Now, I've been with VPS.net for quite some time, from their very beginning in fact, and I've always liked the service and the people working there. I'm not one to easily leave and on top of that, having had issues at other hosting companies before, I know that things are bound to go wrong at some point. So, I decided to confront my contacts at VPS.net and "talk to the boss". That boss is someone I hadn't spoken to before, Rus Foster. Rus has recently (7 weeks ago) joined VPS.net as their new Managing Director, although he's been in the VPS business for years, replacing Nick Nelson, who's gone higher up in the UK2 Group.

As you can see, I asked him some, I think, rather tough questions. I was happy with the answers I got, and must say that the changes he's talking about below on the AMS cloud have indeed had a very positive effect on my yoast.nl server.

Interview with Rus Foster, MD of VPS.net

Hi Rus, thanks for agreeing to this interview. My goal is to shed some light on what is currently causing all the issues around VPS.net. First of all, it seems as though every day, somewhere in the world, a VPS.net SAN dies. Some locations have more issues than others, but in general, it's been quite bad lately. What's causing that? And, more importantly, what will you do about it?

Start with the easy questions eh? Nothing like whats your favourite colour? :)

Seriously though yes there have been SAN issues on some of our newer clouds.

Some of the SANS in multiple locations have been showing instability issues caused by the software running on them. As such we are starting to undertake a very aggressive upgrade schedule to move the SAN software to the latest version. Coupled with this we are also upgrading the storage network within each cloud to increase I/O speeds.

We are however also looking to start using the enterprise class Nexenta storage solution on our new clouds which is engineered fundamentally different to our current SAN solutions. The upshot of this is that the system is much more resilient to failure meaning in the event of a failure there will be no noticeable effect on customers.

This will be going live on our next cloud but more about that later .....

When you say "very aggressive upgrade schedule", what do you mean, exactly?

We have identified 6 clouds where we feel significant upgrades, or full migrations to new facilities are required. We are doing 1-2 clouds a week and aim to have everything completed within the next 6 weeks, if not sooner. This is a significant investment in our infrastructure to increase resiliency and performance.

To be fair, some people would say that it's a significant investment to make it work the way it should... Which clouds are we talking about?

There were decisions made in the past that were right at the time. Those choices however no longer reflect customers expectations as cloud hosting is becoming more mainstream. We are making decisions now that prepare us for the future allowing easier service enhancements to be rolled out to all our customers new and old. We are targeting clouds in both the US and Europe. Some of the work, for example on our Amsterdam cloud, has been completed.

Could you say that maybe you've grown a bit too fast? (Which would be partly my fault, perhaps, sorry about that)

We learn from mistakes. There is nothing wrong with growing fast. There is something wrong with not managing that growth. I would say that is where as a company we found ourselves tripping over our own feet. My personal focus is split into both pushing the growth of the company, looking at exciting new markets and technologies but also its vitally important that we look after our current customers. This is reflected in us bringing back such old favourites as sales live chat but also focussing on how we can help existing customers. This include things such as the cloud upgrades as well as some exciting upgrades we have coming for all customers.

Apart from the SANs, another issue seems to have been the fact that you weren't responding during those outages, either on tickets, or on Twitter, with the status blog being deafeningly silent too. What are you going to do about that?

Communications. Communications. Communications. Nothing travels as fast as bad news. We need to be quicker. We need to be more open. We are taking steps to do that. We are now proactively emailing customers in the event of an outage. We are making it the sole responsibility for the manager on duty to communicate with customers. The status blog and twitter are important fields of communication but they can't give customised responses to each customers. Our support ticket system is in place for that.

I've seen you jump in on more and more tickets yourself, are you one of those managers on duty?

Its best to lead by example. I never ask anyone to do something that I wouldn't be willing to do myself. When things get busy in an outage its really a matter of needing all hands to the pumps. Thats why you will see me replying to all sorts of support tickets from simple reboots to full implementations of load balancing.

I get the feeling, talking to some of the people who bought a VPS, that they actually shouldn't have a VPS. They have two types of downtime, the one caused by themselves as they don't really know their way around a web server, and the ones caused by SANs or other hardware failures at VPS.net. I think that for people who have a lot of those first issues, the new Cloud Hosting, or a somewhat faster WestHost package, both a bit more managed, would be better for them.

Do you agree? If people think that's true for them, is there any way for you to help in that?

We all love power. As a petrol head I dream of having a TVR Sagaris on the drive but do I need the power? Of course not. Some people do however need that power. It's all about what matches your individual needs. If people just have a few websites that need to "just work" then a VPS isn't always the best choice and there are other things in our current, and upcoming, product range that could suit them better. If however people do require large amounts of customisation VPS are still a good way to go. If they do require that little bit of hand holding they can always get an On-Demand ticket for a one time issue or pop management on top for unlimited help.

If a customer wants to move to another product we can move a reasonable number of sites free of charge.

Cool.

So you mentioned a new cloud... Tell me more.

Yes our Japan cloud is the first cloud to be running our new Nexenta storage system and OnApp 2.2. It will also be live next week. Coupled with this, as we know people might be a bit wary of the new solution, we are doing first month, free of charge, for customers new and old. There is a limit of 10 free nodes per customer.

What can customers do if they think they deserve more attention?
They can contact me directly at rghf@vps.net.

VPS.net issues: what’s up and what will they do about it? is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

I was talking about this with Terry Myers of VPS.net, and decided to turn it into an interview, so here we go:

• Terry, could you introduce yourself to the readers of Yoast.com and tell us what your role at VPS.net is? 

  Thanks for giving me the opportunity to chat with you and your readers today. I'm Terry Myers, the Chief Evangelist for VPS.net. I've been working with the company for a little over the past year, working in a couple of different roles. The great thing about my role with the company is there isn't a real set job description, so I find myself going wherever the customer needs me. My day to day tasks range from chatting with our customers on Twitter, where you can follow us @vpsnet, to working with our engineers to setup a complex multi-server cluster for our customers. Both of which, are oddly enough, equally as exciting to me. I'm guess I'm a bit of a social nerd.

• What is the difference between Cloud Hosting and a VPS Cloud Server, which would you advice to whom? 

  Our cloud hosting is a product we recently launched in May of 2011. When doing market research we found that there was a lot of demand for an easily administrated cloud hosting solution. What we've done with our cloud hosting product is essentially created a shared hosting product that you would get from any web hosting company, and then combined that with our cloud infrastructure. What you get is a shared hosting account that is built off of the cloud, which means it's easily scalable, while also having extremely good redundancy, as there are multiple servers available for your site to run on.What makes this different from our cloud servers, is the cloud servers require a bit more technical skill, requiring you to administrate the web server. Our cloud servers are like a private web server for your specific website. Where they're advantageous over the cloud hosting is they have a bit more flexibility, in that you can configure the server in fashion you need, while also being able to handle more traffic.
  Between the two products, I really feel that we have a solution for almost any customer. If you're running just a basic website, our cloud hosting will likely work out tremendously well for you. If you have a site that requires a unique setup, or a site that receives a significant amount of traffic, then our cloud servers can suit your site well.

• WestHost is a sister company to VPS.net, what's the difference between WestHost WordPress Hosting and Cloud Hosting? 

  The WestHost WordPress hosting solution is a great product. It lets the customer get up and running with a wordpress installation in just a few minutes, and that works out very well for a lot of people. The difference between the two products is with the infrastructure used on the backend. The WestHost WordPress hosting uses dedicated servers that are shared amongst multiple customers, like any traditional shared hosting arrangement. It's a solution that makes for a stable, and affordable hosting experience.Where our product is a little bit different is that instead of using dedicated servers to host our clients, we use our cloud infrastructure. We're essentially able to create servers on the cloud to host our cloud hosting clients, which benefit from the instant scalability the cloud offers, along with the auto-failover abilities. What this means for our clients is if one client is put on a site like Digg.com, we're able to immediately add resources that'll prevent their site from going down. Additionally, if one server in the cloud experiences a problem, like a hardware failure, that has no effect on the clients. The other servers in the cloud just take over the work that it was doing.

• Especially in WordPress hosting, there seems to have been a race to the bottom in prices. Slowly people seem to realize that if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys, yet they'd like to know what kind of support they can expect if they pay a bit more, after all $20 a month still doesn't allow you to have a dedicated engineer. What's VPS.net's service like? 

  We've definitely seen a shift in the market; people no longer are looking for the absolute lowest price, instead they've started to look at what their hosting company can offer them, and support is definitely a big part of that. We have a team of support engineers that are solely focused on our cloud hosting product. We're seeing average response times under 15 minutes, with the issue being resolved by the 3rd response, and on average, in less than 1 hour.

• That's actually quite impressive! Thanks for your time Terry, I'm quite sure my readers will know where to find you if they run into issues with their new Cloud Hosting accounts!

  Thanks. I'll definitely be around on Twitter.

Cloud Hosting, Cloud Servers, what’s the difference? is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Bas van den Beld interview Olivier Branchard, aka The Brand Builder, and myself on Search & Social:

And Chris Tompkins from Go Media interviewed me as well:

Fusion Marketing Experience in Brussels is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

On the other hand I do really want Microsoft to keep trying. We need the competition... If you understand Dutch, listen to the interview here.

*Bing* on national radio is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

On WPWeekly Episode 48! is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Hey Sherman, can you give us a short introduction of yourself and your work experience?

I first started working in the software industry at really terrific company called Broderbund, where I worked in the product management group on titles such as "Prince of Persia 2" and "Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego." After Broderbund, I was a program manager at Apple for several Mac OS technology components, including AppleScript and OpenDoc. I then spent seven years at Sun Microsystems in the Java Software group, where I was the product management lead on J2SE 1.4.

A desire to get back to user-facing software led me to Mozilla, where I met my co-founder, Scott MacGregor. We realized that we shared a similar vision for email and productivity, and from that, Postbox was born.

Can you tell us what Postbox is?

Postbox is a new desktop email application that dramatically improves the way people find, use, and organize email messages and content. We’re currently in public beta for our 1.0 version, and anyone can download the beta from our website.

What made you dive into creating Postbox?

Advanced Search

We didn’t feel our software tools were doing enough to help people stay productive. We’re literally drowning in information, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to make sense of it all. For example, we found that many people simply keep everything in the inbox, essentially living out of their inboxes because it’s too much effort to keep everything organized within folders.

And while message volume is certainly a contributor to overload, we also found that messages were being used for functions they were never designed to support. We leave messages in our inboxes because they remind us of things we need to do, or because they contain a document or a piece of information. How many times have you emailed a message to yourself, and did that feel like an elegant way to work with email?

We’re building Postbox so that people can spend less time managing email, and more time using email to get stuff done.

What are the main reasons for people to switch to Postbox?

We can save people a lot of time by providing very fast ways to find and use messages and content. In Postbox, you can get instant access to all of your files, images, and links in just one click, and then perform useful actions on the content that you’ve found. For example, if a relative asks for more recent family photos, simply hit reply and search through all images stored within your email – directly within your message reply window.

Message Compose with Attachment Search

We also make it easy for people to organize messages by topic, which essentially creates a lightweight activity space to work within. People can quickly assign a topic to a group of messages, and then jump into that topic to get stuff done. This allows people to stay focused on just one thing at a time, while minimizing interruptions from unrelated messages. Topics can also be combined with Postbox search to get faster access to the content that is most relevant to your current activity.

Finally, because we’re a desktop application and do everything locally, you can use Postbox with either your work or home accounts, while maintaining the privacy and confidentiality of your email information.

What's your business model?

We're currently evaluating a variety of options, but no decisions have been made to date.

What are some of the features you will be adding in the near future? Are you guys going to offer email hosting like RackSpace perhaps?

We have some great features in the pipeline, but in the near term, our Beta 10 release will contain a new way to add custom signatures to your messages. You can create a variety of rich HTML signatures, and then quickly select which signature you would like to use directly within a new message window. It's pretty slick, and it actually turned out to be kind of fun to use.

We'll also be adding in support for additional content types to search for, and we'll be providing new ways to view, organize, use and share this information within email and online.

Any closing thoughts?

Postbox works great with any POP or IMAP account, so I would encourage everyone to try it. We're still in beta, so there's a lot of active development going on. Since we release a new version about every three weeks, there's always something new to check out.

Thanks Sherman for your time, and everyone, go try Postbox!

Postbox, an interview with Sherman Dickman is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Hey Matthew, could you quickly introduce yourself and a4uexpo?

Sure, I’ve been involved in Affiliate Marketing for over 10 years. I started off by subsidising my university ‘drinking fund’ by developing, optimising sites for Google with a little Arbitrage, Google Adwords, Developing true Content Sites.

I even managed to travel a bit of the world whilst tweaking affiliate websites roving with my laptop through Australia, Asia, Fiji, Canada and the USA – Certainly a great affiliate lifestyle!

Things have become more serious though as I now employ a team of 7 who work from our offices in Bristol in the UK who develop more complex sites such as Pricecuts.

A4UExpo initially grew from our networking events that we organised alongside our forum for many years around the UK, with informal gatherings of affiliates, networks, agencies and merchants. However we realised we must change the format when over 600 people attended an event in London and we had to close registration early and limit numbers from each company!

This gave us the confidence to invest upwards of £100,000 in our first Conference at ExCeL in London back in 2007. Thankfully it was a huge success and we’ve since been back in 2008 and grown attendance by 30% - This April we boldly decided to expand the Conference into mainland Europe with our event at the RAI in Amsterdam.

You've decided to come to Amsterdam and make a "Europe" version of your conference, why?

We just love Amsterdam :-) Seriously though, after both the 2007 and 2008 conferences we were besieged with requests to expand into mainland Europe, and we felt the time was right to take our conference model to a neutral territory for a Pan European Event. We didn’t want to programme a light version of the conference either, which is why we’ve gone for the two full days, brining over 68 Speakers from around Europe to the conference and offering an astounding 46 unique sessions to attend. This is even larger than our show in London last year!

The internet and Affiliate Marketing in particular is also very strong with good broadband penetration in most countries. Our mission with a4uexpo Europe is to spread the word and gain increased publicity for the channel to media planners, agencies, merchants and the press.

It’s time that as a community we all shout to the world just how effective Affiliate Marketing is. That way more budget gets assigned to Affiliate Marketing as a channel and we all win.

Of course we’ll need to show those brands how to embrace the sector effectively to get the most from it – and that’s where we can help.

Affiliate Marketing simply put is not an out of the box solution; it needs hard work and effective management to make it a success.

What's the difference between the UK and the rest of Europe, from an affiliate's stand point?

The UK along with Germany is recognised as being the most mature within Affiliate Marketing. I’d say in fact they are even more advanced that the market in the USA.

This does mean that lessons have been learnt from Publisher and Advertiser activity, and this knowledge can be passed on, and new opportunities can be discovered by knowledge sharing.

Whilst similar opportunities exist in all countries they are at different maturity levels. For instance Cashback or Loyalty, accounts for a huge proportion of affiliate activity in the UK at 25% compared to just 5% in Germany. However what is common across Europe is that SEM remains the key driver within Affiliate Marketing based on both Organic optimisation within Google and Paid Search Activity being conducted on a Performance Basis.

Other than local nuances across sectors and verticals, the opportunities for cross country collaboration, standardisation, and monetisation are immense. This is one of the key reasons to bring the whole of the Affiliate Marketing Sector in Europe together in one place, at one time. The business and relationships that could be formed by pro-active delegates is what makes it all worthwhile.

What do you look forward to the most on A4UExpo Europe?

Everything! The agenda this year is awesome; we’re really proud and honoured to have attracted so many knowledgeable experts from within Affiliate Marketing, Search and Peripheral Channels.

Naturally I’m looking forward to your sessions Joost, and the numerous conversion optimisation and SEO panels we have scheduled, and also the famous networking opportunities that we offer.

This April for instance we have three parties in Amsterdam only open to conference delegates. Our gentle (ish) pre conference bash at the Rosarium, the middle evening party where we’ll be heading to a lively Central Amsterdam Venue and Club and finally our After Show Party where we are planning on hitting the Urban Beach and then offering everyone the opportunity to head once again into central Amsterdam to a special venue that will be announced very soon, just next to the canals for the Queens Day celebrations.

The networking at a4uexpo is what sets us apart, especially in an Industry where relationships really can make the difference between an Affiliate Programme being promoted, or not.

Anything else you'd like to share?

Well, it would be rude not to offer your readers a discount to attend the event, therefore ‘YOAST10’ will give everyone 10% off the delegate rate which starts at just 279 Euros.

An interview with Matthew Wood of A4UExpo is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

We discuss WordPress optimization at a pretty basic level, so for those just starting out with WordPress optimization this might be a good one to start on!

Interviewed on SEO 101 is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

So, to introduce you to the company and to Todd Garland, who runs the company, has been kind enough to answer a series of questions for me. If you've got advertising on your blog and it's either taking up too much time or you're not selling enough, you might want to give them a try! But don't do that before you read on and see how incredibly passionate and smart Todd is about all of this.

Hi Todd, could you introduce yourself and buysellads.com to the readers of yoast.com?

Sure thing, my name is Todd Garland, I live in Boston, MA with my lovely wife and smelly dog and I run BuySellAds.com. BuySellAds.com is a self-funded startup (so far) advertising network targeting the design and development community. We've been around now for almost a year and we are doing very well. Selling a ton of ads, helping publishers make money, and helping advertisers create killer campaigns to target the web design and development niche. I'm young, 27, and have been building websites for what seems like forever now (10 years) and was most recently employed at another hot startup, HubSpot where I was their designer/front-end engineer/SEO guru (one of many SEO guru's in the company I might add).

Why did you start BuySellAds.com?

I started BuySellAds.com because I was frustrated. I was operating two
hobby websites (csselite.com and 13styles.com) and selling ads directly to advertisers. I also bought ads to help promote and grow those sites too -so I was solving a frustration that I experience both as an advertiser and a publisher. None of the well known ad networks could solve my problem... they are a pain to deal with, they don't give publishers enough control, and they take too high of a commission.

You've won me over as a publisher for BuySellAds by providing me with excellent service, and allowing me to do the transition with old advertisers on my own pace. Is that something you try to do for everyone?

Well, yes, everyone gets great service - regardless of how big/small the
publishers/advertiser is. Great service is something none of the other ad networks had (in my experience). It is important to me and I want people to feel like they're getting that great service every time they have a question or need a hand. In terms of helping with transitions, of course... we have transitioned many blogs over to our system who are already selling ads direct and I can proudly say that it's happened seamlessly every time.

What is, in your opinion, your added value to advertisers?

1. Our system is very simple. Fixed 30-day rates on a subscription basis. No other ad network does this, and I can't figure out why - it just makes sense.
2. They can trust us. We always do what is right and we're very reliable. When you buy direct from publishers who are not in a network you never know what you will get.
3. You can manage all of your ads in one central location. Many of our
   advertisers previously had to manage these ad buys individually, site by
   site, publisher by publisher. This was very time consuming. It's now very efficient. You don't have to contact anyone, you don't have to go back and forth on pricing, size, payment, etc. - it's all here in one place and when you are ready to pull the trigger it's done, the
   ads go live, that's it.
4. You no longer need to "discover" new placements. New sites that are
   worth advertising on are always coming into the marketplace and we're always recruiting new publishers. We keep our eyes out for advertisers and make good recommendations to them all the time.
5. We know our inventory. Too often advertisers are stuck dealing with
   people who have no clue where they should be advertising. We know our
   inventory very well and make honest recommendations vs. just trying to spend their money.

And to publishers?

1. Automated. They don't need to waste their time dealing with advertisers, remembering when to put up and take down ads, figure out how to get paid, etc. You install the ad code and you're up and running - it takes only a few minutes to get setup.
2. We don't get in the way. Our ad code is unobtrusive, flexible, and we don't plaster our brand all over your site like the other networks. We just blend in nicely - I bet visitors to your site didn't even notice a change when you switched over to BuySellAds.com.
3. We help you find advertisers. Like I said above, we know our inventory, and when an advertiser comes to us or when we seek out great advertisers we know exactly where their ads should be in our network. We are always sending out proposals, making recommendations, etc. Publishers in this niche NOT in our inventory are missing out these days. You, Joost, went from 4-8 advertisers in how many weeks? A couple I believe... ;) 3 weeks indeed, quite an achievement
4. You can trust us. We do what is right and we're always willing to help and give advice on pricing, placement, etc.
5. Highest payouts of any ad network on the planet. We pay out at 75%,
   which is unheard of and includes credit card processing fees (usually up to 5%), publisher payment fees, ad serving fees, support for the publisher and their advertisers, etc.

How is the online ad market doing at the moment, is it suffering from the recession?

Well, I think we're different. All of the ad networks you see that are
struggling right now are struggling for two main reasons:

1. They rely on targeting to produce results and their targeting is awful.
2. Their prices are inflated and they have been robbing clueless advertisersfor a long time and now it is catching up with them.

BuySellAds.com is very different. We don't do any targeting, the advertisers do this themselves by self-selecting the placements they wish to buy. Our prices are good - they're not inflated or anything, they make sense and are cost effective.

My best take away from all of this? Even in a market that might be shrinking, those who provide excellent service and a good added value will always prevail.

Interview with Todd Garland of BuySellAds is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

I'm really looking forward to seeing Kevin and Matt on SES Hamburg in a couple of weeks!

Check out the post here, or download the MP3. Thanks to Eduard Blacquière and Bas van den Beld for their help in setting all this up!

Interview with Kevin Ryan of SES is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!