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.

Yes people do seem slightly more cautious. But this is partly to do with the fact we were told we were heading for recession. I remember backing out of a property deal after the Nothern Rock crisis. Thank goodness Gail and I plucked up the courage and pursued the deal, it was Castell Cidwm, the UKFast training property which is now an integral part of our successful recruitment and training strategy.

The reason for my comments are not flippant, I know a great many people have been through difficult times, my point is this. Is this a recession, or is it merely a change in the way people do business? What do I mean by this? Well, it is safe to say that people have changed the way they buy things.

When you purchase something there are 2 decisions that you make.

1/ do I want/need this product or service?

2/ where shall I buy it from

In the old days! People went to shops and bought there and then.

Then came the internet. Now people looked online, researched and then once they’d narrowed down what they wanted, they headed to the shops and bought it there.

But, then came the new era. An era of confidence where people simply go online to do research and then simply buy it without hesitation.

Well this is a massive shift. It surely makes sense that if you as a business have not embraced this you are going to be in a huge amount of trouble.

I believe the cultural shift in how we buy is SO extreme it is literally wiping businesses out who do not have a credible online presence. Look at Woolworths, they felt that the internet would not work for their business. Yet Argos who embraced it is now one of the biggest online retailers in the world.

I was at a round table this week discussing the economy and budget. I heard numerous businesses explain that they had zero growth. The same businessmen stated clearly when I asked them do they use the Internet to attract new business, “people  in our industry do not use the internet to research our product!” The irony is I have helped a few businesses in the exact same sector generate millions of pounds worth of new business, all via the internet! But how do you educate people who simply do not believe it is possible. These sort of limiting beliefs are lethal and often are the main reasons why businesses simply stop evolving.

If only I got a pound for every time I heard business people say “my customers wouldn’t use the Internet!”

Over the years, I have won a few £1 bets to people I have met at Sale Sharks who said, exactly that.

Caunce O’hara, now giants in the Insurance industry were about to spend a fortune on a website. I asked them to consider a different option. For less money I helped design and build a new system that not only worked out an accurate price for the insurance premium, it took the money and attracted new business. I won my pound.

It’s not a business model I’d advise people to follow, I am lucky enough to be able to do this as a hobby as I have a huge R&D team, I also have done this enough times to know, I’d succeed.

I have done the same in a variety of industries. Debt management, clothing & retail, one business in particular (again who said it cant be done) is now invoicing more than £1,000,000 per month from online sales!

I can guarantee these people dont think we’ve just been in a recession.

The problem is, “you don’t know what you are missing until it is too late.” It’s people’s own shortsightedness that is simply holding their businesses back, or in some cases damaging their business.

I have 15 year old kids who are customers and a great many small businesses who are doing extraordinarily well. It’s never the brands who are riding the crest of the wave, they simply think they are. A lot of the high traffic sites are below most peoples radar. The people who win, are the ones who realise that customer experience is everything, and they build a super fast and effective site and host it on a dedicated server for that added umph. Before they know it, they are getting customers from Google, and the customers are coming back in their droves because the experience is perfect.

When we explain to people that their site is slow, they don’t understand. They look at their own site and say, “it seems fast to me!” This is the biggest misconception. They are ususally viewing a cached version of their website on their own local machine. What does this mean? Well basically, your machine stores images of sites that you visit regularly. So it stands to reason that when you look at your own site, you do so though rose coloured spectacles. You are in effect getting an artificial view of how your business is really NOT performing.

On the flip side through your customers eyes, it doesn’t hide the harsh truth, that for new visitors, your site is like jelly waiting to set.

This is particularly noticeable for people who end up hosting in the US to save money. People can simply drop out of the UK arm of Google once the search engine picks up the foreign IP address. Google simply assumes that your main focuss is probably aimed at the foreign market, as your site will perform better in the country where it is hosted. Some of the largest hosting providers in the UK, host their customers in the US and Germany. Rackspace host thousands of their clients sites in the US on their Cloud environment. One and One (1&1) a German company who also own Fasthosts, who market themselves a the hosting worlds market leader , host their servers in Germany!

Personally I believe keeping it simple is the best way. Host your site as near to your customers as you can. We are lucky, by being in Manchester we couldn’t really be more central to the whole of the UK.

I hear horror stories all the time on this subject. One thing worse than going abroad to host, is taking it in house! The ultimate in stupidity. Let’s stick our server on the end of our broadband connection or a leased line. So what if it is 100Mb. You may as well attach it via string! Yes it might work occasionally but not enough to get noticed on the search engines. Telcos for years simply resold 100Mb lines time and time again, and guess what? They attached them to a 100Mb line. The ultimate in bottlenecking.

If you imagine the internet works on the basis of regions. You can host your store on the main high street, the Oxford Street or you could host it on a back street. Which gets more traffic? Obviously the high Street. Yet so many businesses spend 10′s of thousands of pounds on their websites, yet they think they dont need to invest in their hosting. They think they can simply stick it on some shared space, or a cheap dedicated server (down a back street). Even worse, they dont realsie why it doesn’t work properly or why they dont get awesome results.

At the same time, we come across small businesses who take our advice or dip their toe in the water with UKFast. Experience the speed of the UKFast network and then get addicted. These companies listen to their customers and upgrade every time their site slows down by a fraction. These are the businesses who are the next generation. It is not the brands you know about, these are the new kids who a carving out a new horizon. They not only get my vote, they get my help and support in every way. They are the entrepreneurs of tomorrow.

So be warned. If you have a business and you are NOT taking your online marketing seriously, or worse still you are spending the bulk of your budget on the design and leave nothing for the location of your window to the world, you will not get the results you are wanting, but you will get what you deserve.

This does sound harsh, but it is a really harsh world out there.

If you are a web developer or you run a business designing sites, if you are hosting your sites on a single server to save money or to create a revenue stream, although you may think you are doing your client a favour, you are actually suffocating their business. If you wish to try a server to see the difference, drop me an email at UKFast or post me a comment. Every business I have tried this with has increased sales. Its not  rocket science, but it will certainly pay for one!

It is a good question. I often wonder how and why I ended up in a career so similarly named to one I had been involved with in a previous life.

As an event organiser, I essentially hosted parties for businesses. It involved the ultimate in commitment and service, a degree of attention to detail you seldom see and passion to keep you striving when the going gets tough. First up, last to bed….. it is a thankless task behind the scenes of a busy event.

The business I had that specialised in this field I sold to Granada at the end of the 90′s. they did me a massive favour. I stayed and learnt so much about bigger business, “how to and how not to run my next venture.” It was great time of my life, but one I treated as a learning experience and I was glad to move on.

And somehow I ended up continuing to host again. This time, people’s lives and peoples entire businesses. I thought managing and hosting peoples parties required the ultimate attention to detail, however this new world really does take my responsibilities to another level.

So, what is hosting? And, why is it called dedicated hosting? It should be called dedicated hosting because my team and I are dedicated to ensuring you have the perfect platform to run and host your business. Actually, it is called “dedicated hosting” because the infrastructure that manages your website or application is dedicated soley to you and your business. This means no neighbouring business can impact on your service if they damage their machine or if they hit a busy period.

I do think my previos life has helped UKFast massively. I was talking to a senior official at Microsoft (who incidentally we host too) and he said the level of service we provide is so much over and above even our nearest competitor. He explained he felt this was to do with our attention to detail and sheer passion for customer service. “In a technical environment UKFast are just on another level. Where businesses in your sector are usually driven by process and techies, we find ourselves focussing on people and their needs.”

Thanks for that observation Bill. Most kind. Ironically, having the passionate people around has made us focus more on the technology side of things and 10 years later we find UKFast not only the market leader in the dedicated server area, we also deliver our product faster than any other provider on the planet. Our network is focussed too on speed. And there is no coincidence that we released information about the link between FAST websites which become more successful and gaining better rankings with Google.

I am confident, we are something to do with Google letting the cat out of the bag towards the speed link after we got a letter from Google asking us to remove the information with Speed and Googles rating of faster sites. After a few letters backwards and forwards I finally wrote to the lawyers at Google asking one simple question. “So what you are saying is that there is NO link between faster servers and higher search engine results.”

We were immediately engaged with the big G, who were intrigued with our confidence. What no one knew is we have been testing all the major networks around the world for a decade and we even have servers on our main competitors. Each one is used to test various sites and the results they produce. By 2006, UKFast had already deduced there was a significant link between speed and happy customers.

Aptly named UKFast! Interestingly it comes from the importance I put on customer service and the fact that I believed that the internet will be no different to every other walk of life. We want everything NOW!!!

It is very funny though. I have some awesome quotes from angry competitors about some of our claims. They really thought that the thing was a marketing ruse. Little did they know we have had servers with them for years and we still do. Knowing ones enemy is an important part of the game in my opinion. how else do we develop if we cant identify strengths and weaknesses efficiently and accurately.

When a business describes themselves as “fanatical” for example, I want to know to what extent? I am always intrigued to hear other business owners claims, just as they are to hear ours. I don’t blame them for misunderstanding them. You’d have to be a little over obsessive to go to the lengths we go to to drive our business harder and further than everyone else. Nevertheless that is what we do.

One day I’ll publish some of the ridiculous comments that the leader of some of the largest hosting providers have said. “there is no reason for speed to improve peoples results,” “It is irrelevant” , “what about all the money you are missing out on by contending your network…. they will never know….. we make millions from the excess bandwidth charges.”

For me, whatever you are hosting… customer service is key. Keeping your client happy is the ultimate game. Being honest with your clients is the only way. Yes it might take longer to build an empire, but it is then built on stronger foundations.

It is a difficult answer and to define one event as anyone in business will know it is a fast paced journey of peaks and troughs and no 2 days are alike. The most difficult challenge I face and continue to face is the pace I am required to develop.

10 years ago the skill set I had to set up a small business was very different to the one I now have running a multimillion pound organisation. That in itself presents challenges year after year.

I know if I’d walked into a business the size of UKFast 10 years ago, I could not have managed it. Yet I dont feel I have changed that much. However it is very easy to under estimate the experience you gain from being on hand day to day.

If I take a snap shot of me a decade ago and me now, along with the aging process on the outside, the inside is very different too. Eight years ago I was interviewed on Granada News by Lucy Meacock. Last night at the National Business Awards in the Hilton Hotel in Manchester Lucy Meacock was the presenter. We had a chat afterwards and she remembered Gail and I, however she could not believe how much we had changed over the years. It made me think, she is right, I just assume I am the same person. I often describe myself as a man with “no qualifications” and this may be true, however I now have experience, and that is priceless.

Jim Collins describes “great businesses” in Good To Great as having leaders who grow from  within. It makes perfect sense now. Experience out ranks qualifications.

So why then do some businesses grow faster than others? Is it safe to say people are gaining experience at different speeds. I think the answer is obvious. This then explains why businesses evolve at  different speeds. It is relative to the amount of learning and experience the entrepreneurs with in the business encounter.

One of the responsibilities Gail and I have at UKFast is to continue to learn and every year we regroup. We go off to the Maldives for a 3 week holiday. 2 weeks of family fun and 1 week of intense preparation for the year ahead. We write huge lists which fill books and we review the lists from previous years. And we tick off our accomplishments and those we miss we carry forward. Imagine a graph that is steadily rising. This upward curve represents everything we do in our lives. It is easy to peak and trough in life, so we then draw a horizontal line at the highest point we are at at present. This line now becomes the platform for continued growth. Anything below this line is considered an area of dissatisfaction, there is only one way to grow.

So if that means, if I had done 6 hours a week of exercise in 2008 and if we consider being in good shape important to maintaining our growth, I would set a goal to increase that to 7 or 8 hours.

We apply this principal to everything we do.

To be truly successful you have to be disciplined. On that journey to achieve whatever you set out in the early days, you will be tempted to ease off, take your eye off the ball, but I have never met a successful person who was not incredibly disciplined.

Take Lucy Meacock for example. She was employed to present the awards at the ceremony last night. Her schedule of responsibilities from her employers that night would involve arriving early for a rehearsal, and being ready to perform between the hours of 8 and 10 o’clock. During those hours she is on show. She will be required to perform her duties at the highest level. For that she will have received her fee and her rider.

Yet she is the consummate professional. Once the show had finished she took the trouble for the next 2 hours to walk around the entire room greeting and thanking everyone for coming. This is a discipline which not only made her successful but keeps her at this elevated level.

I will give you an example of a fallen star. Do you remember Victoria Wood? The comedian. In a previous life before hosting dedicated servers I had a small business that Granada aquired from me called MDC (The Music Design Company). I organised events. I was lucky enough to win the contract for a charity fund raiser, Christies for Cancer. I chose the venue, The Palace Hotel, Manchester (a place I later got married in).

I wanted Steve Coogan ( a then rising star) however Angela Rodden the MD insisted we went for Victoria Wood. Between her and my PA I was out voted. What a big mistake. Steve Coogan was a mega star by the time the event happened. They both commanded the same fee. £17,000 for the hour.

I should have known when I saw Victoria Woods rider. Her list of particulars was ridiculous. I had put on events for mega pop stars with smaller requirements.

We provided everything to the letter. The flowers (a particular length) were ready in her dressing room, the particular alcohol, the flesh coloured microphone that she taped to her forehead, the Steinway grand piano and the spot light that resembled a bomber tracking light from World War II, we did everything. 

I went to her dressing room and introduced myself. My God, what a rude woman! I politely explained that Angela (who had chosen her) was a massive fan, and would it be possible for her to have a photograph with her at some point before the end of the evening. It was a flat “no” “you have employed me to do a stage show, and that is what I am here to do!” or words to that effect.

We got the last laugh though, when she was doing her stand up, the sound engineers tripped over a wire and switched off the spot light mid act, which was being operated by Jonathan Bowers who is now UKFast’s communication director.

But this sort of attitude explains why Victoria Wood is no-longer on our screens. It is a great lesson, whatever your profession, always be professional. I have a rule that I only do business with people I admire or have the greatest respect for. If somebody’s standards slip in any way, ethically or performance wise , I will not want to do business with them. I have been known to turf suppliers out if they have not stuck to an agreement, either verbal or written. If you agree something, stick to it. Honour it at all costs.

I had a supplier who  cost me a great deal of embarrassment and stress not so long ago. When I confronted their acting MD on the matter, I was told to read the terms and conditions. He said “I think you will find we are doing everything we are contracted to do.”

Two weeks ago, I wrote a cheque for almost £3,000,000. That supplier who has had a monopoly in Manchester on the service he supplied is about to find he has a very passionate competitor in his midst. At a time when they are planning expansion, they are about to loose their biggest customer and find out they have an exodus of existing clients who we already have undertakings with that they are coming on board with our new venture.

Lack of professionalism isn’t a one off. People who are unprofessional are consistently unprofessional, day in day out. And, if you want to be successful, in whatever profession, stay alert and learn from everything that goes on around you. Be disciplined and be a great person. Follow these simple practices and you cant go far wrong. 

I’ll see you at the top! Or on that great journey.

Lawrence Jones @ UKFast

A couple blogs ago I wrote of the importance of a speedy dedicated server to build your brand online. Since then I’ve been asked several times whether a Linux or Windows-operated server is more beneficial to the marketing of your business. The key to a successful online marketing campaign is a fast server, so which operating system offers the quickest service?

In actual fact there is very little difference in the speed of Linux and Windows servers. Speed is largely based on the quality of the hardware. So, if your online business resides on a Quadcore Dell or HP, with a high level of bandwidth your server and therefore website will be much faster.

As discussed in a previous blog, server speed directly affects Search Engine Marketing because Google ranks sites that provide a valuable customer experience more highly. So as long as your server is fast, your Web marketing campaign benefits.

For the ever demanding customer, website response rates have to be immediate. How long do you spend on a slow page which doesn’t load properly? My guess is not long at all. And neither do your potential customers.

For slow websites the click-away rate is often incredibly high – and what do web users do when they’ve clicked away? They go to the next search engine listing, which just happens to be your fiercest competitor.

Speaking of search engines, many of the top ones use website response rate and server speed as part of the ranking process.

When a website responds more quickly, search engines see the site as more reputable and of a higher quality. These sites are rewarded because they offer a good customer experience and so they’re boosted higher in search rankings.

Fast websites are always located on quick and powerful dedicated servers. The hosting solution will often include more than one dedicated server for increased stability and performance – but that’s for another blog.

When you choose an internet hosting provider make sure you check out the reliability of their hardware. The speed of your server is as vital as other parts of your online marketing campaign.

Meta, keywords, PPC, dynamic content, great design and link building are all successful methods with which to advertise online. But what’s a great campaign if the website it’s based around is too slow to keep the attention of your customers?

UKFast smashed industry records by winning the award for four years consecutively.

Being recognised and praised for the hard work we have put in to the company is a wonderful feeling. I sincerely hope our victory proved the importance and necessity of excellent customer service as well as top of the range dedicated server hardware.

However, I for one am not willing to rest on my laurels. That’s not the attitude that has got the company this far.

So this year we’re going to keep pushing.

As a company we’re growing very quickly in size, knowledge and experience. The boundaries of the internet have never been closer but at UKFast we’ll never see them as closed- continuing to push them with all of our strength.

This year we have great things planned at UKFast. Our aim is to increase employee numbers to 100 before 2009 and continue to provide the most powerful and reliable technology, networks and support.

And of course to win the ISPA for a fifth time in 2009.

I noticed that Graeme Hastings from Harper James suggested I elaborate more on the hosting issues and the connections between fast well written sites and successful ones.

There is no doubt that speed is now a major issue on the internet, you only have to look at how our obsession with bigger and faster broadband connections is evolving to see how high up the list speed is on our agenda . Customers are becoming more demanding when using the internet. We have all done it, gone on to a search engine like Google and clicked on a link and straight away clicked back because it took too long. It is very rare to have a product that is so unique that prospective customers will actually wait whilst a site slowly chugs along. There is so much competition on the internet that you are only another click away from finding a faster more effective site.

I do it myself. I’d rather use a company that had a mediocre looking site that is fast, providing it has all the information I need, rather than a very flashy one that takes forever to download.

So what makes a site slow down? Firstly if you are checking your own site you have to remember that your site will always run faster when you look at it rather than if a fresh customer viewed it for the first time. Why? Because your computer is caching or storing a great deal of the site on your local hard drive. Secondly the speed of the site will vary throughout the day. Through the night or early in the morning you may find it is acceptable however at peak times when the server gets busy you will experience a bottleneck. This happens because historically clients host web sites on “shared servers”. This means that you may have between 500 and 1000 other websites all on the server at the same time. This is fine if the server can handle this, however as sites get busier and often one or two sites take up all the resources of the machine at peak time, resulting in a slow down and sometimes even a complete standstill. The same happens if there is insufficient bandwidth to support all the clients wanting to service their customer’s requirements at the same time too.

The antidote to this problem is what is known as a “dedicated server”. This is one server just for one website. This gives your visitors the ultimate experience. All the RAM and CPU just for you without anyone else hogging it. The result is no slow downs and seriously improved customer experience, which is quickly rewarded by happy clients who recommend and trust in your brand.

As your site gets even more successful it may be necessary to loadbalance your site. This is when your one site may have more visitors than the server can handle. Businesses who realise the importance of their sites uptime may even put a loadbalancer in place not just to improve the speed but it also to ensure that if one server fails, the other server automatically takes over meaning you have no loss of connection. It is this sort of commitment that wins business. It is also proven that Google and some of the other search engines will reward you for your efforts. Google is now taking into consideration the speed of the site when determining where on its directory you should be placed, so there has never been a more important time to take hosting seriously.

So in short, customers don’t like waiting. We use the internet to save time and therefore demand information at the touch of a button. It therefore makes perfect sense to give clients instant gratification and provide them with what they want; when they want it.