One World Hosting

OK, it’s been a while; with everything going on, we’ve not had much time to get to our blog. Now that the dust has settled, we can again use it as a client update tool, and a general communication outlet. Today’s quick story is that we have migrated our servers and services from an aging Baltimore data center to a state of the art facility in Massachusetts. The new facility will give us the flexibility to make all sorts of needed improvements in capacity, speed, security, and new features.

The move itself was longer than expected, and complicated by a number of factors not foreseen before the process began. We’ll provide more details in the coming days and weeks, but we are over the hump now, and making great progress toward what we continue to firmly believe is a bright new future. Our customers have been sometimes frustrated with this process, and certainly concerned, but on the whole very supportive of us and our terrific technical staff as we work through the remaining details.

Stay tuned for more!
One World Hosting

As part of our on-going effort to provide our clients with the highest quality of service available, we will be performing maintenance on our network devices on Wednesday, May 23, 2007 between 12:00am and 4:00am EST. Some customers may experience degraded network performance (resulting in a slow connection), and at times, the network may not be accessible.

Content theft is a problem many web sites owners will face at some point. Legal action, although tempting, is often the least effective and most costly response. There are better ways to handle the problem. First off, let us know - there may be simple changes in your code or site configuration that we can recommend that might minimize the problem. For more information on the topic, these three articles from the excellent Lorelle on WordPress blog are a great overview of the issues and best responses:

“What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content”
http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2006/04/10/
what-do-you-do-when-someone-steals-your-content/

“Finding Stolen Content and Copyright Infringements”
http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2006/04/11/
finding-stolen-content-and-copyright-infringements/

“The Growing Trends in Content Theft: Image Theft, Feed Scraping, and Website Hijacking”
http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2006/04/11/
the-growing-trends-in-content-theft/

Trendwatching.com, always a reliable source for business and consumer trends and just great ideas from around the globe has a terrific piece this time around on the concept of “transparency” with respect to consumer purchase decisions. In their words,

“Old economy fog is clearing: no longer can incompetence, below-par performance, ignored global standards, anti-social & anti-eco behavior, or opaque pricing be obscured. In its place has come a transparent, fully informed marketplace, where producers have no excuse left to underperform. TRANSPARENCY TYRANNY for some, TRANSPARENCY TRIUMPH for others.”

Trendwatching: “TRANSPARENCY TYRANNY”
http://www.trendwatching.com/trends/transparency.htm

If your web site has customers and you expect to improve your interaction with them in the coming years, transparency will be a key factor in a number of areas. Take product/service reviews; if you’re not managing those now, then someone else is:

“Positive reviews will pop up more plentifully when you a) perform better, and b) give satisfied customers the tools to share their experiences. Either on your own site, or through syndication with third party review sites (like some independent hotels have started doing with TripAdvisor). If consumers are going to post about their experiences anyway, there’s definitely merit in presenting these reviews (all of them!) on your own site. At least this will give you a chance to immediately react, displaying your reaction (and how you solved an issue) for all to see. “

April 25, 2007: One World Hosting will perform preventative maintenance on the data center BGP routing systems during a scheduled maintenance window beginning at 12:00 am EDT and ending at 2:00 am EDT on Wednesday, April 25th, 2007. During the maintenance window, we do not anticipate experiencing power outages or network downtime.