How important is your website? Two years ago, we would have told you the AINEO website is an online brochure for people who want to find out more about why AINEO is such demand and growing. However, over the last two years, AINEO.com has become a source of great information on technology on the web. As you can see from one of our earlier websites, we have come a long way.
In general, the first websites were made in HTML and you tended to focus on presentation more than content. It was always a pain to update as graphics and other elements would tend to go out of whack when you wanted to put up something new. Then people would add “Flash” which gave movement and action to an otherwise static website. Korea in 1999 was in love with Flash on websites.
The world has moved on to Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is going away from website built on HTML files and concentrating more the content of a website. AINEO.com has 50-100 visitors a day from every continent on the globe and over 80 countries. The average visitor spends 5-7 minutes on our site. It will become an online window into a new service into groupware called AINEO Secure in June.
With these things in mind, we were reminded of how important our website was. We are a big Microsoft shop. Meaning, we support Microsoft applications and OS very well; Active Directory, Sharepoint, Exchange, ISA Firewalls, IIS. We are very happy with Microsoft over the alternatives. Studies have shown that having a standard has brought down the overall price of software for all of us end-users. Of course, Microsoft is not always easy to deal with as they are so big and not always the best choice (try MS CRM on that one). However, our current website was built on Apache and LINUX in late 2006.
As we put a lot of effort into Microsoft, until recently we didn`t want to give up precious rack space (our previous data center was much smaller) to a web server. We opted for using a web server in the US. Unfortunately, the guys in the US migrated our site to a new server with a different build of PHP and MySQL. They didn`t bother to tell us or give us any type of notice. They ended up breaking our site (built on a content management system) and taking it down for 31 hours as we tried to figure out what they did. Clearly, they were incompetent and should not be in business. A letter to their president documenting the $2000 USD costs to fix their errors received no response even after two resends. (He did respond to suggestions on how to improve their services weeks earlier). But if you have ever searched for a web host, you will see zillions of companies in the business. Most of them should be out of business as they have no support policy, qualified personnel, or systems to properly support their customers.
With a relatively popular corporate website down for 31 hours and no one telling you what the problem was, it was a bit frustrating. It was clear, our website has become an important part of the AINEO business. As an IT service provider we could no longer entrust our image, our reputation, or our data to people with no sense of technical expertise. With new services and a data privacy certification we have no patience with lost or broken databases. We decided to bring our website into our own datacenter.
It was the best choice, we`ve ever made. What did building our own web servers do for team AINEO?
-It gave our system engineers a chance to do more work on LINUX related servers.
-Put servers in the hands of an engineering firm that already has close to 300 Active Directory (Windows Servers)
-Put our web server in what is currently the fastest, cheapest, and most reliable broadband network in the world.
-Got AINEO on a dedicated server that is serviced by AINEO SEs directly and is so fast it screams.
Moral to the story; if your website is important to you and especially if you are a corporate, please make sure that:
-you`ve got qualified (BQF) LINUX or Microsoft Engineers with a experience maintaining your equipment.
-they are committed to a service level agreement
Check out their website (is it professionally done and succinct?), their billing process, the way they answer the phone, and the way they set up your accounts. If you see any sign of being unreliable, avoid those folks like the plague.
The corporate website is no longer an online brochure. It is a communication window to customers and potential customers. For AINEO Networks, it is so much more.
Thanks for stopping by!