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

I bet them £1 I could prove them wrong.

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

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

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

So what went wrong?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The result, they lost momentum and they never recovered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1   Google         9.16% of internet traffic

2   Facebook    7.69%

3   You Tube    2.48%

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So whats next?

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

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

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

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

Can you imagine the internet 10 years from now?

Go create.

Loz

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

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

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

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

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

2/ where shall I buy it from

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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