1-800-HOSTING Blog » Christopher Shaffer http://blog.800hosting.com Inside 1-800-HOSTING Wed, 02 Nov 2011 17:00:58 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Social Networking and Your Blog http://blog.800hosting.com/2011/10/social-networking-and-your-blog/ http://blog.800hosting.com/2011/10/social-networking-and-your-blog/#comments Tue, 25 Oct 2011 23:46:56 +0000 Christopher Shaffer http://blog.800hosting.com/?p=2186 Some of you may know I love food, and in my effort to both learn more about social networking, wordpress architecture, cloud computing, and search engine optimization I decided to create a blog devoted to my adventures in seeking out the best places to eat around.

Creating a blog is easy, though customizing it for your use is can be challenging unless you take advantage of the work of others with the thousands of free themes, plugins, widgets, and other tools that are available to streamline the customization you wish to add. Here we will discuss how to tie your Facebook fan page into your word press blog so you can share information between the two seamlessly and promote traffic to your site.

There are many word press to Facebook plugins, but the one I chose was Add Link To Facebook. This allows me to publish articles composed on the site to the Facebook Page I have setup for the blog and share the comments and likes between the two. It was rather simple to setup and configure as I already had a Facebook developer account which was required to create the Facebook application needed to bridge the two together. The instructions were super simple and I was up and running in no time.

 

If you have a blog and a Facebook Page I highly recommend you integrate the two to steam line the content management between the two.

 

-Chris

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]]> http://blog.800hosting.com/2011/10/social-networking-and-your-blog/feed/ 0 Vacations are the Journey, not the Destination http://blog.800hosting.com/2011/07/1765/ http://blog.800hosting.com/2011/07/1765/#comments Fri, 01 Jul 2011 17:58:04 +0000 Christopher Shaffer http://blog.800hosting.com/?p=1765 If you’ve read past articles you probably know that I like traveling. It’s not so much the destination for me as it is the journey that becomes the vacation. I seek the road less traveled, things people might not have discovered, and seeing parts of the world that most people don’t. In a way, I guess this correlates into my chosen technology profession where people who are truly passionate about technology are interested not only the end result, but the way the goal was achieved.

roadIn a few weeks I will be traveling to Rock Fest 2011. I’d be lying if I thought camping in the middle of Wisconsin for 4 days was my idea of fun, but the journey to get there and getting to see many bands popular in my childhood sounded good at the time I said I would go. Hey it’s about the journey right?

So with my Jeep freshly out of the shop and ready for it’s 2500 mile road trip and camping adventure, I’ll start researching possible points of interest along the way, mostly through TV Food Maps.

-Chris

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]]> http://blog.800hosting.com/2011/07/1765/feed/ 0 1-800-HOSTING Heads to Chicago, Hungry http://blog.800hosting.com/2010/04/1-800-hosting-heads-to-chicago-hungry/ http://blog.800hosting.com/2010/04/1-800-hosting-heads-to-chicago-hungry/#comments Thu, 29 Apr 2010 20:22:26 +0000 Christopher Shaffer http://blog.800hosting.com/?p=1419 Over the past few months I’ve been evaluating the possibility of establishing a second point of presence outside of our home Dallas market. I am pleased to announce that we are very close to signing the agreement with a facility in the Chicago area. The location is downtown,  close to the financial district for low latency, and includes all  the redundancies and capabilities of our primary Dallas facility.

This location will service as a secondary location and DR (Disaster Recovery) site to our customers wishing to have geographic disparity of their data, for those who wish to maintain off site backups, and for customers interested in moving content closer to users in the Northeast for increased performance. I’ll be in Chicago a few times over the next few weeks for both personal and work reasons, and look forward to getting to know the city and their local cuisine.

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]]> http://blog.800hosting.com/2010/04/1-800-hosting-heads-to-chicago-hungry/feed/ 0 Employee Appreciation and the Lost Art of the Road Trip http://blog.800hosting.com/2010/01/employee-appreciation-and-the-lost-art-of-the-road-trip/ http://blog.800hosting.com/2010/01/employee-appreciation-and-the-lost-art-of-the-road-trip/#comments Tue, 19 Jan 2010 18:14:30 +0000 Christopher Shaffer http://blog.800hosting.com/?p=1140 winnie-road-trip

Here at 1-800-HOSTING, we strive to make sure our employees are satisfied. Creating group incentives that keep our employees happy across the board is difficult as everyone is motivated and responds differently. Nevertheless, one thing is sure, everyone enjoys a vacation. Luckily, for those of us who make it to the magical 5 year mark, we enjoy a company sponsored trip to a destination of our choice. In the past, many have chosen Hawaii, and when I reached 5 years of tenure last August I started thinking about where I would like to go. Given my duties and responsibilities here, it is hard to take a week or two off, but I figured it was time. Because hey, I’m not paying right?

So with the funding and time in place, I pondered the usual places people tend to head to for their vacation getaways. Hawaii, Mexico, and maybe even Europe if I could sell it, but none of these seemed to really interest me enough to make me pack my bags. What I have been doing for some time now are mini-trips of a 2-3 day nature, usually centered around some sort of goal or purpose. But sometimes I just get in the car and drive. Being a fan of the Food Network, Travel Channel, and food and travel in general, most of the destinations end up being a restaurant or a local attraction in a far off city or state. Always the adventurer, I’ve been known to drive 500 miles round trip just to eat a hamburger and am currently 20% through my Texas Monthly top 50 burgers in Texas list.

texas-monthly-50-best-burgers

I must mention that my father never allowed us to fly for family vacations when there were safe roads leading to the destination. So unless we were leaving the country, Canada excluded, (think 36 hour trek from Houston to Calgary Alberta) we drove…always. Ironically, when I was younger, I dreaded the days upon days in our custom Dodge van. I now believe that this is what has instilled my passion for the open road. The trip itself should be the vacation, not the destination.

So with a basic idea in place of visiting unique local establishments and attractions across the country, I am now thinking about how to do make this into a worthwhile vacation.  My travel partner/cohort/ for many previous adventures and I have already settled on a 1-2 week adventure. We plan on heading east from Texas towards Florida, then up the east coast, and then returning through the Midwest. This should give us plentiful amounts of scenery along the way and allow us to sample the most genres of food from local BBQ and seafood, to comfort food and diner joints along the way.

Keeping with the technology geek that I am, and to make the trip more unique, I think we will be renting a Winnebago rather than spend each evening in a hotel room.  With my desire to avoid lodging chains, this should prove a lot safer as well as fun by allowing us to cover more ground in less time. Armed with the latest in wireless aircards and GPS navigation and tracking, I am sure I can find some way to integrate the trips progress electronically into our blog or mini site.

epic-1-800-HOSTING-road-trip-route(Preliminary route courtesy of Google Maps)

I’m interested in hearing about any local attractions or points along the way we should visit.

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]]> http://blog.800hosting.com/2010/01/employee-appreciation-and-the-lost-art-of-the-road-trip/feed/ 0 Why My Blackberry is Cooler than Yours http://blog.800hosting.com/2009/06/why-my-blackberry-is-cooler-than-yours/ http://blog.800hosting.com/2009/06/why-my-blackberry-is-cooler-than-yours/#comments Sun, 28 Jun 2009 23:28:00 +0000 Christopher Shaffer http://blog.800hosting.com/?p=598 Coming from the days of the RIM 850 “Brick” I’ve had a lot of experience with BlackBerry’s in both my personal life and work related roles. With the launch of the Pearl, which introduced BlackBerry to many consumers BlackBerry’s as personal devices, and from the competition from the iPhone, the evolution of the BlackBerry has progressed at a welcoming pace. Gone are the days of just email, calendar, and tasks. Now armed with GPS, faster data connections, and a much more brilliant display the newest generations of Blackberry’s are truly useful and well rounded devices. Connect them to the corporate Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) and they are an administrators’ dream compared to the open an insecure nature of other manufactures devices.

Here are my 5 top applications that I use on a daily basis for my BlackBerry 9000 (Bold):

1) Email

While this one used to be obvious, most smart phones today have decent email capabilities. With Exchange ActiveSync, push email is a reality for Windows Mobile and Apple’s iPhone. However, Blackberry does it better as what other phone lets you configure email filters, out of office replies, and manage multiple accounts so efficiently.


2) Blackberry Messenger

In the old days I used to message other blackberry users by their unique 8 character PIN. This was useful as you could tell if the message was delivered and also when it was read. More recently BlackBerry messenger has improved on this by tying this into a useful chat client. You can send text, files, pictures, voice notes, and location status, all to whoever you have on your Contact list. The messages are more secure, you can guarantee delivery, and bypass the SMS/MMS headache. We use this application extensively internally for escalations and group communications.

3) Viigo

Viigo is a great application that is basically an RSS reader, news, weather, sports, stocks, entertainment. One of the nice features is you can easily email the content/link to a user, post it to your twitter followers. While it does many things, it is an excellent client for reading RSS feeds and blog posts.

4) Beejive

I originally found this a few years ago when looking for a proper client to interface with our internal jabber server. There are many IM clients for the Blackberry, but beejive takes top honors in my book. The simplicity of setup, usage, and integration with alert profiles as it runs in the background can’t be beat. Looking at the feature list it seems I need to upgrade as it now supports group chat for jabber! Now I can chat with my guys all at once when I’m away from my terminal.

5) Facebook Application

I’ll admit it, I like facebook, and the current client for the Blackberry is top notch. Being able to upload photos, respond to messages, and set your status is quick and easy, as well as integrating with the a Blackberry alert profile. Become a fan of 1-800-HOSTING on facebook.

There are many other applications that I have found since the introduction of the Blackberry AppStore as well as others I have but use on a less regular basis. Pandora, Slacker radio, Shazam, UberTwitter, Google Maps, Telenav, and Mobile Admin. I’ve also finally setup tethering via blue tooth with my laptop so I have a data connection anywhere I have service.

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]]> http://blog.800hosting.com/2009/06/why-my-blackberry-is-cooler-than-yours/feed/ 0 What is load balancing and why do I need it? http://blog.800hosting.com/2009/05/what-is-load-balancing-and-why-do-i-need-it/ http://blog.800hosting.com/2009/05/what-is-load-balancing-and-why-do-i-need-it/#comments Fri, 01 May 2009 21:32:00 +0000 Christopher Shaffer http://blog.800hosting.com/?p=370 We have many customers who as their sites, applications, or services become more popular outgrow the capacity and performance that a single server can provide. I could write a book on the evolution of a website or application, and how the architecture needs to evolve as its traffic doubles, triples, and quadruples exponentially, but for the purposes of this article I’ll use my unmatched Microsoft Paint skills to outline the load balancing concept in a simple manner.

lb_small

Imagine you have a user who is at their personal computer and wants to purchase something from your online store, or connect to your next great internet idea application. That user connects to your server following the path to eventually reach your server hosted here at 1-800-HOSTING. What happens when you have more users connecting than your server can support, and the end user experience begins to suffer as response and page load times start to increase? The 1st thing most people try is to throw more hardware at the problem through bigger and better servers. This works for a time but isn’t a permanent solution. The next thing is to scale outwards (horizontally) with additional servers (nodes) providing the same function. This is where load balancing comes in by way of a separate device designed to distribute the traffic to the available servers. There are many ways to distribute the traffic based on individual requirements, but it’s safe to say it balances the traffic evenly between your available resources. When combined with fail over functionality, you also can achieve redundancy should one of the servers experience a problem and need to be taken out of the available “pool” of servers.

Sales plug: 1-800-HOSTING provides both dedicated and shared load balancing services for all of our clients and are skilled at explaining how load balancing can work for you, as well as implementing it for your existing services.

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]]> http://blog.800hosting.com/2009/05/what-is-load-balancing-and-why-do-i-need-it/feed/ 0 Information and Metrics http://blog.800hosting.com/2009/05/information-and-metrics/ http://blog.800hosting.com/2009/05/information-and-metrics/#comments Fri, 01 May 2009 17:00:14 +0000 Christopher Shaffer http://blog.800hosting.com/?p=4 Being involved in most all aspects of the operations of 1-800-HOSTING I get to feel firsthand the impact of having disparate data sources, or not having proper information for processes you would like to apply metrics to. Trying to make decisions without having reliable and useful data is almost pointless if you don’t know where you’ve been then how do you know where you are going? A good example is our previous phone system that was in operation when I started with 1-800-HOSTING many years ago.

When I first started we had no idea how many calls we received, made, abandoned, or were forced to hold each day. Running a contact center where customers are invited to call us 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year with a phone number such as 1-800-HOSTING, and then no way to measure our performance and the customer experience seemed a bit odd. Fast forward and we now we have the ability to measure, report, and convey our progress to our employees and customers a like.

Previous 30 day statistics:

- SLA (Calls answered in 20 seconds or less): 95%

- Average Wait for Answered Calls: :11s

This is information that has a direct impact on the customers experience by allowing us to adjust schedules of the technical support, sales, and billing staff members based on when our customers contact us most.

The other problem that we, and every other company out there faces, is allowing for internal and external systems to share related information rather than manually replicating it. While I am not a application developer, I do have a pretty good understanding of how information “should” flow between all of the systems we employ, and know it can always be improved. Automation and systems integration are a key focus here at 1-800-HOSTING and we are working hard to integrate as many functions as we can to save both time and money.

Here is a short list of some of the software and systems we use:

Billing and Customer Account System

  • The Request Tracker Ticketing System
  • Network and Server Monitoring Systems
  • Server Deployment Environment
  • Network Statistics Reporting
  • Network Device Management
  • Datacenter Management Software
  • Website Statistics System
  • Authentication Systems

The goal is to never have to enter the same bit of information more than once and then ultimately in the same place. While many of our systems share this philosophy there is still a lot of work to be done towards total company automation.

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