Howdy-do, TurnKey Lovers?

Jeremy here, with another entry for you to gobble up. “Gobble”? Well, that’s a funny use of the word, but it actually deals directly with my current post. The word “gobble” results in thoughts about turkey. Now, this could be due to the fact that I’m hungry. Any reference to food incites a bout of extreme hunger, causing me to crave that 5-piece spicy nugget from Wendy’s that I have left over. But, I digress.

The reason that I mention “gobble” is really to talk about turkey—not TurnKey—but turkey. That, sometimes dry, meat that you have to cook perfectly on Thanksgiving, or start looking for a gallon of water to just get through the meal. Turkey brings us to Thanksgiving; one of the joyous occasions most Americans celebrate every year by engorging themselves with as much food possible, and then passing out an hour later. Ok, that might just be me who does the passing out part…

There is also another GREAT benefit to this time of the year. Have you figured it out yet? Did you even guess? I’ll give you a hint; it’s the day after you recover from stuffing yourself with delectable food. Queue the jeopardy theme song—BLACK FRIDAYYYY!!!

Black Friday isn’t considered a holiday, but with the sheer amount of people out shopping, you would think it was the busiest holiday of the year. I will give you a bit of history on the day Black Friday:

This day, Black Friday, is the official kick-off to the Christmas shopping season. You will see/hear/read about many retailers opening up at 4AM or earlier to accommodate the large rush of customers expecting to find ridiculous deals on different products. Consumers every year look forward to this one day, so that they can purchase those headphones they’ve been eying for months that were a bit too expensive, or that new 50-inch LCD flat screen that they’ve been wanting to hang up over their fireplace since first seeing the ad on television.

To put this in perspective, I’ve included the table below from our good buddy Wikipedia, which depicts the average amount of money that is spent on this day:

Retail Sales

The National Retail Federation releases figures on the sales for each Thanksgiving weekend.

Now, you may be wondering, “What on Earth does this have to do with hosting?” Well, my friends, we live in a world with a digital economy now, and it seems that everyone and their mother has a website. Almost every major retailer has some sort of ad space where they post their upcoming deals for Black Friday. With so many consumers looking for the best deal, you can imagine that sites will receive heavy traffic spikes due to the demand of finding the best deals.

These large spikes of traffic need to be handled as smoothly as possible, so that retailers and consumers do not experience any downtime during this whirl-wind of a day. Enter stage left—expandable cloud servers, multiple VPS’s (virtual private servers), or another dedicated server to handle the increase of traffic. All of which you can find here, at TurnKey Internet.

Each solution has its unique benefits. For example, let’s say you have a cloud server. On Black Friday, your traffic quadruples. Well, one of the main benefits of a TurnKey cloud is the ability to add more resources without incurring downtime. You could have more RAM allocated, increased disk space, or even increased bandwidth. The scalability is very enticing. Then, after Black Friday has concluded, you can downgrade your cloud server with no issues.

Or, let’s say you purchase an additional TurnKey VPS to handle your increase of traffic. You could then have those extra VPS’s decommissioned. You see, the real winners on Black Friday are the consumers/retailers that plan ahead. They purchase the additional bandwidth or add another server before the day occurs. As my college professor would say, “Prior preparation prevents poor performance.” That could be increasing your Turnkey cloud resources, adding an additional Turnkey VPS, or purchasing a new Turnkey dedicated server ahead of time. That way, you can keep your sales flowing in and your customers happy.

Now, my chicken nuggets are calling. Until next time, TurnKey lovers!

Meet the latest member of the TurnKey Team, here to help assist you 24 x 7!

My name is Kyle Sponable, I am a graduate of Hudson Valley Community College with an Associate’s Degree in Computer Science specializing in Systems Administration.  I have been working at TurnKey Internet for about a month now.

Technology has been my passion for many years be it computers, rockets, aircraft, even antique engines. When I am not at Turnkey, my days vary from reenacting the days of old steam at shows and fairs, to launching rockets, to building DIY projects in my garage. When I am not building something or another I like to hunt and fish, watch movies, and travel.

Today I would like to tell you about my experiences here and maybe give you a taste of what it is like to be a tech here at TurnKey Internet.

I have been on all sides of the IT field from programming, to field work, consulting, to now datacenter. While I have been fortunate to have worked with many great people, working with the TurnKey team has far been the most enjoyable experience I have had so far. The atmosphere here is great; we have a team here that actually works together to solve problems and you can easily bounce problems off one another.  I think one of my biggest un-expected moments the first week was the friday barbecue – where the company sets up in the back parking lot and grills up chicken, burgers, or kabobs and everyone takes a break together to just chat and share a meal.   Its not something I’ve seen at other jobs before that I have had.

My first job was working as an automation programmer for a local Industrial Automation company; I have seen many green solutions for heating, cooling, and power generation.  Here, we have a radical design to cool our servers and cut our usage of power drastically. The heart of our datacenter is composed of state of the art servers, and they run the same as in any other data center I have been in or worked around. The only difference being is the sheer amount of energy saved by this new approach. Every day I am excited to come to work to get a chance to learn more about how this unique “bleeding edge technology” operates.

In closing, I am really enjoying working here, I feel as if I am growing not only my career as an IT professional but personally as an individual. I remember when I came in for my interview, Dave, one of my interviewers asked what I was looking for. My answer was “Meaningful employment”, and I am happy to say I have found it. It is great to be a part of building my community while saving the environment, and working at TurnKey has allowed me to do all of that.

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.

No matter what business you’re in, data security is important to you and to your current and potential clients. For many small business owners, the fear of poor security is enough to inspire them to invest huge amounts of money in in-house data infrastructures to run their businesses. In many (if not most) cases, this level of infrastructure far exceeds what the company needs, or even what it can handle. Hiring the IT staff necessary to keep in-house technology running and up-to-date, alone, can put you out of business. And with the constant evolution of technology today, the costs are not likely to go down any time soon. On top of all that, your data security probably isn’t as solid as you think it is.

Downsize

The first step towards financial independence from your IT infrastructure is downsizing. I don’t just mean buying cheaper or less robust equipment, I mean getting rid of your equipment all together. It might seem like a bold step, but the number of world-class, secure, affordable web hosting and data storage providers out there make this step a no-brainer. Not only will you enjoy improved data security and performance, your out-of-pocket costs will plummet. Good web hosting companies can afford to have the most robust, powerful security measures available. Why not trust the experts?

Going Remote

While it will probably feel strange at first–like you’re arriving at high school without your pants–you will quickly realize how liberating it is to trust your data to a company that specializes in security. If you do your homework and sign up with a reputable company that offers guarantees (guaranteed backups, guaranteed bandwidth, etc.) you will have someone to hold accountable when things go wrong, and you will be protected by their terms of service and their public reputation. No good web hosting company is going to let your business fail because that means their business fails. In an online climate where word of mouth makes and breaks businesses every day, the small business consumer is protected like never before. Also, when your data is accessible remotely, your office suddenly becomes mobile. You can access your business website, client records, everything, via a secure remote connection. This can be a real boon for a small business, especially when that business only has a few very busy employees.

Save The Green

By outsourcing all of your IT costs, you won’t have to worry about electricity, IT staff, hardware replacements or the potential for catastrophic data loss due to fire, flood or any other natural or man-made disaster. Your business won’t be tied to one physical location. If you sign up with a company that has multiple data centers, you can opt to have your data backed-up to multiple geographic sites. This redundancy protects you, your clients and your business future.

Upgrades

One of the most compelling reasons to get your infrastructure out of your office is the possibility for on-the-fly technology upgrades. What if your business suddenly takes off? Do you want to be held back by your aging infrastructure? With a good web host, you can add server space quickly and easily. Often all you will need to do is submit an online order!

Support

If you are not particularly tech-oriented, or don’t feel entirely comfortable letting go of your hardware, find a package that includes fully managed support. Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone to call when things go wrong? Someone who knows the technology backwards and forwards, and who’s fee is already included in your monthly bill? Yes. Yes it would.

Provider Competence

Of course, what goes without saying here, is that you need to find a solid, reputable provider (that’s right, I said it anyway). In addition to solid guarantees and a good TOS, look for a company with a proven track record with small businesses like yours. If other business owners are happy with the service, chances are you will be too. Funnily enough, one such business pops to mind: TurnKey Internet. We specialize in small businesses! We also offer a huge collection of additional automation services to streamline every aspect of your business. Hop on live chat if you’ve got questions. We’d love to make you an offer you can’t refuse 😉

This is a phrase we’ve all heard before. That infamous first impression is the moment of truth: when a new person is deciding how to feel about us for the first time. While it may seem overly dramatic, it is hard to deny the power of the first impression. It may mean the difference between getting hired and, well, not getting hired. Even if you endure multiple interviews, the impression you give in that first moment truly does shape enduring opinions about your character. The same is true for making business deals, or forming friendships.

When I first arrived at the door of TurnKey Internet, I was ready for my nerves to sabotage my carefully planned first impression. My resume looked good, my outfit was professional, my hair was coiffed, but still, I was prepared for the worst. That’s why I was so surprised when I was greeted by smiling faces, friendly handshakes and a laid-back professionalism that exuded both confidence and welcome. I don’t know why I was expecting the worst: maybe it was my previous experiences with technology companies, or maybe I was just letting my nerves get the best of me. Still, I was bowled over by the lack of pretension and abundance of humor that greeted me at the door.

I share this story because I think, when most of a company’s interactions happen electronically, it’s easy for the people on the other end of the computer to miss out on the true heart and soul of the company. As someone who works in marketing, I often wonder how to best portray this aspect of TurnKey Internet to new clients. Making a first impression online is a challenge! Of course, there is the customer service and the products, but a company is so much more than that.

I hope by sharing my first impression of TurnKey Internet, I will give you all a little window into the heart and soul of the place. While our CEO, Adam Wills, brought the friendly, professional spirit to the company when he started it, his spirit is contagious. Everyone here shares his sense of pride in what we do, and we hope you will give us a chance to demonstrate that.

Anneke
Marketing

The suspense is killing us! We just welcomed our brand new 16,000 lb generator that will provide the 100% uptime we guarantee alongside superior performance! The installation was really something to see, with cranes and people scuttling about, and we can barely contain our excitement. Ok, so we’re not trying that hard, so sue us. We are thrilled to report that the generator installation went without a hitch and it is now snugly nestled in its new home.

Beyond the obvious benefits of the new data center (increased capacity by 12,000 servers, green-friendly efficiency, multiple high-speed fiber optic connections and fancy biometric security) we are also very excited about the user-friendliness of the space. The building, formerly a US Postal building, offers great office space, a loading dock, a beautiful (and quite large) server-room floor, and, perhaps coolest of all, a vault! The vault offers literal iron-clad security! We’ll be offering fully-managed colocation suites for those looking for true physical and virtual security.

More updates are coming soon as we put the finishing touches on the space. We can’t wait to get settled and to give you a virtual tour! Stay tuned .

Social media is here to stay. It’s about as mainstream as mainstream gets and pretty much everyone has realized the import of the medium for businesses. As a marketing tool, it’s invaluable, though not without its pitfalls. I have written before about how to use social media to grow your business, market products and run specials. Today I am going to talk about how to use social media to build your business’ reputation with customers.

Interacting with customers in a public way is commonplace on the Internet, but on social networks it gets personal. Social networks, by their very nature, encourage participation, interaction and conversation. For individuals that makes keeping active friendships easier. It keeps families closer. It provides a forum for debating the issues of our day. From a business perspective, it presents a potential problem. In some cases, without the proper forethought, monitoring and attention, that problem can be devastating.

For a business, customer service is a cornerstone of growth. Without good customer service any business can fail, and fail fast. With social networks, customer interaction becomes virally public. In the old days, a customer might complain on a forum or on a blog, but today they complain in a Facebook feed… YOUR Facebook feed… and everyone sees it in real time. How you handle that complaint will define your customer service to existing and potential customers. This makes developing an internal customer service policy for social networks paramount. But how many companies are doing this? Is this critical element of social media business being ignored?

On a social network, a snide remark from a tired employee can influence thousands of potential customers. Incorrect information can snowball into a support nightmare in minutes. Every single interaction is being watched by your customer base, your bread and butter. If you’re not coaching your employees on how to handle social network interactions, you better start… fast.

One way to handle this is to restrict access to your social network account. Only give access to employees you trust, who understand the importance of decorum. It is also very helpful to develop a standard policy for social media interactions that focuses on openness, honesty and fairness. The good side of this kind of transparency is that customers can see when one of their own is being unreasonable just as easily as they can see everything else. If you handle interactions admirably, you will build trust, a kind of trust that no amount of traditional marketing can create.

So the social media of our times is one of the most useful and personal tools we’ve ever had for business. It crosses the divide between personal and commercial, paving the way for companies to build relationships like they used to in the mom and pop businesses of old. But with that incredible access comes great risk. Developing a strategy for social media interaction today will help protect your company tomorrow.

On June 13th, TurnKey Internet donated an iPad II to the Southern Saratoga Chamber of Commerce’s Spring Classic Golf Tournament at the Saratoga Spa Golf Course. The tournament is an annual networking event that brings together area businesses for a day of golfing and prizes. This year the competition was fierce and we were there to watch as Jack Feyrer hit closest to the pin, winning the iPad II.

Jack Feyrer is Vice President of Trading for Holcim Trading, one of the world’s leading suppliers of cement and aggregates. Feyrer plans on using his new iPad to connect to his TurnKey Virtual Desktop when he travels across the country to the many Holcim Trading ports. Holcim will also be trying out Voxwire Web Conferencing to hold online meetings with their internationally-based staff and customers. We’re excited to see how our products and services can help make Jack Feyrer’s life easier on the road.

Jack Feyrer with his new iPad II

This event was a great opportunity to get out on the green and have a whole lot of fun while making some new connections with the local business community. We’ve been working to make TurnKey a community company, something that we feel is often overlooked by web hosting and SaaS companies who focus on online efforts. We see the value in establishing and fostering local ties as well as a global ones, and events like these are a big part of how we build our local relationships to become involved in the happenings in our own backyard. We believe it is possible to be a community company even if your products are designed for the virtual world.

As the sponsor of the closest to the pin contest Turnkey manned the tee box with its own representative, online sales manager Nick Molik (check out our next blog post for his Staff Interview.) Nick greeted each foursome as they came to the tee box by telling them about the iPad contest for the closest to the pin winner. Nick, always the consummate sales person, used the opportunity to demonstrate how the iPad can access the Virtual Turnkey Desk even from the golf course. Nick explained afterwards that many people were extremely interested in the Virtual Desktop concept while others were strictly there for a day of fun and golf. Nick had a great time chatting with everyone and is looking forward to next year!

The Cloud Brings Ease of Use to both IT managers and business owners. The complexities of setting up and maintaining office servers and desktop applications can be replaced with a click of a button for scallable IT On Demand with TurnKeyCloud’s Virtual Desktops and Cloud Servers.

TurnKeyCloud simplifies compliance requirements for your business with our Cloud Applications which provide instant compliance such as HIPAA and SOX compliant email and PCI / PA-DSS eCommerce Compliance.

TurnKeyCloud Saves You Money

TurnKeyCloud takes IT on Demand further by helping you greatly reduce your IT costs – no more expensive servers in your office to replace every few years and no need for expensive IT consultants. For example, TurnKeyMail our Enterprise Email Solution can provide you with a robust feature rich email and collaborative solution for your entire office for $19.95/mo. Compare that to the cost of placing a microsoft exchange mail server in your office ($20,000 and up for the server, software and installation by a traditional IT Company).

TurnKeyCloud is Reliable

TurnKeyCloud solutions are housed in our Enterprise Grade Datacenter providing redundant network, power and data systems to ensure continous access at all times. Our Cloud Servers offer self healing redundant systems – should a server go down (for maintenace, or mechanical failure) it self heals and replicates to a new server within minutes. Data backups are automated and stored off site – providing you not only the best in reliabilty but the peace of mind of data security as well. Compare a Cloud Server to running a server in your office, if the disk drive fails, or power goes out – what would you do? With TurnKeyCloud, your cloud server is back online automatically with our self-healing technology.

TurnKeyCloud Protects Your Data

TurnKeyCloud solutions are all protected by internal backup systems, offering daily, weekly and monthly backups of all your servers, virtual desktops, and applications. We remotely backup these systems, provide you with easy access to snapshots in time for restoring data should you need access to the data. Our Cloud Servers and Virtual Desktops utilize advanced encrypted connection protocols to protect your data, and ensure your business and staff always are protected.

TurnKeyCloud is Green Friendly

Cloud sourcing IT is not only reliable, cost effective and instant – but it also helps save the environment. That server in the office running your business email, or company CRM, or other applications will be drawing power 24 hours a day to keep it connected to the Internet. Even when there are no emails to deliver, – the disk drive, the fans, the power supply all are drawing electricity.

With a Cloud Server – our cloud infrastructure is up to 30 times more energy efficient versus leaving that office server online all day. Cloud Servers are more efficient because of the core design model of virtualization and how resources are allocated on demand. For example, TurnKeyCloud through its datacenters provides services to clients from around the world. A client in Asia typically will have highest usage when clients in the United States are at their lowest – so over a 24 hour period the TurnKeyCloud system dynamically and efficiently can allocated resources on demand to ensure you have the maximum performance while greatly reducing your typical energy foot print.

The cloud is IT on demand. The cloud is a scalable, reliable and cost effective way of accessing information technology at any time from any where.

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 data center. This data center is where your IT equipment, office servers, desktop applications, web applications, business software and data can all be accessed easily, at a much lower cost, and securely via the Internet.

TurnkeyCloud is IT On Demand

TurnKeyCloud offers ready to go Cloud Applications that help any business be more efficient, communicate and collaborate with ease. Our instant on technology can have these Cloud Applications running for your business within seconds, and save you both money and time versus trying to deploy similar solutions in your office. Our Cloud enabled Virtual Desktops let you connect your computer work environments together with employees across the room, town, or globe with a shared desktop, suite of Microsoft Office applications, and access to files and folders in a secure environment. Cloud Servers offer instant replacements and instant capacity for your office servers. At the push of a button you can deploy additional services, cloud servers, increase speed, increase storage capacity, increase the number of users all without having to call your IT company and schedule an expensive site visit.

How Does the Cloud Help My Business?

Cloud Sourcing your IT (Information Technology) provides significant Cost Savings, increased reliability for your business, instant access to computer resources or applications when you need them, green friendly benefits to both you and your community, and access to powerful software tools to help your business grow and be more efficient.

How is Cloud Hosting Different?

Traditional hosting servers run applications in a linear design without extensive redundancy or scalability. The traditional method until now when hosting a server, web site or application is to place it in your office on a single computer. Although the hardware on this computer may have some limited redundancy such as a spare disk drive- it is inevitable to have some form of business disruption from loss of power, exceeding the capacity of the computer or network, hardware failure, human error, or simply having a software crash. This disruption could cost a business significantly in lost data, lost time, and for the IT company you have to hire to come in and fix everything.

With the TurnKeyCloud Hosting model, the single point of failure is replaced by a scalable on demand network of computing resources that are hosted in our data center with multiple redundant ultra-high capacity network connections, on-site generators, precision cooling systems, and leveraging green-friendly practices. The single server design model of yesterday is now replaced by sophisticated SAN (Storage Area Network) file servers, multiple clustered HyperVisor virtualization based systems, and control module nodes that ensure a reliable always available experience for your servers and software applications.