As most of you reading our blog, and reading our news letters know – TurnKey purchased real estate in 2010, and made a multi million dollar investment into upgrading the facility to serve as our new Head Quarters and primary datacenter here in the heart of New York’s Tech Valley Region. Significant portions of that investment were made specifically towards GREEN technologies, some of which are unheard of in use prior in high capacity datacenters like ours.

In April, we will be sharing with everyone a full video tour, and additional information on these, and other GREEN technologies now behind one of the world’s most advanced, and now GREEN, datacenters!

The new cold containment pod system, as shown in the image to the top left provides the absolute most advanced and efficient cooling capacity for massive datacenters like TurnKey’s – very new technology, we have one of their first deployed solutions world wide direct from the manufacturer (Emerson). More efficient than hot aisle / cold aisle – more efficient than raised floors and forced air, Cold Containment Pods in parallel with our Emerson in-row ‘intelligent’ cooling systems allows spot cooling at a precision level never seen in the industry, lower power consumption and eliminating waste from the typical cooling process found in datacenters.

Here are a couple of photos of our on-premise power generation system, with our own Solar Array! Yes you read that right – we are actually powering racks of servers directly from the Solar Array (of course fed through un-interruptable battery systems, backed up by both hydro-electric based utility and on-site generators). The Sun is literally powering our hosting servers for clients! Unlike other hosting companies, or datacenters that may off-set carbon foot print buying ‘wind energy credits’ or something like that- we are actually producing our own clean energy right on site!

Solar Array View #2 for our New York Datacenter

Solar Array Power Controls

View Of the Solar Array

Stay tuned, for more photos and the video tour in April!

Yes, the countdown has begun. IPV4 address exhaustion and depletion. What is an IPV4 IP address? IPV4 addresses are the (4th) revision in the development of Internet Protocol; however the most widely developed among all of the versions. About 4.3 billion IP addresses spread out, all across the world. Think about that for a second, about 4.3 billion websites.. And there almost gone? Well the Internet started making a name for itself in the early 80’s, and as we all know, BOOM, all of a sudden we had Millionaires coming out of the woodwork. The Internet was the way of the future. Everything and anything could and can be found on the World Wide Web. But we are talking about a billion here.

Well believe it or not, in less than 35 years, more than 3.9 billion IP address have been allocated in one way, shape or form. Why is this so important? Well most of you reading this blog know about SEO Hosting, or Search Engine Optimization, and how it can affect your website(s), its traffic, and in some cases the success of your business. You are able to take an IPV4 (IP) address and in a matter of speaking, attach your website to that specific dedicated IP. Now when your website is the only site on a specific IP, and someone uses a “search engine” to look up your industry, you’re not sharing your IP with any other company, or website. Which in turn allows your website to be viewed first, more so than people sharing an IP. So since the development of IPV4 and the Internet boom, companies have paid top dollar to make sure that they were the only ones on a specific IP, so again, when a consumer was searching specific products, your company shows up first in line, right on top of the page. This leaves such an importance on a single IP…. Now they are running out….

In comes IPV6, to allow more people and traffic on the internet. Now remember I said that there were around 4.3 billion IP addresses in IPV4.  So mathematically IPV4 allows for 32 bits and therefore has 2³² (4 294 967 296) possible addresses, IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses, for an address space of 2¹²⁸ (approximately 3.4×10³⁸) addresses.

You are now into the trillions, more IP’s than anyone could even think about.

You can see how the amount of IPV6 IP’s will greatly diminish the importance of a specific IP.  With so many IP’s, well beyond the billion mark, where is the individuality and diversity?  With such a number, how can we make one website more important than the other, especially when web traffic is designed to follow internet protocol, IP’s.

Now don’t get me wrong, in the next few years your company will still be found on the web, no matter what, but at what cost?

Find out in Part 2….

Good customer service is what separates good businesses from bad businesses and great customer service is what separates great businesses from good businesses.

I have learned over the years that more often than not, people will knowingly pay a higher price for your product/service if they feel they are being taken care of. Most people are willing to pay more for a reduction of hassle and a reduction of time required to use your product/service.
Nowhere is this truer than in the online world. It is so easy to “pick-up and move” from one site to another these days that you HAVE to have good customer service in order to retain customers and reduce churn.

Low prices might very well get a customer in the door to purchase your service but, it’s good customer service that will keep that customer. And, conversely, if you have a reputation for offering top-notch customer service, you can place a premium on your service(s) because many people are willing to pay a higher price for peace of mind and less hassle.

Let’s take a look at just one of many things that constitutes great customer service. Always answer your phone and be prepared to help. Be courteous and professional at all times. Good customer support personnel understand that the reason a person is calling is because they need help and they are generally frustrated by the time they call. More times than not, people calling for customer service can be somewhat abrasive and they will say anything they can, to tell you (the customer support rep) how important they are and how lousy you are. We all need to listen to our customers and let them vent any frustrations they may have. Always be prepared to interject, at the earliest point in the conversation, that you are here to help and would like to assist. Many customers who call for help, tell you that they want to be fixed immediately yet they will continue to talk and not allow you to help them correct whatever the issue is. This is one of the things that separates a great support rep from a so-so support rep. You need to know how to wait for that moment when the customer takes a breath and allow them to get to a place (mentally) where they are now ready to let you help them. Depending on the conversation, there might be a hundred things you could say so I’ll just give one example here. Let’s just presume that the customer is going-off on you, when they take a breath, I might say something
like:

“Ya know John, I share your level of frustration. I absolutely hate it when I feel I can’t get help from some company, let me help you get this issue corrected right now because I want to treat you the way I would like to be treated myself”.

That previous statement HAS to come from your heart.
If it’s written on a piece of paper as a canned response, it won’t work.
This is the toughest part of training any customer service representative.
You can teach them to fix any number of problems, and you can teach them certain techniques but, you can’t teach somebody how to respect someone else and to have empathy – they either have it or they don’t. When I hire customer support reps and I have the choice between a person who has multiple years of experience in the field and has a so-so attitude or someone who has no experience whatsoever but has a great attitude – I’ll take a good attitude over experience all day long – I can teach them how to fix things, I can’t teach them a great attitude.

I’ve seen lots of people who think that great customer service is fixing customer’s problems. And, although that is partially true, the most important aspect of customer service is HOW we deal with the customer. If you treat your customers with respect, courtesy, friendliness and dignity, you’ll see that you can turn nearly every situation around and make the customer extremely happy. Always approach customer service as though you’re the person on the other end of the phone looking for help. Let me offer an
example:

Lots of times I’ll get a person on the phone who is obviously elderly. When I hear that voice on the phone, I think of helping my grandmother or grandfather. For me, being able to put myself in that frame of mind, relaxes me tremendously and allows me to deal with that person just like someone that I personally know and care for. You’d be amazed how much that can benefit both the support rep and the customer, because that type of care, even though it’s in your mind, comes through in your voice and your demeanor. Obviously you’ve got to be able to actually fix their problem too but, the way you treat customers is paramount to a good customer service experience. I have had situations arise where there is no immediate fix – for whatever reason. It is in those situations where the support rep absolutely MUST employ the niceness techniques in order to win-over the customer and keep them happy. People will pick-up on your ingenuousness or disingenuousness. You can try to hide it all you want and even though you may be a thousand miles apart speaking on the phone, the customer is able to decipher your true feelings. If you truly have their best interests at heart, they will know it, understand it and be patient.

There’s lots more to great customer service and we’ll cover more ground in future posts. I hope you’ve enjoyed this.

The Cloud, and Cloud hosted applications are all the buzz today. Businesses are converting IT infrastructure into the Cloud every day – phone systems, virtual desktops, office servers, and lots more. But when your business is making that transition to The Cloud, why are there there so many options that look the same but with different names like “Cloud Hosting”, “Virtual Servers”, “VPS”, “Dedicated Servers”? Which is the best option for you business – and what is the difference?

First, the term “The Cloud” is among the most popular terms on the Internet today, but lacks an agreed upon firm universal definition. The Cloud is IT on Demand. The cloud is a scalable, reliable and cost-effective way of accessing information technology at any time from anywhere. The technology of the cloud revolves around the benefits of moving expensive and complicated IT out of your office into an efficient, scalable, and secure datacenter. So if you are looking to move your office server into “The Cloud”, you are looking to host the office server in a secure datacenter, and use the Internet to connect to it from any where, any time.

A Virtual Server (also called a Virtual Private Server, VPS, Virtual Machine, VDS, Semi-Dedicated, or Hybrid server) is the term used for the computer server and software that runs on the same physical computer server as other virtual servers and is functionally equivalent to a separate physical computer dedicated to the individual customer’s needs. A single high capacity server in a datacenter can host 10 or more Virtual Private Servers – such that each client has their own privacy, computer resources, customizable operating system and software. The virtual server model is a more power and cost efficient method and provides an easier to manage and generally more reliable computer server infrastructure than say hosting the same application on a typical server in your office.

A dedicated server has all the same benefits of the Virtual Server for privacy, and custom software, but costs more since you have all the resources dedicated to just you (even when the system is idle, its using up electricity, so your costs and efficiency aren’t as optimal compared to a virtual server). But the dedicated server does offer a high level of performance, and for a busy application (say a phone system that connects 500 employees across 3 regions of the country) you will find the dedicated server is your best value when you need the maximum level of computing power.

Cloud Hosting can mean just about any type of hosted solution in a secure datacenter. The more advanced Cloud Hosted solutions providers are offering a robust scalable network of servers that can provide redundancy and scalability that otherwise is not present in a single virtual server or dedicated server. You have to be careful when you shop vendors who use the term “Cloud Hosting” to promote using the Cloud to host your application or server. What you generally want is cloud hosting solution which offers you a ‘virtual machine’ in the cloud providers network, that offers some level of scalability, and redundancy. Some Cloud Hosted solutions providers focus on you developing a specific application and hosting just that application (not an entire server or operating system) on their cloud – this is a bit more complex and ideal for developers. For instance Amazon EC2’s web site states “Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.” SalesForce’s offering in the cloud called Force.com lets savvy businesses and developers write applications to run on their cloud platform, utilizing their proprietary system to gain scalability and redundancy.

TurnKey’s offering, TurnKey Cloud offers a full virtual machine ontop of multiple redundant clusters of servers which provides the cloud benefits of scalability and redundancy to let you install any operating system and any applications without having to utilize software developers to convert their applications to a proprietary cloud platform. If it runs on the server in your office, it will run in the TurnKey Cloud platform.

So what’s different between Cloud Hosting, versus a VPS or a Dedicated Server? The reality is they all do about the same thing but vary based on price, ease of use, performance and the ability to offer scalability and redundancy. Some hosting companies sell a non-scalable non-redundant VPS and call it a Cloud Hosting solution because its hosted over the Internet, and it looks attractive due to the lower cost. Companies like TurnKey, Amazon, SalesForce offer a true Cloud Hosting solution with scalabiltiy and redundancy included. So you have to look closely at the infrastructure utilized by your ‘cloud hosting’ solutions provider.

A VPS will be your lowest cost – easiest to use, option in most cases. If you need a lot of computing power, or resources (disk, network bandwidth, etc) – your costs can go double or more very quickly. The down side is your VPS resides on a ‘shared’ resource (that dedicated server that is split up between 10 or more other VPS clients). So there can be times when you have trouble getting all the performance you may need, and scalability is limited (you may be able to increase ram or bandwidth double or more from your initial machine, but costs shoot up quickly as you do so). But the VPS is easy to manage, you don’t have to worry about hardware generally since the server that your VPS is housed on will typically be a very high end server with built in redundancy. But it is still a single point of failure, which can have several hours of down time should your provider have to do maintenance.

A Dedicated server will actually be your best performer, and best value if you have a highly demanding application that needs a lot of computing power. You can have access to 24 or more cpu processors, and 128+ GB of ram if your budget allows – and it’s a lot cheaper than getting the same computing power versus a Cloud based Server. The downside is the single point of failure, and additional administrative efforts needed to maintain a dedicated server. Make sure you selected a dedicated server from your provider that includes management, backups, and guaranteed response times if something goes wrong.

A Cloud Server (Cloud hosted solution) – is going to give you best of all worlds – but at a price. You get the simplicity of a virtual machine to administer it. You get the ability to scale to very high capacity (even speeds faster than your average dedicated server), and you can even replicate to multiple servers and utilize load balancing for literally infinite scalability. The built in redundancy offers protection from single point of failure on hardware (since a cloud based server if the hardware fails, should auto restart on another node within a few seconds, picking up right where it left off) – but all this does come at a higher price. Typically 2x to 4x the cost of a traditional VPS, and if you need a lot of computer power, disk space, or bandwidth you really are going to pay a lot more for the privilege to have that level of redundancy and ability to scale on demand

So what works best for your business? Give your Service Provider a call – tell them what your application is, and your needs, and concerns – and they will help you choose the best one. At the end of the day, all 3 get you ‘in the cloud’.

Those of us with any knowledge of the software industry would question statements aligning open source applications with Microsoft Products. Even more unusual is the fact that a new product from Microsoft which has recently come to market, actively promotes the use of open source applications to be run from its new web development platform. Strange as this may seem Microsoft’s new WebMatrix application is basing much of their marketing efforts of this product through the promotion of open source solutions which traditionally did not blend well with anything from the leader in licensed software.

For those of you that don’t know what open source applications are let me offer a brief description. Open Source Software “OSS” is that which is available in source code form and the source code as well as certain other rights normally reserved for copyright holders, are provided under a license that permits users to study, change, improve and at times also to distribute the software free of charge. Some of the more popular open source applications you may recognize are, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and Sugar CRM.

Before I discuss anything more about this phenomenon of Microsoft promoting open source software, I want to first explain what WebMatrix is and what it is capable of providing. WebMatrix connects you to a world of popular and free open-source Web applications, including DotNetNuke, Drupal, Umbraco, WordPress, Joomla and more. Once installed on just about any windows operating system, you simply select an application from the templates available or select from the built-in open source application gallery, and WebMatrix handles the downloading and installation of your new Web site. The days of hand-editing configuration files and making sure you have all the right components are long gone. Customize your site using the built in code editor and make it your own.

Why is this happening? What is the benefit to Microsoft? I am of the opinion that because many of these open source solutions such as WordPress, Drupal and Joomla are becoming so popular it is changing the culture of the industry and becoming more accepted that many of these solutions are every bit as capable as their more highly publicized licensed counterparts including many Microsoft products. Now by bundling many of the most popular open source offerings into a very user friendly web management platform, Microsoft gains the best of both worlds. By leveraging the consumer awareness surrounding the OSS products along with the branding of Microsoft it further legitimizes their acceptance and Microsoft still gets to participate as the developer of the platform. Oh and please be aware, WebMatrix at this point in time is a free application available to anyone, no strings attached. Don’t worry, I am sure as the leading software company in the World they will somehow be benefiting from this application release.

Microsoft is currently running promotions with many of its partners including Turnkey Internet to bring brand name awareness to this exciting new application. To find out how you can take advantage of the of discounted pricing by bundling WebMatrix with other offerings visit WebMatrix at TurnKey.

Having a website is a crucial part of any business today.  Figuring out where to start, who to go to, how long it will take and how much money needs to be spent are just a few of the important questions you need to ask first.  It’s not an easy task, but once your website is up and running, you have given yourself another outlet to increase sales and validate your company’s reputation.

There are many applications and resources available online to help make things easier in building a website.  The latest application (and our newest partner) is Microsoft’s WebMatrix application.  WebMatrix is a brand new web development tool from Microsoft that includes everything you need to build your website. From open source web applications, built-in web templates or just start writing code yourself WebMatrix is all-inclusive, simple and best of all free. Developing your company website has never been easier.

I for one am excited to play and learn more about what this new application offers.  All you have to do is download and install WebMatrix using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer. Then once WebMatrix is installed you just install the latest version of your favorite free web applications such as WordPress, Joomla!, DotNetNuke and Orchard.

Once that is up and running, WebMatrix provides all the tools and features needed in a single user interface.  You no longer have to switch between multiple applications just to complete a common web development task. WebMatrix simplifies tasks like editing your files, managing your database or modifying your server settings.  Then when you are ready to show the world your new website, just access the hosting gallery, select a provider (TurnKey Internet) and your site is guaranteed to run smoothly and publish directly from WebMatrix.

Who’s ready to try it?