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Those of you that have followed WebHostingBuzz for some time will know that we take the environment very seriously. We care about the world in which we do business and as a fairly heavy consumer of electricity due to the amount of servers we run, we like to give back and minimize any impact our operations have.

Almost 6 years ago we partnered with the ITF (International Tree Foundation) to sponsor tree planting campaigns across Africa. This partnership ran its course and in recent weeks, we’ve been looking for a new partner to work with to help reduce our environmental impact.

Introducing the Woodland Trust…

The Woodland Trust is a UK based organization that looks to conserve woods and trees. They also help businesses minimise their impact by allowing businesses to make financial contributions and grants to the good work that they do. And we at WebHostingBuzz have done just that. We’ve joined The Woodland Trust as a corporate member and will be making an annual donation to help the good work that they do.

Why The Woodland Trust?

When we work with an organization, we look for one that shares similar values to us. We don’t just buy carbon credits to make some feeble claim that we’re carbon neutral. Instead, we select a partner carefully that we can work with long-term and work with to promote a greener, environmentally friendly hosting market. The Woodland Trust met all of our selection criteria and further to that, they are headquartered just 20 miles from our UK datacenter.

Our partnership with them means we’ll both be presenting regular news and updates on the good work that our sponsorship is allowing them to do.

Any business that provides a service that involves storing data should understand the importance of data security. And to be honest, all too often we’ve witnessed the undesirable results when data security is breached. It can be human error (or judgement – Wikileaks?), system error (hacking/compromised systems) or a combination of both. From wikileaks secrets being made public, to governments losing important documents, to bank/credit card details being exposed – any breach of data security can have catastrophic results.

As a hosting provider, you are entrusting us with important and perhaps confidential website files, databases and emails. We’ve spoken before about the great lengths we go to to secure, protect and manage data in an appropriate manner on our live production servers. And the methods we employ, most of which we keep private for security through obscurity, constantly evolve.

But what we can share is what we do when a server, or in this case a hard drive, is retired. Our web servers are generally on a 4-5 year upgrade cycle to keep hardware fresh, powerful and reliable. But hard drives, with all of their moving parts, are more prone to failure. Hard drive manufacturers (Hitachi, Western Digital, Seagate) now offer some of the best warranties that they ever have. The Enteprise drives we use now come with a 5 year warranty. But previous drives came with a 3 year warranty and can fail when out of warranty. We take a very pro-active approach to hard drive maintenance and at the first sign of something being untoward with a particular disk, it is removed from the server (all of our servers use RAID so we can do this on the fly), tested, warranty checked and if in warranty, securely returned to the vendor for replacement.

Drives that fail out of warranty are dealt with in a secure way. They meed an untimely end at the hands of our datacenter staff. And a picture is worth 1000 words here…

8 drives that have gone to hard drive heaven

So rest assured that any data remaining on a failed drive is destroyed in a secure way

I often get asked how to get started with social media. What is the best way, the best place, to talk to customers? How do you do that? Just start tweeting or posting to Facebook or LinkedIn?

These are natural questions, yet they shouldn’t be the first ones to come to mind, even if they seem the obvious ones.

There’s a far more important step to take before you start talking.

If you want to understand how your customers perceive you, your company or your brand, you have to do that on their terms, not yours. You need to be where they are, not trying to get them to come to a place that you prefer, eg, your business website.

While that can mean spending time on a Facebook page, creating a Twitter handle or uploading video to YouTube, you ought to take a more strategic look at what’s happening online before you make that jump.

Not only that, you need to know what they’re talking about.

That starts with listening not talking. Pay attention to all those online voices and discover what they’re saying about you and the things that are important to your business, whatever size it is. You need to know what the conversation is before you join it.

Think about that. Can you answer these three primary questions:

1. Do you know how, where and when your customers discuss your brand online?
2. With whom?
3. And what they’re talking about in relation to topics you care about?

Do you really know?

There are simple steps you can easily follow that will not only give you valuable insight into how others see you and what they say about you online but also give you actionable insight and confidence on what your first steps should be.

You can take your first step today. That first step includes asking yourself what you are going to listen for.

For instance, are you listening to online discussions for reputation management or customer service reasons? Do you want to gather business intelligence and get feedback on your brand? Or are you looking to find conversations you can join so your organization can get exposure in front of new audiences?

And, you need to be clear in your focus:

• You must have a clear objective.
• Your objective should be measurable.
• You must be able to answer the question: how does your use of social media help you achieve your objective? (what some would say “What’s the ROI?”).

With those foundational steps taken, you can now make a start:

1. Listen and learn – know your customer’s world online with precision. No more guesswork.
2. Focus on actionable insights – what exactly can inform your planning.
3. Identify who drives share of conversation – who you should pay attention to: with whom you might engage.
4. Expand your reach with a clear focus – think of new ways to add value and really engage with your customers and communities.

What’s important isn’t the tools and the channels. Social media is about people and new, simpler and more effective means of connecting with other people.

Above all else, listening is paramount. It’s what you do before you start or conduct any engagement activity online, from leaving simple comments on a blog or typing your update message in Twitter, to a deeper relationship-building exercise with a prominent influencer.

Listening lets you discover who’s saying what – useful knowledge in planning how to engage effectively, before you start to engage.

(Picture courtesy Stalin Raja, used under Creative Commons license.)

Guest blogger Neville Hobson is an entrepreneurial communications professional with a curiosity for tech and how people use it. He’s an early adopter (and leaver) and experimenter with social media. He co-hosts the weekly business podcast For Immediate Release: The Hobson and Holtz Report. He’s an occasional test pilot of shiny new objects and he’s a WHB Ambassador. Follow Neville on Twitter and Google+.

rs1.abstractdns.com    100.000%
rs14.abstractdns.com    100.000%
rs17.abstractdns.com    100.000%
rs18.abstractdns.com    100.000%
rs19.abstractdns.com    100.000%
rs2.abstractdns.com    100.000%
rs20.abstractdns.com    100.000%
rs21.abstractdns.com    100.000%
rs22.abstractdns.com    100.000%
rs23.abstractdns.com    100.000%
rs24.abstractdns.com    100.000%
rs25.abstractdns.com    100.000%
rs26.abstractdns.com    100.000%
rs27.abstractdns.com    100.000%
rs3.abstractdns.com    99.972%
rs4.abstractdns.com    100.000%
rs5.abstractdns.com    100.000%
rs6.abstractdns.com    100.000%
rs7.abstractdns.com    99.977%
rs8.abstractdns.com    99.943%
rs9.abstractdns.com    99.907%
asteroid2.abstractdns.com    100.000%
business3.abstractdns.com    100.000%
buzz2.abstractdns.com    99.912%
buzz4.abstractdns.com    100.000%
buzzsg4.abstractdns.com    100.000%
intense1.abstractdns.com    100.000%
panda.abstractdns.com    100.000%
server01.abstractdns.com    100.000%
server02.abstractdns.com    100.000%
server03.abstractdns.com    100.000%
server04.abstractdns.com    100.000%
server05.abstractdns.com    100.000%
server06.abstractdns.com    100.000%
server07.abstractdns.com    100.000%
server21.abstractdns.com    100.000%
server22.abstractdns.com    100.000%
server23.abstractdns.com    100.000%
server24.abstractdns.com    100.000%
server25.abstractdns.com    100.000%
server26.abstractdns.com    100.000%
server27.abstractdns.com    100.000%
server28.abstractdns.com    100.000%
server29.abstractdns.com    100.000%
shared7.abstractdns.com    100.000%
zeus.abstractdns.com    100.000%

Here are October 2012 Uptime Figures. Let me remind, that some of the servers started at the end of the month, so the Time Up % couldn’t be 100%.
Thanks.

rs1.abstractdns.com    100.000%
rs14.abstractdns.com    100.000%
rs17.abstractdns.com    99.955%
rs18.abstractdns.com    99.999%
rs19.abstractdns.com    100.000%
rs2.abstractdns.com    100.000%
rs20.abstractdns.com    100.000%
rs21.abstractdns.com    100.000%
rs22.abstractdns.com    100.000%
rs23.abstractdns.com    99.956%
rs24.abstractdns.com    100.000%
rs25.abstractdns.com    100.000%
rs26.abstractdns.com    100.000%
rs27.abstractdns.com    100.000%
rs3.abstractdns.com    100.000%
rs4.abstractdns.com    100.000%
rs5.abstractdns.com    100.000%
rs6.abstractdns.com    99.985%
rs7.abstractdns.com    100.000%
rs8.abstractdns.com    100.000%
rs9.abstractdns.com    100.000%
asteroid2.abstractdns.com    100.000%
business3.abstractdns.com    100.000%
buzz2.abstractdns.com    100.000%
buzz4.abstractdns.com    100.000%
buzzsg4.abstractdns.com    100.000%
intense1.abstractdns.com    100.000%
panda.abstractdns.com    100.000%
server01.abstractdns.com    100.000%
server02.abstractdns.com    100.000%
server03.abstractdns.com    100.000%
server04.abstractdns.com    100.000%
server05.abstractdns.com    100.000%
server06.abstractdns.com    100.000%
server07.abstractdns.com    100.000%
server21.abstractdns.com    99.998%
server22.abstractdns.com    100.000%
server23.abstractdns.com    99.903%
server24.abstractdns.com    100.000%
server25.abstractdns.com    100.000%
server26.abstractdns.com    100.000%
server27.abstractdns.com    100.000%
server28.abstractdns.com    100.000%
server29.abstractdns.com    100.000%
shared7.abstractdns.com    99.896%
zeus.abstractdns.com    100.000%

We maintain a datacenter right outside New York City in Clifton, NJ. Like most people on the eastern seaboard, we’ve been monitoring the progress of Hurricane Sandy. Given the possible severity of Hurricane Sandy, we have rolled our a hurricane response plan and will be fully operational throughout.

Like all the datacenters we use, the facility has fully redundant power systems including UPS and generator backup. The datacenter is sufficiently inland to not be at risk from any storm surge and the building is hurricane resistant but there is possibility of losing grid power as a result of the hurricane.

With this in mind, we’ve undertaken a number of precautions:

• Generators, already tested on a regular basis, have been re-tested for readiness.
• Generators, UPS and transfer systems have had an extra maintenance check. This is in addition to the regular scheduled checks.
• Extra diesel fuel is on site to fuel the generators for up to a week. Refueling contracts are (and always have been) in place.

For those in the path of the storm, stay safe. Our thoughts are with you.

I’m writing this post from the one of the restaurants at the Hilton New York hotel. I’m here for Affiliate Summit East 2012, having arrived yesterday from the UK. As I was about to load up my car, it crossed my mind just how much technology I would be travelling with and took a picture of my luggage.

Wait. Let me take a step back. I travel a lot – between our offices in Boston and datacenters in NYC, Atlanta, Phoenix and Dallas in the US, Amsterdam in The Netherlands and Nottingham in the UK. Add conferences and tradeshows into the mix and most of my life seems to be sat in an airport departure lounge (Amsterdam’s Schipol is the most frequented one) or an airplane seat. So I’m a well versed traveller, I travel with what I consider necessary for that trip and ‘enjoy’ whizzing through airports without my luggage being a concern. Most of the time my luggage arrives with me at my final destination unheeded but I do not want to tempt fate. Your luggage going missing, for example when you are in Warsaw for New Years and no shops are open until January 3rd, sucks.

I disgress.

The post was designed to discuss how much technology people actually travel with. What you see above is my main suitcase with a pair of jeans, smart pants, some shirts, polos and underwear/toiletries. Okay, and some hair gel. Enough to last for a 5 day trip. Along side the suitcase is my laptop messenger bag which contains my main workhorse laptop for travelling – a Lenovo T420S specc’d out to the max. Also in that bag I carry my charger, 2 spare batteries (one main battery, one ultra-bay battery), an iPad, a Kindle and an external hard drive.

In the roll-on I carry a spare laptop (11″ MacBook Air). Spare laptop? Well yes; have you ever been stuck in a country that doesn’t speak English where your main laptop fails/breaks/goes kaput? I have. And trust me, you don’t want to try and buy a laptop with a non-English keyboard. Even in Germany, they use the QWERTZ keyboard layout which is near impossible to work on if you are familiar with QWERTY. The T420s, by the way, has a British English keyboard and the Air has an American English keyboard. I use both interchangeably and other than the differing location of the ” marks, they are almost identical. But for someone unskilled at foreign languages, i.e. me, trying to use a non-English keyboard is near impossible. So two laptops it is.

I also carry a few miscellaneous accessories in the roll-on – worldwide power adaptors,phone chargers, micro/mini USB leads as well as a 2/3rds SLR digital camera – a Sony NEX-7.

Also in the mix are my cell phones. I carry both an iPhone and a Blackberry. I’ve used Blackberry since the were black and white and continue to love them for email and “phone” stuff. That means calling someone, even though iMessage/BBM seem to be the preferred communication method in this industry. For apps, nothing beats the iPhone, including all of the Androids that I have tried. Plus it means I can use one phone with a local sim and one with my regular sim and avoid 4 figure phone bills.

So lets recap. Too much technology?

• 2 x laptops (1 PC, 1 Mac)
• 2 x cell / mobile phones (1 Blackberry, 1 Apple)
• 1 x MiFi – buying a local data only sim saves you from the roaming charge pain that ANY carrier will inflict on you
• 1 x tablet – iPad
• 1 x e-reader – Kindle
• 1 x digital camera – Sony

When is enough enough? As a lover of technology, I use all of these on my trips. But it adds a new dimension to travelling light…