Dedicated Server Reviews

The maxim "You never get a second chance to make a first impression" (attributed to W. Triesthof), has been applied to the art of selling, to good posture, to well being, and, of course, to web design. Still, on the web, this adage is flat wrong. When trying to impress millions of individuals, two eyeballs at a time, there are millions of chances to make a first impression.

Which is why, several month into this blog, I am fixing my home page. It may be too late for the readers of this blog, but I probably still have a chance with the rest of humanity.

My original design had two pages - Home page, and About page. The Home page listed links to the main sections of the site. The About page added a little technical, personal and contact information, and a pitch for contributions.

This design has two problems. First, the home page is scrawny, making the page look empty and uninviting. Second, the contributions pitch, on the About page, is likely to be much less viewed, compared to the Home page. Considering the relative potential importance of contributions to the future development of the site, the pitch should be more visible.

So I tried a second design, combining the two original pages. This time, I only needed one column in the table, the page size is more appealing (IMHO), and there is more room for the contribution pitch (so I can explain the purpose, instead of just asking). I also moved that part higher up in the page. I like this design much better.

However, I ran into yet another web site, and adapted it for my needs as well. This one uses two columns in a table to direct the viewer to accomplish various desired action. It's a bit sparse, but gets all the information across in an organized fashion. This last design looked even better!

So, I decided to try and duplicate the last design with the markup tools of PmWiki, with a little bit of color thrown in as well.  And here it is. When I figure out how to set the font family and font size, I will improve the page even more.

Finally, I copied the page into an existing group, with its headers and footers, here - which resulted in a repetitive visual, since the footer and side bar already include the 'Donate' button.

Sadly, I have to say that the PmWiki page looks a lot better than any of my 'adopt, extend and modify' ones. It may be an indication that professional tools are superior to hand coding, or a testament to my web design prowess. Either way, I will probably stick with it in one way or another. The only problem is that PmWiki's PHP processing takes a few miliseconds more, making the site a bit more sluggish.

You are invited to check out the different designs, opine on their relative merits or lack thereof, or offer better ones. Bear in mind, though, that the focus should be on the design, not necessarily the text.

Here are the links again:

Home and About

Combined

Table view 

Table by PmWiki

PmWiki Table with header and footer 

One thing that has come out of this conference is that Google is being treated with a lot of credibility as a threat to Web hosts. Now that we all agree (interesting in and of itself, I suppose) that Web hosts are clearly in the business of offering hosted applications, and Google has been extremely consistent in executing on its strategy of delivering hosted software.

And it is, of course, important to note that Google is not in the business of partnering with ISPs or hosting providers. Google is going it alone, and is succeeding at securing the market - hosted email, definitely, and to a fairly menacing extent other small business apps.

One of the remarkable things about that, and one of the things noted Serguei Beloussov, CEO of Parallels, in his Tuesday keynote presentation, is that from the Web host's perspective, that makes Google the new "evil empire."

The company doesn't want to partner with distributors. It wants to control everything from user activity to user data to payment. And it doesn't appear to have any intention of leaving any business out there for anyone else (meaning Web hosting providers).

Once considered the "evil empire," Microsoft is now the nice guy in the SaaS market. Microsoft has always been friendly to the partner model, from OEMs to VARs and now more attentively to hosting partners. Now, the company is almost by default carrying the banner for smaller service providers into the battle for the business of small business.

It's a battle between giants - big as they come - and if you're a smaller hosting provider, you're either in the ring with Microsoft, or you're on the sidelines, probably cheering for Microsoft.

That metaphor maybe got a little confused. Basically, you don't have to be a Microsoft partner to want "partner-hosted solutions" to beat "one company operates the whole Internet" as far as SaaS models go.

From Serguei's perspective, the answer to the challenge is something akin to "use Parallels products," generally. More specifically he says you should be paranoid about efficiency, and about providing an automated and self-managed solution. And that mans an automated and virtualized architecture.

And make sure you own your customers. Hosts are in the enviable position right now of having the customer relationships that every builder of business applications covets. When adding those applications to your own offering, hang on to those customer relationships. Only resell solutions in a white-label model, he says, where you continue to own the customer.

Ultimately, Microsoft and Google are going to offer everything that hosting providers used to offer - domains, a Web presence, email, and everything else. For more complex business solutions, there's still room for hosting providers to make those customer relationships evolve.

Approximately an hour and a half after being driven to my inspired "just let them pitch it" conclusion, which I described in a blog entry yesterday, I saw a presentation that went against my feeling that presenters in general are unwilling to make (or are discouraged, directly or indirectly, from making) a sales pitch, and confirmed my feeling that an outright sales pitch would serve the presentation better.

At yesterday's 4:45 session "Server 2008 and IIS7 - New Hosting Opportunities with Microsoft Hosting," Microsoft Deutschland's Web platform architect evangelist Bernhard Frank took the opportunity to deliver a pretty unfettered sales pitch.

Granted, he had the built-in advantage of being scheduled to deliver a session on the features of a piece of software that is generally of interest to Web hosting providers, which sort of fundamentally made the "infomercial" feel more like information and less like a commercial. But an even more fundamental fact of the situation was the simple fact that it was a good presentation.

That is, it was interesting and engaging throughout. And I believe that a lot of that had to do with Mr. Frank apparently not feeling like he was under any pressure to carefully soften the message with a lot of possibly-irrelevant contextualizing. What we got instead was an unapologetically straightforward look at the features and functions of Microsoft's new products. No harm done.

There was a bit of PowerPoint, which I suppose is pretty inescapable as far as seminars go, but he cut that off at one point to project his laptop on to the big screen as he logged into a remote server and updated a website to include a FastCGI module by changing config files, and apply an application to a live site.

And the presentation concluded with a video showing how Mambo could be set up on a remote Windows server in about seven minutes, using the advanced Windows hosting package, in a process that did away with a lot of time-consuming troubleshooting and many pages of documentation-reading.

Maybe this is no real revelation, but I couldn't help but feel impressed with the degree to which we'd actually been provided practical information. Then again, maybe that's an indictment of typical boring tradeshow fare. I think I'll hold off on making a sweeping generalization either way this time.

And yes, I realize that the intricate workings of the newest Microsoft applications is not interesting information to everybody. But as I mentioned in the other post, the name ought to be enough to steer the profoundly uninterested in the direction of a different session.