It was a creative place for me and whilst it was mid holidays and the majority of students were on vacation, I really got a sense that I was in a special place. I had a great summer and made some lifelong friends and although I considered moving there, I was fundamentally a musician and back then, wild horses would have not dragged me from my vocation.

I never realised just how important Palo Alto was going to be in the technical revolution that followed. With Stanford University on its doorstep too, the area is steeped in history in the same way people look upon Manchester as a central point for the Industrial Revolution, Palo Alto and Silicon Valley have to carry similar weight.

Since then we’ve seen meteoric rises from a number of the worlds largest technical giants, Apple, Cisco, eBay, Google, who house their head offices there.

One of the most recent of the dominant players is Facebook who moved to Palo Alto in 2003. They have had an interesting rise to fame and good fortune, although the fortune is a little more recent.

With traffic volumes exceeding Google, Facebook has more than 830 million users, and as a result has to be the world’s most high profile website.

In recent years it has entered everyones homes and hearts, linking families, businesses, long lost relatives, school mates, it has done the impossible. It is doing the unimaginable. It crosses borders as easily as water and it knows no boundaries. There is no culture that has rejected it. It works in every language. Fundamentally it feeds the needs of all humans, whatever creed or continent.

The billion dollar question is how far can it go?

There is no point trying to work out how Mark Zuckerberg created such a masterpiece as I doubt he really knows. There was evidently a gap in our social lives that none of us knew about and Facebook filled it. What Zuckerberg has done extraordinarily well is exploit that gap and give us exactly what was needed.

So with talks of the Facebook IPO, is it worth the $100 billion that they are hoping to raise? It sounds like a lot of money and with economies all over the world facing tougher times around the corner, it seems crazy that a website that allows us to communicate with each other can be worth so much.

Yet, if you put it into perspective, $100 billion is only 27 times the annual revenue of $3.71billion, when Apple went public in 1980 it was valued at $1.19 billion 25 times its earnings. It is moderate in comparison to Googles who went for 218 times earning back in 2004. Yet Google delivered and in the last 8 years changed the face of advertising. Facebook would have to be the world’s first $700 billion dollar company to replicate Google’s rise.

When you consider Facebook grew 88% last year, it is a tempting gamble, yet a great many brokers are warning against investing in the rising giant. Personally I can see it going for a great deal more than 27 times even though the market currently dictates around 12 times. There is an emotional attachment that people have with the site and that sometimes carries a great deal of weight, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the initial entering is particularly high.

If you scrape away all the hype though and compare it to Apple who grew its profit 85% to $25.92 billion, Apple trades at a modest 13 times its price to earnings.

If you apply the Facebook multiple, UKFast would be valued at almost $1.0 billion.  ($939 million to be exact.)

Maybe I should have stayed in Palo Alto after all, especially when you apply the Google multiple, UKFast would be worth $7.5838 billion. Now even my wife couldn’t spend that much.

Whatever the outcome, you have to hand it to Zuckerberg, he’s done well. And inspite of a great many people all professing to have either come up with the idea or influenced it, he has hung on to the lions share getting credible people in around him who have track records in designing large scale corporates, enabling him to remain creative.

This is the thing I admire the most in any business. Its the first thing that suffers usually. Demands on the entrepreneur dictate new pressures and larger responsibilities as businesses sky rocket, so much so they often suck out the life and fun of most founders. Yet in spite of this and some pretty stupid gaffs, Zuckerberg enters the Silicon Valley Hall of Fame as one of the youngest internet billionaires.

On the subject of gaffs Zuckerberg paid David Chloe a graffiti artist who decorated a wall of his first office in Palo Alto offering him shares instead of a few thousand dollars. Those shares are now worth an estimated $200,000,000.

Ironically, the fee for the picture David Chloe painted is more than the cost of the building that they left. I am not sure I’d want to paper over that mistake.

So as Facebook move to Menlo Park Campus to their new HQ, I cant help thinking of the neglected piano. I do hope with all that money sloshing around someone takes the trouble to give her a tune and a tinkle every now and again.

I am ever the optimist and I have been wrong more times than I have been right on most subjects, however it does feel as if the mood in the board rooms of businesses is continuing to lift.

It is difficult to ignore the politics in other parts of the world, there are so many countries and people fighting for a myriad of causes. It certainly is a reminder to us all how fortunate we are in the UK. Yet back here in Westminster, politicians argue on the idea of AV (The Alternative Vote.) Whether it is right or wrong, can we afford this debate? Has the current system not served us well enough in the past?

My idea of a utopia would see the country run as businesses do. In a well run business, I can’t imagine people sat around debating a process of electing board members. It cost huge sums of money and diverts the attention from important life changing agendas.

I don’t have an opinion on The AV system, however I do think its a waste of resources and time. I rather like Winston Churchill’s comment. “The most worthless votes go to the most worthless candidates.”

Back to business, it does look like things are on the up. I was speaking to a friend who operates an amazing commercial property business called Bruntwood. I am always keen to hear Chris’s opinion. We sit at opposite ends of the spectrum in business terms, yet we both get to see early signs of activity in the economy at ground level.

Bruntwood rent commercial office space. It is safe to say they are the market leaders by a country mile in Manchester. I am proud to be one of their customers and we occupy the top floor of City Tower in Piccadilly. As a business renting out office space, Bruntwood see first hand and feel the immediate effects of businesses in trouble. At the same time when things pick up, they are able to spot this early on their radar.

Talking with Chris at the opening night of the Grill On New York Street in Piccadilly, it definitely sounds like things are on the up.

And for us at UKFast, it feels so too and I have blogged before about the number of business owners beginning to invest again in R&D and technology. Outsourcing is becoming fashionable, not only for the cost savings, but also for the convenience and technological advantages it brings.

The result within UKFast is very noticeable, with a massive surge in devices sold in the first quarter of this year, with March breaking every record in the company’s history. I’d like to put it down to clever marketing, however I can assure you its not, it’s literally a change in attitude.

It appears to be across sectors too. During the early part of the recession, we were fortunate to continue to grow along with many other businesses in IT, whilst other sectors were hit very hard indeed. It feels more balanced now, and its great to see such a wide variety of businesses flourishing.

Sat amongst friends at the bar in the Grill, there was talk of Apps, Cloud and Outsourcing from just about every business person I spoke with. Its just mind blowing when you consider these words didn’t exist in the capacity we know them now, 5 years ago.

And what’s around the corner?

I couldn’t even begin to accurately predict the future and I am at the helm of a technology company helping to drive change. But driving and encouraging change is different to being a visionary.

I believe the internet has changed more in the past 12 months than it has in the past 12 years.

The same people who just a few years ago firmly said, “the internet is of no interest to my customers,” are now ambassadors of the revolution taking place.

It is extraordinary to think that Gail and I set up UKFast in a tiny office in the spare bedroom. It only seems like yesterday  when we risked everything by moving to our first office on Fountain Street and employing our first team member Neil Lathwood, our IT director. When I look back, the process to sell our services was very different to today. No one really used the internet for business as such. It was a “nice to have,” it was a tough thing to sell for many years.

If you compare the 2 eras in technology terms, we were in the dark ages a decade ago. Although a great many people had the appetite and the imagination, it was untried and untested. The internet at that time was the great gamble. Back then, there was no Google and the designers of Facebook were still in school. None of us had any real idea of what lay ahead.

Regardless of this, it was new and I was addicted. And that addiction grows stronger and never subsides. It brings with it a huge amount of variety and satisfaction. Being a heart of an industry that dedicates its existence to helping others grow and trade around the clock,  across the globe in the blink of an eye, is extremely rewarding.

And 12 years after incorporating UKFast, I am in exactly the same position. I still have no idea what lies ahead.

What I am certain of, is change. Expect change always. Be nimble, listen with big ears and never take anything for granted.

I am often asked for advice because of our good fortune in the IT sector. We have seen the dotcom boom, although we were too small to enjoy that era. We saw the bubble burst and luckily for us, we were still too small to feel the effects of this era too. We have seen the economy rise and fall and rise again, so what is it that keeps us on track?

Actually its very simple.

My philosophy is based on enjoyment. If people enjoy coming to work and doing what they do, the results they deliver are far more impressive than someone who is disengaged. The challenge to make everyone enjoy their career is much more difficult. People seldom tell you they are disengaged. You usually find out when they leave, when its too late.

I am a great believer in spending as much time as I can with people in our business. By hanging around the team and being part of it, I am able to find out a great deal more than if I leave it to others. Middle managers are often very good at reporting what you want to hear and hiding things that make them unpopular. Its important to create a channel of communication that flows freely through our organisation.

Friday is a good example, about 40 or 50 of us went for a drink after work. I got my ear chewed off by a couple of people on a something that was infuriating them. It’s no surprise my first job after pressing send on this blog, is to go and support them and make the necessary changes required to make their lives easier.

If you have opinions on what works for you, I’d love to hear them.

Have a great week.

Loz

This sounded very much like a challenge. And as someone who hosts hundreds of online retailers, some huge ones too, I knew I couldn’t lose.

I bet them £1 I could prove them wrong.

Sitting with my web designers and marketing team, we immediately found ways of improving their system. Their e-commerce shop was clunky although the photography was stunning, the site could never live up to the brand, because the site was slow and the user experience was poor.

We got stuck in as a project and actually built Henleys a new website and content management system to help run it. I know this is some way from our core business, however we were helping out friends and after all, I had a pound at stake.

With in a few months of UKFast getting involved, the site was bringing in significantly more money, and in December that year, they did more than £1,000,000 on the site. We’d actually done nothing more than make the user experience the most important focus point. By speeding up the site and putting the ecommerce shop on seriously fast servers on the UKFast lightening speed network and the results to date, speak for themselves. We didn’t do any “SEO” or optimisation, we didn’t try and stuff the site full of keywords, we didn’t try and cheat the search engines, we built something that users would just love, and they did!

So what went wrong?

Well this is a lesson for us all. Luckily the site is still going and although the brand is taking a battering at the moment, the site is still in action, though sadly it is not performing like it used to.

As a marketeer, when you change something, you monitor it. If it’s good you carry on, if it’s bad you stop and revert to previous stage.

Henleys recruited some in-house SEO Experts. The revenue the site generated warranted more investment in this area and quite rightly, this is what they did.

However, in my opinion, they changed too much in one go to measure what it was that stifled the traffic.

Along with moving to a new web designer, they moved their infrastructure to their designers too which resulted in a massive slow down in site performance. This was not picked up by the team as when they viewed their site, it was super fast as all the images were cached on their machine. To a normal visitor arriving for the first time, they did not have this luxury, to them, the site ran incredibly slowly.

They also changed their domain name from HenleysClothing.co.uk to Henleys.co.uk

This is a fair enough decision in the board room, however, henleysclothing.co.uk was now a massive asset and well used and loved by hundreds of thousands of consumers. It was also very popular with Google who attributes “track record” historical performance information to every domain. A new domain, is literally starting again.

With a number of other UK businesses with the name Henleys in the title, Henleys Clothing descibed the business perfectly.

This coupled with umpteen other changes to their strategy and layout, image sizes, all made it impossible for even the best marketeers to monitor what works and what doesn’t.

The result, they lost momentum and they never recovered.

Sadly, they were already doing everything right and if they’d just left it, it would have continued to flourish at the rate it was.

We have all been there. When something starts to go well, we want more. Its not until you lose what you had, that you concede where we were, was actually where we wanted to be. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and this is why as a business owner or manager or if you are involved with an online business, there is so much information available to help you track your progress. The important thing is, no matter how excited you are for growth to keep the board happy, make small steps and measure. I call this Stop, Start, Rewind. Only when you get really good can you do the fast forward, however use this mode with caution, and if you really cant resist, make sure you have the right people on your team who will tell you the truth at every stage. More importantly, never put middle managers in between you and your key suppliers.

I had real problems reaching Ben and Simon once the site was established. When I was told news of the domain change I did everything in my power to get them information that I had on hundreds of other companies who had done similar things. I was always batted back to the same person who was pioneering all the change.

If you have people helping manage suppliers, make sure you check in regularly to ensure your team are not holding back information to protect themselves. No one likes being responsible for failure, so its imperative that you keep a close eye on the things that really matter in your business.

On a positive side, Henley’s still has a very strong brand, great clothes and if they can get the site back up to speed (quite literally) in my opinion this is fixable. If Simon and Ben are remaining at the helm, I’d imagine they will bounce back very quickly and learn from these very difficult lessons we have all had to face at some time or other. They are tremendous entrepreneurs, it is important not to underestimate what they have achieved building a huge brand in a very short amount of time.

We have an amazing statistic that the vast majority of people who leave our network, return at some point in the future. We had one this week, Gypsy Media. We had hosted them from early 2001-ish for 5 or 6 years. They left for a more competitive solution. They found that that didn’t work. They tried a more expensive solution with a competitor of ours, and after bouncing around a few suppliers, they returned. It is the most rewarding feeling, helping people achieve their goals. At the same time, it is a thankless task. Whilst it goes well, everyone assumes its the SEO specialists and the marketing teams, when it goes wrong, it’s the hosting.

Still I love it and its an amazing era. Who knows where it is going to take us, all I know I am going to keep going, small steps at a time, and measuring as I go.

Back in 2001 after the bubble burst, no one could have predicted how technology would evolve at such a pace.

In a decade everyone’s lives have changed. The internet is bigger than TV, Radio and Press put together and it’s just the beginning.

Google came out of nowhere, (or rather a garage in San Francisco)  to challenge Microsoft with alternative ways to search the net providing innovative ways to advertise and attract customers. It facilitated the long awaited revolution and in the process lost its “cool” status and became a corporate giant.

Google was so successful it was difficult to imagine a challenger. But then along came Facebook and although the ranking for Top Performing sites looks like this:

1   Google         9.16% of internet traffic

2   Facebook    7.69%

3   You Tube    2.48%

Google has to be worried, because unlike many other sites that rely on Google’s ranking system to attract clients, Facebook doesn’t.

Facebook grew from the dormitories of Harvard University and permeated  through the university networks before entering the real world. It is the ultimate viral marketing machine and works on a referral basis and it literally is mapping the entire world.

It is too big for Google to influence now and it has done something far cleverer. It knows its audience far greater than Google does. Although Google pioneered very clever technology recognising IP addresses to predict your searches and preferences, it is limited as it cannot determine who is behind the IP address. So when different users in the same household search the internet or at work, Google tars everyone with the same brush. It can be really frustrating when it makes inaccurate assumptions about your searching and buying habits, whereas Facebook knows you inside and out.

Facebook knows everything. It knows who the most popular people in every corner of the globe are. It knows where you go, what you like, your birthday, your sex, your girlfriend, your spouse. Whether or not it is far more sophisticated than Google remains to be seen. In my opinion it is a great deal simpler and this maybe why it is so popular.

What is proven about Facebook, is the fact that everyone in the Google head-office corridors must realise the threat to the myth and their domination they created.

If you have any doubt, check out the latest figures tracking popularity and visitors to their websites. Whilst Google grows less than 15% over the past 3 years, Facebook grows in excess of 300%.

Facebook climbs faster than Google. And meanwhile the Internet is on the move again, with Mobile Apps making everything possible from wherever you are. Apple is helping, making user experiences a far cry from the pain created with setting up programs via a floppy disk back in the 90′s. I watch my 4 year old manoeuvre around an ipad with the ease of someone who is growing up in a new era, yet my Uncle Phil who is still alive remembers being taken to hospital as a child on the back of a horse drawn ambulance.

It is safe to say, the world we live in is an extraordinary place, made so by a few extraordinary people. It is an industry I love being a part of. I’d love to think that I had the foresight to have predicted all of this, but it was not part of a larger strategic plan. One thing I have learned since setting up and running UKFast, is think on your feet, be nimble. Never assume what works today will work tomorrow. If its not growing its dying. You have to keep evolving with one eye firmly on the future.

So whats next?

That’s a good question. It was one a friend asked me minutes before going on stage in front of the world’s press with Al Gore in Frankfurt last year.

It has to be virtualisation and although its a 15 year old technology, it is only just beginning to work and if I am honest, it still isn’t quite there yet. Dedicated servers have dominated the hosting world for the past 5 years and are essential when trying to compete on the internet with e-commerce and lead generating websites. However, if you are looking at cost savings and consolidating a large number of machines, there is new technology available that offer some amazing solutions to what traditionally have been very expensive problems. (If you are interested you might want to check out VMWare and HyperV for virtualisation and cloud hosting solutions)

Where it will stop ? You can rest assured it wont! You embrace it and ride it like the raging bull it is, holding on for dear life. Its a good analogy because that’s how UKFast feels and we are only a tiny part of the internet as a whole, yet we are accelerating to a new level(*). And with hundreds of thousands of websites on our network , it’s a wonderful responsibility and one I take very seriously. And round the corner, I have no idea what is next.

I host thousands of businesses and anyone of them could have a break-though moment at anytime. Thats part of the fun of what I do. I get to help people grow their businesses far quicker than they could ordinarily do themselves. It’s something that is bone deep in UKFast and is embedded in Lighting our purpose. Watching and helping businesses succeed and compete is incredibly rewarding and I cant imagine doing anything else. It’s become a way of life. Somewhere on our network lives the next Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page just waiting to light the fibres of future.

Can you imagine the internet 10 years from now?

Go create.

Loz

(*) UKFast has a new DC coming live in May 2011. It’s large enough to host 12,500 dedicated servers and is the first of an extra 100,000 sq ft we are intending to bring to the UK market in the next couple of years.

That was a comment from Nick Jaspen from How-Do the great online resource that keeps Manchester upto date with the latest business news and current affairs.

I had described Murdoch as a dinosaur at a round table event held at UKFast. It wasn’t meant in a derogatory way at all. Find me a man who didn’t love dinosaurs as a kid. They were incredible species. The biggest, the best, the fastest, the most aggressive, they were just awesome in every way. Then one day, poof, they are gone. All we are left with are memories from people who have picked up the pieces of times gone by.

There is no doubting Rupert Murdochs achievements, but I still feel my analogy is a good one back in March or April this year. And actually now I have had time to sit on the sidelines and analyse the results, Murdoch has huge courage. I think in this case he is making a dramatic mistake and I stand by my prediction, that “Paywalls” and forcing people to pay for news simply wont work.

Sitting listening to Ross Warburton at an event recently, talking about the history of his family business, I understood completely. “you need someone to hate,” he said. I translated this as you need someone to compete with.

We all have our own axe to grind. A competitor who is so good they challenge your standards at every turn. This is a healthy form of competition in my eyes, and “hate” isn’t a word I’d use to describe my competitors. As a former boxer, I have had a few eye opening experiences in the ring, quite literally. The first thing you learn is to respect your opponent.

I have never hated an opponent, I was taught by my coach Master Chang when I switched to Thai Boxing that “hate clouds judgement,” and reading between the lines of Ross Warburton’s message I am sure he is referring to the same respect you’d see between 2 heavyweight bread-winners.

So who do you compete with? And is competing with your competitor the right course of action? I believe you need to be constantly looking for inspiration. If you are lucky enough to have a great opponent as a competitor, then yes you should not ignore this opportunity to learn and better yourself and your business. At the same time you really want to compete at the highest level, the question is not “how do I compete with them” its more along the lines of “what do I need to create an environment where the entire market looks to you for the answers?”

I think this is where Murdoch previously has been a master. Like Ross Warburton, he stepped into a family business. His father Sir Keith Murdoch was a highly successful regional newspaper magnate based out of Melbourne. Murdoch was groomed by his father from an early age, and went off to study philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford University in England.

When Rupert was 22, his father died, prompting his return from Oxford to take charge of the family business; becoming managing director of News Limited in 1953.

Heading all over the globe Murdoch had competitors of great stature in every area. Yet it is safe to say he shaped and conquered the world of TV and News, globally.

But suddenly, the world is changing very quickly and the Internet is dominating the fastest growing revolution I have ever witnessed in my lifetime.

So who does Murdoch compete with now? Online, there are bigger fish. There is Google and a hundred other sites popping up unpredictably every week. In fact, Murdoch will be the first to admit he sat on the side lines for years confident that things would never take off to the extent they have, and the highly paid consultants predicted the growth of the internet would never affect the readership of newspapers. A great many awesome newspapers were taken by surprise by this phenomenon, so he was not alone with this prediction.

So who does Murdoch take on? Google?

This is where I think the mistake is made. Instead of plotting a course for something that is tried and tested, where victory results in a worthwhile prize, I believe Murdoch’s chosen the wrong opponent. He is competing with culture.

What do I mean by this? Well, with the Timesonline.co.uk business model, they chose to put their news behind a username and a password, in order to charge money for the news.

This was a pricipal too, the revenue was NOT an essential part of the equation. Especially as the online revenue for a massive site will soon outweigh TV commercial prices. That’s my prediction.

Back to my prediction of earlier this year. I explained at the round table discussion, that people will simply go and find the news elsewhere. The BBC, there is no point me listing them, there are hundreds of alternatives. These days, we are fed news not just at home, but to our phones and it is litterally in our faces at every step of any journey. News will not stop. Humans are naturally inquisitive so they will always want news, but there are also resourceful and if something is free and easily accessible, people will vote with their feet. Or in this case their mouse.

Below is the graph that shows the decline in traffic to the timesonline.co.uk website. And although they are putting on a brave face, advertisers who can now track every customer from every marketing campaign on every site will soon learn that lower numbers (although not publically available to the general public) will translate in lower conversions and consequently less business generated per pound spent.

TheTime.co.uk lose significant viewers to their website

Three guesses when they switched on the pay-wall. So yes, Nick, Murdoch has massive courage I grant you that, but I also hope he has massive ears too, because it is not too late to save this great business. By frightening away your existing loyal customers, you are training them to find their news elsewhere. If things don’t revert back soon, I fear that this great institution will be the victim of an experiment that went horribly wrong.

As a businessman, I’d rather my adverts were seen by 200,000 people, as opposed to 20,000 passionate (crazy) fans.

Whatever the size of your business, big or very small, listen to your customers at every opportunity.  If you are prepared to ignore 90% of your customers it is safe to say you will experience trouble ahead.

The jury is out on this one. One thing is certain, Murdoch has deep pockets and an awesome track record so he has plenty rope to play with. But choosing where to focus your attention both as a business person or a person with in a business, will determine the level of your success.

Google the internet giant that grew from a garage start up in San Francisco has a competitor. As an underdog myself in the hosting world fighting to grow our business, I have to favour the smaller player.

It is not often that you can refer to one of Bill Gate’s enterprises as a smaller entity.

But smaller for how long?

A little like a boxer who smiles at his opponent in the ring when he feels a punch that cuts him to the quick, he makes too much effort to hide the pain. Recently Google have been sparring in similar style scoring points with Microsoft over petty issues. In my opinion they merely give Bing the limelight and raise their credibility.

The signing of a 10 year deal though between Microsoft and Yahoo must hurt. These are 2 very large competitors joining forces, sharing resources. Both retaining the side of the bargain they do best. Yahoo running the PPC, (the model that Google plagerised) and bing with the search engine, who surprisingly is faster that Google.

These extra milliseconds set Google out from other pretenders over the years, yet the secret is out, it is common news to those of us involved with SEO and dedicated hosting.

Google have to be concerned. If you break down the traffic that all the engines get separately it doesn’t seem that threatening, with Bing’s share of all UK traffic at 0.44%. Combine it with Yahoo’s 0.99% and add in all the other MSN related traffic and it reaches a staggering 17.1%.

It is interesting that MSN hasn’t made a move to acquire search providers that already use Googles’ search capacity such as Ask and AOL as this would increase their distribution and reduce Googles’ at the same time. I am confident that they will be talking, whether a deal can be reached or not, if Microsoft want to take on Google this acquisition accelerates their growth curve and takes out a further healthy chunk of the market.

On a wider international scale, I’m sure all the major search providers are thinking about the global strategy of getting Baidu in China and Yandex in Russia involved as the global distribution battle commences.

Why is this? Is Google acknowledging that faster sites give the customer a better experience? Absolutely! Is traditional SEO as we know it dead or is it evolving at such a pace that it has caught a large proportion of the SEO enthusiasts and internet users by surprise? Could it be that speed has always been a major deciding factor in ranking and no one knew about it?

Or did we?

For the last 6 or 7 years we have been watching clients with faster machines and lean sites soar to the top of the rankings. Not only this we have witnessed that when sites have slowed down, through congestion at peak times or with network or routing failures, they loose traffic and consequently customers.

A fantastic example of this and believe me I have hundreds was a site called Cheapest Flights.co.uk. The entrepreneur, Andy Speight, who set this up, built one of the fastest growing travel web sites in just a couple of years. Its growth was so impressive it attracted attention from TravelCare who ended up buying the business for millions. We had extensive meetings with TravelCare over their change-management procedure, as they decided to move the site to their in-house datacentre as part of the cost savings after the acquisition.

What they underestimated was all of Speights reseach and the lengths he and UKFast engineers and R&D team had gone to with regards to the hosting environment Cheapestflights was on. Speight had truly pushed the boat out, he deduced that slow downs at certain times during the day had a direct effect to his business with reductions in sales. He instructed UKFast to build him the fastest solution we had, load balanced, clustered, it had everything.

The results were phenomenal, his traffic went through the roof and the customer experience improved dramatically resulting in higher customer numbers, leads and direct conversion rates. Each time he upgraded the solution, the results just kept getting better.

I received a telephone call first thing one Monday morning from a very angry director of Travel Care. I was very distressed to hear that there was something radically wrong with the cheapestflights web site and that orders from their website were down massively. We take great pride in providing the very best service at all times even when clients are moving away. We have an astonishing rate of customers who return after leaving so we are careful to never burn bridges. I called my IT director immediately.

Neil Lathwood was perplexed. He is a lot more pragmatic than me. He simply called me back and calmly explained the poor results were down to their own network, not ours. He showed me the speed difference, it was staggering. Travel Care had moved the site over the weekend and the speed difference alone had begun to decimate their business.

The site never recovered and it lost momentum and credibility with search engines and customers. It dropped out of the Alexa.com top 1000 to become a shadow of its former self at an embarrassing 1,799,379th place when I looked a few minutes ago.

So why is Google bothered by this? Surely Google is just interested in land grab and their PPC model. Absolutely not!

If you understand Google’s model and what motivates the Google team, you will understand and unlock the key to true online success.

Just like Bill Gates said, “how do we become the intelligence that runs all the computers in the world?” when he founded Microsoft, the young men in Google have similar aspirations.

“How do we become the definitive doorway to the internet?

When you ask a great question like that, you start to look for great answers. In this quest for the answer, Google realised that they need to provide the very best search results and the absolute best customer experience.

Google analysed their customers and their user experience and found that the most important factor was not the number of links on a page, or the meta information, or one of the countless SEO rules we hear about, but the speed. The speed determined whether or not customers got bored waiting for sites to load.

We have all done it haven’t we, where you click back because of a tiny delay? Well guess what, they are measuring that and in our opinion, they have been for some time.

So during the discussion I had about search engine optimisation, I was challenged to provide evidence of Google’s stance.

Firstly, Google posts on their own site that landing page quality and Quality Score will be negatively affected if a keyword is graded ‘This page loads slowly’. The full details are presented by Google on the Adwords page below.

http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=87144

I have also enclosed a UKFast pdf which summarises the Google stance. I am specifically referring to item 4 on the ‘Google load time advice’ PDF:

http://pdf.ukfast.net/google_load_time_advice.pdf

Secondly Google advises website owners to contact their hosting provider if they are experiencing slow load time.

http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=93116

My third and final point is more emotive. Google like any corporate body take their revenues very seriously. Yet they are prepared to sacrifice some of this for fast sites with good quality scores. Why is this?

It is safe to assume that as they take speed seriously in the PPC model, they also view speed as equally important with their non paid for search.

Remember this, Google does not publish a list of what to do, like the top 100 things to make your site go up the search engines. SEO experts have simply deduced their findings from things that have happened to their sites. (Increases and decreases in traffic directly linked to recent changes they have made.)

The problem with this method of research is that they are comparing these to their own sites that they manage and not the Internet as a whole. How can this be accurate? They are not able to analyse all their changes in relation to the changes all other website owners are making. This would take an impossible coordinated effort.

However, at UKFast we are taking an active role in trying to speed up commerce and at the same time understand the search engines and what makes customers choose and leave sites. We have spent almost a decade with an R&D team always around 20% of our workforce splitting the Google atom.

With hundreds of thousands of domain names on our network and clever pieces of kit like our CISCO GUARD anomaly detector which funnily enough looks for anomalies and unusual spikes in traffic or our IDS and IPS which track and prevent unwanted intrusions, our unique CTM software (Capacity Threshold Monitoring) we are able to spot a change in a sites behaviour in an instant. Often it turns out to be a genuine increase in traffic. When this happens we all get excited, contact the site owner and put on our Google analysis hats.

Overwhelmingly the majority of increases in traffic to sites are directly linked to an increase in server or site speed. So a leaner web site on the same server is a great place to start.

Ironically if you look at a well SEO’d web site, they are text heavy with very little imagery. It is highly likely the leanness of the site is winning the great results. Imagine what is possible when you upgrade onto a faster network.

And this is where the fun begins.

I remember 7 or 8 years ago, sat at an ISPA event talking with some hosting company owners. Their businesses dwarfed UKFast at this point in time. They ridiculed the UKFast idea that speed was important. They thought I was missing a trick and they both proudly explained how they were maximing profit by reselling the same bandwidth (contending) over and over and over again. What frustrated me most was they were so pleased with themselves that their customers would never know!

And businesses are still doing it. Hosting companies who offer unlimited bandwidth or terabits of traffic can simply not be telling the truth if they promise an uncontended network. What happens when the internet users start to use the promised traffic.

Take the top hosting providers who make these large promises and you do the maths. If everyone of the 1000’s of businesses on their networks, all demanded the traffic promised in one month, in my opinion their networks would collapse. They probably would struggle if people require 25% of their allowance! It is a nice idea to be able to offer so much traffic, but it is simply not feasible because in the long run, as the internet grows, so does the need for bandwidth. Sadly, aggressive marketing often takes precedence over common sense.

The good news is, long before we knew that speed was fundamentally important, we realised that with a name like UKFast, we’d better live up to our name, and the result? UKFast customers are growing like wildfire.

So a decade on, although it is immensely rewarding to be larger and more profitable than the 2 businesses who scorned our honest approach to hosting and this is clearly one of those occasions where less is more, I have to attribute a lot of our success to good fortune and plain old fashioned luck that we find ourselves in this position now. Still fortune favours the brave and I am a big believer in karma, especially in business.

Finally if there are any SEO experts out there who still need convincing, just remember that your industry massive as it is, is built on supposition. If you are asked to name the top most important SEO ingredient I guarantee it will differ from expert to expert.

Speed is one ingredient which is easy to track. Try it, the results are awe inspiring.