Congratulations to all of my employees (and, of course, myself) for setting Simpli’s 1-day revenue record today. It was a long day (I worked nearly 12 hours and I have overflow to finish up tomorrow), but well worth it. I was able to pay our entire bi-monthly payroll with our net profit from today.

Here’s to more days like today!

And this time it’s business that has broken my heart.

I have a friend (or one of those “business acquaintance” types, since he doesn’t really know me outside of my role at Simpli) who is starting up a wireless ISP. He wants to be the Wal-Mart of wireless and target suburban areas that don’t already have DSL or cable modems. I think it’s a good business idea, but his business is much like mine in that there is a lot of competition. What happens when those areas he targets with his wireless company get DSL or cable modems? What happens when customers need more than 6Mbit bi-directional? (This will come more quickly than anyone wants to imagine.) There are a lot of “what-ifs” with his business.

Knowing him, he will probably be successful. It’s incredibly frustrating, though, when I have a company that makes well into 5 figures every month, and I am really struggling to find investors to invest even $10,000 into my business. Contrast this with him–he has this “napkin idea” of a wireless ISP, which has 0 customers and 0 revenue, and he’s already received $235,000 in investments for his company. I want investors to help Simpli become the front-runner in distributed computing to achieve true 100% website and email uptime, and, while I do have some investors who are interested, I don’t know when the checks will actually come in.

In the meantime, AboveNet is having some of the worst issues I’ve ever seen. They’ve had three outages in 5 days. I’m ready to move out and get a new location with multiple network providers so we don’t have to be chained to them. I feel stuck, however, because we don’t have all the money I need to invest in the new location to make it totally 100% redundant. That’s where the investments come in, but it seems the potential investors I talk to all say “That’s a great idea, but I don’t have the money right now. Sorry.” And another door closes on my dreams.

No one out there takes it harder than me when we have an outage. I wear it as a personal badge of pride that Simpli has fantastic uptime. When we’re down, and especially when it’s completely out of my control, there’s nothing I can do but answer unhappy phone calls from customers. Half of them berate me and threaten to leave and half of them seem to want to hang out on the phone forever and ask me questions until it’s back online. Some of them say things like “This is unacceptable.” Do you think I don’t know that? Do you not realize that every cell in my body wants to go down to the damn datacenter myself and reboot whatever switch or router it is that has fallen over this time? Believe me, whatever pain your business is feeling, I’m feeling it 200 times worse, because I have hundreds of customers upset with me (even though no outage this week has been our fault.)

We are ready to move. I have everything in line. I’m waiting for one or two investments to make it happen. I have a meeting with a couple potential investors tomorrow, so I will hopefully close something. This has just been a very rough day for me. One potential investor finally backed out, saying (how many times have I heard this?) “Yes, I’m interested, but I don’t have the money.” When I expressed disappointment, he actually had the nerve to say “Don’t stop prospecting just because you’ve had someone [him, in this case] say ‘yes’.” Perhaps I just have too much faith and trust in others, and I have to learn the hard way that hardly anyone ever follows through with what they say they’re going to do. Cases in point: Not only him, but AboveNet, who guarantees 100% network uptime. Cheers to that. 🙁

Though Simpli gets a fair amount of business from referrals, I thought April would be a good month to experiment with various online advertising methods. My goal was to find the most cost-effective advertising out there. Since web hosting companies advertise pretty much everywhere, I’d like to tackle new areas where other hosts may not have saturated the available space.

I knew that press releases are one of the most cost-effective forms of advertising, so I wrote up a press release advertising the opening of 10for10.com and its tagline, “Host up to 10 websites for $10/month.” I submitted it first to HostingTech.com, which a lot of other sites (including WebHostingTalk.com) syndicate. After about 48 hours, HostingTech pushed the press release live and it also appeared on WebHostingTalk. So far, we’ve gotten just over 100 visitors from it. No signups, but the visibility can’t hurt.

TheWHIR.com called today to seek permission to syndicate the press release from HostingTech, which I gladly approved. I also found the media contacts for TopHosts.com’s press section and got my press release submitted there (on the front page, no less!) It’s too early to see stats from those last two, but I fully expect them to bring at least 200 more visitors to 10for10. Cost to post all those press releases? Free… it just required diligence on my part. Press releases are definitely a no-brainer for good publicity.

Another low-cost advertising option is writing news articles. Since I love writing, this is something I definitely want to do. This could actually be a net positive in terms of cash flow to Simpli (or me), as most companies pay for good articles. I’m thinking about this now and may write an article and submit it to websites in the next few weeks.

I’ve so far managed to avoid hosting directories and the like, though I fear that if we seek a large amount of growth, we’ll have to go to them. To get around this, one of the things I’d like to do is create my own hosting resource website. Obviously, it would have to target a specific niche market, as the “hosting directory” market is almost as saturated as the web hosting industry itself. I’d place my first priority on writing articles and my second priority on this; I’d hope it would eventually showcase my articles as well as others’.

I also want to let you guys know about a special we’ve been quietly running for the past week: Dedicated Pentium 3 Servers for $69/month. There are only a few servers available, and I expect them to sell out within the next couple weeks, so get in now if you’re interested in having root access on your own server for $69/month. There is a $1 first month special if you wish to pay quarterly. That makes these $139 for the first quarter. It’s a bargain. 🙂

We’ll be introducing some 10Mbit unmetered specials within the next week, so be on the lookout for that, as well!

You know, there are a lot of ways I have found out reasons that people aren’t happy with Simpli. But when I have to find out about it by reading your blog, that’s when I say you’ve gone too far.

This person, “victim” (heh) of a server move (a move, I might add, that upgraded his site for free from a PIII to a dual Xeon with a much nicer control panel), didn’t even bother to email us and say that something was wrong. No, he just switched hosting companies, and he’d been hosting with us for about 2 years. Guess what… that’s the second blog I’ve read recently of that nature.

This is the real problem in this industry. It’s so easy to switch hosting companies that people don’t take the time to actually work out issues; they just leave. It really bothers me. I know it shouldn’t; “that’s business” and so on. But it does. It’d be one thing if we were a multi-national billion-dollar corporation with hundreds of thousands of customers. But we’re not. I know every one of our customers on a first-name basis. I would hope that this would extend a little bit of faith in their direction. But no, when something goes wrong, they just leave.

I know this doesn’t apply to all our customers. (Some have had a relatively trouble-free ride with Simpli, and some have been through hell with their hosting for various reasons and are still hosting with us.) But at least have a little consideration and dignity and send me a personal email explaining the problems (preferably with a big red flag in the subject line, as I get hundreds of emails a day) and take the time to work it out and give us a chance. Sheesh.

Quick update. I just got a phone call. The woman introduced herself as “Sue”, a bankruptcy attorney in Oakland. I had no idea who she was until she said, “I heard you were interested in the office furniture?”

The company whose office we are taking over is in bankruptcy, and Sue is in charge of handing out their possessions. She said that I needed to go in there and take an inventory of all items, then send her a list of everything I wanted (she recommended that we take everything), and she’d give notice to their creditors. The creditors then have 20 days to accept or reject the offer (she said she’s never heard of anyone rejecting a reasonable offer.)

There are laptops, desktop computers, big servers, switches, a conference table, desks, phones, and chairs sitting in that office. I’m going to take Brandon in there this week, scope it out, and submit a ridiculously lowball offer for the entire office (off the top of my head, I’m thinking $5000 or less.) It looks like I may just get the entire shebang.

Wow.