TheGarage Tech Blog

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Anyone who reads Instapundit knows what an Instalanche is. Certainly if you have ever been on the receiving end of one you know. An Instalanche is when Glenn links to your site and you get an outrageous number of hits over a couple of days. Were talking tens of thousands. Many of the lower-tier websites go down for bandwidth overages. (A blog I used to write, enormous incongruities, actually received a link from the Instapundit but it was only worth a couple a hundred hits. My instalanche that wasn’t. I sold that blog last year to someone that wanted to take it down. In hindsight, now that I’m trying to rebuild some page rank on several new websites, I think I sold EI too cheap because the site had a pagerank of 4.)

So my Twitterlanche came from, you guessed it, Twitter. All my posts from this blog and my outdoor blog are automatically tweeted. A post I made on Gulf Coast Texas Outdoor Blog got a retweet and in less than half a day I’ve had dozens of incoming Tweeters. I know dozens doesn’t sound like much, but we are talking relative here and it’s not even been a full day yet. The outdoor blog is rather new and I haven’t spent much time on it in several months. I don’t know if the Twitter referral has staying power, like Google Page Rank, but the Twitter traffic is a huge spike. I’ll update if the Twitter traffic continues in noticeable quantities.

The moral of the story: You don’t have to be a user of Twitter, or even understand how it works or why people would use it, but for maximum exposure to a potential mass audience you absolutely must include it in your website marketing strategy. It’s a gold mine once you figure out how to take advantage of it.

For the past few days or so I’ve been working on converting a regular brochure website into a content managed Wordpress website. The previous web… er, I don’t know what to call them actually. Certainly they are not designers or developers or anything of the sort that might have real technical knowledge. If they were they would provide real value with their service and there would be some keyword meta tags along with a stat counter on the site. Let’s call them web page hangers. The Internet is full of these page hangers who are out calling themselves “web developers” and such. It’s a reseller scam set up by the big hosting companies designed to rip-off the unknowing buyer of Internet services.

So the previous web page hanger had the website and the email hosted at 1and1. Not a problem; I have all my stuff hosted at 1and1. The only problem is that the customer thinks everything is hosted at GoDaddy, where they purchased the domain name. They are not even aware that their website is actually saved at and hosted from 1and1.

The page hanging company simply entered 1and1’s name servers in the DNS and pointed the whole shebang away from GoDaddy to their hosting account at 1and1 where they have set up an external domain record and some mx records for a few email forwarding accounts. Fairly standard from a technical standpoint but from a business perspective this practice is extremely bad form and I see it over and over again.

About 80% of new website clients over the past decade have had this problem where getting information — like a user name and password — from the previous provider is like pulling teeth. The page hangers basically have the customer’s site held hostage until the client gets someone who knows how to cut the strings and say farewell. I’ve seen cases where unscrupulous web page hangers were charging literally thousands of dollars over a year to make the simplest of changes.

So I got everything switched back to GoDaddy and have been using GoDaddy’s hosting service. This is my first GoRound with GoDaddy and at this point I must say that GoDaddy is about the worst piece of Internet software I have ever used to manage an Internet account, and I’ve been around a very long time. I thought 1and1’s user interface sucked but GoDaddy makes 1and1 seem like a world-class operation.

GoDaddy is so bad I can’t be sure it’s not made that way on purpose to somehow enhance sales through trickery. For example I almost bought a pack of forwarding accounts when i didn’t need them because you don’t know you have them until you activate a credit, which is of course buried in the maze of incomprehensible, unintuitive, bifurcated, navigation choices that never seem to lead to the same place. Kudos to their 24/7 telephone support, but the fact that you need it so much speaks volumes about the site and it’s nearly worthless on-line help facilities.

Furthermore they — both the page hangers and the service providers — somehow dupe people into buying stuff they don’t need. My client has the GoDaddy deluxe email package, domain protection, and business registration that they don’t use and don’t need. The hidden, free forwarding accounts is all they needed.

I can see why the page hangers didn’t want to use GoDaddy’s service — after being set up with 1and1 they probably couldn’t figure out how to get anything done at GoDaddy.

From FT.com, News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch on paid content:

“We intend to charge for all our news websites,” Mr Murdoch said.

“If we’re successful, we’ll be followed by all media,” he added, predicting “significant revenues” from charging for differentiated news online.

He warned that “the big competition will be coming from the BBC,” which offers online news for free, but said: “Our policy is to win.”

Mr Murdoch said News Corp was highly unlikely to develop its own electronic reader, but took aim at Amazon’s Kindle device by praising the rival Sony Reader.

He insisted that News Corp would retain a direct relationship with its subscribers to its content via e-readers, information that Amazon has refused to hand over.

Chase Carey, who recently returned to News Corp as chief operating officer, said the online charging policy would extend to cable networks such as Fox News.

Just because the current advertising model is in a slump doesn’t mean charging for content is the way to go. That would be like raising taxes during a recession.

Mark this as an example where the decision of one powerful, but misguided individual can wreck a billion dollar company.