Posted on May 26, 2011 by David Thomas
I’ve been copywriting for Ultraspeed lately so had some expert schooling from the Ultraspeed engineers in the terms, jargon and principles of Managed Hosting. I figured it would be high-tech and difficult to understand.
During these clinics my mind sometimes wandered back in time to when my ancestors were Indian sailors (on my mother’s side), blacksmiths in Manchester (on my father’s side), and braves (I have some exciting Native American blood in me too).
What counted as useful technology to my ancestors may have been the spinnaker, the anvil, and the stirrup. Little positive changes like these come about through expertise and experimentation. And most importantly they came about because they fulfilled a need.
Managed Hosting and outsourced IT fulfill a modern need: cutting the nonsense out of peoples’ lives. Innovations make complicated things simple, and it’s said today more than ever we’re thankful for such clarity.
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Posted on May 19, 2011 by Michael Shanks
The opening of Facebook’s new datacentre made a bit of news in the tech and mainstream press. Essentially what they have done is build a very efficient datacentre. The most interesting thing about the opening was that they open-sourced their entire design: from servers to cooling they let the world know how they did things.
As open-sourcing increasingly creeps into the hardware world a show like this demonstrates a commitment to ensuring that other people are able to take advantage of their research and development and ensure they themselves deliver more efficient operations. This is certainly very welcome and hopefully as time goes on there’ll be a fully-agreed ‘open standard’ that can be updated iteratively over time – hopefully modular in design so these monolithic buildings can be upgraded with newer advances rather than just remaining as version 1.45b.
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Posted on May 18, 2011 by Michael Shanks
It’s been an eventful few weeks for data in the clouds; a few high profile outages, including Amazon EC2 and the PlayStation Network, both used by different people for different reasons (and with separate events the cause of these outages), plus also the launching of Facebook’s new datacentre initiative.
A sunny day…
On the day Skynet launched the world awoke – or, at least, the Internet community did – to news that there were numerous problems impacting cloud providers. The most prolific of these was at Amazon, on the west coast platform it uses to host customers’ virtual instances. Of course, this had the knock on effect of taking some quite significant online services offline. Now, outages clearly do happen – and I don’t want to analyse what went wrong or how it could have been prevented. The thing that interested me was the customer reaction to the outages.
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Posted on May 6, 2011 by Jordan Gross
Personal Service is a term that gets bandied around a lot. But what does it mean and why is it important?
I was reminded of the importance of personal service this week, whilst on the train to Chester. I was accompanying one of my colleagues to go and see a potential new customer; the client in question has quite a fantastic small charity that provides music education to children in schools. Chester is a good 2 hours each way on the train from Euston, and as some of the more regular readers will know, I am a massive proponent of rail travel in general, but prefer the elegance, speed and comfort of high speed rail travel in Europe, rather than the antiquated and under-invested excuse for a rail service currently available. However that’s another story for another day. Anyway, we arrived in Chester, and after a short walk around the town (many heels and spray tans in attendance, apparently it was Race Day?) we settled ourselves into a nearby hotel ready for our meeting.
Suffice to say the meeting went well, and we were able to explain a number of things that might seem obvious to our more technically hosting-savvy customers, but to non-IT people and a majority of the general population, frankly aren’t. Sitting across from someone explaining the concepts of data integrity and security undoubtedly quickened understanding and helped to build trust. Here at Ultraspeed, we always make a big effort to meet clients in the early stages (and later in service reviews etc!) as we feel that making that personal connection is always worth the journey, even as far north of Watford as the world of Chester.
Personal Service in my humble opinion, is where you specifically instruct your team to take personal responsibility for the service you provide to the client, and you encourage them to improve (or make suggestions to do so) the service. Personal Service is also hugely aided by the building of personal relationships with clients – its not only about knowing that they have just taken a new puppy into the family, and therefore may have been up all night letting it out in the garden to “do its business” its also about knowing and understanding that a particular client prefers something explained in a certain way or will respond only to cold hard technical facts. It is the tailoring of the communication approach that is critical, and makes all the difference to any sort of service, whether as complicated as IT or as simple as a meal out.
