How to (un)successfully advertise on the Internet, Part 1

Business Development, SEO, Web Development

This is Part 1 of  a series by Oban Lambie.  Part II is here.

I’ve done some hard time on the ‘Net.  For years, stretching into decades, I’ve coded sites, run servers, and held the hands of customers both big and small to get my little business to where it is now; a hosting and programming shop in Taos, New Mexico.  I love the work, my staff is great, our customers are loyal and happy, and though we’re not getting rich, it pays the bills.

Now I’m going to try to do three things, none of which I’ve successfully done before:

  1. Launch a new product on the ‘Net.
  2. Find some people that have never heard of me, or my business, and persuade them to buy the product online.
  3. Show you exactly how I do it.

The Promise

I’ll expose everything, pants on the ground style, while I do it  – from the under-the-hood technology, to the how-we-target-Keywords techniques, to the Search Engine Optimization tricks that we’ll employ and finally through a wee bit of email marketing.  I’ll also show you what tools I use to track my successes and failures and detail exactly how much money we make, or lose, in the process.

But first…
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Can’t login to Squirrelmail!

Systems Administration, Web Hosting, , ,

Squirrelmail, aka “The old webmail,” has gone wonkey on us as we migrate it to more robust servers and upgrade it.  i.e.  Its online but its broke.  So don’t use it.

For the four of you who actually use “The old webmail” to read your email, I apologize.  In the meantime you can use the real webmail, here.

We’ll update this blog, and our twitter account, when its fully functioning again.

Better uptime than Google, Rackspace, and Amazon?

Systems Administration, Web Hosting
Smooth Flying
Better than Air Kazakstan!

Yep.

In 2009 Brownrice provided our hosting, co-location, and virtual server customers with 100% network up-time for the entire year – soundly besting the volume-based hosting companies.

OK, full disclosure: Our network was down for a total of 3 minutes and 11 seconds for the calendar year.  I think that was when Dave rebooted one of our main switches.

How did we fair against the big boys?

Google had multiple network outages.  Amazon’s cloud went down.  Rackspace had multiple extended network outages which brought down many of the biggest sites on the internet.  Many hosting providers who co-locate in the Rackspace data centers suffered from their outages as well. And Dreamhost – who advertises a goofy 100% up-time guarantee (read the fine print, it’s funny) – seemed to have nearly daily network failures.

Why is our up-time so good?  Because our network is quadruple-redundant, impervious to fiber cuts, and because we are small.

Why is being a small provider good?  Because we run less than 100 servers – instead of hundres of thousands – most of which are in our own, on-site mini data center, where the size of our operation allows us isolate and fix problems extremely quickly.

I’ve always known that our staff is smarter, more experienced, and provide better – and friendlier – support than the volume-based hosting companies.  Now the raw data is proving that we are more reliable as well.