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.

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.

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.

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.

Please allow me to share with you some lessons we’ve learned at Dynamic Net, Inc. from a lightning storm that took out our business phone system.

Several weeks ago we had a major power outage after a lightning storm that lasted several hours (depending on your geographic area or power company that might be very short or very long; for us it was long).

By the end of the day, we noticed that our business phone system wasn’t working the way that it should.

We didn’t notice at first because it is our goal to answer every single call — there are no menu prompts during business hours.

Once we hit after hours, we found out calls coming in were not receiving any menu and were going directly to our office manager’s voice mail.

If you are like us where you take every point of customer service seriously, you can understand our dilemma.

Since we do our best to Think Local, we did purchase our business phone system local to our physical place of business.

When we called them, we were told it would require a base fee of $212.00 (that included travel time to our office; they were approximately 30 minutes away) along with one hour of labor. Additional labor would be at $150.00 per hour.

While I felt the fees were on the higher end, I also knew we would be supporting a local business if we went through them; and they did provide value for the rate.

However, I was reminded of the main concerns faced by a lot of my fellow small business stewards — the uncertainty of the project.

The business phone system provider could not provide a ball park estimate so this could be a $212.00 project or a $812.00 project (if the tech was at our office for four hours) or much larger as parts were not included, and there would be the potential of multiple times back and forth to the office. Each one incurring the $212.00 base price.

While the hourly rates were within industry averages, and I can understand travel time having previously done on-site based work, the uncertainty of the total cost for maintaining a 15 or so year old system was unnerving.

Looking back, what surprises me is that the vendor did not present other options such as buying a new / replacement business phone system where the total cost can be known in advance.

The lesson I was reminded of here is that whenever you working with a customer, do your best to provide a narrow base line picture that caps their investment. Do give them options, and do cover your bases (you are not in business to lose money). When possible, give them two to three alternative choices (i.e. this is the cost to fix, this is the cost to replace or cost to fix, and here are two replacements).

The uncertainty of the cost to fix the existing, approximately 15-year old, business phone system encouraged us to look at alternatives including VOIP (voice over Internet protocol).

VOIP has come a long way over the past decade. Originally, the call quality was extremely poor; and your dial menu plans were extremely limited. Often times you had to have an expert create the dial plan; and should you need changes to that plan, incur further expenses updating it.

We did our home work in this area; and there were a lot of good choices out there — GetJive, Grasshopper, RingCentral, and many others.

Based on our needs, we settled in GetJive.com.

We paid approximately $260.00 for the IP-based phones (the original system cost approximately $3,000 — and just to fix it was $212.00 base plus uncertainty). There was no setup fee. We will save approximately $120.00 per month on our phone bill. We also have a web-based means for creating and maintaining our dial plan; and since we want to answer calls as we are able (goal is that no customer gets the phone menu), the system allows us to do that. We can even set up custom dial plans for our VIP customers; all without paying an outside party.

Two lessons learned:

• Whenever you working with a customer, do your best to provide a narrow base line picture that caps their investment. Do give them options, and do cover your bases (you are not in business to lose money). When possible, give them two to three alternative choices (i.e. this is the cost to fix, this is the cost to replace or cost to fix, and here are two replacements).
• Use any down turn as an opportunity to review options; be open to change and adapt as necessary.

What lessons have you learned when something bad happened in your business? Please share them in the comments below.

We do our best to buy products made in the U.S. even if we have to pay more to do so.

I would like to encourage you to do the same; doing so keeps more of the dollars you spend in the local economy. Plus your continued support of local businesses may help them keep their current employees as well as hire more employees.

If you live or work in Berks County, Dauphin County, Lancaster County, Lebanon County, Lehigh County, and York County, please give us the opportunity to earn your web and email hosting business by calling us at 1-717-484-1062 or 1-888-887-6727 or using our contact us form.

Since I believe it is important to put your money where your mouth is (live and do what you speak), let me share with you a partial list of the local businesses and organizations we have supported in 2012.

If you live or work in Berks County, Dauphin County, Lancaster County, Lebanon County, Lehigh County, and York County, please give us the opportunity to earn your web and email hosting business by calling us at 1-717-484-1062 or 1-888-887-6727 or using our contact us form.

I’ve found you stay in touch by being in touch.

The most recent topic of discussion in the Linked To Lancaster LinkedIn group was the need for every single organization to have a web site — especially if your organization is a small business.

Kenton’s statement makes a lot of sense.

Web site design is very visual. Designers can white board, story board, and show you successful sites they have created in the past.

What can a web hosting company show you, visually, that they are unique as well as the being the company for you?

The Kennebunk Inn in Maine, US came to mind. Brian and Shanna O’Hea came to us in the year 2005 when they needed a managed hosting provider who would help keep their site secure; and walk them through the ecommerce dance.

Brian and Shanna are passionate about cooking, about food, and about their inn.

Like most small businesses, they don’t have the time to make sure their web site is online yet alone worry about the what if… what if their work is featured on a major network? Would their web site be crushed? Would they be pressured to upgrade to a VPS or dedicated server from their economical shared hosting plan?

Who has time for those worries?

Back to cooking and great food. Did you know Brian and Shanna have “THE BEST” Maine Lobster Pie?

Iron Chef Cat Cora put her reputation on the mark when she picked the Maine Lobster Pie from The Kennebunk Inn in Maine. Brian and Shanna’s work was featured on The Food Network, The Best Thing I’ve Ever Ate.

All of our infrastructure was completely green while The Kennebunk Inn’s sales of Maine Lobster Pie skyrocketed from being featured on the show.

Brian and Shanna didn’t have to worry about being throttled or otherwise being put into a bad spot due to being featured on a major TV network.

When Shanna O’Hea was one of the competing chefs on The Food Network show, Chopped, she didn’t have to spend a moment worrying if her and her husband’s web site was up and running.

Shanna spent her time on Chopped cooking with passion!

Just like when Brian and Shanna’s Maine Lobster Pie was featured, being on a major TV network with increased site traffic still had the servers and environment with green lights on.

Each and every one of our customers matter to us. We compete on core values we believe strongly benefit our business customers.

If you are not 100% happy with your web site hosting provider, contact us to discuss how we can be your servant and provide you with reliable and secure hosting.

Those who don’t believe in Jesus might smile at the sentiment. Those who are just fans of Jesus might think of some similar event in their lives. Those who are fully committed to Jesus knows this is just the first of many landmarks of a long journey.

Today, I would like to encourage you to put your faith in Christ Jesus into action… into action by how you view customers, how you view work, and how you apply the Bible to your day to day life at work.

Every day you face people who believe faith is something you only “practice” (show, put on, etc.) on Sunday’s or on a Wednesday evening. You are told you should keep “religion” and “politics” out of conversation.

I want to encourage you to understand and live your faith. Faith is not a piece of clothing or jewelry you put on and take off. Neither is it something you brag about or show off as if it is just a piece of eye candy.

It is my firm belief the Bible is more than a x thousand year old book; it is my firm belief we can find practical applications on how to live our day to day lives from the Bible.

Please let me share with you some Bible verses which I hope and pray will encourage you in the areas of being a servant to your customers.

“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters,” — Colossians 3:23 NIV

Please let me remind you whether you are a business owner, co-owner, manager, or employee, we are all stewards (God owns everything).

We report to Jesus. All the work we do should be done willingly, cheerfully, with all of our heart with the goal to glorify and please Jesus.

What will our attitude be like if we view every single customer need as being one driven by the desire to lovingly serve Jesus for His Glory, and His Honor?

What will our customers see in us if we make ever effort to do our best for them from our heart?

“You will do all right, if you obey the most important law in the Scriptures. It is the law that commands us to love others as much as we love ourselves. But if you treat some people better than others, you have done wrong, and the Scriptures teach that you have sinned.” — James 2:8-9 CEV

As we serve our customers, we need to do our best to treat each customer equally with the same effort and same heart. While we need to honor all service level agreements, we need to be very careful to have the right attitude and mindset that every single customer from the person paying the least to the person paying the most, from the person who is easiest to work with to the person who is the hardest to work with that all should be treated with love, patience, and care.

Speaking of love, let us be reminded what is love.

“Love is kind and patient, never jealous, boastful, proud, or rude. Love isn’t selfish or quick tempered. It doesn’t keep a record of wrongs that others do. Love rejoices in the truth, but not in evil. Love is always supportive, loyal, hopeful, and trusting. Love never fails!” 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 CEV (1st line of 8)

Followers of Christ Jesus are called to love everyone — yes, everyone. In doing so, we are reminded to be kind. Are you thinking of ways to show kindness to your customers?

Love is patient. When you are on that phone call, are you looking at the clock or wondering about when you can get off the call, or are you focusing on being patient with the customer?

When a customer shares with you about their achievements or if their business is going well, don’t get jealous or feel you have to boast about your own accomplishments. Be humble, and not proud.

Be careful never to be rude with your customers; and be quick to apologize if you have given offense (of critical importance, if your customer or someone else points out you were rude, take their word for it, humble yourself, and apologize without regard to what you believe).

While I do believe there is a time and place to fire customers, you want to be very careful to keep no record of their wrong doings. We all sin and fall short of God’s Glory. It is only by His Grace, and His Mercy we have anything. We can do all things through Christ Jesus who strengthens us, but this never makes us perfect or better than our customers or anyone else.

Rejoice with your customers over truth and anything they share which is of God (whether or not they believe in God). Do not rejoice in any suffering or wrong.

Always try to be supportive to your customers, loyal to them (without worry or concern as to if they are loyal to you). Trust in God, not in men or women.

“I can endure all these things through the power of the one who gives me strength.” — Philipians 4:13 CEB

Remember, we don’t receive any strength from the world or from earthly things; we can give our very best because Jesus gives us the strength.

Be encouraged today to give your very best to each person you encounter. Be a servant. Love. Encourage. Be of good cheer. Be a light. Show Grace. Show Mercy. Love.

Contact us if you have any questions as to why faith matters in customer service.

The hard part when it comes to choosing a hosting provider when you have approximately 32,000 hosting providers in the United States alone tied to various groups saying, I’m using so and so for web hosting is commonly falling into the lull of not reading the fine print, not taking the time to do one’s homework.

You might be a member of the LinkedIn WordPress group or a similar business or hobby group; and ten or more people share to go with so and so provider; they’ve been with them for x period of time, and they are happy.

You check out so and so providers site, it looks clean, and they advertise so much disk space and bandwidth… wow, you are really going to get your money’s worth… so you think.

Your site starts off small, and everything appears to be working well. You might even join the band wagon sharing with others, use my host; look at all I’m getting for just $ per month.

Now for some house keeping… almost all businesses fall into one of two categories for how they choose to compete against others in their field of business.

The majority of the hosting providers in the world compete on price. And that way of competing involves a number of dirty little secrets.

One of the dirty little secrets you may never run into if your site stays small — small in traffic usage, small in CPU usage, small in disk usage, and so on.

If your site does grow, you may find yourself in a bind with the provider for whom you thought you were getting so much value for the dollar just looking at all of the resources they advertise for such a cheap price.

Yet, as your site grows you are most likely going to face problems you would not have thought about in advance.

inode limit – WOW, I thought I had so much available disk space.

Cheap hosting providers, to keep their costs low, will place limits on the number of inodes they allow per hosting plan.

Value hosting providers such as Dynamic Net, Inc. provide unlimited inodes.

CPU limit, RAM limit, process limit — what happened to my online store? Why are my online sales down?

On March 7, 2012 there was a post in web hosting discussion forum about a popular, cheap hosting provider titled, Issues with ____________ Throttling? (hosting provider name removed to respect their privacy).

Cheap hosting providers, to keep their costs low, will use either home grown operating systems and tools or operating systems like CloudLinux to severely limit the amount of CPU, RAM, and processes available to a site.

Value providers such as Dynamic Net, who do use CloudLinux, will have limits high enough to allow any normal site usage including being on the home shopping club and various TV shows like QVC; and what limits are in place are high enough ceilings to catch only misuse.

If you were hunting for physical office space, a home, an apartment, etc. you would want to see the place, look at the neighborhood, check out the surrounding businesses. You would carefully review any lease or rental agreement. You would leave very little (if anything) to chance.

Why not take a more serious, proactive approach to your hosting needs?

While you may not be in a position to visit a facility or the office of the provider (not all providers own the data center where the equipment is located), you could call or email; and dig deep with questions that go beyond what’s advertised as being a part of a particular hosting plan.

The bottom line is will the hosting provider allow you to grow your business easily without ever holding you hostage? Will they be there for you over the years whether your business is growing, or sad to say down sizing?

Contact us if you have any questions about our managed hosting services. We compete on value because we know you and others like you matter far more as human beings than wanting to be the cheapest or among the cheapest provider around.