Ok, I’ve been promising this to you for some time now, and I’m finally able to announce it:

As an IX Web Hosting customer, you’re invited to our first “Online Success” webinar!

The webinar topic is “How to Develop X-Ray Vision in Your Market” and we’ve scheduled it for late January.

Which means I now get to reveal our “secret” presenter, David Bullock, author of the social media study and book titled “Barack 2.0″. David is a well-known expert in the Internet marketing space and I’m really excited to have him share his vast amount of online marketing knowledge with you.

David, together with Howie Jacobson (author of “Google AdWords For Dummies”), will be showing you exactly how they use Google and other tools to discover:

• Whether an online market is worth entering
• How much profit can you expect to make in a market
• What your customers want (and can’t find right now)
• The messages that will attract the right customers to your web site
• What to show visitors on your web site that will predispose them to buy from you

In short, you’ll discover a 45-minute protocol for quick, zero-cost market research that can potentially DOUBLE the effectiveness of your website.

We’re making this webinar available as part of your regular hosting package, so you won’t have to pay a dime to attend. (In fact, you won’t even have to worry about using your phone minutes – you’ll listen in right on your computer.)

Space is limited though, so register now to reserve your seat.

If you can’t make the event, register anyway and we’ll send you a video of the presentation later.

See you on January 20, I hope

Happy New Year!

IX Web Hosting

PS: Remember Howie’s recent video on how to get into Google in <a href="http://blog.IXWebHosting.com/2009/12/important-hosting-account-updates/#google”>my last blog post? Keep an eye out for a post with another video – this time from David Bullock – real soon.

Fathi Said here, with a couple of important updates about your hosting account here at IX Web Hosting.

But before I share them, I want to acknowledge something that hasn’t made me very happy.

When I look at the world of web hosting, I realize that IX Web Hosting – my company, the one I founded and the one I run – is just about average. No worse than the competition, but not much better either.

We have a giant data center in Columbus, Ohio that looks really impressive, we have a big support staff to answer your emails and phone calls, and we offer competitive pricing, but when I look at all that from my customers’ point of view, I have to say: “So what?”

I didn’t go into business to just create an ordinary service. And yet that’s where I find myself in the last month of 2009.

And that’s going to change. In fact, it’s already changing. In two big ways.

First, we’re changing the way you receive support when you have a question or problem with your site or hosting account.

The new system is called “Support Heroes” – and my commitment to you is that it’s not just a catchy name, but also a fundamental improvement that makes your life noticeably easier.

Second, we’re redefining our business model to move from “hosting provider” to “strategic partner” as you grow your web site.

When I sat down and thought about the contribution I want to make, it wasn’t enough to be a reliable place to stick your website. We decided to actually branch out from being just a “boring hosting company” and actually show you some of the killer techniques we use to get thousands of hits to our website each day!

You’ve created your web site with a goal in mind. Maybe to make money. Maybe to spread the word about an important idea. Maybe to connect people. Whatever your goal, I want to help you achieve it.

We’ve teamed up with some of the top online marketing experts to provide cutting edge strategies, tips and techniques to get more visitors to your site, and to get those visitors to take action once they get there.

So without further ado, here are the details about the two big improvements to your IX Web Hosting account:

Support Heroes

What if you had a personal contact at IX Web Hosting – an “insider” who knows your name, knows your business, and can pull strings to get you exactly what you need? We’re in the process of assigning a personal Support Hero to each IX Web Hosting customer. Your Support Hero will be an actual person who works in our Ohio office.

When you have a question or a problem, you can send them an email. You can phone them directly. Or you can IM them.

Support Heroes

Your Support Hero is responsible (and accountable) to get you what you want as quickly as possible, and not to leave you hanging. Since they’re your personal “account manager,” you won’t have to explain your problem again and again as you get transferred from one technician to another. And if you get disconnected, your Support Hero knows how to reach you, so you won’t have to dial the main number and be told your “wait time is approximately 26 minutes.”

Each Support Hero will handle your issue as if they were the owner of the company, because their bonus is based on how long you stay a customer, and how many of your friends you refer to us.

So the happier you are, the happier they are, and the happier I am. (I believe the business books call this a “win-win-win.”)

Now, sometimes our Support Heroes sleep, or take vacations, or are “busy helping other customers” (as the phone company voicemail messages say). What then?

Without boring you with the details, we’ve set up teams of Support Heroes who will pinch hit and report back to each other. And each Hero has their own team of technical specialists around the world, whom you may also get to know. But the ultimate responsibility for your satisfaction rests with your individual Hero.

Look for an email from your personal Support Hero within the next several weeks.

Online Marketing Advice from Top Experts

As you probably know, just having a domain name and a website doesn’t guarantee that anyone will find your site.

And if you use your site for business, it’s crucial that people find it when they’re looking for what you provide.

We’ve partnered with some of the top online marketing experts to provide you with exclusive videos, articles, and even live webinars – all completely free for IX Web Hosting customers.

You’ll discover:

• quick and simple tweaks you can make to your site so Google can find it and know what it’s about
• how to “cut to the front of the line” on the three big search engines
• how to get some of the most popular sites in the world to link directly to your site
• how to find out where the traffic you should be getting is going right now – and how to stick your site in front of all those people
• what to show visitors once they arrive at your site, so they stay, play, and pay

Here’s the first video for you to watch:

My friend Howie Jacobson explains some killer techniques. It’s only 7 minutes and 29 seconds long and reveals the first thing you need to know if you want to get your site ranked high on Google.

Also, look out for a survey I’m going to send you in the next few days. Please make sure to fill it out, this way we’ll know what kind of free “traffic getting” videos and webinars you want us to make for you. This is going to be fun, and I can’t wait to hear stories about you receiving boatloads of traffic.

I want to close this entry by stating publicly what an honor it is to have earned your business, and that we’re going to do much, much better in 2010. I’m truly jazzed by the opportunity and I can’t wait for you to share my excitement when you experience what we have planned.

Wishing you health, happiness and prosperity,

IX Web Hosting

This is going to be huge.

Since my last several blog posts, there have been many changes that have taken effect at IX Web Hosting. We’re rapidly building our support team of “Personal Heroes”, we’re participating more in external social media so we can keep in touch with you, and we’re building an internal community of customers so you can put your collective voice together and be heard about the things that matter.

But what I’d like to talk to you about today makes all of that turn just a shade pale in comparison.

One of the top-secret projects we’re developing right now is one we call Imperia (seriously, this is ultra-sensitive, so I have to watch what I say about it). Essentially, it’s an entirely new way of running and managing your website. There’s a lot of technical aspects to it, but suffice it to say it will have beautiful effects on how successful your site will be and how much it will do for you.

The best part is: It will be available to you for FREE. I’ll go into more detail in a second but first… I need your help. And it’s urgent.

We have only 24 hours left.

Imperia’s technology is built on cutting-edge open source software from a wee little company called Red Hat (just joking, they’re actually huge). They hold an annual contest to determine the year’s best innovators, and guess what? Imperia, your soon-to-be new hosting platform, just won the Red Hat Award for Outstanding Open Source Architecture! We now also qualify for the overall Innovation of the Year Award.

This directly affects you.

Winning this award would be of tremendous benefit to you. Should Imperia win, Red Hat will invest significant resources into the project to make it even better. We’re competing with the likes of Geico, Verizon, Whole Foods, etc – giants compared to us. Luckily, the big award is open to public voting – that’s YOU – for the next 24 hours. I hope you’re with me on this.

If you are willing to give me your vote (it only takes 10 seconds of your time), please go here:
http://www.keysurvey.com/survey/269267/2c6a/

Vote for: “Ecommerce Inc. + Vizuri — Outstanding Open Source Architecture” at the top and the bottom and hit “Submit.” That’s it. (Ecommerce is our parent company name. That’s why it doesn’t show IX Web Hosting on the page).

Here’s a screenshot that shows you what to select and how to vote. (Of course I know you’d have figured that out yourself. But I wanted to show you that we’ve made every possible effort and even prepared a screenshot!)

I would REALLY appreciate your vote! This is about you, after all!

IMPORTANT: VOTING ENDS THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, SO PLEASE HURRY!

By the way, to read more about how Imperia works technically, take a look at this:
http://www.redhat.com/promo/summit/2009/awards/ecommerce_vizuri.html.

What Imperia Means for YOU

Ok, now that I have your vote, let me show you exactly what Imperia will will do for you. If you didn’t vote yet, go do it right now!

Imperia will bring you:

What this means for you? Well, instead of being assigned to a single server and suffering the fate of that single machine (or group of machines), your website flows in a fluidic fashion across the grid, never being impacted directly by singular hardware or software glitches. This means no more localized disk failures, RAID rebuilds, slow server response, overload impacts, etc. In a nutshell, it makes your website’s life pretty much great. And as a consequence, hopefully yours too, if only in a small way!

You may be a technically interested like I am – so if you are curious to learn more about how Imperia works, read on.

Imperia Technical Background

Last year, it became clear that the H-sphere Control Panel software we use to provide web hosting services was way too outdated. We reviewed other control panels such as cPanel or Plesk – but those too suffer from inherent flaws that lead to downtime, and are sometimes difficult to use. I felt that to really improve, we were going to have to develop our own new system; from SCRATCH. Enter center stage, Imperia.

At its core, Imperia is a combination of state-of-the-art hardware, leading software solutions, innovative command and provisioning logic and an intuitive user interface. That’s a really fancy way to say that Imperia will bring many amazing features together to create the ideal hosting platform. I already elaborated a little bit on the hardware that we will use above.

To utilize this hardware to the fullest extent possible, Imperia was designed using the latest Enterprise-class software including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBOSS, EnterpriseDB, Hyperic, Zimbra and Windows Server 2008. Together with Vizuri, a Red Hat-preferred award-winning development company in Washington D.C., and our own internal development guys, we are able to coordinate these applications to work in beautiful harmony. These software solutions are being tied together in a super-streamlined customization (dubbed Imperia Command) to make them all sing, and I do mean sing.

Imperia Command is a business-decision based intelligence system for running large super-computer grids and data centers. Some may call this a “cloud” architecture, but we don’t. Clouds mean rainy days. We prefer to think of this as “ionosphere” architecture, or something else much more cool than a rainy day.

Imperia Command actively senses thousands of metrics for all of the services and nodes operating within the grid and continuously applies the results against a set of rules for action. This built-in “intelligence” gives Imperia Command the ability to move services across servers as needed to eliminate downtime and DRAMATICALLY improve speed and performance.

And what’s even better is this is all going to happen soon.

In the coming weeks we will be in touch with you about Imperia’s development and the cool features it’s going to bring you. Beginning in late October, Imperia is scheduled to go into a limited beta-release, with full migration likely occurring by the end of the year. Our goal is to make the transition as seamless as possible, so all you have to do is sit back and enjoy the improved features and performance.

And hey, thanks again for being an IX Web Hosting Customer!

Until next time.

Fathi Said, CEO
IX Web Hosting

Psst…remember to vote! http://www.keysurvey.com/survey/269267/2c6a/

In my <a href=”http://blog.IXWebHosting.com/2009/06/how-will-we-blow-you-away-exactly-part-1-of-3″ target=”_blank”>last post a few days ago, I told you a little bit about our history of service issues and what we have and are doing to improve it.

I wanted to thank everyone for your outstanding feedback on my last post. We are working on all mentioned issues and I will reply in detail (as a comment to this post) what we are doing about all of it.

It’s exciting to discuss all the opportunities we have to do better for you and on that note, I want to share our idea on what kind of customer service you can expect from us in the future.

Create a “Wow!” Customer Service Experience for you. Always. By the end of the year, we will transform our customer service team into delivering “Wow!” every time you call, email or chat with us. In detail, we will give you…

One Of Our Personal Heroes

1. Your own ‘Personal Hero’. A personal and fully accountable contact at our company who will be responsible to ensure your satisfaction at all times. You’ll know him/her by name. Your Hero will know everything about you and your objectives for your website. He or she will be heroically interested in what you are trying to achieve and what obstacles you’re facing so that he or she can blow them away. And every one of them will do everything in their Hero Special-Power to make your website successful (and we are making sure they have plenty of manna to do so).

2. You can help replenishing your Hero’s manna by sending in raving testimonials. I believe they also accept candy of all kinds. In fact, they prefer the latter, but I personally prefer the first. To be on the safe side, you could also do both.*

3. You’ll be able to talk to your Hero in all fashionable, not-so fashionable and even unfathomable ways: On the phone (they feel special if you call them on their hero (cell) phone), via chat, ,   (MySpace is against our Heroes’ core values), any instant messenger (including ) and if you really have to, via email (totally unhero-ish). Or if you prefer , that works too. Webcam? No problem, your Hero is very personal and loves talking face-to-face. Or in person – visit us for a local get together.

4. By the way, don’t be freaked out. Occasionally, your Hero will call you just to ask how you’re doing and if there is anything they could iron-out or make go-away for you. And maybe if he or she can make your day brighter today. We promise there are no other intentions. (There is also no ulterior motive for making this a separate point for no reason at all.)

5. <a href=”http://blog.IXWebHosting.com” target=”_blank”>A company blog (you’re reading it). This place will soon be filled with stuff that you can really use to grow your website, Increase Traffic and eXplode Sales. You really can use a website to make a lot of money. That’s what I did with IX Web Hosting. I’ll show you how you can, too.

6. <a href=”http://status.IXWebHosting.com/” target=”_blank”>A status blog, featuring posts and your comments about any current and past service issues that warrant special attention. This is already online but not yet at its fullest capacity. We’re still working out the quirks.

7. <a href=”http://forum.IXWebHosting.com/” target=”_blank”>A customer forum and comm-YOU-nity. This will be a place of vivid discussion among all of you and all of our Heroes. Participate, experience and learn about how to use your website to its fullest capacity (= how to Increase Traffic for your personal site, or how to eXplode Sales and impact your business).

8. <a href=”http://wiki.IXWebHosting.com/index.php/Main_Page” target=”_blank”>A customer-wiki that your Heroes and you will co-create. Any content you think is worthwhile mentioning can published here and shared among our entire customer base. All of the Internet, even.

9. A presence on  (up and running!),  and all the other places you’d expect us to be but we’ve failed to appear so far. Our Army of Heroes will soon appear e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e…

I’m hopeful that these upcoming changes will, umm… I don’t know! Create some kind of excitement for you?

Please don’t hesitate to leave your comments and let us know what you think. Criticism, suggestions, new ideas – anything that’s on your mind, please share it with us! Your feedback will allow us to change our plans and make sure we do less of what you don’t need, and a lot more of what you do! So what do you think about our heroic ideas? Did we miss something?

And now that you know there will be Heroes who will teach your site how to fly, let me share the most significant change that is coming:

We would like to make your success our only focus. Specifically, this means…

Customer Advisory Board (a.k.a Round Table)

1. A Customer Advisory Board. We’d like to hear from you often, in fact, we can’t hear from you often enough. Sometimes, even with our new Heroic and Wow! customer service approach, we may still miss what’s important to you. This could be a new feature that we should offer, a whole new kind of product or just supporting you in a different way. I’d like to establish a method that will allow us to always stay in touch with you and listen to your feedback. I’ll follow up soon with several ideas how this could work exactly.In the meantime, do you have any ideas on how best we can make this happen?
2. Frequent face-to-face meetings, between you and anyone of our staff. Anytime one of our managers, Heroes or Technologists travels (and some of our staff practically live on the plane!), they would love to meet you in person. To talk about your business or work situation, how an improved website and more traffic can lead to advancements for your business and career (and how to do that!), and of course to get your feedback about how we’re doing and what we could be doing better… or we can just hang out! Atlanta and Chicago are coming up next on our travel schedule. Anyone interested?
3. Show you how to Increase Traffic and eXplode Sales, or IX, for short. We know exactly how powerful a website can be. After all, we’ve built our entire company – a hundreds of employees strong organization – on just that. How interested are you in a course, or possibly a monthly digital and printed newsletter, that teaches you how to use your website to your advantage for both your business and you personally, in easy-to-understand language?

A few ideas that come to my mind: how to build a website that sells, how to get your website listed on popular search engines (mostly: Google), how to successfully advertise online, what an affiliate program is and how to use it to your benefit? How to use your website to find a better paying job or advance your career? How to make your website more popular by means of Social Marketing, Word of Mouth Marketing, and integrate core functionality such as forums, wikis, blogs and other interactive community elements? This list could go on forever…

But what are you most interested in? Please let us know.

We have a very full plate in front of us, but we will never be too busy to listen to your feedback. It is golden. Please keep it coming.

Thank you for being our customer.

Fathi Said, CEO
IX Web Hosting

PS: This blog post contains several ideas that you could try out in your business or at your workplace to improve your company’s service and relevance. Feel free to quote any part of this blog in your own publication. If you mention us in your quote, we’ll appreciate it all the more. Ideas for this blog came from Seth Godin, one of the most remarkable entrepreneurs I know of, and … and respective books …; I highly recommend both of them.

*Disclaimer: Your Hero will be nice to you, so please be nice to him or her: do not overfeed your Hero.

Customer Service

Selling web hosting services over the internet can be a bit impersonal. You may have signed up on our website. You might have never talked to anyone at our company. Sign up should be easy and that might be what you were looking for.

I do much of my banking online or through an ATM for the same reasons. However, there are times when I like to go in the branch and talk to someone when I have a more complex transaction. It’s nice when they listen to me and learn more about my needs. From a position of better understanding, they can make recommendations to improve our relationship.

We thought that, sometimes, you might like to talk to someone too. Of course we have phone support, this blog, and soon a forum where you can connect. But, we also decided that when anyone from our management team travels, we will try to get to know you and find out more about your goals for your online presence, your dreams, and how we could help you attain them.

I had a perfect opportunity last week. I traveled to Nashville for a seminar by David Bullock and Jerry West from SEO Rainmaker. (Excellent conference, by the way). Wednesday night I invited some customers to meet me while I was there.

I met Karen from Room in the Inn, and Jennifer from AccuImage, LLC . We had fun talking about their organizations.

Room In The Inn

Room In The Inn provides food and shelter for up to 225 people each night in over 150 area congregations from November 1st to March 31st. The congregation is in the middle of Tennessee, and their volunteers offer hospitality by giving their time, energy, and resources. Here are a few highlights of the service provided in the past year:

• 28,522 beds were provided to 1,033 different individuals (46% first-time guests)
• More than 150 congregations served 72,217 meals. 16,804 snacks and offered 12,658 showers
• 29,373 volunteers provided 11,030 hours and drove 155,242 miles in order to offer safe shelter for the homeless in Nashville.

We feel good that <a title=”IX Web Hosting” href=”http://www.IXWebHosting.com” target=”_blank”>IX Web Hosting plays a small part in the important work that Room in the Inn does.

AccuImage

AccuImage, LLC also does important work. They specialize in the design, development, deployment and support of systems designed to solve business problems. They streamline laborious paper-based processes and we all need that!

AccuImage works with financial services, manufacturing, retail, distribution, government, accounts payable/receivable, human resources, and a variety of specialized industries – both regionally and nationally. With health care being one of Nashville’s largest industries, AccuImage has a high concentration of health care clients as well.

WOW! Two very different organizations yet, both count on us to keep them up and running on the internet. The conference was excellent and meeting Jennifer and Karen was a pleasure.

I did manage to squeeze in a little extra fun. I’ve been to Nashville to run the County Music Marathon two times before. Both times I looked forward to the barbecue at Rippy’s. After running 26 miles, it sure tastes good! So it was a real treat to be able to walk just a block or two for a sandwich and some good music.

So, you never know when one of the IX team might come to town and give you a call. We’d love to meet you and learn more about your organization. If you want to make sure we don’t miss you, post a comment below and let us know where you are and what you do.

Depending on your online journey with us so far, you could be in awe of how well we’re doing for you and in high anticipation of what’s coming next. Or you could read this as “Gee, thanks. My server is too slow and you still didn’t fix it. You already blew me away… far away, as your customer.”

Just two years ago, the first was wishful thinking. Our servers indeed were slow (in all honesty, a few still are). Backups were made sporadically. Downtimes were frequent. Customer service, suffering from low server performance, ran at a very low morale. If you look around online, you will find many negative reviews about us spanning that two-year timeframe. Despite all this, many of you stayed on board and with us, supporting us through the tough times, allowing us to outgrow the growing pains.

To all of you, our wonderful customers, I want to say thank you. There are no words that could express my gratitude, but there are actions.

In three parts, I would like to introduce to you the sweeping changes we wish to make to improve our company for you. I would like to ensure that your continued journey with us will be worthwhile for you. The only way to ensure this can happen is with your help and feedback. So please, don’t be shy!

Before I get started, I’d like to briefly recap our major milestones of the last two years:

1. All service issues previously stated are now resolved.
2. We’ve successfully deployed IronPort anti-spam and anti-virus filtering to our entire customer base; a very expensive project, but well worth it. For you, this eliminated 99.9% of all spam and virus emails received to your domains and created a significant uptime improvement for your email service with us.
3. Database related servers (all types of SQL) have been dramatically accelerated through improved ‘abuse’ management and massive hardware upgrades. Compared to two years ago, today you will experience expedient and stable database connections.
4. Today, we operate our data center out of a self-financed and owned, state-of-the-art 20,000 sq. ft. facility in Columbus, OH connected with Tier 1 Premium Bandwidth only at 5gbit/s (from Sprint and Qwest). At some data centers, you will find ‘cheap bandwidth’ resulting in longer loading times when visitors come to your website. These delays are hardly noticeable when you test for them yourself, but as long as they exist, your sites will lose visitors. But not with IX. At this facility, we would not even allow a mediocre bandwidth provider’s fiber optics to pollute our crystal-clear path of light. This industry-grade true Tier 3/4 data space can house over 10,000 servers, all self-managed and employee-owned.

   In fact, I would love to give you a tour! If you happen to be visiting Columbus on business or you can spare a few hours on your trip, I’d love to show you around our data center. We’ve a few hundred customers in Columbus as well – you’re welcome any time. Give one of our representatives a call and we’ll meet soon!

So how will we make your hosting experience with us worthwhile?

This year alone, my company has committed to its single largest investment into customer service and the level of server performance you experience.

Old and New

Before the year’s end, we are planning to upgrade our entire web hosting infrastructure. This should put an end to virtually all service-related issues. I can’t promise 100% uptime, but it’s what we’re shooting for. In detail, we will…

1. Introduce Imperia, an ‘intelligent cloud’ hosting environment, for all of our customers. This effectively means that your websites, databases and email services will be hosted not on one server, but on hundreds or thousands, all at the same time. You could theoretically turn off half our data center, or take an axe to the server hosting your website – and it would be back online within seconds (in fact, it may not be down at all). Please don’t try any of the above by yourself.*
2. Develop and launch a website management control panel featuring a state-of-the-art user interface that we are developing in-house right now. It is designed to make your life easier.
3. Replace ALL existing hardware with brand new blade servers, centralized storage and a fiber-channel switching architecture. This is a multi-million dollar investment into our networking and server infrastructure that will make your sites load faster than any dedicated server ever could. If you were to rent an entire server and all it hosted was your website, it would load your site as slow as molasses compared to how fast your site will load on Imperia.

Our development team is starting a special Imperia VIP Membership that you can join if you are interested in providing feedback to help us test and optimize the new platform. As a VIP member, we’ll share top-secret development material with you, your suggestions will be considered first for upcoming releases and you’ll get early access to new releases (membership is, of course, free of cost.).

Stay tuned for Part 2 of 3, in which I will address a whole new approach to customer service.

Please don’t forget to let us know your opinion and feedback.

Thank you!

Fathi Said, CEO
IX Web Hosting

*Disclaimer: Don’t use axe to destroy computer of any kind.

Ohio Growth Summit

We’re Pumped!

What an exciting day Wednesday was . . . Social Media in real, live action! We felt lucky to be there.

Where were we? At the Ohio Growth Summit right here in Columbus, OH. This event was sponsored by the Ohio Small Business Development Center, located at the Columbus State Community College, and was organized by @MichaelBowers. Thanks Michael!

Jim Canterucci

The first keynote speaker was Jim Canterucci, author of Personal Brilliance. Jim’s speech focused on achieving success, by applying four key habits (Awareness, Curiosity, Focus, and Initiative) to your life and work. Thanks Jim, very motivational!

Throughout the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon, attendees chose between several enlightening breakout sessions such as: Social media – Small Business the Social Guerrilla Marketplace, Invent, Build Go to Market, Go Global Now, and Obtaining Financing: How to Play the Game.

After lunch, additional breakout tracks included: Social Media Tools that will Mobilize Your Business Growth Strategy, From Models to Sales, Supply Chain Management, and The Banker’s Perspective. After the “Pitch It” session competition, where new starts try to promote their product in two minutes or less, it was time for the afternoon’s keynote speaker.

Chris Brogan

Chris Brogan had people on the edge of their seats with his humor and quick wit. With Chris we instantly took his message to heart, “Be Human”. Chris not only “talks the talk” (or should we say “tweets the tweet”), but more importantly, he definitely “walks the walk” when it comes to social media. Thanks Chris for knocking it out of the ballpark! Your speech made us all pre-order Trust Agents.

The 1st Chris

On the topic of startups, Chris Brogan says if he were to start today “No matter what, the very first piece of social media real estate I’d start with is a blog. It’s a website, with lots of built in features that make it useful from a search perspective, and simple from a content creation perspective. That alone is worth the price of admission.” And Chris should know.

Chris Brogan Blog

Chris Brogan is a ten year veteran of using social media to build digital relationships for businesses, organizations, and individuals. Chris blogs at www.chrisbrogan.com, a blog in the top 10 of the Advertising Age Power150, and in the top 100 on Technorati.

With a blog virtually anyone can publish their thoughts, ideas and opinions to millions of potential readers. In return, those readers can “participate” by expressing their view points or comments. This method of communication is allowing all of us a means to become involved in information rather than just being passive consumers of it.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary awarded “blog” as “The Word of the Year” in 2004, when more and more people started using them as a means to express themselves personally. Today, blogs are reaching new heights in popularity. Many businesses and corporations are increasingly implementing blogs as they discover the flourishing opportunity it provides to build relationships with their existing customers as well as developing relationships with prospective new customers!

We’ve talked to many of our customers who say they want a web-presence. Cash is tight and they don’t have big advertising budgets. Blogging is a very inexpensive way to help accomplish this goal (all you need is your IX Web Hosting account).

Some of our customers haven’t started a blog because they are intimidated by the setup process. That’s where the other Chris comes in.

The 2nd Chris

Now that you’ve heard the reasons that a blog is the first thing to do from Chris Brogan, it’s time to hear from another Chris. Our own Chris Testerman. Chris will help you with the “how” do I start. Chris created this really awesome video that will show you how to set up a WordPress Blog in your IX Web Hosting account in under 2 minutes!

If you don’t have a hosting account here’s a blog post to let you know why you should.

Now, there’s nothing to hold you back!

Now that you’re ready to start creating your content, you are going to have to start sharing it with someone, right? So please, feel free to comment to this video with links to the blogs you’ve created. We’d love to take a look at them!

By the way, here’s a link to the tutorials Chris mentioned in his video: IX Web Hosting Customer Center” href=”http://www.IXWebHosting.com/index.php/v2/pages.customerCenter” target=”_blank”>http://www.IXWebHosting.com/index.php/v2/pages.customerCenter

How Bored are You?

This may seem like an extremely odd question, but I was thinking (as I sometimes do when the weather is nice), why are you reading this blog?

Is it because you’re secretly hoping that maybe, one day, it will contain information relevant to your account? It will, I promise. As much as I love delving into difficult topics like MC Hammer pants and the curious patterns of squirrels, I am fully aware that customers are interested in things that involve THEM. This is why we’re working on getting a customer forum, our status blog and our Twitter status account up and running for you. We greatly appreciate your patience while we set these things up. We would also love to get your feedback about these ventures. What are you interested in? How would you most like it presented? For example, would you like to see a status blog that churns out facts about system functions daily or would you like something more interactive where you can leave comments or interact with other customers?

Or are you reading because you’re in some way dissatisfied and hoping that we’ll address your concerns here? If you take a look at the comments we received on our first post, you might notice that many of them were cries for help—feedback voiced in our very first medium between customers and staff that isn’t LiveChat, a phone call or our ticketing system. This was a big indicator to us that we were doing something wrong. What was being expressed on our blog could have been voiced on the phone or through any other avenue of support, but obviously, those channels were not satisfying some of you. This too will be changing. Our support is getting better each day because, well, you all know why. We want you to be happy. You employ us. The changes we are making to our customer support will be big, they will be noticeable and they are already happening. If any one of these items proves untrue, I trust that more than a handful of you will let us know and more than two handfuls of our staff will get moving on making them so.

Or is it because you lost your job? OK, this is a stretch, but losing your job frees up several hours in the day for blog-reading, starting a home-business online or scowling at those that insist on constantly flaunting their new stuff.

The economy is so bad, I might actually have to break my 2 dollar bill!

So those are not real tears, but that is a real $2 bill and that certainly is a real used-tissue…

We record the reasons that our customers leave so that we can better tailor our product to prevent cancellations. Well, guess what one of the leading reasons for cancellation is? “I can no longer afford hosting.” Most of you already know that we’re one of the least costly hosts available, so it is thoroughly depressing to hear this as a reason for ceasing to host with us. Still, even more depressing is giving away free hosting to those who cite their inability to afford it only to hear that they “no longer have a need for their account” because they couldn’t get their home business off of the ground. Well, providing detailed information and resources about making your home business work is also on our agenda. We’ll have to count on Obama to take care of the economy.

When I was younger, I genuinely thought that my father was a superhero and that I was placed on the planet to get him fired from his company so he could fulfill his true calling full-time. In that notion, I was not far from the truth. He has several skills that would be impossible to use all at one company (especially with a talent list as diverse as his: wind-harmonica out of a car doing 80 mph, moustache grooming, writing, child-lecturing, JavaScript, SQL, oil painting…). My point is that people with diverse skill sets can be liberated by job loss because they can use the internet to employ themselves in their own business, or even just to secure an even better job by creating a site to strengthen a résumé.

Here’s a good example: Let’s say that you got fired from your job and now need to justify the monthly cost of hosting. Here are a few things you could do:

1. Set up a site to slander your former employer. This, while obviously a joke, is something people really do! Instead of taking that route, I would actually suggest creating a site or blog that outlines your work experiences—things you have learned, things awry with their current business model (you might want to avoid naming the company specifically if you still want them on your list of good references) and advice you would give other employers. Creating a community out of a site like this is easy as there are several people looking to release steam about being released from employment. That community would be a valuable asset for those that have entrepreneurial/superhero aspirations because more could be done than just commiserating with your visitors. There’s an increasing market for job counseling and HR consulting, and whether you earn revenue from it or not, you’ve contributed something to the global community as well as enhanced your résumé. Imagine what: “Built an online community from zero to four-thousand by providing valuable, original resources and consulting. Please see www.HireMe.com/about for more information.” could do for your résumé…

2. Create a site to show-off. Set up a site with a forum to discuss hobbies with friends, organize gatherings or anything related to things that you’re good at. Throw videos, pictures, artwork, lessons (if you have a teachable hobby) on your site and then bask in self-satisfaction.

3. Resell your hosting account. Do you know someone who is constantly talking about his/her ideas but not actually doing anything with them? Sell them a portion of your account to get them started! They can still develop their domain with your hosting and you won’t have to worry about bandwidth or transfer (because it’s unlimited) and you set the price. You can even buy a domain for someone as a gift and host it on your account, free. No more need to read holiday or special-occasion wish-lists. Just give everyone hosting! That includes Mom (Mother’s Day is coming up in the US!), your brother, your 7-year old daughter (she has to learn sometime!) , etc…

I think it’s safe to say that most of you could come up with better ways to use your hosting account. When we get our customer forum ready to go, please feel free to inform fellow customers how to make the most out of their account; if not for us, then for the economy.

Thanks for reading!

First Place – Woo Hoo!

Well we did it again folks!

IXWebHosting.com” title=”IX Web Hosting“>IX is the first American web hosting company to introduce Alipay as a method of payment for our customers. “What is Alipay?” you ask. Alipay is the preferred method of payment for China. Think of it as their PayPal. It is well known and trusted, and gives the Chinese consumer peace of mind when it comes to online purchases. It makes buying from America much more attractive.

Next question you’re probably asking yourself is “Why am I reading about a service I will never need?” Promoting the use  of Alipay is not the intention of this blog (Actually we rely heavily on messenger pigeons to do the bulk of our promotions). The real purpose of this blog is to show you IX’s flexibility and responsiveness to you, our customers.

One of our Chinese affiliates asked us to consider offering Alipay. According to an article in China Tech News , the number of members have grown from 57 million in 2008 to over 150 million as of April of this year. Alipay reaches more than half of the people who use the web in China. Also of interest are the demographics of Alipay members. They are young (83% are between 21 and 35) and their spending is increasing faster than other segments of the population.

So, a few weeks after the original request – we are the first American Web Hosting company to offer this payment method! You may not be surprised. After all, we were the first to offer Unlimited Bandwidth and Unlimited Disk Space too.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. Feel free to send your ideas or suggestions by responding to this post. We might not be able to adopt all your ideas but at least you know we listen!

Jeremy Fox

Affiliate Manager