Premium Wordpress Hosting
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I have been thinking a lot lately about our hosting business at Pleth. We never have really fit into our industry very well because our philosophy is completely different than 90% of the hosting companies in business today. Most web hosting companies offer low-cost hosting plans with very few bells and whistles so they can keep their costs down and undercut their competitors prices. Services like DNS Management, Website & Database Backups, Storage, and bandwidth are often sold separately as add-on items because they have little or no profit margin in their hosting rates.
My partners and I have never wanted to take our hosting business in that direction, primarily because the market is saturated already with companies trying to do exactly that. Another reason we haven’t went that route is because it’s just not our style. We see ourselves as niche hosting providers with a unique perspective in that we are also developers. We cater to a large population of clients that could care less about web hosting, they just know they need it for their website to stay online, and they will pay extra to have someone else worry with all of the technical issues surrounding it.
Our business philosophy when it comes to our hosting business has always been to add value to our infrastructure as opposed to looking for ways to cut corners and reduce overhead. Since we started we have established our NOC (network operating center) in Dallas, as well as an alternate location in Houston. We have also put a lot of thought into things like Bandwidth, Storage, Virtualization, and Automation. We also have system monitoring in place as well as automated backups that will allow us to quickly restore any of our clients data that might have become lost or corrupt. In addition to our robust backup system, we also have the industry’s leading control panel software, Plesk, running on our shared servers for our managed hosting clients. Our server admin, Matt Critcher, has also devoted countless hours configuring our security solution, mod_security, to fight off security threats.
Before I go any further, I should probably say that we have done quite well with our hosting business. I would venture to say that we have several hundred hosted domains running at any given time and our business continues to grow leaps and bounds despite the fact that we haven’t ever spent one penny on advertising campaigns, etc. Our entire business has grown via word of mouth. I have often wondered what our business would be like now had we promoted ourselves, but I honestly don’t see how we could bring on many more projects than we are handling currently.
The past few days I started thinking back to this past weekend’s Wordcamp Fayetteville where I met a lot of people who work with wordpress on a daily basis, and that utilize a lot of premium solutions, such as premium themes and plugins. Something I noticed at the conference was that the vast majority of people there were developers and bloggers who have their website(s) hosted by a third party provider. This got me to thinking about premium wordpress hosting. Granted, not everyone would be interested in paying for hosting their blog when they can get it for free or next to it from a handful of providers in the industry, but here’s what I keep coming back to. The days of the Mommy Blogger sharing recipes and baby photos are behind us, I know several women right now who are actually bringing in a substantial income from their blogs, the same goes for men too. My thoughts are that if someone has a blog that is bringing them $10,000 monthly in revenue, then they probably have already given some thought as to what they would do if the server their website is hosted on crashed. I think this is the target market for this premium offering.
In my mind, premium wordpress hosting not only consists of web storage for your database and files, but it also includes disaster recovery / backup solutions built in w/out having to purchase add-ons. Premium Wordpress hosting also includes a secure environment made possible via our ever changing security protocols and configuration. One thing that I also feel is very important is redundancy and failover connectivity, for example, our network has 19+ backbone providers.
Last night I started mocking up a child theme for Genesis / Studiopress that would be a clean, simple, and very user friendly landing page of sorts to promote this premium offering. I decided to use the enterprise child theme as my starting point for the project and somehow in between catching up on client emails and answering the telephone, I have managed to get the vast majority of the design & layout coded. Below you will find a screenshot of the home page.
My initial plan was to just add a page to our existing corporate website, which runs a different CMS than Wordpress so after talking w/ a few people I had discussed this with earlier, I decided to create a small simple landing page site w/ details about this premium solution. As of right now, I have no idea as to when this site will come online, it’s going to be a very basic site w/ only a few pages outlining our service offering but it’s likely going to take me several weeks to put together all of the content together given my current workload so stay tuned to this blog for more info on this project…
If you are interested in Premium Wordpress Hosting, don’t hesitate to drop us a line…
Rackspace Conference Interview
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A few months ago I was interviewed at the Rackspace Reseller Conference in Atlanta, Georgia about a variety of topics related to Rackspace.
As some of you might already be aware I am a huge fan of Rackspace as a company and their CEO Graham Weston, who shares a very similar service philosophy as my partners and I. If I look a little rough in the video, please keep in mind that we were out until pretty late the night before this was shot and I am working of just a few hours of sleep. That’s my excuse…
My partners and I thoroughly enjoyed the conference and met a lot of really cool resellers from around the globe including Dubai, the Netherlands, Germany, and Mexico. I also serve on the Rackspace (NASDAQ: RAX)Customer Advisory Board. In the upcoming months I have also agreed to be part of a webinar focused on email archiving solutions, a product that Pleth has rolled out in a big way recently.
For more on the conference, please see the related links below…
Pleth to Sponsor Wordcamp #wcfay
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My partners and I are pleased to announce that Pleth will be sponsoring this years Wordcamp Fayetteville on May 29-30, 2010 in Fayetteville, Arkansas. This will be the first ever Wordcamp in Arkansas.
From the minute I heard about the conference I knew that I wanted our company to be involved with it in some way. The Wordpress open source CMS accounts for a large percentage of our clients projects these days and with the advances expected in version 3.0 I can only see it’s deployment within our organization growing.
A week ago I had one of the planners from Wordcamp Fayetteville, Christopher Spencer, on The Cotton Club Podcast to discuss the upcoming event and to give us a rundown as to what we can expect to see at this inaugural event. In case you missed it, here’s a link to the show…
Below is a press release about Wordcamp Fayetteville that was released earlier this year:
Also, if you are on the fence about attending Wordcamp Fayetteville, here’s some incentive, there are only 5 spots remaining, better jump on Eventbrite and register now!!!
Rackspace Conference Thoughts
I am presently sitting in the Delta Sky Lounge hacking this blog post because our flight from Atlanta to Little Rock is delayed. I am heading back from the Rackspace Reseller Conference to what looks like the Mt. Kilimanjaro of emails. If you have sent me something that I haven’t tended to in the past week and half, please know that I have it on my desktop and will get back to you as soon as I get home. To say it’s been a rough two weeks is an understatement.
The conference we attended was awesome. It gave us an awesome opportunity to network and meet in person some contacts that we have known and worked alongside for a few years now. Was pretty cool. I made about two pages of notes on this new MacBook Pro and didn’t get frustrated the first time and toss it across the room. That’s a sharp contrast to the less than 3 year old HP tablet PC I just had to trash. I will be going through these notes and throwing up some blog posts as soon as I get back to my office and climb out from underneath email hell, so stay tuned.
One really cool thing about the trip that happened today, I was sitting in the food court outside the conference having lunch and looked up to find one of my sports heroes as a child. Kevin Mchale of the Boston Celtics was just standing there getting a cup of coffee. Mchale was a sports star back when sports stars could be considered positive role models. Being the nerd that I am I had already twitpic’d the dude before he was finished putting sugar in his coffee.
Rackspace Reseller Conference
Just a heads up, my business partners and I are heading to Atlanta for the next three days to attend the Rackspace Reseller Conference. I will likely be in sessions for the biggest part of the next three days but will be checking email and voicemail whenever possible. If you are going to be in Atlanta for the conference be sure to send me a tweet, @cottonr and let me know. Maybe we can meetup between sessions.
Also, I will likely be blogging some things that I pickup during the conference, so stay tuned.
Checkout the O’Reilly Answers Social Network
I am typically not one to recommend a social network to my clients w/ the exception, of course, of the already established networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc. My whole philosophy regarding social networking at this stage of the game is that if you want to build a community, build upon what’s already out there as much as possible (Facebook API, Twitter API) and don’t try to re-invent the wheel.
However, I have always felt that strong, reputable Niche networks could exist externally if they were packaged correctly. A good example of such a network that is currently in Beta right now is O’Reilly Answers. O’Reilly has a good vision with this network, and of course they have some really positive things in their favor already such as Awesome Reputation, an Established Following, and a Trusted Name, what more could you ask for?
You can also look at the Network and tell that there were some clear objectives put into place while developing this solution. They obviously wanted it to be user friendly, functional, and interactive. There are basically three ways you can interact inside O’Reilly Answers:
Share Your Knowledge
You can actually enter in blog posts and tag them according to your subject matter and other users can comment you on your posts. This is one area that I think they could have done a little differently. We all manage our own blogs externally, why would we want to post our content on their website as well and have 2 comment systems running at the same time to follow up w/ readers? My thoughts on this part are that they could have put into place some sort of RSS option where you could aggregate your content from your blog and have your friends inside the network click out to read your posts. Maybe I am not seeing the big picture on this, but as a workaround I posted about 3/4 of 2 blog posts into their network along w/ a link at the bottom to get to the remainder of my post on my blog.
Ask A Question
Since O’Reilly has been catering to the Technically Minded community for so long, you can rest assured that some pretty sharp folks are going to be hanging around in this community. Well, let’s say you have a question about a project you are working on, you can post that question to the community, tag it, and before you know it some of the sharpest minds in the world are answering your question. This is an area where I really see this network having value for a lot of us…
Answer a Question
Let’s say someone asks a question and you know the answer, you can provide them w/ your insight w/ ease. I think that this networking model is going to speed up the “obstacle to solution process” once the network get’s off the ground.
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Also, just a few notes regarding the Network as it is right now. There are obviously some bugs, I had a couple of errors pop up on me when I was setting up my profile, this is to be expected w/ a new release like this. Give them time, I am sure that O’Reilly will iron out all of the kinks very soon. Here’s some basic information that was forwarded to me today from our Account Rep at O’Reilly…
We’re launching the beta of O’Reilly Answers, and I’m inviting you to be part of it. In brief, O’Reilly Answers is a community site for sharing knowledge, asking questions, and providing answers that brings together our customers, authors, editors, conference speakers, and Foo (Friends of O’Reilly).
Why Answers, and why now?
O’Reilly is at the center of an amazing exchange of knowledge sharing and idea generation. We’ve created the usual means of facilitating communication between customers, O’Reilly folks, and the outside experts we call "alpha geeks" who contribute to O’Reilly books, conferences, and websites. We can connect through reader reviews, errata submissions, book forums, blog comments, Get Satisfaction, our customer service department, and more. But too much of this conversation is siloed, and not enough is public (e.g., discussions on our internal mailing list for editors, or personal responses to customer questions). O’Reilly Answers will be the place where much of that communication happens from this point forward.Why participate?
The lofty reason: Like O’Reilly, you want to "change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators." That’s our mission, and we’ve been fortunate enough to build a community of passionate, committed people who love to learn and share their knowledge as they work towards a better world for us all.The "nice, but what’s in it for me" reasons: reputation, recognition, and rewards.
Get Recognized: "Find interesting people" is a core activity at O’Reilly, and an important component of our success. We see Answers as an important way to discover and connect with our next authors, online instructors, videographers, and speakers.
Build Your Reputation: You’ve learned a lot, why not get credit for all that knowledge? As your submissions to Answers are voted up, your personal reputation on the site increases. At launch, your reputation will be based solely on your participation in O’Reilly Answers. Soon, we’re expanding across oreilly.com, so the book errata and book reviews you’ve submitted, books you’ve registered, and conferences you’ve attended, will add reputation points. You’ll also earn badges to mark accomplishments and milestones.
Earn Rewards: Glory is great, but discounts and deals are nice, too. We want to reward your contributions to the O’Reilly community. Shortly we’ll have a point-based system in place that you can redeem for books, training, courses, and conferences. Details soon, but in the meantime, any actions you take now will count towards your total points.
This is just v.1: The best part of any project on the web is watching it take on a life of its own. With that in mind, we’re looking forward to *your* suggestions about where O’Reilly Answers should go, what features should be added, and what benefits and rewards we can offer all of you.
I’d like to acknowledge the projects that have proceeded Answers and inspired us, such as SitePoint Forums (we distribute their books), StackOverflow, Yahoo! Answers, Knol, and many others. They’re great resources, and we think the O’Reilly community can create a useful site that’s, well, a different kind of animal.
One last thing: O’Reilly Answers is in beta and you may encounter bugs. We’re still working on many improvements to the site, such as feeds for each tag, but would love to hear your suggestions for features and improvements. Please send any suggestions/questions/bug reports to answers@oreilly.com.
Until next time–
Marsee Henon
Also, if you should signup, be sure to add me as a friend, http://people.oreilly.com/cotton
Out of the Office: Pleth Corporate Retreat 2009
This weekend is our Pleth corporate retreat. Each year my business partners like to take some time away to focus on our business model. We have been successful at doing this too in some pretty cool venues, Las Vegas and Chicago just to name a few, but this year we are taking a little more laid back approach, we will be on Greers Ferry Lake this weekend on a pontoon boat, bouncing ideas off of one another that we have compiled throughout the year.
We have found that this process has helped us to refine our business tremendously. We will of course be examining our current products and service offerings, thinking of ways to improve them, and also doing the whole creative process for new directions.
All of this to say that I am signing off for the weekend and don’t expect to see me back in the office until next week! I do have a blog post on Usability that is scheduled to publish on Saturday but outside of that you probably won’t see much out of me except the occasional twitter or facebook post from me all weekend long, and trust me, I am ready for some R&R…
Oh, and by the way, once we are finished brainstorming this weekend I suspect we will have some new and exciting announcements so be sure to stay tuned to our corporate website (www.pleth.com) and our personal blogs, (www.gregorysmart.com) and (www.kegalsmart.com).
Also, if you are one of our existing clients and have ideas as to how we can improve on our existing products and services, please feel free to comment below, we would love to hear your feedback…
UNIX System Monitoring
Matt Critcher recently posted a review of Monit on his blog. We have been trying it out as a monitoring solution on our servers at Pleth. I get the impression from Matt’s post that he likes the software pretty well, I know he’s not a big fan of any kind of bloated software.
I checked Monit’s website this morning and was very impressed to see that they also have a free iPhone application that will allow you to track your systems from your phone. How cool is that? The software itself is also pretty cool. Monit can start a process, restart a process if it does not respond and stop a process if it uses too much resources.
Being a developer, one thing that I can see might be useful is that Monit also allows you to monitor files, directories and filesystems for changes, such as timestamp changes, checksum changes or size changes. There are several other solutions out there that will all you to track remote hosts also but they don’t have all of the functionality that monit has I don’t think. With Monit you can monitor remote hosts; and ping a remote host and can check TCP/IP port connections and server protocols.
I can remember a few years back I installed a similar solution to this on one our first servers for the purpose of tracking uptime and posting it on our website, it was a nice solution but it had so many security revisions with it that we eventually decided the risk wasn’t worth it in the long run. I can’t remember the name of the software we were using but I am sure it’s gone away by now… Here’s what Matt had to say about Monit on his blog:
When you maintain several servers each running several virtual machines and have anything else at all to do, it is impossible to keep your eyes on them 100% of the time. There are a handful of software packages out there that can do this for you, but most are either too bulky, too complicated, or lack the features that you want.
Scott Pinkston referred me to one the other day called Monit, which is the first one of these programs that I actually liked. Most of the others just have too much. This one is short, and to the point. Monit installs very quickly, and runs in the background as a daemon.
One very simple config file holds the configuration data for the services you want to monitor, and if you so choose, you can have a secure webpage display stats on your services. It can also be configured to email you (or call the beeper, etc…) if certain events occur, and best of all, is super lightweight. It won’t tell you if your version of apache needs updated and it won’t impress you with tons of buttons, whistles, and flash animations. But it will let you know if some process is running away, and it will kill it for you (and restart it if you have it configured)
So far, we have NO complaints. It’s licensed under the GPL, and they also sell a version (which we haven’t tried) that can monitor multiple servers from one central login for around $135.
Here’s a screenshot of Monit that I found on their website, looks pretty straightforward to me…
Focusing on MODx Hosting Solutions
I recently did a blog post for our corporate website about our MODx hosting solutions. As I have said in the past, we aren’t your typical hosting company, we very easily could be though given our advanced infrastructure, but for us that’s just not where our heart is. We tend to take more of a developmental approach to hosting, this is probably because we are developers first and foremost. The fact that we don’t spend as much time promoting our hosting solutions as we do our development services could probably be viewed as an injustice to those that are familiar with our infrastructure.
When it comes to our hosting solutions, the fact is that we probably have one of the most secure infrastructures on the market, with possibly the most value added services you will find anywhere else. We also rank very high when it comes to bandwidth and our storage rates are quite comparable to those offered on a national level. We can even provide developers and small agencies that are not interested in managing their own hosting infrastructure a viable and affordable alternative with our VPS (virtual private server) solutions.
Even though we don’t typically pursue hosting clients, we will occasionally notice a segment of the landscape that we would really like to reach, one of those segments is the MODx developer community. Here’s an excerpt from the post I did on MODx hosting solutions that we provide. (you can read the entire post here…) Given the fact that we know the software relatively well, possibly better than a lot of the larger, bargain basement providers out there, we feel as if we can do a better job hosting it for our clients.
One service that we have gotten very good at over time is hosting particular software, primarily Wordpress and MODx. My partner Greg and I almost work exclusively with these two products and we know the inner workings of these applications and can pretty much troubleshoot any problems that may arise with little cause for concern. Also, Matt Critcher has devoted a lot of time toward securing these applications and making sure that they run at optimal performance. In the case of wordpress, there are a lot of hosting providers out there that can provide one click wordpress installations through their control panels (us included), but with MODx, there aren’t a lot of hosting providers out there that have worked with MODx in comparison to some other CMS solutions that are out there such as Joomla or Drupal. This sort of is a good thing for us, it gives us an advantage over a vast majority of the hosting companies out there because we already have a good working knowledge of the software, and can provide straight to the point support on any issues our clients should have running the software. In fact, this site runs on MODx.
With this in mind, my partners and I are going to focus a lot of our attention toward the niche MODx managed hosting crowd that just wants to deploy their website from a developmental and management perspective and not have to be bothered with the actual hosting itself. We can provide one of the best hosting environments on the planet for MODx CMS as well as some of the most knowledgeable technical support for the software you will find. Again, we know this because we also deploy MODx solutions for our clients and manage them on a daily basis.
If you are interested in discussing your MODx hosting needs, please don’t hesitate to contact us and we will be glad to provide you with a free quote for managed or dedicated hosting.
If you have a need for MODx hosting, whether it’s 1 or 300 installations, please don’t hesitate to contact us if you think we can be of any assistance. We enjoy speaking with other developers who utilize this platform.
System Administrator Appreciation Day
At Pleth, we will be celebrating System Administrator Appreciation Day! What an awesome idea. I know that this holiday is probably not on those calendars you get for Christmas from your family each year, but it’s a pretty cool thing to add to it. Friday, July 31, is system administrator day across the country, it’s celebrated on the last Thursday in July each year. If you have a system administrator be sure to let them know how much you appreciate what they do behind the scenes. And if you have never had a conversation with your system administrator when you weren’t frantic about something, you should take it even a step further and take them to lunch or something because he / she probably thinks you are a turd…
I feel blessed because I have worked with a lot of system administrators over the years and can honestly say that Matt Critcher is quite possibly one of the best ones out there, and I have the pleasure of working alongside him putting out fires. Of course it’s usually him spraying the water and me pointing at the fire with a dazed look in my eye, and also sometimes denying any responsibility for the fire whatsoever!
So What is a System Administrator??
A sysadmin unpacked the server for this website from its box, installed an operating system, patched it for security, made sure the power and air conditioning was working in the server room, monitored it for stability, set up the software, and kept backups in case anything went wrong. All to serve this webpage.
A sysadmin installed the routers, laid the cables, configured the networks, set up the firewalls, and watched and guided the traffic for each hop of the network that runs over copper, fiber optic glass, and even the air itself to bring the Internet to your computer. All to make sure the webpage found its way from the server to your computer.
A sysadmin makes sure your network connection is safe, secure, open, and working. A sysadmin makes sure your computer is working in a healthy way on a healthy network. A sysadmin takes backups to guard against disaster both human and otherwise, holds the gates against security threats and crackers, and keeps the printers going no matter how many copies of the tax code someone from Accounting prints out.
A sysadmin worries about spam, viruses, spyware, but also power outages, fires and floods. When the email server goes down at 2 AM on a Sunday, your sysadmin is paged, wakes up, and goes to work. A sysadmin is a professional, who plans, worries, hacks, fixes, pushes, advocates, protects and creates good computer networks, to get you your data, to help you do work — to bring the potential of computing ever closer to reality.
So if you can read this, thank your sysadmin — and know he or she is only one of dozens or possibly hundreds whose work brings you the email from your aunt on the West Coast, the instant message from your son at college, the free phone call from the friend in Australia, and this webpage.
