BenBlog

Ever since I was a child my dad was always promoting local businesses. He refused to shop at the big box stores, opting for the mom-pop stores. He believed that the service was better, and that the prices were fair. His theory (which I believe has some scientific merit) was that of every $1 you spend locally, $.70 goes back to your community.

I too work for a locally owned company. I know the president of my employer (Profitability.Net) very well, and feel very fortunate to work with them.

I had a feel good deal the other day that gave me the idea to write this post, and that’s of Waltz Business Systems.
We’re a very, very small client of theirs but they seem to care about our business. When we have toner go dry at our offices, we don’t call up Staples or any of the others, Waltz Business sends out a guy to our office to take care of the situation. And at the end of the day, the price is good and fair.

I like to express to my clients that they are not a number. That each account is important to me. Matt Jehn and the rest of the crew at Waltz Business seem to hold these same values dear. If you’re in the need of copiers, printers, or tech training, I’d at least give them the opportunity to quote and keep the business local!

Popularity: 5% [?]

Email is a mission critical application.

10 years ago it wasn’t, but that was before everyone’s IPhones and BlackBerries buzzed their pocket.  That was before when you didn’t respond to an inquiry, they wouldn’t search for your competition and by the time you responded, the business was lost.

Email is a mission critical application.

GMail had a worldwide outage last night, successfully making Eastern Europe unaccesible via Gmail for the better part of their day.  Should they be mad?  Well, yes and no.  Yes they should be mad that Google hadn’t posted a rhyme / reason / resolution for the outage.  I guess their guys were head deep in a server cabinet in the Google bunker and didn’t have a PR guy to post an update.

But on the other hand, you get what you pay for.  Did you really think that paying $50 / year for your companies email would really include true 100% uptime, or even 99%?  1% of the year is 87+ hours!   Do you really think that they have someone on the other side of the phone ready to answer your question and give you a backup plan?

One day this may be a viable option.  One day we may be able to only use dumb servers to connect to a server in “The Cloud” that will serve up all our content and 100% of the time everything will work in this pretty fluffy cloud.  Care bears and all.  Until then, I’m only going to trust multiple load-balanced mail servers, serving not millions of users, not 100,000′s, but a managable load.   My email is important for my business.   My business is important to my clients.  They’re important to me.

Email is a mission critical application.

Gmail Down!

Popularity: 5% [?]

Washington DC Obama Inauguration

I was lucky enough to have the ability to travel to DC for the inauguration on Tuesday.  10 hours in a car, sleep on a couch, and a bitter cold 16 mile walk the next day, and I couldn’t have been happier.

Things that I noticed:

- 1 Million + people packed into a large wind tunnel on a cold day on the Potomac River, yet not one
person seemed to mind the cold or being cramped next to total strangers.

- A man held his 5 year old child up next to the Washington Memorial during the Inaugural speech and
told him “One Day you’ll tell your son you were here” and knowing that young man really will.

- As where there seemed to be a high democrat population, not one person (literally) showed any type
of ill will towards the president elect nor his policies. There was a true sense of national unity.

- Being just one in an amazingly large throng of people taking your hat off and singing the national
anthem can be a truly moving experience.

- 16 mile walk that will really hurt tomorrow, but is well worth every blister on my toes.

- 500 mile drive home and the highways were filled with people w/ Obama stickers.  Everyone was waving at each other, honking, and pumping fists while doing 65MPH.

- At rest stops on the way home people were literally giving us high-5′s as we were walking around.

All politics aside, this is simply amazing.  1.5 Million people converged in one spot, and not one person was arrested.

Here’s to peaceful transfers of power.  Here’s to hope for a better tomorrow.  Here’s to America, the land AND the idea.

Swearing In

Popularity: 23% [?]

Can you afford your business to have this image on it’s homepage?

I often get questions about why someone shouldn’t use a budget web host.  These are web hosts that you commonly see hosting for $10 a month with amazing promises of 100GB of storage and unlimited transfer.  They have ads all over the place, in magazines, on Superbowl Commercials, and online advertising on almost every google search.  Their names are familiar and usually say something quirky such as “supergreathostdaddy.com”.

The other day I had a friend call and say that their website that was hosted at GoDaddy went down.  I gathered their information and called GoDaddy to see if I couldn’t help alleviate the situation.

When I asked their technical support why this site was offline they mentioned that his account was $20 past balance and that they had removed the hosting option from his account.  Amazed that they would remove their site for such a small balance, I asked that if the $20 was resolved if they would reinstate his hosting, they agreed.  Then I asked if I would be able to retrieve the files only to find out that GoDaddy had removed them.  They were more than happy to restore the backup copy that they “Most probably” had, for a fee of $159.

Most reputable webhosts will maintain multiple backups of your site and can restore your data with a quick call to their support team, and at no cost.  Backups are an integral part of any hosting package, normally they only take a few minutes to restore, and it’s just simply good service.

Another feature that they love to offer is their amazing amounts of transfer that they allow.  However, if you do actually experience any real traffic, they’ll pull your site offline as it’s too taxing on their servers as well as the bandwidth is costing them much more than you are paying annually.  This happens quite often actually and in my opinion is a bad business decision.  You want your site to have traffic.  You build it with this in mind. You want people to use your site and see it’s content.  Finally you get some good press, people are visiting your site, your name recognition is gaining, and then they rip your site down for actually asking for what they promised.

Another point that is worth considering is the theory that shared hosting is much akin to living in an apartment building.  When looking for an apartment to reside your home or business in, would you consider a run down, overcrowded building with shady neighbors who don’t lock their windows at night?

Many of these webhosts do not take the time to get to know their clientele, and therefore are unaware of what is being hosted on their (sometimes outdated) servers.  These servers are overcrowded to maximize profits per server, often with 1000′s of sites on each server, many shoddily coded and open for malicious attack.

Is your neighbor hosting porn?  Are they running a file server pushing out illegal music / movies / software? Are they using the same mailserver that you use to send clients critical email to send out spam?

It’s anybody’s guess.

One last point that comes to mind is customer service.  Many of these companies simply cannot afford to have actual people answer the phone, much less one who knows you and knows your business and it’s needs.  Often times you’ll have your call transferred to a foreign company that has been outsourced to take care of support, if you’re so lucky to even find a phone number on their website to call when you need help.

It all goes back to the idea of “you get what you pay for”.  If you spend more on your coffee each day than you do on making sure your business’ online presence is secure and always available, you may want to reconsider your business plan.

Popularity: 96% [?]

Margarita’s Restaurant
Tower Place Mall
28 West Fourth St.
Cincinnati, OH  45202

There are a few things in this world that upon thinking of them I automatically smile. Baseball games on a nice summer day, driving the Jeep with top off doors off, a pretty smile from a pretty girl, all are up there in making me feel good. But I was let down by another of my favorites today, Mexican lunches.

Normally we go to Rio Grande Mexican Restaurant in Southgate KY, but being a tad snowed in at the office, today we walked to Tower Place on 4^th Street downtown Cincinnati. I was in the mood for Mexican since I’ll be unavailable for the normal “Fiesta Fridays” at Rio Grande, and talked the guys into going to Margarita’s in the basement of the Tower Place complex.

Now in the past we have gone there and have always said “it’s OK at best, but it’s no Rio Grande.” It’s definitely not on “The List” as far as restaurants that we frequent and take out friends to. But, it will do in a pinch, or so I thought. Upon entering the themed restaurant we were seated off in a corner all by ourselves. One of the reasons I like to eat lunch everyday at a restaurant is to experience the camaraderie of the public. I was not too big of a fan of their seating arrangements today. Now, normally this place is packed, but due to the inclement weather, there may have been ten tables down. So there we are off in the distance when our waitress approached us with the normal complimentary chips and salsa. The chips were OK, but the salsa was the worse imitation of a Mexican condiment that I have ever seen. I make it a point to taste as many Salsas as I can, I wouldn’t call myself a connoisseur, however I am an avid participant in tastings. This salsa had all the flair of a Kroger Brand can of tomato paste, and not their “Private Selection” brand either, the cheap white can stuff. You seriously could spread it across dough, throw some cheese on it, and call it a pizza. Disgusting.

So there we are, Aaron, Andrew and myself all disappointed at the lack of effort in crafting a good salsa when the waitress arrives to take our order. I asked the young lady if they had any hot salsa, to which she handed me a bottle of hot sauce off the table.

“you can use this” was her unhelpful answer. I returned “I was actually looking for a homemade salsa perhaps that was hotter than this” hoping that they had a secret stash of salsa in the back that tasted better. “We do, but it’ll be an extra $1, so I suggest you use the bottle”. Not much of a salesperson, nor is it proper etiquette to make patrons pay for salsa. I can’t think of any other Mexican restaurant that would ask for extra. I believe that the ancient Aztecs began the tradition of free salsa, and it’s been in place ever since. I imagine that those who came up with this additional charge are haunted and cursed by the aforementioned creators.

Not being able to stomach the salsa, I figure that their burrito must be a good lunch as it’s priced around $10. I’m not saying that Chipotle is the best burrito in the world, but they certainly have set a par for the tortilla concoction. This burrito had half the girth of a normal Chipotle-esque burrito and was wrapped in aluminum foil. The foil itself scares me. I hate things that I’ll chew on being wrapped in foil in ever fear of leaving a tad on and biting on it. The burrito itself was void of flavor, the beef wasn’t strips of beef, rather ground beef that had been cooked. The other fillings were bland and I had eaten my burrito in no more than 5 minutes. No side items came accompanying the $10 burrito, and upon getting the check, I felt somewhat cheated.

Now I must admit that they have a great list of tequilas and their margaritas are quite tasty.  We have stopped there a couple times on the way to the ballpark to enjoy, but I would limit my purchases to their bar and stay away from their kitchen.

There’s a small list of restaurants that are on the permanently banned status for our lunches, however Margarita’s has made those ranks. It’s a shame too, I do love Mexican cuisine.

Popularity: 94% [?]

Thanksgiving is a time for remembering the amazing things in our life that we are thankful for, eating copious amounts of food, acting kindly to strangers, and of course football. Let’s think about football for a second. On each side of the line of scrimmage you have large blockers and defensive linemen trying to get the precious pigskin from the quarterback before he lands a reception to the receiver. Without the offensive line the quarterback doesn’t stand a chance against the rushing defensive line. He’s toast.

Quite similar to an online transaction really.

In the online world, you have the football (your credit card), the passer (you), and the defensive linemen (spammers / phishers / badguys). Depending on how you protect yourself, you can either make a successful pass to the receiver (amazon.com) or you can get nailed by the bad guys. What type of protection do you have for your precious information?

58% of shoppers this year intend on buying at least one gift online, while 70% overall are planning on filling their entire list from online retailers. In preparation of this deluge of transactions the bad guys have been hard at work as well. These guys are busy sending out millions upon millions of spam messages trying to hawk their fake Rolexes and their Viagra pills. Some of them are harmless, simply delete the mail. Others, however, contain viruses and malware.

Attackers will be creating fake e-commerce sites hoping users will voluntarily hand over their information, a socially engineered cyberattack, as opposed to more elaborate, technical methods in a cybercriminal’s arsenal. and even spoofed websites that look and feel exactly like the one’s your used to buying from.

If you fall for the last one, you’re basically handing your credit cards into the hands of evil doers.

I encourage online purchases, and will do almost all of my shopping from the comfort of my living room this year, with the exception of a few items. But every year I hear horror stories of identity theft and computer corruption. So, go ahead and pick up that new TV for your lovely husband, after all, the lawn didn’t mow itself. But make sure that take some basic procedures into play first.

- Do not leave your wireless network at home open.
- Do not click directly on links embedded in emails. Copy and paste them into a browser first, and
make sure that it’s really amazon.com and not amazzon.com or any other misspellings.
- When possible, use secure services that offer fraud protection such as PayPal.
- Incorporate an awesome spam filter, not one that is software based but rather service based. I
prefer Postini.

If you’re an online retailer, make sure that you are behind a managed firewall in a secure data center and using a secure connection. It’s only fair to the people helping you put presents under the tree!

Happy Holidays, and safe shopping!
-Ben

(Oh, and if you’re interested, I’m hoping Santa brings me a new pair of Infinity Kappa 462.9cfp speakers, found on Ebay and they accept Pay Pal )

Popularity: 97% [?]