Dedicated Server Reviews

It was a few hours ago now, but this afternoon we held the draw for the 50" HDTV that has been brightening our networking lounge since Tuesday morning.

The winner was the lovely Dianne Stayton of Web Your Business, who seemed more than a little excited to have won the prize.

Congratulations to Dianne. We had a lot of fun at the networking lounge this year.

A while later, at the other end of the exhibit hall, most of the exhibitors who had prizes to give away took the stage at the presentation theater to announce the winners (the TV was a little bit big to bring over there).

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At the conclusion of things, Keith Duncan of Ping! Zine took the stage. After a little grandstanding and the obligatory good-natured potshot at the WHIR, Duncan proceeded with the much-anticipated showstopper, giving five lucky winners the chance to sit on a motorcycle for a couple of seconds.

Nobody wins! Goodnight everyone!

I suppose it was understood in advance that there was really a very slim possibility that somebody would actually win the motorcycle (about 2 percent, I believe - five people each drawing a key from a bowl of 250, one of which apparently unlocked the box containing the actual key to the bike). But it was still a big of a lame duck promotion, and it should have been apparent to everyone hyping it up that it would be a bit of a let-down as big end-of-show prize drawings go.

Sure, it would have been fun if, against all probability, somebody had actually won that motorcycle. As it turns out, there was a bit of "how do we know there's a real key?" and "let everyone take one more key." Nothing too serious, but it wasn't much fun. I'd rather have a Nintendo Wii.

Kudos to Keith for making a big to-do out of what basically amounted to nothing. I suppose it was a pretty good promotion at the end of the day.

By the way, you heard it here first: at HostingCon 2009, anyone who can throw a baseball from Navy Pier to the W hotel wins 100 spaceships, courtesy of the Web Host Industry Review (a challenge made all the more difficult by the fact that the event's going to be in Washington DC).

We ran a bit in the latest issue of the magazine about the new appointments in the marketing department at Verio, and the new marketing strategy ushered in across the company by that move.

The new faces are Ken Giffin, director of marketing, and Wendy Pearson, director of makerting and communications. While Giffin focuses on the Via Verio partner program, Pearson will focus more on the company-wide marketing effort.

Yesterday I met with Wendy Pearson to discuss some of the content of that revamped marketing effort, or the part of it that is complete at this relatively early stage in the redesign.

The new blood in the marketing department starts with Steve Renda, who was made VP of sales and marketing in January of this year. And he brought many of the company's new faces on board.

But the shift, says Pearson, comes from a mandate at the company to reinvigorate a business that has been not quite stagnant but certainly coasting for a period of a few years.

Verio is one of those hosting companies that deals with the small to medium-sized business market, which can be a pretty broad and vague term when you start to really think about the kind of business that describes. Part of the process at Verio in the last 60 days, says Pearson, has been to really narrow the focus within that realm, partly by trying to characterize those hypothetical customers.

At the very high end of a chart she drew that described the importance of IT to a given customer and their competence with IT, she identified a sophisticated, demanding customer that Verio has acknowledged that it just isn't the customer it is best suited to serve, or most interested in serving.

At the low end, they've identified the basic domain-name-and-one-page-website customer that also isn't really in the mould of what they're best suited to, or most interested in, serving.

The customers they're looking at targeting are the kinds of small businesses that are looking toward growing online, changing positions on that chart to move toward more importance of IT, and in some cases a higher rate of competence.

It's an interesting discussion, this idea of a host narrowing its focus and, if not getting rid of certain customers than at least admitting that "these aren't the customers we're interested in serving."

For Verio, the next step in this process - now that it has really polished the notion of what it means by "SMB" - is identifying the means by which it will target these better-defined SMB customers.

I'll keep this one brief. As many of you may already know we're giving away a really excellent tv this afternoon. It's pictured below. Just to give you an idea of its scale, I can say without exaggeration that the laptop sitting next to it is ten hundred feet tall.

Yeah. It's huge.

Anyway, we're doing the draw at 3pm. So you have about two hours to come over to the networking lounge (booth 627 - it's really big) and drop your business card in the fishbowl.

That really only takes about one minute. So you definitely have time.

Good luck!

Today’s HostingCon keynote was a fitting capstone to a very good conference.  Although a bit personal at times, it reinforced for me the high emotion that goes into transactions.  For all of the “be objective” talk – deals are emotional.  This is true both for buyers and sellers – though particularly true for sellers.  I don’t see how it is possible not to get emotionally invested in a deal.  From negotiating to money, everything about a deal involves emotional investment.  In my mind, not being emotionally invested in a deal is akin to dating and only looking for friendship – a bit of an oxymoron.

Like dating, however, there are ways to participate in the process without getting completely heartbroken or frustrated.  From my experience the following points may help:

 
·         Don’t put all your eggs in the buy/sell basket.  Keep operating your business and innovating.

·         Know what your hard stops, or non-negotiables are, and realize that the deal will end if these are reached.  Only designate these as non-negotiables if you are willing to walk away.

·         Communicate with your advisors constantly.  Feel free to vent to us about your frustration – but try not to make it personal unless it really, truly, is deserved.

·         Hire people who have participated in deals before.

·         Don’t give yourself artificial deadlines.  If you want to take a day off to go see your kid’s swim meet, do it.  The deal will be there when you get back.

·         If the deal falls through, take time to deconstruct what happened, what you can learn, and try to reuse any documents that were created in the process.

 

At work, I have a Mac Mini as my main workstation with one monitor. There’s another monitor to the right which is connected to my Linux box. I run a synergy server on the Mac, and I run a synergy client in Linux. However, I was getting pretty frustrated when I’d have to manually start the synergy client on the Linux box with another keyboard.

After a bit of Google searching, I found a solution that will enable synergy at the GDM login as well as after the login (when the window manager starts). Here’s the process:

Open /etc/gdm/Init/Default in your editor of choice and go to the bottom of the file. Just before exit 0, add the following:

/usr/bin/killall synergyc
sleep 1
/usr/bin/synergyc 111.222.333.444

Next, you can create the /etc/gdm/PostLogin/Default file as an empty file, or you can copy over the template file from /etc/gdm/PostLogin/Default.sample to /etc/gdm/PostLogin/Default. Either way, add the following to that file:

/usr/bin/killall synergyc
sleep 1

Finally, edit the /etc/gdm/Presession/Default file and add in the following before exit 0:

/usr/bin/killall synergyc
sleep 1
/usr/bin/synergyc 111.222.333.444

Once that’s done, you can log out and log back in to see the changes. You can also reboot your Linux desktop or switch to runlevel 3 and back to 5 (if your OS supports runlevel changes).