make a lot of sense to us. Take for example the fire-proofed safe that weighs 600 pounds that our parents use to house important documents and family photos inside their homes. Since most of the photos taken today are digital, it only makes sense to have digital safes to store these items in. A computers hard drive can fill up pretty quick w/ digital photos. Many of todays digital cameras will default to approximately 4mb or higher resolution per image, with the higher the resolution the higher the quality of the picture. This is a sharp contrast to the size of digital images even just a year or so ago, most of which were in the 2mb range with some defaulted to even smaller file sizes. In the event of a fire, or even a stolen computer system, an entire lifetime of digital photos would be lost forever, but with the offsite data backup solution in place, digital photos can be stored a mouseclick away…
Another trend in todays hosting industry that doesn’t really fit into the PLETH portfolio of business offerings was game hosting. Game hosting is extremely popular, probably moreso than any of us had really imagined. It wasn’t until I heard the new CEO from the PLANET, Doug Erwin mention that Insomnia365 was one of their popular offerings that it really sank in for me. In further talks with Julia Morgan, VP of Sales and Marketing for the PLANET, we learned that our network center was equipped with one of the most state of the art centers for game hosting in the world. Cortex, a gaming control panel, is already in place and available for our use should we decide to offer gaming as a service in the near future. We have been considering this pretty hard for the last few days and expect to have an announcement regarding gameserver offerings in the very near future…
HostingCon 2006 – SaaS (Software as a Service) on Demand
Don Best, from JamCracker.com was the guest speaker for this informative seminar highlighting one of the most popular buzzwords of the entire HostingCon 2006 Conference, SaaS. SaaS, an acronym for software as a service, is basically the wave of the future for hosting providers. For many years the hosting industry and development community have taken two seperate paths, but w/ the advent of websites like jamcracker.com, the roads have converged. Many hosting companies are now going to be offering specific software applications to their clients based on individual needs and not feeling the urge to hire out custom application work to development firms for various vertical applications. For instance, a development firm like PLETH, that has a particular application that is valuable to widget manufacturers, can really benefit by posting their software into the ecosystem of applications that are available and a hosting company w/out a design department or another development firm might have a client who manufactures widgets who could benefit from this product. In a sense PLETH has already been a part of the ecosystem, providing everything from Intranet solutions to Real Estate MLS IDX to clients across the United States, but I think that since the industry has decided to follow the PLETH business model, things will only be getting better.
In a seperate lunch conversation with Don Best, we shared our business model with him and how we service our clients and he immediately understood where we were coming from. That wasn’t a common thing at HostingCon in talking with service providers from other parts of the United States, in fact I would go as far as to say that most of the ones we talked to probably do not know their clients. The hosting industry as a whole is an inpersonal type of industry that strives to obtain quantity moreso than to provide quality of service. I have to also admit that prior to PLETH I was guilty of having this mindset, but I have seen that Hosting clients that are also development clients that trust 100% of their online presence to us are willing to outsource the technical aspects of managing servers, configuring dns, managing email configurations, etc. to a firm like PLETH than they are to try to hire a full time IT department. These clients also aren’t concerned in the least that they are paying a little bit more for web hosting since it also comes with support that is fanatical and around the clock. I can see many of todays larger firms eventually getting this and transferring the management of their web presence entirely to an outside firm as opposed to an internal staff of IT professionals who clock out each day at 6pm.
A couple of suggestions that we did hear that we will likely be incorporating over the next few months were:
- Offering Hosted Microsoft Exchange as a Service
- Providing a Disaster Recovery and Offsite Backup Solution
- Offering more Services geared toward Mobile Messaging / Applications
One of the other sessions we attended was for recognizing the trends that are growing in todays marketplace and one that I was a little surprised by but shouldn’t have been was mobile messaging. In fact, I was text messaging a friend as the speaker pulled up his powerpoint slide displaying a graph that showed many business’s today are using Mobile Messaging as well as bundled Mobile Applications in tandem with their regular management software. I was impressed that we had thought of this about 6 months earlier when we added SMS to our already robust PLETHWARE Groupware / Webmail solution.
