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!

We have been down at the Internet World trade show at Earl’s Court. The Internet is a very male dominated industry being a techy lead industry. Sadly there are not enough women in our industry. A statistic we at UKFast are doing our level best to change. Women in our work place are essential. They are great communicators and organisers, and life would be very dull without the dynamic that mixing men and women together brings.

That being said, why is it that people automatically assume a pretty girl dressed in heels on a stand is not as smart as those around her? It is funny though, there were a few people (mainly women I am sad to say) who got a bit of a shock after making comments like “get yourself a proper job!” That particular comment was addressed to my personal assistant who takes great pleasure in being part of the team at these events and she manages the girls and their taxing schedule. If only they knew. Rachael took the comment on the chin, smiling at the lady as she laid into the commercial director Gail Jones (dressed in shorts too!) “why do you let them do this to you?” Gail simply said, “I want to dress like this. Last year I wore a dress, but but it’s too hot. The shorts are great and I love the atmosphere we create.”

The girls on the stand all work for the UKFast team. Most of whom have just come back from Verbier. They have the toughest job in my opinion. 30 hours in heels is something I know I couldn’t do! I admire their spirit immensely. I make sure I spoil them as much as I can. They work long hours and never grumble. They all have roles with in the business, some in sales, account management, customer care, but they enjoy the responsibility of representing UKFast publicly at all our sponsored events and client facing hospitality.

For me it’s imperative to have people who work for UKFast all year round representing us and not to outsource. The difference between the UKFast Girls on our stand and the others was so evident and the majority of people who came on to our stand commented, showing their surprise and pleasure that the girls all were able to understand their requirements and business needs, talking comfortably on subjects like clustering and load balanced environments.

But I think this is evident when you look at UKFast. We are so different when you take the trouble to look a little closer. This is why in the week Gordon Brown called someone a bigot for all the wrong reasons, sadly there are bigots out there, maybe someone needs to explain the meaning of the word to him, and for those real bigots, you should take the trouble to look a little closer, stop stereotyping and be a little nicer. There is a place for everyone in this world, and I am only glad the ladies said these hurtful comments to the UKFast Girls and not others who may not be as tough or as confident.

As Rachael my PA put it, “If only they knew, I have been in 4 countries in 10 days, they should have a go at trying to manage your diary.”

That being said, even superheros have to sleep, and boy, do they deserve it. To all the Girls on the UKFast stand, especially Laura, thank you for the energy you put into the event, you are amazing! Lads, you weren’t bad either.

They are human after all

The UKFast girls work incredibly hard. They are all super intelligent, fun characters with big personalities with the caring gene which means they make the perfect hostesses. You find the UKFast Girls at all the outside events, Twickenham, Sale Sharks, Silverstone Grand Prix and all corporate hospitality. They also fly with me on a great deal of my business travels and commitments.

I find it helps having fun people around. The girls help break the ice at events and play an invaluable role in so many areas of the businesses. They all double up in some capacity or other – be they a PA, sales person, account manager or even senior manager. By hanging around with the girls we develop strong relations with each other cementing a bond which is necessary when working under pressure.

I personally believe it is the toughest of all the jobs at UKFast. They are expected to always greet people with a big helpful smile, a task they do very naturally.

They have been a big hit at the premiership rugby this year, we have never had so much involvement directly with the players.

The photo here is of the girls thawing out after a morning skiing. They have all been involved with the 2010 UKFast Hosting Summit in Verbier’s prestigious venue, The Lodge.

After a heavy week discussing how to revolutionise our product offering, The UKFast Girls are due to be flown back to Manchester by Private Jet so they are fresh and ready for the Internet World, where they are hosting the UKFast stand at the hosting worlds biggest conference.

Why not come and say hello! If you are in London this week, Tues, Wednesday and Thursday, come and visit us there and meet the ultimate team that helps make UKFast one of the most unique businesses on the planet.

UKFast Girls on The UKFast Private Jet

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.

If you go to the Virgin Limited Edition website we will see a whole host of amazing properties. They all have a similar style of layout with long sociable dining tables, comfy spacious chill-out lounges and bars where you can help yourself to just about any drink or cocktail you can dream up.

One of my favourites is The Lodge. It is particularly special to me as my early memories of the Alps always involve bus trips and cheap hotels. As I grew a little older I progressed to chalets, but invariably you get what you pay for. I am in a fortunate position to be able to experience The Lodge, at £80,000 to £90,000 per week, it is a place for the discerning skier who wants to really live it up in the mountains. It is the ultimate hideaway, with a beautiful style of bleached & distressed wood throughout the building. Down stairs there is a swimming pool and jacuzzi with a steam-room and gym. Although the gym is small, really with skiing all day (if you fancy it) and mountains to run up and down, even I seldom use it.

Another great point is the location. And even though it is only 250 yards from the bottom of the main lifts in the resort of Verbier, Switzerland, the team here drive you to and from the lift entrance.

Do you remember the queue at the ski rental shop? Here the guys from the ski shop bring the boots and skis to the Lodge for you to try on at your leisure. Nothing is too much trouble for the team of superstars that Branson and the managing director John have hand selected.

The food really is something else too! We are not the easiest people in the world to cater for. We are incredibly disciplined and my wife and I eat no dairy, wheat, and my wife takes it even further with zero citrus as well. Yet the chefs are all too accommodating. Cutting out wheat and dairy more or less rules anything scrumptious out of any meal. Not for these guys, Gerwyn the head chef and his crew design and make cakes you could not believe were possible, using blends of rice and tapioca flour and soya milk. The Michelin stars are evident the moment you put food to the palette.

The bedrooms are wonderful, all spacious and have great touches like funky ducks on the sides of the baths, and bath hats you feel compelled to take home for the kids. There is nothing quite like the Lodge. The jacuzzi, a cup of tea and a Bolivar cigar complete a good days skiing and prepare you for the evening of kicking back and enjoying a bottle from Richard’s wine cellar. That is something that is common to the Virgin Limited Edition properties. You really do feel you are in someones home, and with pictures of Richard Branson with his kids and wife and friends on the shelves, it simply makes it all the more special.

I know it is out of most peoples price bracket, however the touches that these guys lay on can be done by any operator. It’s just that people don’t overlay this layer of attention to detail. Things like:

• your names are written on your door in chalk
• the boot room has an elaborate system which dry and warm your boots so they are warm in the morning and again with areas named for your hats gloves and equipment.
• postcards with stamps already on them are in every room
• a cuddly toy dog with “let sleeping dog’s lie” to leave outside your room if you want a lie in
• great books you can pick up and put down everywhere, in every corner of the house

the list is really endless.

Hat’s off to Hannah and her fantastic team and best wishes to Hannah and Paul who are expecting their first little-one soon. We are thinking about you and we look forward to returning soon and catching up.

If you are thinking about having the ultimate mountain holiday skiing or even mountain-biking in the summer, this is the number one place on the planet for it. I use it for team building and training sessions too where I am able to take people outside of the office environment and get their undivided attention. It is a great place to work!

The Lodge, Main lounge

BBQ Lunch on the veranda

We are here to redesign and shape our product offering to ensure UKFast clients get the very best service and solution in the IT and hosting industry.

But, because we believe so much in our philosophy that fresh air, exercise, coupled with learning and sharing experiences drives better decision making, we have chosen this years retreat to be hosted at The Lodge, Verbier. Mountain retreat to Sir Richard Branson. Mine and Gail’s personal favorite winter retreat.

Today’s itinerary for example, is play hard in the morning with plenty of Skiing and Boarding.

2pm lunch back at the lodge

3pm – 7pm Focus Groups and product shaping

7pm – 9pm Dinner

9pm Coffees and home made biscuits

9.30pm – close

Midnight relax and pre-detox drinks.

I have a mixture of members of the sales team here along with 4 directors and my personal assistant. In a way it doubles as an incentive, because although we dont take the biggest earners or highest revenue generators, who are usually the people you reward in an organisation, we take people who contribute to the highest level, and for them it is a once in a lifetime opportunity to hang out in the ultimate property in the alps, whilst being fed by the best chefs in the world.

Stood in the Great House on the hill looking at a photo of Sam Branson and his friends, I turned around and Richard walked up to me arm outstretch and with a warm smile he bowed his head gently and welcomed me to his home. It is the greatest thing for me to meet such a distinguished businessman. I have many friends who have become incredibly successful. Most of them though are particularly hard with their staff and rule their businesses with an iron rod. Richard is someone who clearly breaks this mold and it is refreshing to see that he is a million miles away from the ludicrous business ethics they portray on The Apprentice.

It didn’t take him long to suss me out and pretty soon we were discussing sport. He is currently in training for the Virgin sponsored London Marathon. He had already heard I was a keen exerciser and immediately asked if I’d like to run with him. A couple of Richard’s guests arrived for drinks, they were staying on the nearby island. They owned and developed Vale and Beaver Creek in the US. (An amazing Ski Resort) During the conversation with Janet and Paul from Beaver Creek, one thing stuck out and it made an indelible mark in my brain that I think will be there forever.

Richard said, “well, if you say Yes! to everything, you are going to have a far more interesting life.”

In my 41 years on this planet nobody has ever give me such great advice or such a great directive. And it makes perfect sense. How many of us just potter through life and procrastinate. I have only been on the island less than a week, but I am 100% sure you will never see Sir Richard Branson procrastinating. He is a decisive character, who doesn’t stop for breath.

Before leaving for bed, I asked what time we should meet. He said “pop around to the house at 6.45am and just shout me if I am not up.”

I didn’t sleep a wink that night, excited at the prospect of continuing a great conversation with a fantastic philanthropist and entrepreneur.

We have since run for a number of hours together and I have had some solid business advice during my time following in his great footsteps. Advice that once you have heard it appears like complete common sense. However you could read a 100 books and find 50 different ways from a variety of experts which all contradict each other. So to hear it from someone you respect, immediately fills me with confidence. And actually now we have discussed it, I totally understand and I cannot wait to get back to UKFast and start implementing some of these great ideas.

Yesterday I ran with him a little later than before, and I reminded him of what he had said to me and what an impact it had.

I explained that you could have written an essay, yet in one short sentence he summed up just how simple you need to make it.

“If you say Yes! to everything, you are going to have a far more interesting life.”

What a great piece of advice and for anyone setting out as a young entrepreneur, in business, in school, wherever and whatever you are wanting to do, this is good advice. It is a simple strategy that I can promise you Branson lives by. He is a man with a large appetite for life and it grows bigger by the day, and I am sure his positive attitude towards just doing things straightaway, off the cuff without procrastinating has to have something to do with his enormous success.

I am very interested in how he portrays his feelings on this subject, as he decided to use the line as subject matter for a column he is doing for the New York Times. It is definately something to look out for.

Lawrence Jones UKFast

Dedicated Server Hosting, Manchester

I asked a couple of members of the BA staff, does BA stand for Bloody Awful, after the worst experience I have ever encountered of substandard behaviour by representatives of BA.

I was checking in proudly to my first class seats at the BA counter in Manchester, when I met the second rudest woman I have ever had the misfortune to meet. We had telephoned the night before just to ask advice on the recently introduced ESTA. (An official government document required if you are flying to or through America.) The advice we were given by BA was “don’t worry about it, arrive at check-in in the morning and we will deal with it then as technically you don’t need one as you are not staying in the US.”

We trusted the advice and when checking in, told the lady at the First Class counter why we had not filled out the ESTA as per our instructions from the BA staff the previous night. At this point she categorically refused to check us onto the flight and promptly blanked us. I asked for help, and pleaded with her for someone more senior who could assist.

Enter (stage right) the rudest woman I have ever met. She arrived with a plastic smile that she maintained for the best part of 45 seconds before laying into my wife who was beautiful in her calmness. The BA official told us we should have filled out the ESTA online and that we should have and I quote, “put that you are staying in Miami in the destination box.” I explained that our final destination was the British Virgin Islands, I didn’t dare tell her it was Necker. “we advise people who are traveling through the US to the Caribbean to put down they are staying in the Continental in Miami.”

I explained that this would be incorrect and that this was a US official immigration department document!

Without another word the 2 rude BA staff disappeared.

We were kept waiting 40 minutes. Powerless and no other members of BA staff were prepared to help. When we asked for help, they said, “we are not getting involved.”

It really was like a farce. And if she hadn’t made my 6 year old burst into tears I’d have have been laughing in disbelief. We had turned up to enjoy the first class experience.

Enter Simon, a scruffily dressed man in jeans and a creased polo shirt.  ”Because of the delay at check in and that my staff members had not known how to deal with the ESTA, we are able to board this flight to Heathrow, but unfortunately it was now too late to attach the luggage to the connecting flight.”

He advised us that he had personally seen to it that the plane to Miami would wait for us. He apologised for the behavior of the 2 staff and he assured me we would be met by ground staff and hurried through at the other end.

It was clear this man just wanted rid of the situation. He was working on the principal, Out of Sight Out of mind. (perhaps a new management course BA are running)

My 6 year old asked me , “Daddy, why was that lady so rude?” and I was unable to defend her.

This farce had actually delayed the plane leaving Manchester and stressed 100 or so other people also connecting to Miami and other destinations.

On arrival at Heathrow, there were no ground staff waiting to assist us between the planes. Luckily everyone else just managed to get their flight to Miami, but no surprise, we missed ours waiting for our luggage.

I saw the striking BA logo with the words CUSTOMER SERVICE in massive letters. Fantastic I thought. I’ll pop over and get some help.  The 2 ladies (who reminded me of Les Dawson’s characters) with folded arms grunted back at me when I politely said, “I don’t suppose you can help and tell me where to go, we have missed our flight.”

“We’re baggage.” I continued and the other one piped up, “have you a problem with your baggage?” “No” I replied, “well we can’t help you then. Like my friend told you we are baggage” They carried on talking and I couldn’t help pointing out the irony in how they described themselves.

Walking away I pondered, does BA stand for Bloody Awful. It should do!

Eventually after a series of equally idiotic encounters with various Bloody Awful staff I found someone who was lovely. She was kind and called Jeanette. However the damage was done. The brand was dead in my eyes.

She did start quite hard like the first Bloody Awful staff in Manchester, telling us that as we had missed the flight and it was more than likely non refundable. First class tickets can be as much as £9000 each I didn’t dare ask Gail how much she had paid. I must have turned white with the sick feeling. 4 tickets wasted. 3 demoralised girls, 2 hours extra waiting and 1 missed flight! Jeanette quickly realised what had happened.

She explained the check in staff in Manchester were all agency staff. She fixed the ESTA issue in a few minutes putting “IN TRANSIT” in the destination box.

She went on to explain they had not had a pay rise in 2 years and that they had no idea if their jobs would even be here tomorrow. “The spirit is dead, and I am so sorry you have had all this trouble.”

Every cloud has a silver lining. And thank God, Jeanette booked us on to a Virgin Atlantic seat. One of our daughters, the 3 year old had some sort of anaphylactic reaction on the plane and needed emergency care. 2 doctors on board helped out giving her adrenalin injections, oxygen and salbutamol. Nikki, the Upper Class Senior Cabin Crew team leader was amazing, along with her team particularly Ross and Sacha.

We sat on the floor of the cabin outside the cockpit. The captain regularly came out to check on our 3 year olds well-being and after nearly the entire flight she recovered miraculously as kids do!

So how does something so great, become so Bloody Awful? Fancy not rewarding your staff and undermining them so they don’t know if their jobs are safe. I can’t imagine the people at the top have had similar pay problems?

British Airways is overweight in some areas and anorexic in others.

In our business if you have a potential weakness in an area you invest in it, and you allocate the best, strongest most aligned individuals. You certainly don’t cut back.  The problem with BA is they have multiple areas of weakness, so as fast as you build relations with the likes of Jeanette you have sledge hammer Customer Services or disconnected agency staff with their own challenges. Invariably you destroy the brand value.

I think one of the issues BA also has is whilst they are busy infighting, arguing over pay and bureaucracy, the Virgin Atlantic team is taking conflict very seriously indeed. Going about their business with the Sun Tzu approach.

“He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks.”

Well, in my mind BA does stand for Bloody Awful and although I have enough free airmiles to fly around the world 7 times, I’d sooner pay to fly a proper airline. Britain’s best airline Virgin.  And I wouldn’t swap our seat on the floor next to the loo for a BA Experience.

Lawrence Jones
UKFast

In fact if it wasn’t for a pretty horrendous experience when trying to register and host a domain called theGallery.com, we’d never have changed direction and set up a business in the hosting arena. And I suppose it was the “bad experience” which forged the direction we took to provide the very best in service right from the outset. It was this start which also gave us an understanding of exactly how a client feels when the hosting provider goes wrong or doesn’t listen.
If you are a client of UKFast and you ever have a problem, write to me or pick up the phone. I hate having matters left unresolved and I cannot settle when I know a clients server is down.

Although it is a decade ago, I remember choosing the name UKFast very carefully. The name needed to reflect exactly what we were about. UK, obviously for it’s location, Fast, because we hated slow service and slow connectivity, .net because we were a network and hosting related. Partly too because the .co.uk version had already been registered. It took us 3 years before we were able to acquire the UK TLD version of UKFast.

We must have trawled the who-is directory for 3 days trying every name possible. It was during the boom so the world and his dog were registering every derivative of every word. Design agencies were popping up everywhere linking colours to animal names. Blue Pig, Black Sheep etc. You can almost pin point a company and its date of origin from the style of the name.

So 10 years on what has changed? Well just about everything, in fact it is easier to highlight what has NOT changed. Neil Lathwood, then a teenager working in a computer shop, found by my wife on a search for someone who could network some machines I’d sold. He came in a for a days work experience and never left. He is now the IT director and one of the most well respected boffins in our industry. It is safe for me to say, I do not know a harder working man on the planet. His desire to continually learn and stretch boundaries is only matched by an identical skill inherent in my wife. Together we formed a solid senior management team and 10 years on we continue to disagree and challenge each other. We are considerably more beefed up now with Jonathan Bowers, communications director and Paul Harris, marketing director, yet we all still have to learn new skills every year to ensure we are capable of managing a continually changing business and horizon.

So what lies ahead in 2010. I am so excited by the challenge ahead this year. Even more so than usual. Last year saw UKFast able to compete with a bigger marketing budget. It is one of the challenges of funding a business privately and not borrowing form banks. We have seen many businesses fly past us on our journey, a lot now we have caught up, some we have overtaken, the others give me the challenge and the determination to continue to grow UKFast to be the best of the largest business to business hosting providers in the UK.

Last year we saw the benefit of the Castell Cidwm acquisition, a hotel at the foot of Snowdon in the National Park in Wales. It is an invaluable asset used for training and team building. It is a place where status is removed and replaced with rack-sack and compass, a place where team members can see their managers in as much pain as they experience themselves. We have run more than 40 trips touching more than 100 staff. Put simply it cements all the people who invest time and energy down there and lifts camaraderie when we are back in the office.

This coming year we are focussing on growing the business further and we have some exciting announcements expected in 2010. We are also exploring the opportunities of some potential acquisitions and some new services which will compliment our existing offering.

In the mean time, to everyone who has helped UKFast grow, people past and present, thank you for your ideas and contribution. To our amazing client base, thank you too. By having such a strong client base we are able to invest in infrastructure that ordinarily none of us would be able to afford singly. Thank you for having the foresight to choose UKFast and if you are not already a client I look forward to meeting you one day on our quest to speed up the Internet and improve the way we all do business online.

Happy Christmas.

Lawrence Jones

It was 11 years ago at Granada I first used the Grand Ballroom at the Palace for an event. It was to raise money for the Christie’s For Cancer Appeal. The night was a huge success and I fell in love with the room. It is the perfect room for hosting a ball.

I knew the hotel well, as I’d originally played the piano there in my early years when I first came to Manchester. I had some great memories of the place and I made some fantastic friends. It was during the era of Les Miserables. And the cast used to pile in there for a few drinks after the show, before dragging me out until dawn. It was a real experience and my links to the area so strong, I bought an apartment in Oxford Place next door.

Years earlier I had my first job in a shop called A1 music, right opposite the Palace on New Wakefield Street. I did a range of jobs, from brushing up, to decorating. The funniest of these jobs, (although not at the time) was when Ann the proprietor asked me did I know anyone who could do plastering? Fancy asking a 17 year old for advice on building. Of course I promptly answered, “I can.” I had seen people plaster many times  with the houses my father used to renovate when I was growing up. I failed to mention my specialty was demolition.

The plaster eventually went up and although not particularly smooth, I was quite proud of the job. I spent that evening building all the furniture for the room. The next day I was greeted by Ann’s husband Graham who was furious. He marched me up stairs to see my handy work. All the plaster had peeled off the walls and had covered all the brand new furniture. It had then promptly dried over night!

I did a variety of jobs at A1 including their book keeping, but it was the selling I enjoyed the most. As a “Saturday boy” the professional sales guys hated me in the sale floor, so I was only able to cover for people when they were on their lunch.

Guaranteed with out fail, every lunch I would have a field day selling. I learned that by being honest and directing clients to what they needed as opposed to what the thought they wanted was a great recipe for success. I also realised I only had an hour, so I concentrated my efforts and honed my craft.

As I held the record for the biggest sale in the company’s history, Ann was much aggrieved when the sales men clubbed together and convinced Graham to put me in the basement wiring up reconditioned speakers.

Happy to accommodate, to the basement I went. It was there I was told to answer the telephone and I learnt a knew skill. I was now only able to sell when carrying the speakers across the floor. So this is precisely what I did, and I learned how to get to the point almost immediately, and with in months, we had sold every pair, with me selling the lions share. On the telephone I was also developing relationships, there were a few massive deals where I convinced the keyboard player of a touring band who were playing at the Apollo, who were number 4 in the charts at the time to come in and part with £21,500. Eventually Ann forced Graham to concede that it was ridiculous to bury someone showing promise.

It was around this time that I got my first job as a professional pianist, and rather than rock the boat with the other guys, I moved on and decided to use my musical talent to further my career. Which brings me full circle back to the Palace.

The event on Saturday was seamless, from the outside at least! Behind the scenes, the band, Clem Curtis and the Foundations were without a drummer who had broken down in Nottingham, and with 45 minutes before the start, I called my brother-in-law to ask for help. Dave is a fantastic drummer and agreed to lend me his kit, so we could get it set up and sound checked whilst everyone enjoyed the champagne reception upstairs. He also offered his services as a stand-in drummer too!

There is a saying “you cant chose you family,” and if you could, I couldn’t ask for a better guy. His attitude and calmness meant I was able to enjoy dinner and even with 30 minutes to spare when the actual drummer turned up, I couldn’t have been more relaxed.

On hind site though, it reminds me why I dont do this sort of thing for a living anymore.  If you think computer hardware is unreliable, you should try managing musicians!

I also was reminded of what I loved about event organising too. Giving pleasure to so many people is so rewarding. Being on this side of the fence too, where I was the client and the organiser, meant I could make the right decisions there and then. The team comprising of Gail, Rach, Paul and Jonathan literally had the entire evening organised and scripted to the minute. I could not have asked for a better team. Jim Collin’s description “the right people on the bus can be moved anywhere” was demonstrated by the way my events team, comprising of a few of my senior management team, changed roles as efficiently as a chameleon changes colour. But although I had great fun revisiting this former profession, I would not swap what I do now for the world.

Is there more to goal setting than meets the eye?

What if goal setting was a scientific art form? What if you could literally pinpoint your every move in the future and design the outcome of every turn years before you arrive there, long after the memory of even setting the goal.

Sounds ridiculous doesn’t it. Yet my wife and I have built a business on this very principal.

I am in Amsterdam at present and yesterday went to Anne Franks house to visit a very important place preserved in our history. The one thing I came away with is the memory of something written on the wall.

“I have a goal, to be free from this place and to dance again and to breathe the air.”

This may appear to be an innocuous quote in amongst much more profound remarks, however it is the word goal that strikes me as interesting.

In a world long ago that I care not to even remember let alone imagine being a part of where countless millions did not survive, there is one child who defied the laws of everything that was controlling the world at that time in war torn Europe.

She had a goal and she wrote it down and she not only survived years of German occupation against all the odds she then went on to influence millions of people with her writing, long after she died. You might argue that her goal never worked, as she died in Bergen-Belsen in March 1945, less than 2 months before the end of the war. However she died of typhus and not at the hands of the Germans. She also lived an amazing life and for the short time on this planet her goal kept her determined and focussed on surviving, which she did for a great deal longer than most in her situation. Her father who is the most remarkable man who lived till the ripe old age of 91, it was he who was responsible for inspiring his daughter and family. He was the only one of the 8 to survive the holocaust.

My job here is not to convince you of goal setting though, I already believe in it and we have thousands of examples of it working literally to the letter.

A great example of this manifested itself this morning when Gail and I went through our goals we set on the 7^th January earlier this year. (2009) Gail brought my attention to a goal which was written simply:

“Weekend Amsterdam + Rome”
As we were sat in Amsterdam in the lobby of The Grand Hotel reading this we were able to tick this one off, however when we wrote this goal what we had really meant to write was a weekend away in either Rome or Amsterdam.

What is the likelihood of hitting an obscure goal like this, 2 cities in different countries thousands of miles apart, different climates. Not the sort of trip you’d plan deliberately.

Even though we had written this goal down 9 months earlier and had also forgotten it, a very strange thing had happened.

On the Saturday morning we were flying to Rome. I was not over-enamoured by the idea of a weekend queuing and site seeing, however I arrived in Rome with an open mind. We arrived at the hotel by the Spanish Steps, however there was some sort of rally on and the place was crowded to say the least. That night Gail and I decided to take the plane to a much more chilled destination Amsterdam after a lovely dinner marred only by the chanting of a distant crowd in the square adjacent to the hotel. The plane and pilots were still in Rome for the night, so Gail called the pilot and arranged to meet them on the runway the next morning. So we hitched a lift with them on their way back to the UK.

It worked perfectly, we escaped the chaos of Rome had a few relaxed days in Amsterdam, hit a goal in to the bargain, to the letter.

So as my wise old Gran used to say, “Be careful what you wish for!

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

It is a good ice breaker and for those of us assessing the candidates, it starts to give you a snap shot of what is to come.

A young lady stood up, and I don’t have her name to hand and she described her momentous achievement as creating a small shop on ebay and selling a variety of things.

When she sat down, I immediately asked, “so why are you here?” At first I think she might of felt that I was criticising her at least I hope she realises that I was singling her out because she was clearly different.

Out of the 40 to 50 soon to be leaving education, she truly had done something momentous. She has taken a small amount of cash, purchased something, found a route to market, built a shop however rudimentary and started marketing a business. This woman, because in my eyes, she is no longer a young lady she is a business woman.

Now that I write this blog, I realise that I need to follow up  her progress and make sure she is given encouragement. So often entrepreneurs are discouraged from school, university throughout careers. Usually by people who wanted to do things themselves yet, they never followed through.

If you fall in to any of these categories, it is never too late. My parents left their jobs in their 40′s and bought a run down hotel. Some in the family described it as a midlife crisis. Even I, the eternal optimist questioned their sanity of selling a beautiful family home and giving up great careers to become owners of a semi-dilapidated hotel.

20 years on, how wrong was I and what a hotel. They now have the hotels on either side and it sleeps 100 people. It has an awesome reputation and a massive returning customer base.

Ironically the kick that triggered my father was doing my first years accounts. After tax, it transpired I had earned more than my mother who had been teaching for 20 years.

Last year a young lady came to be interviewed for the job of PA. As soon as I read her psychometric test results, I knew that she would make an excellent personal assistant. However I also realised that  she had the perfect profile of a fledgling business person.

Her test also identified that she would benefit from traveling and it sensed that she was in a bit of a dilemma. I confronted her on this matter and sure enough she was torn between “going travelling” with her boyfriend and starting a job.

I suggested that she should be decisive and as her profile suggested a job working for someone else may just drive her bananas.She just needed a little motivation.

Last week I got a telephone call asking for an appointment to meet with her and her now fiancee. They were back from their holiday, and they had formed a solid business idea and they were putting a plan together. They wanted my advice. I was honoured to meet with her and excited to be a small part in giving her the confidence for her to choose the correct direction of her life.

After a a couple of hours, it turned out, she and her fiancee are about to become UKFast clients and it is looking likely that we will designing and hosting their software to run their new business idea.
If you have a dream, dont lie in bed and procrastinate, or talk about your venture to your pals for years and years. Get a pen and paper and start writing lists, start goal setting. Start organising what you need for your new future. And OK, if it fails, guess what, you pick yourself up, brush yourself down, remember the lessons of the failure and start again. You keep doing this until you get it right.

If a baby is struggling to learn how to walk, do we give up on the baby? Does the baby give up? Never! They keep standing up and falling down until they perfect the art.

Yet as adults this is drummed out of us. We become fearful of what our peers think. A great entrepreneur is born out of simply not caring what those around them think. This in my opinion is why so many dysfunctional kids succeed where clever folk fail. A dysfunctional child is reminded all through their life how much of a failure they are. So it becomes easier to go it alone than be reminded of this throughout a professional career.

My fathers favourite line which stuck with me was “son, you will not even be able to hold down a bin mans job” it was said so much I believed him. So when the time came I did not dare attempt to get a job. Instead I became self employed by default.

All the big entrepreneurs that I know tell a similar story.

Ignore teachers, parents and your peers. Get out and have a go! What is the worst that can happen. Especially whilst you are young and in a recession. In a climate like today’s there isn’t a more perfect time to cut your teeth.

Good luck!

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.

Maybe it is because I have never been to university. Maybe it is because I have no formal qualifications? I don’t know, but I seem to have a desire for continual learning. A search for what drives all things, past and present.

You can learn a great deal from the results of everyday life. If you can learn from your mistakes in time you will get to your chosen destination. If you can learn from your successes you will arrive a whole lot quicker.

One of the things that puzzled me and still does to a degree is “what makes UKFast more successful when my previous businesses didn’t come close?”

It is the same person at the helm, older and hopefully a little wiser, but essentially the same. It had no more money, in fact it probably had less. I put in longer hours with my first businesses.

I think one of the differences is, now we are growing a business as opposed to a set of products. UKFast is the focus as opposed to making money. It is treated like a living breathing entity. You are probably thinking “now he has really lost it!”

Certainly any accountants out there are reeling in agony at my naivety. “Just make money fool” I can hear them say. Yes they could run this business more profitably and find ways of cutting cost and speeding up production, but at what cost?

In time, if I am correct, and UKFast is nurtured properly, money will be a by-product of happy customers and a happy team.

But what about the product? What we sell? Well that changes both with time and careful consideration. When we first started UKFast we sold all sorts to make ends meet. It was this method that helped us find our feet and then direction.

I remember coming in to the office and saying “Gail, find me someone who can build and network computers; and pronto!” I had just sold some computers to Avis Car Rental across the corridor.

At that time we were focussed on selling reseller space and domain registrations, but that job set us on a search that would change our lives and eventually lead us to Neil. The great Neil Lathwood, now IT Director and a whole lot more. It was no simple journey either, and Neil, Gail and I would still probably argue we are still trying to find ourselves a decade later!

So what about the product? (You can read that in two ways.) That eventually found its rightful place, but with the nature of our industry it is almost as alive as we are. It evolves daily and has it’s own team of landscape gardeners in the shape of an R & D team.

So what is my advice? Well if you are destined to be in business and you are daft enough to want to work for yourself, then don’t procrastinate. Forget university, Get an office and start choosing the team. As Jim Collins says, get the right people and put them in the right seats. Then when you have great people around you, the product will show itself.

It is crazy to think UKFast was born from frustration when, one after another, each hosting provider let us down. I sometime question my own sanity. What sort of man dedicates his life to providing a service, just because he felt the people in the industry were not doing it right?

But that was the opportunity. It wasn’t about money, in spite of some pretty big ambitions. It was as much about honour and delivering on a promise. When you charge someone for a product or service, you should deliver. Not in part, but in full. And if you really want to be great, you should over deliver and excel. This is truly where the real excitement lies.

The hosting industry was very underdeveloped and driven mainly by technical people. The ones we came across did not feel the need for touchy feely customer service or in some cases, any customer service.

After an eternity in the incubation egg stage, one day, unannounced we were suddenly there, frustrating competitors who previously had not acknowledged our existence. Even more impressive is that we now hold centre stage in our competitor’s offices with posters about us for all to see. They have even doubled commission for any of their sales staff who can win business against us.

I suppose this should stress me out, but to the contrary it is flattering and an honour to be part of their interior design scheme. Increasing bonuses may win the odd battle but the truth of the matter is they just stopped competing/evolving.

Their company grew so large, so quickly, without competition, they began believing their own hype. Their desire to be the biggest and out-market the rest of the industry actually lead them from dry fertile ground in to treacherous swampland.

They were offering huge amounts of bandwidth with their solutions, with the knowledge at the time that “no one could possibly ever consume that much bandwidth.” It became a double-edged sword.

I remember our first full rack, housing 40 servers in Telehouse. The combined traffic of all the machines and thousands of domain names was less than 50 Gb’s in traffic. These days website use this much just for stats and back up. Suddenly the desire for bandwidth exploded and they had to make good on their promise and their network ground to a near halt. To date, I still don’t think they realise the extent of the problem.

We have servers on their network, which we use to analyse their performance and sure enough, as the day progresses and the internet wakes up, they slow down.

We have known for a number of years that a faster network is the most important ingredient to a successful online campaign. It is not about the specification of the server. The fastest machine on the planet plugged into an over-contended network will run incredibly slow. We have basic low end machines that out perform massive servers on some competitors networks. As Neil Lathwood, IT Director puts is, “A website or database can only run as fast as their slowest component.” The rest is just marketing flannel.

There are other issues too. They have replaced maverick entrepreneurial characters with less dynamic ones, but most of all, their service stopped evolving. Where they talked about value, they now slash prices. Somewhere they stopped believing.

It is a lesson to us all, never become complacent. For me this is the beginning. We are just hatching, our product is evolving and although we believe our product to be light years ahead of theirs, we are by no means the finished article. Where they copy specifications and marketing initiatives, they cannot copy people and passion.

You can argue that this is just a natural evolutionary stage common in the business world. First to market usually ends in disaster or mediocrity. (I will come back to this as this is a chapter in itself.)

So whilst competitors wield their sword I am reminded that the pen is mightier.
So for us, it is back to the drawing board, where we first started, and our quest for the Holy Grail of businesses continues.

So what is the lesson for this journey? Remain focussed, driven and passionate. Do not be scared of something just because it is bigger than you. Stand tall, fight with dignity and pride and remember your core values. The rest will be history, one day.

If you have experiences to share or questions to ask, I’d love to help. Please feel free to contact me. Lawrence DOT Jones@ukfast.co.uk

It may look as though UKFast sprang out of nowhere suddenly winning awards and accreditations for a wide variety of things however what we are now experiencing is nothing new. Countless businesses before us go through the exact same process.

We have for a decade (in September) been slogging away with the rest of the world oblivious to our presence. This is typical in the business world, and the best analogy of this comes from Jim Collins the author of the best selling business books “Good to Great” and “Built to Last”. He describes this common scenario in businesses by describing his “chicken and egg concept.”

“Imagine an egg” he describes, “sat there doing nothing. Totally uninteresting to the outside world, yet inside there is plenty going on. One day, the egg hatches and out pops a chicken. Suddenly everyone is amazed and shocked at the new discovery. Although the egg has been sat there for a very long time incubating, until the day it hatches, no real interest is shown in it.

It is very easy to run a small business and think that you are getting nowhere. Whist your competitors fly past with VC (Venture Capital) backing and lavish their shiny brands in your faces in the best of the trade magazines. But you must not get disheartened. Easier said than done, now we have a business which appears to be moving on from the ugly duckling stage!

But it hasn’t always been that way. I have had many businesses and even more daft ideas! Although each one has made money and I even sold one to Granada in my 20’s, I never stuck it out to the hatching stage.

There is a danger these days with the DOT COM bubble and conceptual businesses which attracted interest, one thing still remains firm from that time, the ridiculous question of “when is your exit point?”

To me this cheapens your business and all the hard work you and your colleagues put in to nurture and build something special. I have been scorned at by some pretty large entrepreneurs for not having a set exit date or amount of money we will sell for. I hate the word exit anyway. An exit is place you look for when the building is on fire or when you have to leave somewhere in a hurry. I get equally blank faces when confronted with the same question from accountants, lawyers and the like. What is wrong with wanting to build something solid, with longevity? A family business or a small business where you don’t feel you want to set the world on fire.

I believe these make the best businesses. UKFast was conceptualised in a garden, one summer. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I knew the internet was going to be massive as I had spent a year on and off in America and the whole of the US was obsessed by it. The only thing I was sure of was that my new girlfriend Gail Everton would make a great person to have on the team.

Years later I found out from reading Good to Great that this process was a tried and tested method for launching a successful business. Collins talks of getting the right people on the bus and the wrong ones off, then when you are confident you have the right team, find your product. It seems a backwards way of doing things, but ironically now I look back this is what we did. It was just a very small bus, or may be a tandem! The first 4 people (myself included) that sat in the Ducie House surrounded by a plethora of other tiny businesses all with similar dreams and aspirations, are still with UKFast , 9 and a half years later.

It took us the best part of a week to find out what we were going to be doing, and ironically it wasn’t through sophisticated analysis or market research, it was because we tried to register and host a completely different business called thegallery.com. The irony was that the company we tried to do this through was appalling and so we tried another, then another, then another and so it went on until I turned to Gail and said the opportunity is not in the website idea thegallery.com, it was in the hosting of websites for other people.

Daft as a brush, and with out realising the might of the organisations around us, without the technical expertise at that time in house, without sufficient finances to pursue such a dream we set about finding a name.

All this because we were frustrated with the shocking attitudes of these new businesses that were growing by default, because their industry was exploding.

I didn’t care whether or not we made money, I knew there was a hole to fill in the market and part of my destiny was to fill it. A decade later we still fill the gap. Yes, we have had to evolve our product and service and our ability as managers and business professionals, but our core values are still the same as the first day we set up. We still have the same attitude. It is this attitude you need if you want to be truly successful. It is something we all experience in our lives, be it as a child, at school, or on the sports field. It is something easily watered down, forgotten or drowned by mediocrity if not nurtured and rewarded. But it is in all of us, it is why we evolve, it is why we were put on this planet.

You have to believe that you are going to be the best at whatever you do. If you are not going to be, you may as well shut up shop and look to do something else. Yes you may fail, time and time again, but as long as the attitude is there you will eventually succeed.

Companies who go against these giant industry leaders do so knowing that deep down their service is better, their staff around them are better or their product maybe better. After years of diligence in the incubating pre-chicken stage eventually they emerge with an amazing business. All it takes is belief, resilience and perseverance.

So if you are in the incubating stage, don’t give up. Don’t let anyone knock you off your path, or make you feel your product or business is worth less because you do not turnover millions. It is highly likely that you will succeed. It is also likely during tough times like today’s economic environment that you as a small business have a major competitive advantage over your largest competitors. They will be in a position where they are having to hit numbers to impress share holders and stock market analysts.

Remember there are still customers out there you just have to fight harder to win and keep them. Work hard and when the recession lifts you will emerge a fitter, stronger organisation and if you have not already hatched, you will be ready.

Typically, schools, colleges and universities have used the internet as a place to display achievements and attract new pupils. Universities in particular have to market their courses, and the internet is an obvious place to do this.

In recent years however, many learning institutions are modifying their online presence to include materials for study. Programmes are now in effect which offer direct access to lecture notes. And more and more, institutions use the internet to establish social networking sites for communications between pupils and teachers.

Due to the many different variations in content, online learning can be undertaken in many unique ways. Video clips, interactive features, PDFs, graphics, webinars and forums are backed by the fact that the internet is the largest publicly accessible store of information on the planet.

But is all this making our scholars more intelligent, or simply more lazy, as they know they’ll always have the answers at their fingertips.

In my opinion, the internet for scholars serves the same purpose as the calculator for mathematicians. Even a student with the greatest store of information possible cannot benefit from it if they don’t have the background knowledge to begin with. Just as with a top of the range calculator, if you don’t know the theories it doesn’t matter which buttons you press, you won’t get the correct answer.

What the internet does provide to learners is the possibility to do research and therefore complete work more quickly. And businesses can benefit too.

Online webinars by Google already play a large part in the training of the UKFast marketing team. Watching a live seminar on the web eliminates the need to travel to far flung locations (like London) and gives up to the minute information from expert speakers.

Basically it levels the playing-field of learning for businesses around the world. Unlike reading text online, you are also given the option to ask questions which are answered immediately.

I’m pleased to see that educational and business establishments are taking note of the internet as it is a valuable educational resource. Organisations are taking the internet very seriously by hosting sites on dedicated servers, helping them to provide a high level of service and cope with volumes of traffic.

Amazing revelations are taking place in educational online content already and I am very excited to find out where it will lead.

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.

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.

I break down true online success into 3 categories.

1. Invest in the right infrastructure
2. Respect the search engines
3. Put your web site at the heart of your business

1. As the managing director of a hosting company, I am in danger of looking biased when I say that your hosting platform is a key ingredient, but I am well placed to give this advice. Since 1999 we have seen the rise and fall and the rise again of this fantastic industry. With over a thousand successful clients we are in a good position to analyse what companies are doing right and also what they are doing wrong.

There are some definite trends emerging. Out of every successful client we host, each one of them takes their hosting environment very seriously. Why? Because customer experience is important to them. They have learnt that fast web pages mean happy customers.

Have you ever gone to google or yahoo, typed in something and then clicked straight back because it took too long? Of course you have. You do it every day. Well there is a danger so are your potential customers. You might think your site is acceptable, but then again, is it cached in your machines memory? So wherever you host, do it right.

2. Respecting the search engines is a complicated conundrum. It was described by one of my fellow speakers yesterday Clare Johnson from Adoofa, as a “dark art.” She is absolutely correct when she said that no one can promise to put you top of the search engines and guarantee it. The reason being is that you would come across someone equally competitive who potentially will knock you off your pedestal. All you can do is treat it as a race that never ends. Once you are committed, you see the benefit and you are hooked.

There are so many pitfalls to SEO (search engine optimisation) that I cannot do the subject justice, so I will be revisiting this topic regularly, and inviting others to contribute.

3. Put your web site at the heart of your business and give it the resources that it needs to survive. I went on a solicitors site yesterday as I am moving house. I knew who I wanted to use, I just needed their phone number. I gave up looking after clicking through about 5 or 6 pages. The irony is that firm of solicitors has clearly spent a lot of money developing its online brand. Yet they are able to make fundamental mistakes which will frighten off prospective clients. I would never do business with someone who does not clearly show their contact details on a web site. I also prefer to do business with people who are passionate so this needs to come across in every aspect of your business dealings. Again there is much to discuss on this topic too and I am keen to explore this in great detail and hear from other marketers about their experiences.

To get a brief summary about last night from Jonathan Bowers communication manager at UKFast click on Jonathan’s link
So what questions do you have? Where do you need help?