Sysdom Blog

Much of our recent client work has been revolving around blogs, or more specificly WordPress.

It wasn’t exactly planned. We helped a blogger that had been hacked and got no joy from his current hosting provider – they wouldn’t even update their servers to remove the hole that the hackers used even after we pointed out the exact cause of it – and moved his site to alternative hosting arrangements. He was ecstatic that all his posts from the last 4 years weren’t lost and recommended us to a few of his friends… who told a few of their friends… who told… you get the idea.

We do provide hosting, but we aren’t one of your normal cheap and cheerful hosting providers, really we are more of a support company. Most people don’t really need a hosting package that can deal with more than 100 hits/second, need high security and don’t want to pay the cost for either, but people do want help to do things that they have no idea how to do. If you do feel out of your depth you are welcome to talk to us. We don’t bite (unless you ask us to ).

Even exactly one month after launch, the website isn’t 100% finished and we are still only in private-beta with some of our services.

We aren’t far away from completion, but we have been putting our clients first in the work stakes which has put our own projects slightly behind – some people (generally big businessmen) have said this is a bad way to run a business; that we will fail and that we should be putting our own needs first and our clients second. I think it should be completely the opposite.

I am my own worst client. I put my customers before my own needs often, mostly because well… they *pay* me.

We put our clients first for one main reason; happy clients come back and spread the word about our services. We pay little in the way of advertising to acquire new clients and we’d like it to stay this way (why should we be giving money to google? They have enough already). We don’t want to be paying £10-20 in advertising to get a signup to the service. The service should sell itself, both by ‘value for money’ and by happy customers spreading the word.

We are never going to be the cheapest option for hosting, web design or support, but we’d like to think that everyone of our customers is happy to be with us and happy with the level of service they receive.

I’m often asked by eager new clients how to make money online. They generally want a quick return and no long term commitments and no real risk – the problem with this is this is that the web generally doesn’t work this way.

I was recently asked by another longer term client how to do this very thing again, but this time was different; he didn’t mind spending a little money to learn what works and what doesn’t. He had a vague idea about making money using ‘domain flipping‘, but nothing concrete, but significantly he didn’t mind losing the little money he threw at the project while he learned and I’ll share some of this with you.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, domain flipping is the process of buying an existing domain on the ‘used domain’ market and making some changes to make it more valuable and then selling it on at a profit – it is hard to do well and there are a lot of sharks out there making money out of gullible suckers. Continue reading →

We use a number of providers for our infrastructure, some are fairly small companies that we have had long term relationships with like Xtrahost and some are pretty huge. One that falls into the second category is Rackspace who we use both in the UK and the US for our cloud servers.

I just happened to see this article with pictures of Rackspace’s UK Datacentre and thought it would be cool to share with everyone. Enjoy!

Many people try to compare things they perceive at first glance as equal. This is perfectly normal human behaviour. The problems come when the two things being compared aren’t really equal.

Take support services as an example. You could go out and hire a straight out of high school PFY and have him work for perhaps £150-200/week or you could employ Sysdom at perhaps £75/hr – big difference there. What you aren’t really seeing is that as a proper employee your cheap labour has a lot more rights – holiday pay, maternity/paternity, decent working conditions etc – all of which need to be paid for in some way by you the employer. Hiring outside contractors who work remotely however avoids most of these.

You are also paying for our expertise – for example, myself, I have been programming for over 20 years and doing system administration for the last 10 – a large contrast from hiring someone to work straight out of school. This may show in the quality of their work or the time to do it, it might take your newbie tech 3 days to set up a server, but perhaps only 2 hours for one of our seasoned professionals to do so. In this case it would be similar outlay but only a fraction of the time as we generally know the pitfalls to avoid – and this assumes that you aren’t pressed for time, if your servers are down, they may well be impacting business and waiting around will be costing you money.

This doesn’t mean that you as a businessman should use our services for everything, although we’d like you to , but play to your strengths, use cheaper in-house staff when you are within their comfort zone, hire out when you are out of it.

Launch was pencilled in for the 14th. It was a tad on the optimistic side, but it was a nice idea… bringing the business launch into step with my birthday – with an excuse to throw a party for both

New launch date will be the Monday 18th July. I don’t like having to put dates back like this, but I also don’t want to ship a half finished product, but given the two options, more polish even if delayed by a fraction is better than to launch and have unhappy customers.

I haven’t taken this lightly and I thank my beta testers for being so thorough with their testing.

Before I go any further perhaps a quick definition or two.

The cloud in this context is any service that is on the internet somewhere, but the specifics are mostly hidden and abstracted away.

A PBX (or PABX in some countries) is a business phone system that allows you to call internally as well as via an outside line. Often they have other features such as call queues, conference rooms and voice-mail built in.

So why would you want a PBX, let alone a PBX in the cloud?

For little more than the cost of the phones themselves, you can have a PBX, so they aren’t particularly expensive – they are cheap.

It can allow you to keep track of what calls happened when and even record all calls if this is important to your business. This accountability is essential in many business.

It allows you to transfer calls around internally. While many cordless phones also have this functionality, they generally can’t be expanded above 4-6 handsets. a PBX can be expanded to 1000s.

It allows you to forward calls to where you are at that time. If you are out of the office, then forward calls to your mobile. Yes there is a charge for this, but better to be contactable than have annoyed customers. You can even choose to forward calls only from a certain callerid. This selective forwarding can be a killer application to some businesses.

If you have a PBX that supports VoIP (making calls via the internet) then you can save money over making calls via your normal phone provider.  In the UK (assuming only a basic calling plan) BT charge 2.5p/minute. Localphone.com as an alternative currently cost 0.7p/min – big difference if you make a lot of calls.

Also, if you have it connected up to the net, you can get extra phone numbers for a lot less than a new line from BT – and they can be from a different area code or even a different country. BT charge £130 for installing a line at present and line rental is an extra £13.60/month on top of that. Extra phone numbers delivered over the internet can be less than £3/month and connection is often included for free.

Okay, so these are compelling reasons to get a PBX, but why host it online rather than at the business premises? Two main reasons. First, connectivity online is generally better than connectivity via a broadband connection. Most hosting providers have multiple redundant connection to the rest of the internet and they tend to be proactive about dealing with issues. If you host it at the end of a broadband connection, you have a single point of failure and it is possible that a fault could take an engineer 2-3 days to fix. This is a long time to be without phones in business and unless your provider allows you to forward the calls, you are going to gain some unhappy customers when they fail to be able to contact you. Online, a new server can be brought up in minutes should the worst happen.

The second reason is less tangible, but no less important. If you take advantage of services such as call forwarding or have call queues in your business, then any competing use of the same internet connection could adversely affect call quality. If the PBX is hosted online, then only the calls you have actually answered will be coming down your broadband connection, this saves bandwidth and can improve call quality all around and should the worst happen and your broadband connection fails, then the calls can be answered elsewhere by either unplugging your phone and moving it to another location, using a soft-phone on a computer elsewhere, or simply forwarding calls to your mobile.

This is already what we do internally here at Sysdom.com and we can provide the same solutions for you too.