WebHostingBuzz Hosting, Marketing, Security and Technology

Many of you in the information technology industry find yourselves in the inevitable position of having to work someone through a problem on the phone. Even if your job isn’t actually phone support, one of your internal (or external) customers will find themselves in a pickle, and you’ll find yourself on one end of a phone conversation with a potentially irate or annoyed customer that needs your help.

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If you’ve looked at our website recently, you might have noticed that we’re making subtle changes to it quite frequently. We’ve added order links, we’ve changed the layouts of some plan pages, we’ve reduced the size of some of the imagery on the site.

We’re doing this to try and improve our conversions. We get good traffic (although more is always better!) but conversions have been lower than what we’d like. We’ve spent time analyzing the visitor process from coming to our site, reading information on the services we have to offer and determining if we’re the right web host for them. We’ve improved it where we think we can, and we are seeing an increase in conversions.

Hopefully that means we’re doing something right.

Any success stories on improving your own conversions? Something that blatantly needs fixing on our website that would turn you off as a potential customer? Do let us know and action will be taken. Comments welcomed below or feel free to get in touch through the usual channels.

Next up… the Christmas decorations.

Unfortunately due to our highly visible website, lots of spammers trying to build inbound links frequent these forums. Myself, other staff and customers who are moderators have a daily fight against this and it is very annoying.

As a result, I have decided to implement a new policy. Every piece of spam we get will be read. If the domain is one we can take action against (such as a .com, .net, .org, .us, .co.uk) then we will submit an abuse report to the domain registrar. Registrars can and will suspend domains that are spamvertized in emails and forum posts and hopefully this will start to make an impact on those who choose to spam.

We’ve all put up with spam for well over 10 years. It’s time we fought back.

WebHostingBuzz was proud to sponsor TigerLAN20, a fantastically quirky gaming event run by the Advanced Technology Student Organization at Fort Hays University.

Held from 12pm to 4am on October 10-11th, the event saw 65 contestants compete in the following fine specialisms:

Left4Dead
Halo 3
Rock Band/Guitar Hero

After a mammoth 9 hours of play the category winners were announced and some very well-earned prizes were claimed. Naturally, WebHostingBuzz chipped in with two brand new iPod Touch devices for the worthy prize winners.

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I haven’t been with WebHostingBuzz for very long, so I have been spending a lot of time familiarising myself with the company under the guidance of Tyler – Marketing Manager. One of our first discussions was about a WebHostingBuzz case study that we’re publishing. The topic? Unlimited Web Hosting.*

As somebody who has worked in the hosting industry in various capacities for several years I had come to accept the ‘unlimited’ plan as a sad but true fact of life. The case study in question was to outline why WebHostingBuzz has not joined the ‘unlimited’ bandwagon.

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Position:
Contracted Technical Writer / Public Relations Writer

Number of Openings:
Multiple

Description:
WebHostingBuzz.com is looking to expand its current staff of public relations and content production writers and bloggers to increase the availability and frequency of white papers and articles posted on our website. These posts and whitepapers will include (depending on the author’s experience): marketing, security, hosting industry, LAMP administration, SEO, tips and tricks, company announcements, other as deemed appropriate. Authors would be expected to produce at least one quality blog post per week, and other content as directed by the editor.

Desired Background/Skills:
We are not requiring a specific background to apply for this position. Motivation and a desire to do great quality work in a timely fashion is highly valuable. Applicants must be able to produce error-free, grammatically correct, and web-ready content.

The following skills/knowledge may prove beneficial:
HTML/CSS
Systems Administration
Blogging/WordPress
E-Commerce
Marketing
Security
Web Hosting
cPanel administration
LAMP administration
BASH scripting
SEO
Public Relations
PCI compliance
Other technology areas

Locality Requirements:
MUST be a citizen of the United States or United Kingdom. No exceptions.

Age requirements:
None.

Payment:
Negotiable based on experience and background

Position Reports to:
Marketing Manager

About Us:
WebHostingBuzz was founded in 2002 by Safvan Malik, our current president. Our grass roots were a simple reseller account coupled with a business idea from Safvan, who at the time was studying Business Management at University. Fast forward to 2009 and we now employ 30+ people, have a network of 250+ servers and power 500,000 websites from within our network. From home and small-business users to large corporations and major websites, we are happy to be the web host of choice by so many people.

To apply:
If interested, please submit a resume and writing samples (if any) to tyler.thompson@webhostingbuzz.com. Your resume will be reviewed and if you are deemed qualified for a position, you will be contacted to set up an interview over instant messenger.

Thank you for your time. We look forward to hearing from you!

Tyler Thompson
Marketing Manager
WebHostingBuzz.com

Blogging. For me, blogging is an oxymoron of types. I enjoy writing and think I’m quite good at it but blogging has just never clicked. I don’t blog here much and most my social media writing usually extends to humorous Facebook status updates. However, I am making a concerted effort to become involved in our blog and post regular and most importantly interesting content.

While we’re on the interesting content note, I’d like to add a few words on our blog. Our blog was launched initially as a news outlet. We’d syndicate company news and press releases onto our blog as just another outlet for people to read. Throw in some evolution and we started posting server uptime figures, special offers and more until we made a decision not too long back that we needed to put a lot more into our blog. Reading blogs of other people in the industry, competitors, peers and more left ours shamefully behind. Although we were kindly mentioned on DataCenterKnowledge’s list of hosting blogs a while back, I think our mention was somewhat unworthy due to lack of quality content. We decided that solid action was needed…

Enter Tyler. Tyler was intially hired in a writing/PR freelance type position with the role of working on our press releases and blogs. He quickly impressed us with his active, forward-thinking approach to work and now is member of our management team with a focus on marketing as a whole. I feel that Tyler has contributed a lot to our blog with a selection of serious, interesting and the occasional funny article. We’re definitely going to keep adding more of those and I hope that my involvement on the blog will encourage others to post here too. Afterall, we are a team of highly intelligent individuals… and if office gossip, conference humour and the general team spirit we enjoy is accurate, then we are articulate too.

Demanding people to write on our blog certainly isn’t my or our management style. We’re very much a democratic team within this company and that is something that won’t change. With that said, I am hoping that if the team sees the blood, sweat and tears I endure while writing here, they’ll jump on the bandwagon and provide insights on us as a company, hosting as in industry and interesting web topics.

Laying down the gauntlet, I am going to start writing a series of posts on where I believe the hosting industry to be heading. This will include cloud/grid hosting, virtualization as a whole, SaaS and whether shared hosting as we know it will cease to exist in a number of years. I’ll provide some insight on our own cloud/grid and virtualization plans as well as thoughts on the industry as a whole. Some of you will have more of an active interest than others (I do appreciate that hosting for many is a boring commodity that just there) but as all of us have some degree of interest in the hosting market, I hope what I write will be of interest to you.

That’s all for now. I hope to have the first part of my next blog wrapped up late this week/early next and will post it then. In the mean time, if you have any comments/suggestions/feedback on what you’d like to see here, please do let us know and we’ll try to accommodate.

Here’s a quick introduction to a new service of ours; email marketing, namely newsletters and surveys. We’ve setup a partnership with VerticalResponse, a company who specializes in email marketing. We actually use them for our own newsletters and surveys and after some discussion, we have an exclusive offer to WebHostingBuzz clients.

Visit http://webhostingbuzz.vresp.com and signup with no obligation to get 500 free newsletter credits and preferred rates on additional credits. Our Buzz Email tools allow you to design newsletters or surveys from scratch with no HTML knowledge needed. If you’d prefer to design your own HTML but need to get around the 200 email per hour limit on our shared servers, then simply copy and paste your HTML when presented with the option. Buzz Email will provide you with delivery reports, readership percentage, click percentage on any links in your emails and much much more.

Should you wish to create a survey, the survey designer will allow you to use any imaginable field type to collect data from your users. We’ve done several surveys ourselves in the past using the same tools and will be using them again shortly in our latest survey.

Any questions? Comment below or get in touch.

Today, WebHostingBuzz is introducing an innovative environmental policy to deal with customers who fraudulently open accounts and then choose to file complaints with the Better Business Bureau when we fail to open those fraudulent accounts.

Since we are very environmentally conscious as a company, we have decided to use the paper from such complaints as toilet paper.  This allows our company to save money by buying less toilet paper, but also saves the environment by reusing wasted paper. In addition, we have also pledged to make a $100 donation to the International Tree Foundation to apologize to Mother Nature for this cruel abuse of her resources.

The implementation of this policy began yesterday after a long saga with a fraudulent customer which goes back several weeks.  I will include the transcript of the entire ordeal in a text file attached to this post, but here are the basics of what happened:
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Daniel Marcus

Originally uploaded by webhostingbuzz

Daniel Marcus

I’ve been hosting with Web Hosting Buzz since before I could drive, and before I was out of high school. Now, about five years later, I can drive, I’m in college, and I still don’t have a car. I made a mini version of the sticker for my laptop, and the full size one is on my desktop. Now I have even more excuses to tell people about WHB! On the computer monitor are my original two websites hosted with WHB, and of course the WHB website. The little thing sitting next to the coffee maker is Tux, the Linux penguin.