My cost, annually? $1,594.86

One thousand five hundred & ninety-four dollars and eight six cents if you ask my domain registrar; Just don’t ask my shrink. While we were busy improving, optimizing, configuring, and growing and doing our best to pay attention to clients, others look to steal what they can by cybersquatting. Cybersquatting is the equivalent of squatting residence in an empty house & terrorizing your neighbors because you have the ability due to proximity. In the internet world, that could mean using similar domain names, typosquatting (the act of sitting on misspelled domain names, e.g. fsued.com) and even squatting on usernames using social networks like twitter, facebook & blogging platforms like blogger, wordpress.com, and many others.

Along came a spider named George

Just slightly more than a year after we had launched under Fused Network, someone else had a similar idea. We’ll call him “George” for now. George was in a land far, far away began launching a similar company, Fused Networks. Not unlike us, he liked the name “Fused Network”. So began what would be part of the next five years attempting to contact George. We’d start negotiating, he’d disappear, and we’d begin attempting to contact him some more.. Luckily, for our sake they George seemed busy and was slow to fully launch Fused Networks. Finally, he came to an agreement to part ways with the domain: Roughly about the same time when he went silent again.

Oh, bother..

Not even a week later, press releases began to flow from the United Kingdom. A massive company had rebranded to the name ‘Fused Networks’. News outlets began covering the story, and ‘Fused Networks’ was born. Little did anyone know that while all this celebration was going on, we were here sweating bullets; The individual we had spent years negotiating with was also located in the U.K and had remained silent. Our stomachs sank as we imagined all of the negotiations having fallen apart. Visions of massive amounts of money started floating around in our heads: Had we been outgunned?

Fear.

Not unlike Microsoft suddenly rebranding to John’s Software Shop. We were John the software guy and that creek that we had been in without a paddle had suddenly become a raging sea. Admittedly, my emails to George must have made me sound like raving lunatic: I don’t suspect he noted the frantic nature and what seemed like instant responses from my side, as he soon again agreed to finalize the sale. “Let’s do this today, if you have time!”, I urged him. We settled that same day via paypal and I awaited further communication..

The new ‘fused networks’, quasi-microsoft sized company? They had swapped their older, more popular domain for ‘fused-networks.co.uk’ just as we received ‘fusednetworks.co.uk’ just in time.. We still get contacted by their clients almost daily, and not too long ago they went bankrupt & what remained was bought out.

We learn things the hard way. All of us do, but if there’s one thing this lesson shows is that a little preventative measures / maintenance go a long way in advance. We’ve since purchased every variant we can possibly think of for our domain names: despite us having ~70 of them, there are still more to be had and many more we need to acquire.

For brick and mortar shops, there’s little that can be done about the barber shop that moves in across from your barber shop — but for web-based businesses, it’s unwise not to heavily invest in domain names to prevent confusion*, chaos, and more.

Tips, tricks, and good ideas

Here’s a few tricks of the trade we’ve learned over the years that you should adhere to:

• — It’s a landgrab as far as social media is concerned. Get those usernames on every imagineble network — even variants. Painful, but necessary.
• — Buy every variant of your domain name, especially the .org, .com, .net and even respective country TLDs like .ca, .us, .co.uk
• — Hyphens. If you’ve got two-word names, buy any variants that might have hyphens.
• — Careful, people swap letters. Fuzed is just as good as Fused. There’s alternatives that work for any company name so consider getting them all
• — If you operate with a particular service, consider that it might end up being a variant too. *Someone launched ‘Fused Hosting’ not long after George

Domains are cheap compared to legal battles

The cost of all that extra effort & domain name fees can become expensive. As we noted, we pay $1,594+ ourselves on an annual basis, not including all of the time spent hunting around for variants that someone might decide to sit on. It’s a costly activity but a single cybersquatter, typosquatter or anything in between can cause immense amount of brand damage, confusion, and chaos.

Grab what you can while you still can & stay alert.

Happy new year!

I’ve got a similar story to tell you about: My thousand dollar oil change.

Summer had arrived

A few weeks ago I had begun preparing my motorcycle for the upcoming riding season. Prior to riding it’s highly recommended to change most fluids since the bike has been sitting all winter long. I made a few quick phone calls to some local shops and asked for some time & cost estimates — yikes! Most mentioned about a hundred dollars total (including parts) but because everyone in the entire city was also preparing their bikes & getting them on the roads it would take an entire weekend to have completed.

“Unlikely!”, I told myself. I was well aware the entire weekend was going to be absolutely stunning and I wasn’t about to separate myself from the saddle for that long because a shop lacks enough mechanics. “I’ll do it myself!”, and I did. I set to work in researching the requirements as far as what I would need tool-wise, parts, and worst-case-scenario items. I’ll admit upfront that my garage looks more like a computer palace than a garage: The sole tool I own was an interchangeable screwdriver that allowed me to open server cases. Total servers in the garage: 9. Total tools in the garage: A screwdriver and I.

This should be easy I thought.. I placed a few orders online & started bouncing from store to store…

Finished!

After a day or two the necessary filter arrived in the mail and I had already spent a few hours running back & forth picking up the necessary tools, oil and some shop towels to keep everything orderly. I set out to work & not more than an hour later I was completed in full. I took the bike for a spin and I assumed everything was swell in motorcycle-land. It must have been a Monday as things went downhill from there. Moore’s law.

It turns out that automobile oil in motorcycles is a really bad fit: You’ll wear out your clutch extremely fast due to some lacking ingredients in said oil. I must have been slightly blinded by my dunce cap while researching — I assumed oil was oil; 10w40 is 10w40.

Not quite — I ended up spending over thirteen hours running back & forth acquiring tools to fix my mess including $80 of the wrong oil and the potential loss of a $240 dollar clutch not including many hours of labor.

I still have yet to complete my oil change but I’ve learned a few things in the process…

Verdict, and how this applies to everyday things

Taking into account my time & costs I invested $1,000+ to change the oil in my motorcycle. In order to recoup that I would need to change my oil for four years just to break even to cover the costs of the tools. This same type of scenario is applicable to many tasks that we invest our time into. The skills I learn may come in handy in the future & perhaps be a bit more mechanically inclined — but is it a wise investment?

Take into consideration tasks in your own life that might be equal to my oil change. On an annual basis I’m sure you dig through the nitty-gritty with taxes, accounting, HR, web design & many others. Some of us get stuck wearing all kinds of hats. Some of those hats might not be a wise-investment for your time. Pick any single item that you’ve got on your todo list and weigh it in the balances, you may just want to consider leaving it to the professionals. The costs of your mistakes in addition to frustration could outweigh the costs of getting someone else to do it.

Are there any particular tasks you’ve been investing time into that you may want to consider outsourcing? Let me know in the comments!

p.s. No motorcycles were harmed in the making of this post.. I hope. Now, back to my second week finishing up this oil change.

Pick a name!

The first thing you’re going to do when launching a hosting company is choose a name. Consider first what’s in a name, glance at a couple examples and perhaps gain some inspiration from them. There’s various ways you could do this — some companies simply add an ‘s’, like fused networks did, for example: fused networks (now defunct, though acquired). Or you could acquire another top-level-domain for a company like the lovely fused hosting did. As much as this can get you in legal heat later on little consideration should be put into it as you can simply pick a new name later & start over.

If none of these options suit your needs, you could always combine the word ‘host’ with a random animal. Though many of the common ones are taken, there’s still a few available like ‘swamp rat’. After googling around a bit further I’ve found that every other type of animal is taken: You’re out of luck, so try one of the previous methods. (Even ‘parrot hosting’ is taken)

Remember the best way to duplicate success is to copy someone precisely.

Pick a mascot!

Every company has to portray an image and if you’re anything like myself & have a face for radio you best get a mascot. Considering you’ll be launching your company on dreams, hopes & blood sweat and tears, I suggest you go for a realistic mascot like a unicorn. The now defunct ‘hostingpuppy’ would easily still be in business had they chosen a unicorn to represent their company financially: Trust me, everything is better with rainbows and unicorns — particularly bankruptcy filings.

Here’s a tutorial you can learn how to draw a unicorn if you’re unable to source an image from google image search: Walter Foster’s how to draw a unicorn.

Livechat

If you’ve browsed enough web hosting sites you’ll quickly note that something consistent with a great deal of them are livechat pop-ups. The easiest way to convince someone to sign-up with your hosting company is to initiate a chat with them each time they wander to a new page on your site. Leaving clients to read the pages on their own without a pop-up every few moments is just bad form. I suggest setting up a timer that automatically pops up a livechat request every 15 to 30 seconds. It doesn’t hurt to cover your site with pictures of pretty representatives who don’t actually work at your company either, it leads us to our next point…

Sex sells!

If superbowl ads tell us anything, sex sells. Though I can attest I’ve never purchased anything that was the direct result of sex. If you do intend on utilizing sex in your advertising just don’t don’t forget to cover all of your potential markets like these fine chaps do:

A slogan!

Last, but not least, every company needs a tagline. If you ever intend on your company being advertised on late-night television in between cardio workout video infomercials & blenders, you’ll need a slogan. You will never amount to much unless your company can eat up the competition so I suggest a slogan that’s easy to remember like “Always low prices, always low quality” to ensure customers keep gobbling it up…

I could go on, but in all honesty.. as much as this post was written in slight jest: launching your own company can be extremely rewarding and such a fantastic learning experience: I highly recommend getting involved first-hand with something you’re passionate & love. In the end, do what you love and love what you do

No animals were harmed in the making of this post. Hosts, maybe.

We have all been there. In fact, I’m positive I’ve experienced enough appalling support to write harvard business school case-studies on it. From banks, software firms and even web hosting providers: Service levels are frustrating, profits are up and consumer satisfaction is measured in revenue & stock dividends instead of happy clients.

I often imagine that there are white-haired men that sit around a boardroom table laughing, bourbon in hand, while they listen to the sobs & screams of clients in voicemail boxes. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least, as more often than not companies do happily tear away support pillars to reduce costs and put profits first.

As I sit awake at 6AM EST just hours before our own clients wake up, I’m patiently awaiting a third-party vendor to respond to a mission critical request of our own that they’ve sat on for eight hours. It reminds me of an instance about a decade ago that resulted in us launching the company that is now Fused Network. A web hosting provider had allocated my domain name to a third party and dealing with their support team made any solution impossible. Despite the verdict essentially meaning the loss of my other company I gave up. All of our attempts proved futile and left us frustrated and unamused.

Fused Network launched not too long after that when I decided I could do better, and we’ve just past our 10th year in business. We strive daily to continue to improve our own support because we’re users too, and know just how frustrating bad support is.

Do you have any horror stories of your own? I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

It’s a prime example of what’s wrong with a lot of people in the service industry (I reiterate, I’m guilty) — the lack of patience, time and love quickly turns into the ripe situation and gives us the opportunity to deride someone on the other end. I recall a particular phone call from a client many years ago where a client could sense my frustration levels rising along with his own, too. A short while after our first call ended, he later called and apologized and explained that while he may not be the most technical minded, he was a doctor of medicine. He explained to me situations in his own industry where he could easily get frustrated when someone didn’t know much about the topic at hand. We ended up having a lengthy discussion where we opened up and had the opportunity to simply be human. Instead of him getting angry over his own frustrations, we would laugh it off — the opportunity to be human, and understand that we all get frustrated quickly turned into a tool to keep one another calm.

The end result was my realization that the goal of everyone in situations like these was education — instead of getting frustrated in situations where minor mistakes, we could take the time to educate someone on the topic at hand or at least offer our expertise in the situation. I have been frequently humbled by people who may be uneducated in one particular topic, but experts in their own right in another. We can learn a lot from one another by simply being patient, and respecting one another’s levels of knowledge in different topics and remembering to be human in every interaction.

If I compiled a list of all of the entities that were going to put us in the grave you wouldn’t have to look far from INC500 & the majority of Silicon Valley. There’s a key difference though and it’s one worthy of explanation between ourselves and a lot of other entities competing in the marketplace: Our clients. “Huh?”. At the end of the day heavily funded companies have to answer to investors and those attempting to reap rewards: those of whom are always ready to launch attacks and shuffle CEOs around like pawns. Our clients are our clients, the ones that actively fund us on a daily basis by providing us their business, and we the service. At the end of every day we’re held entirely accountable by each and every client we serve, and are weighed in the balances any day an invoice becomes due.

Over the years we’ve scaled from 30, to 50, to 130, to a over 5,000 websites hosted from clients in 50+ (We stopped counting) countries around the world. At the end of the day we’re accountable to no one else but our clients, conscious & the Lord we serve. When disaster strikes, we don’t have to get an a-okay from above to absolutely, and earnestly offer up our bottom line for rend. We do it out of an honest respect for the businesses & people we host everyday. I can honestly say Fused has had such a huge positive impact in my life and that of my team’s, and learning to serve each of you as clients, friends & business partners has been arduous — and trying at times — but we all love every minute of it dearly and thank you for contributing to our causes, compassion projects & pray you’ll be with us in the coming years.

There’s one thing I’ve yet to see many entities reproduce on a large-scale, and that’s service.
When we say we look forward to serving you for many years to come, we truly mean it from the bottom of our hearts.

Thank you for being our investors.

p.s. Lawrence cries before & after every ticket you send. He’s a softy like that

I know I’m not alone in this kind of feeling. An example of a ‘bullshit’ policy is when I request cancellation from a company whom provides some of our email services (Fused outsourced some exchange hosting last year because we hate anything windows related) — via email. Ironically, email cancellations weren’t allowed so after a week of waiting for a response only to be told to “call them”… we finally did. Sure enough, despite canceling via phone once, twice via email, we’ll still need to call them back another time prior to our billing date to “really cancel” to avoid being billed repeatedly. This is my definition of bullshit.

It’s one of the precise reasons we started Fused, as well — “I can do better than this”, I thought to myself as I dealt with a hosting provider back in the day whom stole our domain name, and allocated it to a 3rd party because their name was attached to the whois. In the end it cost me thousands of dollars in lost revenue as a result of support representatives who didn’t care. I admit we have some policies in place to protect ourselves, as a company, but more often than not I find myself refunding clients in full, despite being well beyond the billing & due dates. What it comes down to in the end is if a user isn’t in need of your services, it’s better to lose the revenue than to lose your reputation over a few meager dollars or policies.

Reputation can’t be bought or sold, but it can be tossed away carelessly.
What kind of bullshit policies have you had to deal with in the past?

We’re not out to find slaves, ticket monkies or people who will burn through years and not see the light of day. We want well-rounded, intelligent individuals who are beyond driven. Not by money, although it certainly helps with the bread costs, but by launching new cool things while making a difference. We’re playing with content delivery, xen, and lots of other interesting technologies that add spice. This isn’t your generic beat-up-luser environment and every last one of our client matters to us. Our end goal isn’t building some giant money-making scheme but to service every last client as though it’s the last thing we’ll do. Luckily enough, we’ve still gone from zero to hero in ~5-6 years and scaled from $30k per annum to over a half million in revenue.

We’re growing, we’re busy. Too busy to keep parsing resumes in fact.

The contract offering is just a cover. A hunt, a quest. For people whom care and want to work for a company that has been charitable, caring and kick-ass since launch.

If you’re only just looking for a paycheque, this job isn’t for you (Of course, we do pay well though). If you love what you do, love technology and want the freedom to steer clear of an office, you might just be a fuser.

Who are you:
1. Someone who loves linux, open source and what it stands for.
2. Someone who lives, breathes and eats infosec / security on a daily basis. You’re on all of the mailing lists, keep up with the news & are in the loop.
3. You’re someone who gets a rise out of that new kernel you compiled and how much more secure & faster it is.
4. You like new technology. Xen? KVM? Virtual content delivery networks? They sound like fun!
5. Someone who thinks tedious tasks are easily fixed with Puppet, CFEngine or something you’ve built in your spare time.
6. Someone whose responsible, intelligent and mature enough to work on their own without someone breathing down their neck. We don’t babysit, and you hate babysitters anyways.
7. Someone who doesn’t mind documenting what they’re up to, as it saves you time later.

Please note — don’t send us your standard ‘cover letter’ that you’ve been sending everyone else. Take two minutes to write out you found particularly interesting about this post, why you think the job is for you and attach your resume to it. If your email is cut-and-paste, it’ll go straight to my trash-bin.

So, now back to the cut-and-dry list:

Fused Network is a small web hosting firm based in Toronto with roughly ~2,000 clients. Launched originally in 2001, the company was acquired by it’s current ownership in 2005 and has quickly grown to it’s size today. We’d like to consider ourselves the underdogs of the industry with a passion for helping clients and an extreme love for new projects. We’ve scaled from a mere hundred clients to 2,000 in two years time and are growing rapidly.

Linux. Linux. Linux. Linux.
There are no windows machines on our network[1].

We’re hiring & that means we’re after high quality, high energy[2] individuals to join our growing team. You’ll be part of a team that is ready to take the IT industry by storm (One client at a time!).

We’re looking for a system / network administrator. The primary responsibility of the representatives will be backend management, primarily utilizing CentOS based linux systems with a hint of xen. Our primary offering is shared web hosting, backup services and content / media delivery.

Skills / Experience required:
• 5+ years experience in a Linux server environment.
• Thorough experience with RHEL / CentOS, and Debian[3].
• Expert experience with LAMP. Experience with nginx, Varnish, and other lovely entities are a plus.
• Experience using / configuring / optimizing: cPanel/WHM, Apache (1.x / 2.x), PHP, PureFTPD & other daemons that are part of the web hosting recipe.
• Cisco IOS[4] switch&router gear configuration / vlan configuration is a plus.
• Some sort of shell scripting language — whether it be perl, sh, — even if you just love one language, love it thoroughly. Ability to automate tasks is KEY.

Other programming languages considered assets[5].

Hours: 40 per week, preferably 40. 3mo term initially, long-term with equity afterwards.
Location: Telecommuting. Whatever cafe, basement or beach you prefer.

Our system administrators will be responsible for deployment, optimization & securing our existing server fleets. Some interaction with clients required although most will be limited to email and the odd phone call a few times a week.

We’re looking for the best of the best who want to work in a company that’s expanding rapidly, we want people who would love to grow with us but most of all whom like to work, get involved and dig in.[6]

If you wish to apply, please contact careers [@] fusednetwork.com

[1] Okay, there’s one. But it was an accident, and we don’t manage it anyways.
[2] Powered by caffeine and redbull is okay, too.
[3] We prefer Debian, but most of our systems are CentOS based as a result of cPanel. We like sid, and miss him often.
[4] I’d rather Juniper, myself. Level2 is handled by Cisco, we’re implementing L3 with Juniper in due time.
[5] Seriously, you must love at least one language — and not just for tweaking, but thorough script development.
[6] There be dragons. We’ve gone through a great deal of part-timers and contractors, and there’s some cleaning up to do. If you’re after a position that requires effort, thought and contribution in full — and with the ability to ‘scale’ upwards, this is it.

During the course of the audio there’s discussion in regards to Matt Mullenwag (co-founder of WordPress) siphoning away users of Thesis using the GPL issue as a lure. I’ve personally seen similar issues (GPL related, in fact) tear communities / userbases in half, spit them up and leave nothing behind. During the course of my younger years I was involved in a few MUDs or two that were in direct violation of the very license the software was developed on. In one particular case (Ahem, Medievia) there was such an undercurrent from the community that several derivatives spawned off, servers were exploited, users quit left & right and the project itself lost multiple developers and thousands of active users as a result of the backlash.

The GPL is an extremely well backed license whether it applies to Diku, WordPress or Linux itself & touts and extremely strong following. I believe that Chris Pearson is treading very thing ice when he states that WordPress needs to “back up their statements”, through force or otherwise. I do suspect Mullenwag’s own twitter remarks alone lead me to believe he’s generating an uprising of his own against Pearson and GPL-naysayers, something I see as somewhat belated but necessary to ensure future derivatives and themes stay in line with the license.

I do hope the situation gets prettier before ugly, and Pearson decides to switch his themes over to the license. The license itself wouldn’t inhibit or detract from any of his offerings, business or personal, but I suppose that’s for him to decide. Several other wordpress theme developers have swapped over to releasing their themes with the GPL intact and from what I garner through their public commentary, “Success” is all they’ve experienced since.

Any thoughts of your own?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“The latest edge build of Installatron has been updated with
fixes for all issues. We’re just finishing up testing and aim to
issue a new relase build this week.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

For the past several weeks we’ve had Installatron disabled on all of our servers. Customers that have attempted to access Installatron from within cPanel have found themselves staring at a paragraph of text which states that it has been temporarily disabled while the vendor works to address some issues.

Some customers have asked if we knew when it would be reenabled. We, too, have wondered the same thing. One week ago I updated my ticket with the vendor, asking them to provide us with the status of the fixes, along with an ETA of the next release. The vendor has gone silent on us.

Below you will find the timeline of our communication with the Installatron team:

============================
11 Apr 2010, 7:07 pm – Day 0
============================
The ticket was opened with Installatron, asking if they would be interested in learning about vulnerabilities in their software.

============================
12 Apr 2010, 7:05 am – Day 1
============================
Phil from the Installatron team replies stating that they’re “definitely interested in discussing any vulnerabilities”.

============================
12 Apr 2010, 8:02 am – Day 1
============================
I replied to the ticket, stating I would need some time to put all of the information together in an acceptable format (my notes were a little sloppy up to that point).

============================
12 Apr 2010, 8:11 am – Day 1
============================
Phil replies stating that Installatron version 6 may actually address these issues, but that they would wait for my reply (the bugs are for version 6).

=============================
12 Apr 2010, 12:20 pm – Day 1
=============================
I sent complete details on how to reproduce 4 of the 8 issues, stating that if they felt that the issues would be obsoleted by the next version of Installatron, that I wouldn’t feel it necessary to send information on the remaining 4, and that I needed to know when Installtron 6 was going to be released.

============================
13 Apr 2010, 4:45 pm – Day 2
============================
Phil’s response: “We’re going through and verifying/creating fixes for each of these.”

============================
13 Apr 2010, 7:45 pm – Day 2
============================
I updated the ticket with the remaining 4 bugs.

=============================
19 Apr 2010, 11:14 pm – Day 8
=============================
Phil replies: “We’re still considering our reply and working on fixes.”

=============================
27 Apr 2010, 2:40 pm – Day 16
=============================
I asked for an update on the status of the fixes and an ETA on the next release that addresses all of the issues.

====================
05 May 2010 – Day 24
====================
No response has been received to our request for an update. However, according to the twitter.com/installatron account, on 1:23 PM Apr 22nd, Zen Cart 1.3.9a was added to Installatron. On 3:15 AM Apr 29th Joomla 1.5.17 was added to Installatron. In the past day or so, Zen Cart 1.3.9b was added to Installatron.

These are the bugs that were reported to Installatron:

BUG #1 – cPanel users can overwrite any file on the box
BUG #2 – cPanel users can execute commands as root
BUG #3 – cPanel users can view /etc/shadow
BUG #4 – cPanel users can obtain a directory listing
BUG #5 – resellers can execute commands as root
BUG #6 – resellers can execute commands as root
BUG #7 – resellers can execute commands as root
BUG #8 – resellers can execute commands as root

None of those bugs have been fixed, but the latest version of Zen Cart has been added to Installatron since they were reported. Twice.

As a paying customer, I think it’s a fair question to ask where Installatron’s priorities are. If you have Installatron installed on your server(s), these are the risks that you face:

Installatron 6.0.9, 6.0.7, and possibly prior view /etc/shadow (BUG #3)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNI-V0Y3Aa8

Installatron 6.0.9, 6.0.7, and possibly prior view any directory (BUG #4)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92B2lW5UCn0

Installatron 6.0.9, 6.0.7, and possibly prior local root exploit (BUG #8)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5MMacCFhfM

Note that while the videos listed above demonstrate the action of taking advantage of the vulnerabilities, they do not provide the level of detail necessary for anyone viewing the video to take advantage of the bugs. The goal here is to raise awareness, and to motivate Installatron to fix these problems.

If you’re an Installatron customer and want root exploits fixed NOW instead of Zen Cart updates next week, then please let your voice be heard:

Installatron helpdesk: https://secure.installatron.com/tickets?user=Guest
Installatron forums: http://installatron.com/forum/
Installatron twitter: http://twitter.com/installatron
Installatron sales: sales@installatron.com

In what is sure to be a memorable way to end the year off with a bang, Fused Network has stepped up to the plate once more, coming in as both reindeer and elves. In fact, Fused Network clients have contributed to roughly 80% of the fundraising! And why not?! After continued successes and an ever-growing client base, giving back to those in need does wonders for the morale. It is absolutely imperative we do more than our best to keep this cycle going – we receive, we give back, and the act of receiving comes back in the form of good vibes. Lather, rinse, repeat – with emphasis on repeat.

The Fused Network team will be hitting the Mod Club dance floors on the 16th in support of a most wonderful cause. Surface level engagements aside, it all boils down to the roots of this event; HoHoTO is about community, camaraderie, and generosity of spirit, all of which should be exercised daily. In a blog post aptly titled Blessed, David writes:

“We will go home feeling incredible knowing we, among many others, have helped foster such widespread generosity. As those feelings of elation start to settle, however, we must never forget that the needs of those who are less fortunate than us have no end. A daily effort on our parts must be observed to ensure that they too, get their daily bread.

When the music stops, the giving shouldn’t.”

Heartily noted – mind, body, soul. In a culture so very defined by excess, no one should have to wander the streets hungry.

- – -

The Toronto Daily Bread Food Bank is the largest provider of emergency food relief in the Greater Toronta Area. There are several ways to donate to the Daily Bread; visit their donations page for more information. For HoHoTO event details and statistics, click here.

- – -

If you find yourself in the city, come on out to the most happening Christmas party to ever hit Toronto! HoHoTO is the ultimate mixer; techies, creatives and good, fun-loving people gathering together for a wonderful cause… What could be better?! E-mail me directly at isshamarie[at]fusednetwork[dot]com for a chance at acquiring tickets.

Their warmth struck me first, and I was immediately drawn to Diane and Shona’s energy. They welcomed me with the widest of smiles and the firmest of handshakes, their warm reception a striking (and most refreshing) contrast to yet another cold and rainy Vancouver afternoon. Formalities naturally evolved into friendly banter back and forth. They are such a delight to speak with from the very beginning.

Diane and Shona’s enthusiasm, passion, and infectious energy are a testament to the working environment behind the doors of Fresh Choice Kitchens. Its humble beginnings stem from the concept of community kitchens, combining the simple pleasures of communal gatherings with wholesome and nutritious food. The frequency of communal, sit-down dinners have significantly decreased with the onslaught of technology, the exponential growth of social networking systems, the odd working hours, and the many other innumerable factors that have infiltrated and therefore defined the “norm” of the 21st century. Good, nutritious, healthful meals are catalysts to long-lasting community ties. The sautéing, the chopping, and the overall process behind food preparation – these activities become vehicles for conversation, for banter, for witty repartee, for emotional unloading. What better way to return to the good old days of communal dinners than to partake in community kitchens?

In 1996, the Vancouver Community Kitchen Project was launched, catching the attention and support of Vancouver Coastal Health, BC Gas (now Terasen Gas), and the Greater Vancouver Food Bank Society. By 1998, 25 community kitchens have been organized, self-directed and fully operational with help from the various workshops and [kitchen] equipment drives organized by those involved in the Vancouver Community Kitchen Project. The focus of the project eventually shifted to providing a resource centre for small groups and communities interested in starting various CKs all across Vancouver and eventually, the entire province. The Vancouver Community Kitchen Project changed their name to Fresh Choice Kitchens in 2008 to reflect this evolution. Diane Collis, Fresh Choice Kitchens manager, helps organize seasonal workshops, Level I courses on Food Safe, and equipment drives to help jumpstart any group looking into developing a CK program in their community. Shona Lam’s organizational and newfound social networking skills have helped brought awareness of this long-standing concept to the online demographic. The people at Kontent Creative, for instance, have worked closely with Fresh Choice Kitchens and the Greater Vancouver Food Bank Society to raise funds for these projects through Innovation Camps. The amalgamation of the social media realm and this highly-evolved CK project made for a natural, super-charged pairing, one that will most certainly bloom with time, dedication, and perseverance.

The emphasis, really, is on the most basic of human needs. We need to be sated both physically and mentally. We need food to survive. Camaraderie and human companionship, abstract and intangible concepts, is food for our souls. Combine healthful, seasonal, nutritious (yet affordable!) food with human interaction and you have before you the recipe for success. Diane and Shona, in their warm reception, allowed me to glimpse but a minute fraction of what goes behind these open doors. I can hardly wait to participate in the cooking session that is to occur on the 10th of December. This post is merely a prelude to the fun that awaits my person over the next few weeks.

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For an in-depth article on the concept behind Community Kitchens, Diane Collis, manager of Fresh Choice Kitchens, has written a wonderful article for SPARC BC here.

For more information on Fresh Choice Kitchens, visit CommunityKitchens.ca

Fresh Choice Kitchens has also released a cookbook titled Many Hands, available in all Vancouver Capers Community Markets, or online. You can find more information on this wonderful cookbook here. The cookbook places emphasis on cooking as a community; the recipes in this book are tailored to accommodate communal cooking sessions and feeding large groups of people!

For information on how to donate to this wonderful project, click here.

Those who know me know that while I do possess in me some knowledge regarding the tech scene, I am not exactly an avid partaker. In short, events such as Barcamp Vancouver are simply not my cup of tea. After having attended this one, however, I might just participate in similar events that allow both tech-industry enthusiasts and creatives to get together and mingle. I had my doubts about this one, particularly during the mixer the night before the main event; everyone seemed to know each other, I had absolutely no idea how to represent the company I work for, I was lacking networking accoutrements such as the all-important business card, and it was way too dark and too loud to really hold conversations with anyone. I could not stay for too long because of this, so I left promptly after a good two hours of roaming around the venue trying to figure out what manner I should approach people. That night was a disaster – for me anyway (nevermind the fact that bars are not exactly my scene either).

The main event was as nerve-wracking as the night before, initially, that is. Fused Network has sponsored the event by paying for lunch, and having had my share of troubles getting to the venue in the first place (via public transportation and cab service), I was extremely lucky to have made it in time to represent Fused Network during the roll call for sponsors. Then came the sessions. Those who wanted to lead sessions were asked to line up, give a 30-second introduction about the talks they want to lead, and were subsequently assigned a time-slot and a room to hold their sessions in. I happily snapped some candids by the time this was taking place:

As I surveyed the board I was quite taken by a few topics of discussion that piqued and highlighted my interests. The sessions I attended in that roster were all related to photography, in one form or another. I took part in the morning photowalk around Discovery Parks’ vicinity, where I happily basked in my element. Quite a few photographers showed up for this session, all twenty of us (give or take), armed with everything from compact cameras to phone cameras to some of the best digital SLRs on the market. It was definitely a great start to my Barcamp experience.

(Tangent: I would have happily crawled through one gaping hole on that chain-link fence leading to the parked trains, but I was honestly not dressed to do some trespassing. Imagine heading back inside with a disheveled business-casual suit and mud sticking to my heels! Now that I think about it, I probably should have done it anyway – it would have made for a more dynamic set of photos. Oh well!)

The post-processing session that followed the photowalk took place right after lunch. I enjoyed that immensely. In this session, two popular post-processing applications were highlighted – Aperture (for Macs) and Adobe Lightroom (for both Macs and PCs). While Photoshop will always be my go-to program for post-processing, it was nice to be able to look at the demos on Aperture and Lightroom. We had very open discussions on post-processing techniques, as well as a little presentation on black and white film developing, led by Michael (@thedarkerside). His talk definitely rekindled my love for film, and it was also during his talk that I found myself piping in with questions and comments in regards to my experience with the medium (given my all-nighters playing around with printing in the darkroom at the University of Toronto!).

Perhaps the most relevant and informative session I attended at BCV09 is ‘Freelance is NOT free work’. An open forum led by academic, Dr. Raul Pacheco Vega, the group discussed well-known qualms that come with doing jobs for non-profit organizations, friends, families, and close associates, for pay that is almost always less than the amount of work you end up doing for them. As a freelance graphic designer put it [in regards to working for non-profit organizations you heartily support], “I do not want to have to burn bridges with the community just because I feel I should get paid fairly for the amount of work I do.”

With the exponential growth of new media and various social networking realms, it is easy to get caught up in doing jobs for free, most especially if it promises “exposure” for the freelancer in question. The fact of the matter is, the freelancer treats these clients very much like he or she would treat an actual paying client; this also means dealing with set deadlines. Where does one draw the line between doing things for exposure and doing things for pay, especially for someone who wants to develop a steady clientele over time?

The perception of opportunity is the Venus flytrap of the freelancer’s world. I myself, have been victim to this several times over the course of my year since having graduated from university. Below are three major points I picked up from the session:

• Outline times. You must provide your prospective client with information on the amount of time it would normally take to complete the allotted task. Decide on reasonable and fair payment based on the hours spent for the job. Outline terms of the job at hand on paper, if needed; this makes things official.
• Your skill is a business. In no way should you, as a freelancer, devalue your work by doing something for “cheap” when you yourself believe in your talents. When dealing with non-profit organizations or friends who cannot pay you much for your services, make certain both parties benefit from your work. Ask them to write testimonials you can put on to your site as a means for you to advertise your talent and reliability to future clients who will come your way. Also, if the opportunity for paid gigs ever comes across your friends or these non-profit organizations, make sure to have them direct these gigs over to you. These deals work purely in a symbiotic manner, so if you do not take that initiative to promote yourself in that way, it will become extremely difficult to establish your clientele over time.
• Change impressions! If companies see that you have done most of your work for free, this devalues your skill. This, of course, is common sense to all freelancers. If this is in fact, your case, showcase these jobs in such a way as to highlight the skills used behind the end product. These “free jobs” then give off the impression of paid work. Utilize those client testimonials in conjunction with your portfolio.

You can view more of my photographs from the event here and here.

To sum it all up, I learned lots and met amazing creatives in the process. And of course, it always feels fantastic to be able to participate in my element, photography.

Thanks for the opportunity Fused Network!

What made this particularly interesting is that the email address NextTree spammed one of my clients through was my own, completely unrelated to this particular site entirely & never having been associated with it. The greeting read ‘Dear David’, as though it were addressed to me but it referenced another website and client in the subject line entirely. Completely baffled by this, I immediately set out to figure out how NextTree would have confused myself and one of my clients. I dug through older whois records, left no stone unturned on google and still came up with not a single link associating my own completely unassociated email address with this particular client.

With still no luck in figuring out where they obtained the contact, I’m left wondering if Jason Matheston is possibly using old Netfirms whois database data to do the web web design related spamming. I did happen to take a few moments to call Jason but beyond stating that he couldn’t disclose where he obtained the contact details, he didn’t have much else to say. I suppose what’s truly disheartening about it all is how someone with previous experience at companies like Netfirms (as large as they are) and even including a positions titled ‘Marketing Director’ and ‘Marketing Manager’ really need to sink as low as spamming my clients. Boo, can’t you guys come up with something better?

Here’s a copy of the email that I received below, along with Jason Matheson‘s contact details, he seems to be a massive fan of unsolicited email so I’m sure he wouldn’t mind receiving some from you, all of your friends and that persistent Nigerian prince who wants to adopt you as his red-headed stepchild.

Dear David,

Have you ever wondered why some websites perform better than others? (Spamvertising, maybe? Or Ci4l1s!)
Some websites were designed by NextTree!

NextTree is a full-service web development company with a passion for spamming, creating highly usable, results driven websites. We’ll make your business look better and perform better than the competition. We’ll make your business shine.

Visit http://www.nexttree.ca/website/ to discover how we can help you launch a brand new website or put a fresh face on an old one. (Lipstick on a pig?) NextTree can you give your website a professional edge!

Sincerely,

The NextTree Web Design Team spammers.
($10 discount off your next design if you can guess which cereal box we got our website out of!)

http://www.nexttree.ca/website/

–
NextTree is a registered trademark of NextTree Inc.
2-112 Petra Way Whitby ON Canada.
We are 100% Canadian eh?!

Luckily they’re 100% Canadian, since spamming is illegal in the United States & CANSPAM is a $50,000 fine per unsolicited message. Luckily, our server infrastructure also resides in Chicago.

A few of Jason’s email addresses, say hi:
mathesonj@mtonic.net
jmatheson@room100.net
jasonmatheson@HOME.COM

Luckily we’re 100% bootstrapped and flush with investments from people who actually matter to us: Our clients.

The past

During the past few years we’ve rather quickly scaled the wall in the web hosting world. By any comparison we’re still extremely small in the hosting ecosystem but we’re continuing to grow despite the often quoted concerns of a recession: What recession? Luckily we’ve had an exceptional group of people who we’ve worked with (again, our clientbase is fantastic) on a daily basis that have touted the Fused ‘horn’ despite some of our shortcomings: At points I’m sure they’ve had more faith than myself!

If we really considered all of the speedbumps we’ve endured this would be referred to as ‘offroading to success’ instead of the road to success. Nonetheless with perseverance and our noses to the grindstone we’ve successfully kept things in working order & for the most part flawless.

I was about to write that our past would be considered easier in comparison to what we’re up against as far as planning & development go and then I recalled the days when I ate with cardboard cutlery and ‘soup’ and ‘soup’ were the two choices to decide between for lunch & dinner. Okay, so the past was rather arduous if anything but the days ahead will be short of easy.

The present

We’re currently spending every waking moment on the hiring process. I recently made the move out to Vancouver largely to take advantage of the bigger ‘geek’ crowd and open-source friendly ecosystem out here. If the size of the ‘vanlug’ crowd is any reflection of the teeming applicant pool, we’ll do swell. I’m currently parsing through over 250+ applications for a recent support & system administrator position at Fused Network. Now’s the time for us to invest in infrastructure, backend and begin really working on client acquisition once we’ve filled up some more positions. At this point I’ve held off on advertising to allow us to continue to offer the same level of service without overloading our existing team.

Although it’s not the sole issue we face, finding applicants who fit the description of the type of people we want working at Fused Network is difficult. There’s a very rare breed of people that we’re willing to hire and sifting through the hundreds of resumes is probably the most difficult task I’ve ever been delegated. I’ve spent years building up this clientbase and even though I can be my own worst enemy at times, there’s a level of service I want to retain on a permanent basis. Luckily (if it can be defined as that) there’s a lot of highly qualified people out there looking for work and we’ve just got to find them.

The future

We’ll be opening a bunch of new points of ‘presence’ in the future that you can look forward to wielding, alongside a small content delivery network we’re slowly building. In 4th quarter 2009 we hope to open up additional infrastructure in Vancouver, Toronto and potentially a second location in Chicago. The intention is to migrate most of our Los Angeles equipment to Vancouver initially, with the latter points being opened shortly thereafter with new gear primarily for shared hosting & some virtualized offerings we’ll be adding to the mix.

Right now our goal is to add significant amounts of infrastructure in Canada: As much as we’re a global company, having the infrastructure within a quick flight will make expansion significantly easier. I’m the ‘hands-on’ type of guy when it comes to ensuring everything is perfect and often want to be on-site for even the smallest changes and construction. You would be surprised at how well I can micromanage a team, just ask Matt!

With the future comes a number of new projects & endeavors. Our areas that we’ll be concentrating on in short order are support, launching additional documentation and working on building additional ‘community’ measures. Once those basic facets of the foundation are out of the way we’ll begin working on new services, offerings and completing upgrades to our existing infrastructure.

We’ve got idle hardware awaiting some MySQL clustering functionality and within two months we should have some dedicated SSD machines online serving 100% MySQL only to open up some extremely delicious performance for databases. The days ahead are looking mighty fine from a technical standpoint.

Last but not least I want Fused Network to be one of the most socially conscious firms on the planet. Our ‘together’ program has been moving along swell but more backend needs put in place to truly make use of your referrals for the greater good. The intention at this point is to add the ability to ‘forward’ payments to a community group on Kiva so we can begin offering microloans to those out there that need it, of course the people the funds are delivered to will be decided by you that contribute with your referrals. Even better, we’ll be sponsoring some additional local charities, open source projects and food banks with more funds than ever. There’s tonnes of need and we’re going to do every little bit we can to continue ensuring it’s met with your help.

All-in-all, Fused Network is in a great position despite a couple of small bumps. There’s no one else I can thank more than each and every one of you as clients for continuing to support us, have faith in us and be there every step of the way. A big thank you from all of us at Fused for being there, we’ll continue to do the same for you.

Want some additional insight on the ongoings of Fused Network?
Follow @davidandgoliath on twitter (my personal account) and our @fusednetwork account otherwise you’ll miss out.

Enjoying what we offer thusfar?
Post a review of our services on Hostjury, GigPark and tell some friends about us. It goes a long way toward helping us keep your services rolling without a hitch and allows us to continue building our team.

The downside of this contraction
The downside of an economic contraction like the one we’re undergoing now isn’t that it’s necessarily a bad thing, in fact for the most part it’s great. Inflation tends to decrease and goods return to their affordable pricing, rent tends to remain the same and we go on with life. In this particular instance though a large part of the contraction is directly the result of a housing bubble bursting — things will be slightly different this time around. We haven’t seen rent prices decrease as rapidly as they should have been because people are still locked into mortgages and financing that’s priced higher than the property they own; As a result they need to retain similar pricing structures for rentals as they had prior to the ‘burst’, inflicting significant amounts of pain on their own tenants whose clientbases are dwindling slightly. Many tenants are simply walking away or stepping out when their lease expires instead of continuing onwards — they can’t get their landlords to agree to decrease on the price and the landlords simply can’t afford to reduce it any further.

But, despite all the bad..
Despite the slight squeeze in the economy, a large number of businesses are wielding the recession to their advantage. Winter has always meant downturns and slower growth in most industries but that doesn’t have to be the case — with the internet, local community and a hint of advertising your growth can still steadily increase. I recently read of a coffee shop that had increased their business several thousand percent by using twitter and other ‘community’ driven tools. In this particular case, they allowed their regular clients to make orders online before they’d arrive at the shop. Their business skyrocketed and they began to become a local ‘hub’ for all sorts of events & gatherings. A win-win, for both the clientèle and company owners.

There’s a number of great tools you can use online to really begin to increase your business. A number of them are considered ‘hyperlocal’, that is extremely targeted sites towards local businesses. A few that come to mind are Yelp* and citysearch– and although both are largely geared towards restaurants, shops and brick & mortar places they can still easily be wielded to garner additional traffic.

Online and offline, one and the same.
Something we often forget (myself included) is that online and offline businesses are truly all the same. Although both may differ in physical locations they largely depend on the same variables in order to decide whether they’ll sink or swim. A large part of any business is word of mouth and reputation, both of which are truly dependent (Offline, especially) on your community whether it be nearby or afar. Negative reviews or comments made online or through word-of-mouth can spread like wildfire and damage any business. I’ve learned this firsthand with some of our own clients that weren’t 100% satisfied but even negative comments can be wielded to your benefit. Remember that it’s always best to ask your clients what they think of your services first before they have the opportunity to tell you (negative or positive).

I’ve seen cue cards left about coffee shops asking clients to leave reviews on Yelp* and other locations, and although it may not seem ingenious those extra few comments left on the web could easily bring in thousands of new visitors each month. In colder climates in particular, many people (at least outside city centers) don’t often roam about without a purpose — it’s key to wield online communities and sites to your benefit and get as many content clients to them as possible. We’ve lucked out ourselves in that sites like Hostjury and Gigpark allow our own clientele to leave great reviews about us. Would you believe that 65% of our clientbase has arrived from either of these sites? We wouldn’t either, until we checked our statistics.

No news is bad news, online
Realize that not every review or peep you’ll hear about your company is going to be a positive one, but with some savvy and quick reaction you’ll be able to always explain yourself and your side of the story. The beautiful part about online communities is they often allow you the ability to respond to any negative commentary (or even positive) left about your company. The more people talking about you often garners more business though, whether positive or negative. You can interact on a whole new level where your clients were once inaccessible, you can be ‘real’ to them.

Local, yes. But don’t box yourself in
Remember that you’re not just a provider in your local community, don’t just offer a service or product. Be involved, get involved — and be local. I’m not saying buy local, in fact I believe in helping neighbors near and afar — especially as a company with clients in more than 45 different countries. Remember that as a retailer of any sort you have the ability to expand beyond your local community and start offering services to the world as well — it’s especially easy and there’s no reason for you to solely target your local market. I’ve seen companies go from a single employee to over thirty just by launching an online store and selling toys of all things. Their local targetmarket only had a few thousand consumers but their global reach was millions: They succeeded and there’s millions of other niches that your own products could easily fill as well. As much as you should think, act and be ‘local’, don’t forget there’s a market just within reach that consists of the entire planet. Don’t limit yourself to the few passerbys, sell globally.

If you are considering launching a retail store online, consider a few of the developers below who are happily hosted at Fused Network:
Sage Media
Peapod Studios
16Toads

Global market, local economy. Two birds with one stone.

There’s a number of exciting topics being discussed and it should be interesting as it’ll be my first time actually stopping in Las Vegas for anything more than gas. I just drove through this weekend on my way across the United States, a 2,400+ mile trip in my mean little Elantra.

If anyone is attending or in the area you should poke us. I’ll be staying in Vegas tonight and attending the first day of sessions. I’ll be hanging around in Los Angeles with Steven getting a few projects completed and enjoying the sunshine!

But it’s that time again as the week begins winding up to get back into gear. We finished up the week before the holiday’s as a sponsor of an event in Toronto, a success! The event HoHoTo raised over $25,000 (We contributed 10% of the total) for the daily bread foodbank in downtown Toronto, making the event one of the largest donations this year for daily bread. I can’t reiterate enough how great of a cause supporting local food banks are no matter the time — but especially relevant today with the slugging economy.

One of the more well-known Toronto bloggers, Mark McKay (And a future fused network client, right Mark? *poke* Especially as your other host is down as I write this!) clipped together a small video that I thought everyone might like to peek at. I did happen to get a quick kind word in (I’m the nerd in the red shirt) partway through the video. Luckily, for all of us, Mark did some decent editing and removed most of my embarrassing moments. Included in the video is a thank you from some extremely cool people on the internet (How can someone be cool on the internet, anyways) like Matt Mullenwag of WordPress, Biz Stone of Twitter, Toronto mayor David Miller and Cory Doctorow, my internet hero.

I can’t even compile into words how great it is for such an awesome IT community to come together and help out, we’ll make certain that the daily bread is always in our prayers & on the top of our together charity list.