I started feeling better on Tuesday, and yesterday I was finally able to smile again. Being able to smile was a nice relief. I felt a lot better just because I knew I wasn’t looking scary any more.

I’m at ModernBill’s 2nd Annual Hosting Workshop in Louisville, KY. I got invited here by Adam Harris, who wrote a piece of software called NOCManager, which helps dedicated server and colocation companies manage their customers. It looks like a great piece of software and I’ve already agreed that we will implement at least a trial run at Simpli. This is good news for those of you who are dedicated server or colocation customers of ours; it will give you one place to manage all aspects of your servers, including billing, bandwidth graphs and remote reboots. It will also help us because we will be able to broaden our managed services offers to include more comprehensive uptime monitoring, etc. All of this will continue to help Simpli move upmarket.

The people here are an interesting mix of hosting company owners and vendors. The hosting company owners run the gamut from tiny hosting companies with 1 or 2 employees and a few shared hosting customers all the way to quite large companies that own datacenters and/or own thousands of servers. I was happy to see that there was one other female hosting company owner here, which gave me a bit of hope that more women are starting to understand this industry.

The talks followed “tracks” that ran at the same time. One track was for customers implementing ModernBill, one was for developers, and one was a general track for business owners that focused not only on technology, but on marketing. The marketing sessions were the most interesting to me. One devolved into a bitchfest about GoDaddy, Yahoo, Google, and others who have driven (or are trying to drive) stakes through the entire industry by devaluing shared hosting almost to $0. An interesting side note is that last night, during the after-party, ModernBill announced that they had a new partner. When they told us who it was, the audience didn’t cheer or applaud, but instead stirred uncomfortably. I noticed the whole atmosphere in the room change in a moment from celebratory to downright cold. Some people grumbled. ModernBill’s new partner? Google.

Why the hostility toward Google? The web hosting industry (and in particular, shared hosting companies) are scared of Google. They are scared for their lives. Think of the mom-and-pop stores that died out when Wal-Mart came to town. There are many mom-and-pop hosting companies that are convinced Google will come out with a free hosting strategy that their customers will switch to. These small companies have worked hard to build up a solid base of customers, and here is a lumbering behemoth ready to put them out of business because they can stick ads on their customers’ websites. Mark my words: No one in the shared hosting industry is a Google fan.

So what was the ModernBill partnership with Google? They’re going to offer free AdWords credits to ModernBill customers who sign up for a new AdWords account, as well as offer the ability for hosting companies that use ModernBill to offer AdWords credits to people who sign up for hosting accounts. The incentives are nice, but the main concern running through the audience was “Do I really want to put my customers in Google’s hands?” There is a fear — perhaps baseless, but there nonetheless — that by putting their customers in touch with Google through AdWords, that Google will be in a position to upsell those AdWords customers later with services that look suspiciously like web hosting. I’m sure some companies will take advantage of the AdWords credits. We may do it with dedicated and colocation customers. But shared hosting? Don’t count on the mom-and-pops to offer it even if it is available through ModernBill.

I also met a hosting company owner who is a really interesting guy. His company (I recognized both his name and his company’s name) is a fairly large “everything hosting” company — shared, reseller, VPS, dedicated, colo, you name it. He is only 26 years old, but already has created a multi-million dollar business that is quite well known for its excellent support. They answer all support tickets within 15 minutes 24×7. I talked to him at length, trying to get a grasp on his business model. You see, Simpli is stuck in a sort of gap. I’d love to be able to offer 15-minute response times 24×7. It would be great and of course our customers would be highly enthusiastic about it. However, it’s not realistic with our pricing structure, and if we raised our prices to the level we’d have to to offer something like that, many of our existing customers would leave.

The reason I’m stuck is that we have so many customers that I genuinely enjoy who don’t want or need managed services. They never call our support line anyway, or if they do, it’s a true emergency. They’re smart, technically savvy, and don’t complain unless something is seriously wrong. I want to keep these customers. But I also want to be able to cater to companies that need managed services. This puts me in a rather awkward position. This is why, with our new website design, I’m making a clear delineation between managed and unmanaged services. Managed services will have an SLA that is much higher than unmanaged services, not in terms of uptime (which will always be 100%) but in terms of support response.

I also (and I just made this decision) want to pull a bit farther away from “completely unmanaged.” We do not set proper expectations with our current website. We offer unmanaged dedicated servers but don’t specifically state our definition of “unmanaged”. We don’t have a clear enough policy of when to charge colo customers for remote hands. These are policy issues that need to be clarified and codified on our new website. Furthermore, we can offer services by default to unmanaged customers, like remote KVM, and raise our prices a bit. I do believe most of our unmanaged customers would pay, say, $20/month more for 24×7 guaranteed remote KVM access. This is, as far as I am concerned, not just an upsell, but a new way of thinking about things. Offer things to unmanaged customers by default, but not things like “system admin” that are frou-frou to these guys. Offer them 24×7 remote KVM, remote reboot, tools to monitor services on their server, a completely customizable (clickable customizable high-end Netscreen!) firewall, and the option to load-balance their servers. This is a completely new breed of “unmanaged” that I think Simpli is in a unique position to tap. This also puts us squarely in the high-end hosting market without having to say we’re managed and offer the system administration that most of our customers don’t need.

I’ll be exploring this much further in the next few months.

I’m on day 6 of my bacterial invasion, and I have to say this is the most disgusting illness I have ever had. It’s also one of the most painful — during the worst days, I could tell time by when my teeth started to ache again (“hey, it’s been 3 1/2 hours since I took my last Advil!”)

Warning: Gross-out ahead. I’m documenting this in case I have another skin abscess or in case you get one (so you know what to expect.) This is nasty, so don’t read it if you think snot is gross.

Sooo… for those of you who have never had these, let me explain a little. This is kind of like having a cold, except instead of snot coming out of your nose, it builds up in your body tissues and causes nasty swelling. Then a nasty sore somewhere on your skin comes to a head and starts to…well…ooze. (This is where it gets gross.) The oozing isn’t painful per se; it’s just that you start to realize how much snot your body made, and how long it is gonna take to ooze out of the inside of your nose–or wherever your skin abscess is. (Are you grossed out yet? It only gets better from here.)

So my body apparently decided yesterday that all that stuff was just going to have to come out faster than oozing up through my nose would let it. I had figured out that putting my head down would let it ooze faster, and I did go through about 100 Q-tips trying to get the stuff out of my nose, but my body was working against gravity.

I went to San Francisco yesterday. I was feeling marginally better and needed to get out of the house. While driving on the freeway, I happened to glance in the rearview mirror and I noticed a glob on my lower lip. Confused, I slowed down and tried to figure out where this had come from. It obviously hadn’t come from my nose; I would have felt it. I peeled back my swollen upper lip to find out that my body had conveniently decided that one oozing skin abscess wasn’t enough, and had decided to locate another one on the inside of my upper lip. And, as if that weren’t bad enough, since gravity was working in its favor, it was dripping onto my lower lip.

Once I got to San Francisco, I parked and sat there in the car for about 15 minutes squeezing the gunk out. I went through about 10 Kleenex and several more Q-tips. The gunk looks exactly like the stuff that comes out of your nose in a cold, except not lumpy. I have never seen so much ooze in my life. Those of you who saw me recently remember that my upper lip and right side of my face were quite swollen; well, that’s what they were filled with, and that’s what I was squeezing out.

I got it all squeezed out and I immediately began to notice that the swelling on my lip was dropping. Now, almost 24 hours later, it looks mostly normal. (I still can’t smile, but I should be able to in a couple days.) Assuming the inside-my-upper-lip abscess does not become further infected, it looks like it was a blessing in disguise. My body did what it needed to do to get the gunk out. Even better news was that this solved the toothache, and I no longer needed to take Advil every 4 hours.

There you have it…the gross-out story of my adult life, blogged for the world to see. I wish I could tell you how to avoid something like this, but even the doctor couldn’t tell me how it happened. The bacteria that cause this live happily inside everyone’s body, and sometimes some people’s bodies stage a revolt, and then Ooze Happens. The only advice I got that might work is to 1) not rub your eyes (that’s probably what caused my stye and started the revolt back in January); 2) if you have an open sore or a scratch, don’t pick at it or rub it, because that will drive bacteria into it; and 3) either don’t use eye makeup or be really careful with it (as George said on the comments in my last blog, throw it away every few months.) 2) and 3) don’t really apply to me, but they do apply as general advice to avoid the Ooze.

I went to the doctor. The first thing he did was give me a tetanus shot (eeeeewwww), which ironically did not hurt as much as the pain I was having in my teeth. He then stuck a swab up my nose and pulled a bunch of gunk out from around the boil. (Actually, he told me it was a skin abscess, not just a boil.) Since the bacteria are now in my bloodstream, he is concerned that the infection will spread. The tooth pain, he said, is an indication that it has already spread or is threatening to spread into my sinuses (which, in his words, “would be nasty.”) He gave me oral antibiotics to take twice a day. If it doesn’t get better by Wednesday, or if it continues to get worse, I will need to make an appointment for daily antibiotic shots until it goes away.

The problem, he said, was that although the abscess is localized inside my nose, the bacteria could be anywhere and everywhere in my body and could continue to cause abscesses anywhere, including internal ones in my sinuses or ears. Even 1 week of the antibiotics may not be enough to stop me from reacting to the bacteria and developing further abscesses. So… yuck. Hopefully I will feel better by Wednesday.

I just thought I’d post a public notice here — I apologize if I’ve been slow to respond to any email or support ticket you’ve posted (the ones that are sitting in my queue, that is.) In January, I got a “stye” in my eye — basically a bacterial infection of an eyelash that caused a lot of swelling and pain. Unfortunately, the bacteria doesn’t seem to have gone away, and now I have a boil in my nose. This is basically an extremely painful infection of a nose hair follicle. I’ve been drugged up on Advil for about 3 days. The boil has also caused a lot of swelling around my nose and upper lip, so I look kind of weird. 🙁

Today things got a lot worse, with dizziness, nausea, severe toothache in the teeth near the boil, and what seemed like a fever (my body was having trouble regulating temperature, at least.) I’ve also felt sick, weak, and tired the entire day. Since the boil is inside my nose, and it’s started to cause serious problems, I made a doctor appointment. The appointment is at 8:30AM tomorrow (so now you know I’m feeling really bad; I’m getting up before 9AM on a Saturday to go to the doctor!)

Hopefully the doctor can lance (drain) the infection tomorrow and give me some antibiotics so this type of infection stops happening. The antibiotics should clear the bacteria up and prevent further infections–at least for a while.

Anyway, I’ve been feeling terrible all day, and I apologize for not responding to the giant pile of emails and support tickets I have. It’s hard to type, fight off nausea, and ignore a toothache all at the same time. So… I apologize.

I’m going back to sleep now.

S left and went back to NYC, so I’m here alone again (and quite relishing it!) I have learned a lot about myself through my encounters with S. Since he and I are so much alike, it’s like looking in a mirror for me. Some of those “mirror” experiences have been good and some bad. However, the most important thing I learned about having him here is how important it is for me to have “me time.”

If you would have asked me a month ago about the importance of “me time”, I would have told you it was important. But I never realized how much it balances me to have that time alone. Though I do have lots of conversations with others, I need time alone to digest them. When I don’t get that time, I start to break down. After just 48 hours of not having “me time”, I could feel things start to crack.

This is what I learned. When I’m around other people, I use a facade. Normally it is incredibly difficult for anyone to break through this facade. With a couple exceptions, those who have seen the inside of me go on to date me, because I show it to so few people that when I do show it to you, it means you’re someone special.

But when I’m alone, there is no facade. I’m just me, in all my silly quirky glory. I sing (LOUDLY) to good music in the car. I dance around the house. I laugh a lot. I’m not afraid to cry at sappy movies (or occasionally TV shows.) I pretend I’m the star of American Idol. I play video games and eat junk food and just relax. This is the kind of stuff I do when I’m truly happy, yet 99% of the time I do it in front of no one, simply because I don’t trust myself to let all that out in front of others. You see, I want to be known as someone amazingly successful. And for whatever reason, I have it in my head that really successful people probably don’t sing Sophie Ellis Bextor songs into a hairbrush while getting dressed in the morning. Still, that is me at least as much as anything defined as “successful” is. So I wear a mask when I’m out. Oh, don’t get me wrong…it’s a friendly mask, and when I say I’m genuinely interested in something, I am. So it’s not fake. It’s just a layer of protection, much like a coat and scarf would protect me from the cold.

When people see the real me, the true me, they are amazed. I see it in their eyes. I know why, too. It’s because I totally open up and become a different person. No longer am I self-restrained. No longer am I worried about success. I’m silly and I make people laugh. I have a good time with things. But then it disappears again, submerged in the serious side of me, and this is when things go wrong. The people who have seen that side of me don’t want to see me let it go. They try to pull it back out. Of course that doesn’t work, and I just run further away… because no amount of begging or coercing will bring that side of me out. It only comes out when I’m truly comfortable with both the person and the situation.

So why couldn’t I bring it out with S? Easy. He is just like me. I can’t bring that side out because it would be dangerous. He would have every tool in his arsenal available to hurt me, and he would know exactly what to say to damage me, perhaps permanently. Oh, I don’t think he would hurt me. But I can’t risk it. So I put the coat and scarf on, and become Serious Erica. Only I can’t hold the Serious Erica facade for too long….it exhausts me. So I start to break down, and as I break down, I become more frustrated. As it continues, I feel things inside me start to snap, and I get really aggressive with other people (much as a cornered animal would.) Once I can have that time to myself to re-balance, I can feel things mending. In fact, tonight, as soon as I dropped S off at the airport (he came here from his San Diego vacation on Sunday… only about 55 hours ago), I put some 80’s music on in my car and realized I could sing out loud without feeling like a complete idiot, and did so. My bad mood went away pretty much immediately.

So what are the lessons from this? Many of you would tell me to be “myself” more often, but I’m sorry–it doesn’t work that easily. That side of me is quite fragile and gets its heart broken easily. If I revealed it more often, there would be that many more chances for me to get hurt. So I will continue to reveal it only to a very few select people. (And no, you absolutely cannot force it out of me. That will only make me withdraw more.) The lesson I feel I’ve learned is that I need that “me time” to recuperate after being around people, and when I don’t get it, I become a really nasty person. 🙁 I also need to be more proactive in telling people that I need to be alone when I can feel things starting to snap, instead of trying to push through it (darn willpower!)

My heart tells me it’s time to reveal itself and help out a friend this week, so I will follow it. This is always difficult for me, but in this case, I feel it’s important. Wish me luck.