Phone System Downtime

Venture Computer Systems will be installing our new Shoretel phone sytem tomorrow (1/3/08). This new VOIP phone system will provide us with additional features and will accomodate our growing staff. There may be some intermittent disruptions in our phone system while the changeover takes place tomorrow.

If you experience such a disruption while trying to call us tomorrow, please accept our appologies and send an email to support@cws.net for an immediate response. Thank you for allowing us to serve you better.

Ask CWS: Hosting Plan Limits

Question: Other hosting companies offer unlimited hard drive space, unlimited emails, and 100 terabytes of data transfer per month. Why don't you offer this much?

Anwser: Simple, we don't oversell our servers.

When a company oversells hosting they are selling more resources than they currently have, just like an airline that sells more seats than the plane can hold because they expect a few to reschedule. For example, if you have a server with a 300 GB hard drive, and you sell hosting packages with 10GB of storage to 50 customers, you have sold 500 GB of server space. Since you only have a 300 GB hard drive, you've oversold the server by 200 GB.

Why do hosting companies do this? Because they know that the typical website only takes up around 50 MB of space and uses 1 GB of bandwidth per month, so on average, these 50 customers shouldn't use up all of the resources on the server.

If a typical website only takes up 50 MB, imagine how many of them you could fit on a 300 GB server -- over 6,000! The potential profits from this type of arrangement, and thus the temptation to do so, are huge. But it doesn't seem very ethical to promise what you can't deliver, simply trusting that your customers won't ask you to fulfill your promise, does it?

We don't think so.

We believe that companies who offer "unlimited" emails or "unlimited" hard drive space are doing exactly that -- promising something they can't possibly deliver. These types of offers also tend to attract a few customers who do try to take advantage of the provider and steal precious resources from quality customers (like you). We want your business website to perform at an optimal level at all times and not be affected by some kid who is streaming a video to five thousand college buddies.

If we promise more than we can deliver, we can't guarantee reliability 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. That's our promise to you and the reason we don't offer hosting plans with ridiculous limits on hard drive space, bandwidth or email accounts. Thanks for asking!

Have a question for us?
Got a question about design, business, marketing, etc? We would be honored to provide some insight into how we'd tackle the issue. Send an email to support [at] cws dot net with the subject "Ask CWS".

End of the year maintenance

It's the end of the year, and do you know where your web site is? Is some of your content outdated, or worse, not showing up at all? Making an annual assessment of your site is a great idea, and here are a few suggestions on what to look for.

1. Is your "About Us" page updated?
Have you been in business for 8 years for the last 3 years? Check on how current this page is. Update any time sensitive items and any services you may or may no longer provide.

2. Are your contact forms working properly?
Make sure that when a customer wants to contact you, messages get to the correct person. Be sure that a form, whose recipient may not always be obvious, is sending messages to your current sales person and not the one who left six months ago.

3. If you have other email addresses or contact information on your web site, are they correct?
Review all your published contact information. Nothing can turn a potential customer away faster than not being able to contact you.

4. Do all your links work -- both within your site and especially those that link off site?
When you're linking to content that you don't control, it's critical to review those links regularly to make sure they're still valid. Check all links, even the ones within your site, to make sure that your customers are getting to the correct place. There is a free online tool to check them here.

5. Check your WHOIS record.
This record is used by your registrar to contact you in case your domain (web site address) is about to expire, or for other important notices. Check yours at Network Solutions.

6. Do an overall review of your web site.
Check photos and see if they're still current and representative of your business. Are any graphics dated? Should you update any content? Do your pages load fast enough or are they slow?

This sort of review should be done yearly at a minimum. Some items can be checked quickly, and others may take some time, depending on the scale of your site. But in the long run, the advantages of a well-maintained website make it worth your time and effort.

We're Alive and Kicking

It's been over a month since our last communication... and we feel horrible about that. It's kind of like when you forget to call your mother for awhile. You keep remembering that you need to call, but something more pressing seems to come up. We're sorry about that and promise to make it up to you real soon.

To bring you up to speed, here's what we've been up to:

Lyle:

Lyle went on vacation last month, which started a work overload at our office. (Yes Mom, it's all his fault). He was gone for nearly 10 days traveling the country and having a great time with his wife Sarah. His shoes are nearly impossible to fill, so we've been busy catching up ever since his big trip.

Alan:

The Walk America walk was a huge success. We had a fantastic turnout of over 600 people and raised lots of money to help save babies. It was very cool and Carson has agreed to continue to be the Ambassador for the March of Dimes Chef Auction later this fall. We look forward to helping this great cause as much as we can.

Ryan:

Ryan just finished another year of college and continues to get smarter by the minute (or at least that's what he tells us). Needless to say, we're happy to have him back on staff full-time for the summer.

As a company, we have some really exciting projects in development. The Rochester Downtown Alliance is set to launch in just a few short weeks (keeping Josh busy). In addition, we're starting or working on web projects for The Wing House, Chocolate Time, Dean Riggott Photography, the Mayo Civic Center, Mayo Clinic, ABPMR, Custom Alarm, and Tru Tain (to name a few). Look for launch announcements about these companies in the coming months.

As if that wasn't enough to keep us busy, we continue to expand our video production business with several projects in the works for the Rochester Convention and Visitors Bureau. Graphic design and logo development continues to be an expanding part of our business, so as of this week we have added a new section to our website.

Now that we've "gotten back in touch", we promise to call more often. We'll have more updates, marketing suggestions, and website tips in the very near future. Well, as long as Lyle doesn't take any more vacation. :)