Why do Hosting Providers Matter?

You see, there are some 20,000+ hosting providers in the United States alone.  According to Tier1 Research, Web Hosting as an industry represents a 46 billion dollar global market and it’s growing at a rate of 20% annually. Of that 20,000 hosting providers around 81.4 percent are composed of Small and Medium Sized businesses (SMBs) and as we know from it’s the small and medium sized businesses that make the US economy flow.  Contrary to the 80/20 rule, these 80% actually generate the bulk of that 46 billion dollars. These SMB’s also represent a large number of employers that employ high-wage, high-tech employees.  By impacting these small businesses, you’ll also impact a large number of jobs. You impact these jobs and well, we all know what happens, we’re living it today due to the financial crash.

What does SOPA have to do with Hosting?

I’m by no means a legal expert or even much of a political expert, but there’s a great website savehosting.org put together by those that are and are also experts on web hosting that really express what the issues are. However, I can give you, my view of the game from where I sit. Basically SOPA will hold service providers (including hosting providers) responsible for criminal activities that happens on their servers. It will put in place a process to respond to complaints that will put great financial burden on these SMB’s, undermines the core principle of our judicial system, due process, and would hold hosting provider liable for damages to content owners. 

You see at the core, SOPA will hold any service providers (hosting providers, SaaS providers, forum owners, blog owners, community operators, etc)  liable for content that is uploaded by users, so if you purchase hosting space from a hosting provider, publish a blog, a forum, etc and one of your users uploads copyrighted content, then you’re liable for their activities as well your hosting provider. Although you had nothing to do with their illegal actions. 

It’s as if, I rent an apartment to you. You decide one day to go rob a bank, bring the money back to the apartment I rent to you and because that money is in an apartment I rent to you, I go to jail! Think about that, you committed a crime, but I go to jail for your crime! Yeah, not cool! (unless of course you were on a beach in Tahiti drinking Mai-Tais with that bag of money next to you when this all went down.. but still not cool for me or your Karma!)

So why pick on poor GoDaddy?

Well, after a 2.25 billion dollar sale, I don’t think Godaddy is poor. I do think however because they are the most recognized name in hosting and domain names that the actions they take can be interpreted as the actions of the hosting industry and even the Internet on a whole. I also believe sometimes individuals and companies have egos that need to be adjusted and this is what the Internet community is doing today.

You may find it surprising but I too have domains registered with GoDaddy, or I should say I did have domains registered with GoDaddy and that was a personal decision.  Although, I’m not going to jump on the bandwagon and say you too should beat up GoDaddy, I’ll simply say if you’re set on transferring your domain names, hosting, SSL certificates, etc away, the team at Applied Innovations will be more than happy to walk you through this process of moving your domains from GoDaddy to your account with us here at Applied Innovations or providing you a fantastic Cloud Server or Windows Cloud Hosting package to fit your needs.

How can you help?

If you want to help support the savehosting coalition and join the fight against SOPA and the other legislation that threatens the Internet today, visit www.savehosting.org and you can learn more about legislation that’s out there today that threatens not only how your hosting provider does business but it will impact how you do business online as well.

Earlier this year we launched a preview beta of our next next generation elastic shared cloud hosting platform with great success.  Last month, we soft launched our first iteration of this service at DotNetNuke World and as “Windows Server 8” becomes a reality we’ll be bringing more to this service and evolving the offering. Windows Cloud Hosting will continue to be a focus for our company and over the coming months we’ll be rolling out a suite of offerings tailored to meet specific business needs.

This year, we also rolled out our first customers on our WebsitePanel enabled Cloud Server control panel and for the first time gave our clients control over their Hyper-V Cloud Servers. We also announced our Windows Phone app for managing these same servers which got amazing response. We’ll be updating that application soon actually and looking to roll out the application for other platforms very soon.  Windows Cloud Servers will continue to be the cornerstone offering here at Applied Innovations and we’ll continue to work closely with Microsoft to see to it that our cloud servers are among the fastest, most stable and best performing cloud servers in the industry.

But those are all extensions of what we’ve been working on and I’m sure you want to know what’s coming?  Well, we have great stuff coming and we’ll be kicking this off in January as we roll out a new and improved referral partner program and for the first time ever, a cloud server reseller program.  This is extremely exciting for me especially!  I believe we can offer a strong set of features that will be very niche focused and specific and allow our partners to deliver an unparalleled offering.  We’ve been busy the past few weeks working this out and in January we’ll be announcing a couple new promotions that will be focused on: 1) cloud servers and 2) delivering great margins for cloud server resellers.  But we’re not going to deliver just great margins, we’re going to deliver great products, great performance and we’re going to help educate you on how to sell these products and solutions to your clients.  We believe these new services will allow you to increase your profit margins and by leveraging our team of engineers for administration and management, you’ll be able to remain focused on your core business.

2012 isn’t here yet and it’s already shaping up to be a great year for all of us and we’re excited with everything that’s on the horizon from our reseller program to SQL Server 2012 (Denali) to Windows Server Codename “Windows Server 8” but most of all, we’re excited that we get to continue working with the great group of customers we have here at Applied Innovations. 

Wishing you and yours, a festive holiday season and great success and fortune in the New Year.

Jess

We believe the best option for 90% of these dedicated servers is without question migration to a cloud server. With the migration to the cloud server the client will benefit from:

• the ability to scale up and down hardware as business demands dictate.
• protection from hardware failures because all of our cloud servers are built on top of redundant hardware.
• and in many cases, drastically improved performance because the cloud servers are built using the latest hardware and not processors from 3 years ago.

So all this new functionality sounds great, but then you start to realize: “oh nooo, this means a site migration and I don’t have the hours, days or (in some cases) weeks it’s going to take to move everything, test everything and get it back online! We’ll just wait it a bit longer for when we can free up the time.”  The reality is, time is never freed up.  But what if, you could make that migration without an extended downtime? What if you could make that migration without impacting your clients but for a brief moment?  What if we told you we could take your physical server, convert it “as is” into a cloud server and you can instantly start reaping the benefits of a cloud server?

That “what if” isn’t a what it at all but a reality.   I’m pleased to announce that Applied Innovations is able to do what’s called a Physical to Virtual Migration (or P2V) of your dedicated server to a cloud server and in most instances you’ll experience only a couple minutes of downtime.   Sounds great? Absolutely! But wait, it gets better.

Not only are we able to do a P2V for you but through the month of November we’ll do the P2V at no charge (up to 2 hours of planning and migration and most migrations take less than an hour)!

If this sounds like something you’re interested in pursuing please email sales@appliedi.net to discuss it further.

• I wanted to be first in alphabetical indices so I wanted a company name that started with an A (yes, it’s an old yellow pages trick)
• I wanted something somewhat generic that if I decided to switch the direction of my company that I wouldn’t have to change my company’s name.
• I knew that shared web hosting on Windows was new, innovative and somewhat complicated and I was looking to apply this innovation in a way that made it easy to use.
• My engineering background taught me that when you deal with technology you are always learning and the speed of innovation is so fast that can be quite challenging and that we’re going to frequently be revamping our services and re-innovating our offerings.
• Lastly, I wanted to help businesses succeed online. I knew by helping them grow their company and prosper, my own company would do the same and I felt that this name helped convey that.

So the name Applied Innovations seemed to make sense.  The idea that we’d take new technology to market early and not only apply this innovation to our company but allow our customers to do the same thing in a way that was easy to use and affordable to deploy was perfect.  Oh and someone else had registered just about every other name I could come up with.  Here’s a couple things I learned when naming my company though:

• Always try to get the .com. If you can’t get a domain with .com in it, find another until you can. It’s less important today as it was back then but it’s still pretty important.
• Don’t abbreviate unless it’s a word people can pronounce.  I hate people saying “Is this ap-lid-e?”  I thought “applied eye” was intuitive .. I was wrong!
• If you’re set on a specific name and can’t get the .com then make sure people can say your name.
• Beware of typos and buy them all.  If you go to appliedeye.net, apliedi.net, applied1.net, applied.net (just recently got this one) or any of a few dozen common typos you’ll get 301 redirected to my site.
• Spellcheckers are evil.  Make sure whatever you name your company that spellcheck doesn’t auto replace it with something else.  You’d be shocked how many links and emails went to applied.net instead of appliedi.net because of this and the applied.net domain wasn’t all that cheap to acquire.

So why all this talk about Applied Innovations?

Well, Recently at the Microsoft BUILD event (www.buildwindows.com) our awesome.net elastic cloud hosting platform (which is still in preview) was spotlighted in multiple sessions as well as our WebMatrix hosting offerings (http://www.appliedi.net/webmatrix) was spotlighted by Vishal Joshi in his session announcing the WebMatrix 2 Beta. The idea of WebMatrix and how it’s evolving and how it’s ultimate goal is to make working with open source applications like DotNetNuke, WordPress, Umbraco, Joomla and such really easy on the Windows platform got me thinking about how we apply innovation here at AppliedI.  At BUILD they also announced the first “Developer Preview” version of Windows 8 and Windows Server 8.  Of course, we’re heavily involved in all things Windows Server 8 and have been for nearly two years now so this past week I was thinking about that and how all of this work contributes back to just who Applied Innovations is and that’s what led to the blog post.  I believe Windows Server 8 is a testament to Microsoft’s commitment to being the software the cloud is built on and I can say without a doubt we’ll be right there with them.  Windows Server 8, IIS8 and Hyper-V to name a few will all play into how AppliedI will continue to provide cloud hosting.  If you didn’t attend Build then you can still see all of the presentations online at: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011

Finally, one last thing. I want to apply this to you.

In November, the DotNetNuke annual convention DotNetNuke World will take place in Orlando, FL (literally our backyard).  As a platinum sponsor of the DotNetNuke project and the DNNworld event I’ve been asked to speak on a customer success story around DotNetNuke and Applied Innovations.  I know of a couple customers that would make great candidates for this story but I thought this would be a great chance to open the opportunity up to the customer base as a whole.  If your company is using DotNetNuke for your website and it’s hosted here at Applied Innovations, please leave a comment on this blog post or reach out to sales@appliedi.net and provide us your details. We’re looking for volunteers that use DotNetNuke today and would like to be spotlighted at this event and part of our presentation. We’ll build a full customer success story around your business and promote you and your company at the event.  What does this have to do with “Applying Innovations”?  Well, it goes back to the whole reason I started the company in the first place and that was to help our customers succeed by providing them the latest innovations and technology in a way that’s easy to use and affordable and I believe the DotNetNuke platform is one such innovation.

From speaking with a number of the DNN Corp. folk over the years, the one thing I’ve really learned is that for DotNetNuke, it’s all about the community and with everything they do it’s the community that comes first.  This includes the recent acquisition of ActiveModules and the addition of Will Morgenweck where the bulk of this acquisition will actually be fed back into the core project and made open-source! 

I also remember when I attended the first DotNetNuke conference in Las Vegas back in 2007 and everyone being up in arms about the recent (at that time) decision of the founders to create a corporation so it was great to sit down with Joe and talk about this and reflect on that decision and how it’s moved the platform and community forward through innovation that otherwise may not have been possible.

Well, enough of me reminiscing.  Here’s the videos and the links as promised throughout the videos. Thanks again to Joe and Will for taking the time to sit down with me and for the entire DNN Corp for hosting me for the day.

Joe Brinkman on DNN6 and Innovation

Joe Brinkman on DotNetNuke 6 from Applied Innovations on Vimeo.

Will Strohl on DNN6, DNNworld and Community

AppliedI & Will Strohl chat on DNN6, DNNworld and Community from Applied Innovations on Vimeo.

DotNetNuke Links of Interest

1. Try DotNetNuke Optimized Hosting
2. Visit DotNetNuke World
3. Demo DotNetNuke Professional Edition
4. Get to know DotNetNuke Corp
5. Attend Orlando DotNetNuke Users Group
6. Enjoy Will’s Gaming Clan Community

Our Hyper-V Cloud achievements

• Became one of the first two hosting companies in the world to deliver Hyper-V Cloud servers.
• Built what was not only one of the largest all Dell Hyper-V Cloud deployments in the world but also one of the first and largest Microsoft Hyper-V Cloud deployments in the world.
• Built a highly scalable, flexibly shared hosting infrastructure for WebMatrix that runs 100% on top of Hyper-V Cloud (more details shared later).

And today we’re adding to that by announcing more firsts as we’re delivering:

• Hyper-V Cloud Pools – a new service targeted at medium sized businesses looking to offer resold Hyper-V Cloud Servers. Although, no the first to offer reseller Hyper-V clouds we’re the first to offer it as a bulk discounted solution.
• Industry’s First end-to-end Managed Hyper-V Private Cloud offering – without question we’re one of the most experienced companies in the world with Hyper-V Cloud so we’re packaging that competitive advantage and offering managed Private Hyper-V Clouds. Whether it’s enterprises looking for a hosted private cloud, ISV’s looking for a customized solution for their application or hosting providers looking to enter the cloud server business without the need for datacenter space, servers or server administrators, we’ll be able to provide the solution.

  By leveraging our Datacenter presence, network vendor relationships, our hardware vendor relationships and our own expertise we’re able to deliver what is truly the first end-to-end Managed Hyper-V Private Cloud offering of this type.

We’re not stopping there though, we’re also investing in open-source! Over the past few months we’ve been hard at work with our friends at Microsoft, the folks at Austin Knowledge Group and our own team to contribute to the WebsitePanel project and are now beta testing our new Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit integrated install of WebsitePanel! 

What’s all that WebsitePanel mumbo jumbo?

What’s it all mean? Well, it means you’re finally able to control your Hyper-V Cloud Server using a web based control panel.  I know, I know. “Well it’s about time Jess!” and you’re absolutely right! That’s why I’ve also had a team of developers from Software Logistics, LLC (and Windows Phone MVPs) develop for us the first ever production, Hyper-V Cloud Mobile Control app and it’s available today in the Windows Phone Marketplace (sorry guys, it’s only running on Windows Phone 7 today but we’ll be delivering more soon). 

My Hyper-V Cloud is available in the Marketplace today. It’s the first release and it integrates with our beta environment today but it’s there, it works and if you’re interested in trying it out just let us know.

As for the WebsitePanel application, we’re putting the finishing touches on it this week and will be putting beta customers on it in two weeks. If you have a windows cloud server and you’re interested in testing out this application, just drop us a note and we’ll get you on the list to test it out.

What’s pretty cool is from start to finish it takes about 15 minutes to bring up a new machine and it will be integrated with out signup system so machine will be delivered on the fly.

Meet us at WPC

This year, Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference will be held in Los Angeles, California.  I’m fortunate that I’ve been asked to speak in two sessions.

On Monday at 3pm I’ll be sitting in a panel session: “WEB01 Panel Session: Development on the Microsoft Web Platform in an Open Source Ecosystem” With Brian Goldfarb (Microsoft), Mark Brown (Microsoft), Paul Sterling (Umbraco), Shaun Walker (DotNetNuke) and Ryan Jones (Microsoft) and we’ll discuss open-source applications and the web and the challenges facing developers today.

On Tuesday at 3pm I’ll be co-presenting in a session titled: “CHP05 Succeeding with Windows Web Hosting in an Open Source World” where I’ll help dispel myths like “Windows Hosting is expensive” and “Windows doesn’t scale as good as XYZ”.

We’ll also be exhibiting in the Microsoft Hosted Cloud Pavilion at WPC where we’ll be showcasing our new offerings for the first time (yes, you just got a sneak peek) and we’re going to be doing this little contest thing you’ll hear more about on twitter (@appliedI) next week.

Just what is it? What is Awesome?

The Awesome Elastic Cloud Hosting platform, or  “awesome cloud” is simply the evolution of shared hosting.

Awesome Cloud Hosting Eliminates the What-Ifs…

In the past when you were on shared hosting you shared the hardware resources of a single server with hundreds, if not thousands, of other users. If your site was expecting a huge surge in traffic you’d have to make plans to move to a powerful server where all of the resources could be dedicated to just your site. That’s assuming you had the forewarning that this surge was coming otherwise you probably panicked when your site went down because it was overloaded and overloading the server it was one. 

Now, what if you could just flip a button and have your site spread across 2 or 3 or 12 different web servers? Then when the traffic subsided you could go back to just 1 server just as easily? 

Better yet, what if you didn’t have to do anything at all! What if, The server automatically did it all for you? That would be awesome!

Awesome Cloud Hosting Eliminates Hardware Failure Worries..

How about this scenario. Today in shared hosting your server is a single server. If that server experiences a hardware failure, your sites are down. This could be for a few minutes or a few hours.  Let’s face it, we’re all grown ups and we all know that hardware fails, not today, not tomorrow but some day that hardware is going to fail. What happens then? 

What if you never had to worry about hardware failing or a web server corruption or failed server reboot again.  EVER!!

That too would be awesome.

Awesome Cloud Hosting is easy

Today, almost every customer we work with is deploying some sort of popular application, WordPress, DotNetNuke, Umbraco, Joomla, etc.  No matter how easy the developers try to make it though, you still have this install process to run through, files to edit, permissions to set, databases to create ..

What if you could install any application you wanted with just one click!

It really couldn’t be any simplier, select the application, agree to the application’s licensing terms and click install..  That’s Awesome!

Awesome Cloud Hosting is advanced

Today, WebMatrix is all the buzz among web developers as it’s one of the most powerful editors available today and it’s totally free! 

What if your hosting automatically supported webmatrix and you’re able to see all of your webmatrix information on one screen and download a publishsettings file that will import all of these settings into webmatrix with just a click:

Yeah .. That’s awesome!

Awesome Cloud Hosting is Scalable

With the awesome cloud hosting platform we wanted to make this as scalable as possible. Today we’re supporting 4 web servers for your website (we call them web workers) but we could just as easily increase this to 6, 8 or more!

What if you could scale your site across more than one web worker by just moving a slider..

Dare I say it.. Awesome!

Experience Awesome Cloud Hosting.

What if you could be part of the revolution and help shape the future of web hosting … make that cloud hosting, today! Well, you can and you can do that at www.awesome.net 

You know it.. That’s awesome so go signup at www.awesome.net.

Last month I attended MIX 11 in Las Vegas.  MIX is a Microsoft event that is promoted as a casual conversation of developers, designers and business professionals. This event is 100% web application related and covers everything from development to design and rich media.  The great news is if you didn’t attend, almost the entire event is available recorded on Channel 9. This was my 3rd time attending the event and I enjoy it because it’s a great opportunity to sit down and chat with influential developers and designers.  This year was especially exciting because I knew that WebMatrix would be a bit part of the event and here at Applied Innovations, we’re closely involved in that project.

AppliedI in the MIX11 Keynote Addresses

As I mentioned WebMatrix is really an exciting product for us. It’s the first product that allows you to easily create a development environment that mimics your production environment so closely and at the same time allows you to automatically publish files, publish databases, set permissions and support: ASP.NET, PHP, MySQL and MS SQL!

During the keynote address Scott Hanselman built the backend of a demo application in Visual Studio 2010 that used HTML5, jQuery, MVC and NuGet. Then around the 52 minute mark Scott used WebMatrix to build the front end for this application.  Scott demonstrated how you could purchase a template from templatemonster and quickly build a custom website with a professional design.  Then at the one hour mark he used WebMatrix and Web Deploy to publish his application to AppliedI.net:

After Scott, Drew Robbins gave a demo of the Orchard CMS where he built a Flower store. Orchard CMS is an opensource CMS solution that’s brand new and quickly become very popular (in fact, it was all the buzz at MIX). During Drew’s demo he built a store using widgets and helpers to show just how much easier web development has become today.   At the end of Drew’s demo (about the 1 hour 15 minute mark), he published his site to his shared hosting provider .. Applied Innovations:

and you can see that demo yourself still running at: http://wmdemo.webmatrix-appliedi.net/

Awesome Elastic Cloud Hosting is born!

The second reason I was excited to attend MIX’11 and the real reason I was there is that we were announcing the open beta of a new project we’ve been working on for the past year, Awesome Elastic Cloud Hosting which is available today at www.awesome.net. 

What is Elastic Cloud Hosting?

Simply, it’s the future of web hosting and the culmination of everything cloud up to this point.  Elastic Cloud Hosting is the ability to host your website on multiple web servers that are all load balanced and clustered. In the event a web server fails, the other servers in the cluster immediately take over the processing of your website and your visitors never see an outage! In the event your website gets spotlighted on Good Morning America, Oprah, Slashdot or any of a number of web server crushing services your website will automatically scale out across more web servers and magically handle the load for you with your visitors never seeing an outage or a slow down!

This is truly awesome web hosting technology and as such we’ve decided to launch it on http://www.awesome.net/ and encourage you to try it.  The Awesome.net platform was announced in two sessions (one on Orchard and one on MVC) and around 1200 attendees invited to the beta.

Miscellaneous MIX’11

MIX this year also talked a great deal about Windows Phone 7 and the enhancements being made to this platform.  This was especially exciting because Windows Phone 7 leverages Silverlight for application development and pretty much anyone that develops web applications can easily develop mobile applications with Windows Phone 7.  Microsoft also talked about the XBOX Kinect and that Microsoft will be releasing Kinect for the PC!

Of course, I can’t write a blog post about MIX’11 without talking about our good friend Clint Rutkas or as he’ll be known from now on .. Dr. Xavier! 

Clint Rutkas (Microsoft Evangelist) single handedly built two robotic reclining chairs that you could drive by simply waving your hands in front of a Kinect sensor! It was on the front page of all of the tech websites after MIX. Clint and Microsoft will be releasing the source code and plans for this contraption shortly but here’s yours truly enjoying a ride in the chair:

Here’s a few other photos

That’s myself with a couple of the folks from the Microsoft Web Platform

That’s Josh Holmes (Microsoft Evangelist & proudly hosted with AppliedI) and myself

That’s John McCarrick from Parallels (our automation partners) & myself

That’s myself and Thomas Robbins from Kentico.com one of our app partners

That’s Philip Beadle (hosted here at AppliedI) from DotNetNuke and guess who.. yeap.. me.

We’re getting ready to launch the beta of the new awesome.net windows cloud hosting platform. I was showing the new awesome.net site to Will Strohl (DotNetNuke guru and all around good guy) and he said “Jess, make sure you get facebook on there and you integrate it with the open graph api so you can admin it and get analytics and stuff”. The URL he sent me to was: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/.

Now before you go running off to awesome.net, If it’s not after 4/11/11 then you’re not going to see much, but if it’s after 4/11/11 then go ahead and sign up for a beta account, it will be FREE until sometime in September.

Anyway, Will gave me the pointer to the Open Graph but how to integrate it just wasn’t as straightforward as you’d hope so I wanted to give you a quick start guide with this blog post because I think this is something everyone should be doing with their websites.

Quick Intro to the Open Graph API

The Open Graph API allows you to integrate your Web pages into Facebook making it equivalent to a Facebook Page.  This means, when someone clicks “Like” on your web page a connection is made between the user and your page and your page will show up in their likes and interests section on their profile.

Not only that but you can also push information on Facebook to people that have liked your web page. 

Basically, Open Graph will allow the Web to marry Facebook and the two to become one.

You can learn more about Open Graph at: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/

How To Integrate your Site

What we’re going to do is add a like box to your website so that when visitors like your page it will create a small post on their Facebook page so that their friends will hopefully visit your site and like it too!

The first thing you’ll want to do is visit the open graph URL and give it a read.

1. Pick Your Title

Let’s decide what the title of our page will be. This should be human readable text and t’s going to be the title on the post that people will see.  In my case, I opted for “My Cloud is Awesome.net!” as seen below

so then I create meta tags in a text editor.  It looks like this:

<meta property="og:title" content="My Cloud is Awesome.Net!" />

One note on the title. You’ll be able to change your title up until you have 50 followers and then it’s locked in for good. So make sure you’re happy with the title you picked (I may actually be changing mine soon).

2. Pick your Site Name

Pretty simple, what’s your website’s name? I opted for the domain name in this case so it looks like this:

<meta property="og:site_name" content="Awesome.Net" />

3. Decide on your Type.

Now you’ll have a few options here depending on what your site is about, it could be about an actor, athlete, city, landmark, book, drink, food or it could be about a blog, website or company. In my case, it was about a company so I opted for company and the tag looks like this:

<meta property="og:type" content="company" />

4. Define your URL

This is the URL that will be used to identify your site/object and will be used as it’s permanent ID. I decided to keep it simple and use the main page as the URL so my tag looks like:

<meta property="og:url" content="http://www.awesome.net/" />

The result:

5. Define an Image

Facebook is all about the images. So you’ll want to get an image that’s atleast 50 pixels by 50 pixels in size and post it on your site.  In my case I used:

<meta property="og:image" content="http://www.awesome.net/images/mycloudisawesome.jpg" />

So the image shows here:

6. Define your Description.

This will be the text that shows up next your image and under the post title. I went with some marketing talk:

<meta property="og:description" content="Awesome Websites Deserve Awesome.Net Cloud Hosting. Experience the future of cloud hosting, for FREE!" />

Similar to the title you’re able to change your title at any time but eventually you’ll get enough followers that your description will be locked in permanently. How many? 10,000 followers.  Yes, 10,000. Let’s hope you hit that number (and please don’t do a Charlie Sheen to get there .. good actor, poor choices.).

Here’s how it came out:

7. Define your Admin

You’ll want to make yourself the administrator of your site. You have the option to allow an application to administer your site on facebook or you can have a person do it. I decided to do it myself. How do you pick the administrator? You have to know your Facebook User ID. No this is not your email address, it’s actually a numeric number.  Here’s the easiest way to figure it out.

1. Log into facebook go to your profile and click on photos
2. Next select any album under your photos.  in the url you’ll see something like this:
3. http://www.facebook.com/album.php?id=777777777&aid=269239
4. That number after id= is your facebook user id (in the above example it’s 777777777 and no that’s not really my User ID, I’m only using it as an example.

So your admin tag will look like this:

<meta property="fb:admins" content="77777777777" />

8. Define your Optional Data.

These you can find explained on the Open Graph API docs but I went with the following:

<meta property="email" content="sales@awesome.net" />
<meta property="phone_number" content="866-706-8691" />

9. Add it all to your meta tags in your web page’s <HEAD></HEAD>

So once you have all of these ready, go ahead and copy and paste them into your web site’s source code inside of the <HEAD> section. Ideally, place it all just before </HEAD>.

10. Test Before you Like

Before you go liking your site. Make sure Facebook is reading everything on your site. The easiest way to do this is with the Facebook URL Linter at: http://developers.facebook.com/tools/lint/

Putting in http://www.awesome.net I get:

The reason this is important is that the first time I built my page, it didn’t pull my meta data correctly, I liked the page and then immediately had to remove the post from my facebook profile. So test first. Once you’re happy go ahead and like it.

11. Add the Like Code.

Next we need to add the like code to our site. In my case, I went with iframe code. Here’s a tidbit, when loading external javascript if you load it as a iframe it won’t slow down the site from loading in the event there’s a problem with the site you’re pulling the javascript from.

You can visit: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/ to see the different plugins you can integrate with your site. I used the like button builder: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/ and copied in the iframe code to my site in the footer:

Why you’ll want integrate the Open Graph API

So you probably saw in the image above where I embedded I have links for an Admin Page and Insights. These are only visible if you’re an admin of your application and visit the site. Clicking on the Admin Page I can see:

So I can interact with my page there and if I go to my Wall I can post stuff that will show up to my fans, etc.

Next we’ll take a sneak peek at the insights page. Since this is a new app on facebook you won’t have any insights to display but it’s going to provide information like this:

Where to go next?

First I’m going to ask that you do me a favor and visit the www.awesome.net site and like the page (bottom left hand corner) next I’ll recommend you check out http://developer.facebook.com and start experimenting with what you can do there. 

Oh and if you’re wondering who that was in my Facebook page, that’s Lyza from www.acutevisibility.com their company does online branding and marketing, if you’re not comfortable integrating the Open Graph API with your site or want to learn more about it, I’m sure they’d be happy to chat with you on it.

Great Customer Service is never perfected.  It’s only through constantly striving to improve on the customer experience that you ultimately deliver great customer service and even then you still need to look back and say “That was a great customer experience but what could we have done just that much better to make it an even GreatER customer experience?” Because that’s what it’s going to take to compete.

Instant feedback on a GreatER customer experience

We are always looking at ways we can improve upon our customer experience and a few weeks ago we started experimenting with a couple ideas.  We routinely run customer satisfaction surveys (in fact we’re due for one shortly) and they give us a pretty good snapshot of how things are going at that point but not how we did yesterday, today, tomorrow, etc.  So the idea was born that we wanted to implement instant, ongoing customer feedback surveys! First we started building out what features we’d like:

• Ratings specific to each support engineer – so they could be individually held accountable for specific tickets.
• Ratings by department & company – hey bragging rights! Internal, external, at the water cooler or the family barbeque … you get the idea.
• Needs to be simple – most systems had a scale of 1-10, 1-5. I am never quite sure is 1 better than 10 or 10 better than 1 … eh forget it! I’m not bothering with this thing
• Reflect the customer’s experience / feelings – Let’s face it, we’re emotional creatures and like it or not a lot of our actions are based on our emotions.
• The ability to leave more information – In the event one of us slipped, feedback (negative or positive) from a customer is always a gift!
• Easy to implement and easy for the customer!

We knew something had to be out there already and sure enough we came across a blog post by the folks at 37signals on their system.  We did a little more searching and found the folks at nicereply.com had a blog post on how to do the same thing with their application … SCORE!

A couple hours later we had the code loaded up and integrated into our signatures in our email/ticket support system!

How we’re measuring it

Our ticketing system today is based off of Kayako.com’s supportsuite version 3.0. It’s pretty much become an industry standard ticketing system. What we’ve done is inside each email reply you get from one of us is a link at the footer:

Once you click on that link, you’re taken to a simple page:

You simply click on the smiley face that reflects ‘how you feel’ about the response you got

Leave any comments (if you like) and click send rating! Our little app connects to the nicereply API and leaves the information for our management team.  Then the management team can go in and review responses, read customer feedback (remember, positive or negative it’s always a gift and helps us improve) and review support engineer performance as an individual, a team, and a company to see how we’re doing.

So what’s your score Jess?

Yeah, I know.  What’s your score Jess?  (I bet he’s mentioning this because they’re kicking butt and he just wants to brag how great they are…) Actually, it’s not bad but it’s not as good as it needs to be.  As I mentioned, the thirst for greatER customer service is part of my DNA. I want it and I want it bad and we have some work.

Here’s how we did in February (we launched a few days before that)

57 ratings with an average rating of 9.68. With 2 customers that gave us “normal” and 1 that gave us a “poor”.   That’s the good news, the bad news is so far this month we’ve had 49 ratings and the average is a 9.02 (yeah, I’m not happy at all but the month isn’t over yet and we’ll work to get that above last month’s numbers).

But that’s really only part of it, the really juicy stuff is what you, our customers and online business partners are saying. The feedback we’re getting is INVALUABLE! Here’s a few examples from this week:

“Patiently worked with me until the problem was solved.”

“Great service!”

“I work with applied i a lot. Hosting is hosting, I stay for the service.”

“An unusual problem troubleshooted and solved in 5 minutes. Can’t get any better than that..”

The list goes on. Of course, we’ve got some room for improvement too but that’s why this is the pursuit of greatER customer service because I know we’re delivering great customer service, we just want greatER customer service.

The Pursuit of GreatER Customer Service Needs Your Help

In our quest to constantly provide GreatER customer service, I need to ask for your help. If we want to not only continue to provide great customer service but improve it and become the hosting provider with GreatER customer service then we need to ask that you take the time to click that link in the email replies from time to time and let us know how we’re doing right then, right there.

So on your next ticket, please take the 15 seconds to let us know how it’s going.

Thanks, Jess