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.

I have always been led to believe that Google does not agree with this, on the basis that it is unfair competition. It merely drives up the cost per click for other advertisers and allows them to monopolise the Google results.

I know that from time to time UKFast advertises under the same keyword. However, we do so only when promoting completely different brands. Each brand has a different marketing strategy so it is very unlikely that two UKFast ads are ever seen next to each other.

Whilst doing some research, I chose keywords that related to our industry. The two words being ‘dedicated servers’.

Immediately, I was confronted with a marvellous example of how you can take advantage of the system. The UK arm of a well established hosting company, and indeed a competitor of ours, was ranked in spots one, two and three.

I spoke to Google this morning and they confirmed that at first look this is the case. They assured me they are already aware of the situation and it is with their policy team at the moment awaiting a decision.

I was pleasantly surprised that this organisation, who have grown so quickly, remain consumer focused and totally on the ball.

However, in spite of Google frowning on this type of monopolisation or abuse of the system, I imagine it is a very successful method of marketing.

Effective keywords are few and far between so it is easy to envisage the fun you could have if you literally own the keywords. Possessing the top three spots means tripling the volume of leads coming in.

But then on the other hand, I was brought back to Earth when I remembered a conversation I’d had recently. We’d won a piece of business from a company and our contact stated that he felt this cumulative marketing strategy was wholly unnecessary.

He’d needed quotes from three different companies and had to make many extra phone calls to really get a good overview of the industry. This monopolisation of Google top spots had really all been a waste of his time. Because of this, the way he now looked on our competitor was unfavourable.

So personally, my advice to companies wishing to use adwords to the absolute maximum is; ‘work within the rules’. There is no point cheating the system. Eventually you will be found out and it may reflect badly on the way you are perceived both by competitors and potential clients.

Ironically the longest queues were experienced with those trying to log in online.

The biggest area where we see consumers being unforgiving in this instance is when they cannot access the Internet site to view or transfer their money. We are all programmed to expect to access our regular and favourite websites 24 hours a day.

So often I come across clients who spend a fortune on their web site and then underestimate the environment where the site then resides. Ironically, the hosting of the site is probably the most important factor in both winning new business and retaining clients, as it directly affects the customer service your users will experience.

Google keep their cards close to their chest with the rules that may give one company a competitive advantage over another; however one thing that is clear and has been apparent for a few years now is that clients investing in servers that provide a better experience to their customer receive a better ranking from the search engines.

If you are unsure on the importance of a fast site over a well designed but slower site, it is easy to demonstrate. How many times have you come across an ugly text based site that ranks highly on the search engines yet the clever flashy ones selling a similar product appear much lower? It happens all the time. The answer is Google rates sites on the speed they deliver their information.

The Northern Rock’s online calamity is indeed unfortunate. It is always difficult to predict the extremes; however it is possible. In fact it is easier to do now than ever before.

The simple way to do this is create an environment that is scalable. At the same time you need to minimise the risk of downtime and probably the best way to do this is, is with database replication. It may sound complicated, however there are companies who specialise in this type of hosting.

Tick these 2 boxes and you are some way to creating the perfect online environment. Capacity and resilience are key to guaranteeing your customers get the best experience.

So why are Northern Rock customers unhappy, and are they right to be unhappy?

The answer to this is down to the fact that their confidence is dented. It is one thing having to get information second hand via the news or word of mouth. It is another if your site that you rely on disappears. Sadly I think Northern Rock should really have been ready for this sort of potential disaster. I’d imagine they may have felt that having the absolutely massive infrastructure to deal with this unusual problem was unnecessary as the chance of this happening was unlikely.

Worryingly they collapsed with real customers however the biggest threats on the Internet come from Service Denial attacks. These could happen to literally anyone hosting a site and they are very common these days. A service Denial attack is when a computer or multiple computers around the Internet all try and log on to a site at the same time, literally flooding the network, switches and servers. The result is down time.

Most businesses who take hosting very seriously will have this at the top of their agenda when designing their network. If Northern Rock had a scaleable infrastructure they would have dealt with this matter far more effectively.

Some of the larger businesses in the UK often suffer from wanting to host their main database in their office. This creates a bottle neck in the time of adversity and high bandwidth. The modern approach is to host your company data on the Internet in a purpose built datacentre, protect it as you would if it were in your own office and host it to as near the hub of the Internet as possible.

Do this and you are guaranteed success.

Do you ever see Google fall over? Google is a company who takes its hosting very seriously indeed, and they have got quite an impressive online track record!

If you ever want help on this matter, or if you have questions, drop me a line at UKFast. I love this subject. Clients who take my advice make millions literally. It is the future and it needs to be taken so seriously if you want to be successful as a business person.

For all the Northern Rock customers who have had a bad time, as the press dies down so will the traffic and eventually they will be able to deal with all your traffic again. If you move to another bank sadly you have no guarantee that they’d have been able to deal with a similar problem.

In a desperate race to out do their competing news rivals, the Telegraph and Business Guardian both have added Anita Roddick’s name to their pay per click advertising.

Traffic to the newspaper’s sites is so important; the media giants, who once ignored the Internet and search engines, now pay Google to forward them traffic. With businesses paying a premium to advertise on their sites it is imperative the newspapers grow their online presence. Any type of customer is a potential good customer and so we see topical stories driving the pay per click campaigns.

Personally I don’t view it as a bad thing as I am great believer in freedom of speech and with that surely comes the freedom to publish and freedom to promote. I just find it fascinating that when Googling such an amazing business woman I find newspapers using Google to promote their brand.

Are these the same newspapers who claimed “the Internet is just a flash in the pan and will never affect good old fashioned print?”

You have to hand it to the 2 papers mentioned though as they are the only ones utilising this technique.

On the other hand, if you have stumbled upon this site whilst looking to find out more about the great entrepreneur Dame Anita Roddick, the site you will find the most helpful in my opinion is Wikipedia.org.

Firstly it’s important to weigh up where your advert appears in the rankings. Are you going up are you going down? It is imperative that you measure your results.

However, are you aware that Google calculates the number of times you view the adverts? If you do not click on them, after a relatively short time (undisclosed by Google) your advert disappears!

Don’t worry it is still there for the rest of the world to see, however the search engine recognises that you keep ignoring it, so it serves you something else instead.

Very clever, but how do you check your adverts with out affecting the potency of the campaign?

Simple, go to:
https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool

This allows you to see all the adverts without any interference. This way you get to see everyone, including competitors etc. At the same time, by not clicking on competitors adverts, they are removed from the list as well, so it is easy to get a false sense of who really is competing in your market place.

You might be asking why does it matter to use the tool, and so what if you can’t see them, as long as your customers do?

Rest assured, Google is calculating the potency of your click-throughs and the volume of adverts that are being shown. Literally every view counts and therefore to guarantee best results, use the tool. In my opinion you should use this for natural SEO too, not just “pay per click”.

Please note you can’t click through to the various sites from this page it is merely a read only application.