stress... time management... recreation..

I've been really stressed out lately, so much to do, so little time!

I've got too many things going on, it's hard to finish any of them as i'm doing too many things at the moment, some of them are:

• Couple client websites
• Browser Game relaunch & recoding
• Selling used computers & hardware
• Client server management

Just lately, i was on a business trip which lasted for 5 days... Friday evening/night till Tuesday night. Coded many days straight without much of sleeping, then configuring couple servers like mad ('sunrise till dawn') etc.
I was REALLY tired after that...

Well, i've been planning, scheduling, managing some stuff for a week after that, and last 2 days i've been deadbeat tired... Can't get anything really done, half asleep constantly and cannot sleep well...

Good news is that i'm getting some computers sold, new contacts etc. and things are going great, it's just it's taking it's toll on me health-wise.

Anyways, i'm gonna soon post more specifics about that browser game, it's an old hobby project, being reworked, i even hired some help with it. If anyone knows any good and high-paying ad agencies, for which i could put onto my advertising spots, please give me a comment about it!
Referral links ok, i will use it :)

Advertising & effectiveness...

I've been advertising lately quite much, but nothing seems to get much effect atm, not even google adwords.

Going to try to change my main site to be more attractive, and do an landing page etc., add more information about the service etc.

I know that i have way too little information about the service, so i got to enhance that one ASAP.

cPanel...

lol, bugs in cPanel are funyn sometimes, you know the cpanel/whm news link on the top navigation bar? Press it and compare the news and see the footer ;)
This is what i have currently isntalled: WHM 10.8.0 cPanel 10.8.1-C29
The bottom news start from 9.9.1 going down to 9.1.x and then the footer has text saying:

Please note that the old WHM News can be found here[link removed]

how come 9.9.1 news aren't old enough already? ;)

well anyways, it's a funny notice and really doesn't matter even :)

Special offers...

I'm doing an special offer currently for Bronze Plan, -90% for the first payment cycle. (See it here)

This special is ment only for Webhosting Talk members and i really hope this offer will fly :)
My past experience is that those offers have next to 0 value, very rarely anyone takes the chance, i don't know is it because of my writing skills, not aggressive enough offerings, or simply that people are flooded with choice and there is too little amount of people browsing those offerings.

I see very aggressive marketing constantly, especially on war prices. Less than 1$ per month? Come on, gimmey a break!
How are you supposed to profit from a package like 1Gb HDD & 20GB traffic for 1$ per month?
You need like 4-6 thousands of these clients atleast to make a somewhat decent living for 1 guy!

How is that supposed to sustain long-term viability of the company offering these? I really don't know!

Now, let's see, cheapest 100Mbps(35Tb/Mo) link is around 1500$(42,85$/Tb) per month probably at states, with a long term contract, that is a business link, guaranteed 100mbps that's why there is that cost.
Cheapest HDDs go here around 100€ for 250gb, that's around 170$ for 250Gb(0.68$/Gb).

Now assume that average usage for hdd is 30% and for BW 10% per user, and so you are doing HUGE overselling(problems to incur in future!).
Now you can only "use" like 60% of that BW(35Tb) to ensure fast usage on busy hours, that leaves us with a price of 71,42$ per TB or 0.069$ per GB.

1Gb & 20GB transfer if 100% used thus costs: ~1.4$ for BW and 0.68$ for HDD...
So we got a total of 2.075$/Month per user if completely used, assume average of 20% usage,
it still leaves 0.40$ per month, 60% profit margin right?
Actually no!

Now you take in the support per user spending, marketing costs etc.
So let's say you get an average of 0.2 tickets per user, average time to solve an ticket is 6minutes(1/10th of an hour), your employer salary is 10$ per hour + other fees.
Assume other fees on that +30% making it 13$ per hour, 1.3$ per ticket is the price and thus
0,26$ per client.

Now we are in total of 0.66$, seems like they would still be profitting.

We need still to take account on marketing costs, then other labour costs (sys admins etc.), hardware acquiring costs.
Also, with the fact that one server can by maximum hold probably 200-400 clients, and that's with a top end server! Yes, we are talking about a Dual Xeon/Opteron, with dual core CPUs, 2gigs of ECC DDR, and then come sin the HDD speed problem: no we need raid to make the HDD read & write latencies go away etc!
Now, these are more floating costs, but cost of acquiring one hosting client can very well & easily go to around 20$, even with a good advertising medium & very good ads!

Generally speaking, acquiring hosting customers is REALLY hard.

So the host needs to perform well in all areas:
Customer support
service reliability & speed

Just to name 2, and yes your clients will get you more clients indeed, but it shouldn't be the only method used.

If anyone could shed some light on this, i would be really happy! I just can't see it happening on those prices for commercial grade goods(=hosting)!

The competition is tough, and even tougher on the guys running price wars!
Most of the time price warriors stumble later on to their own weight!
Well, my niche is in accepting moneybookers, quality & support orientation, so i don't fortunately need to worry so much about 'price warriors' :)

Credit Cards...

I've noticed something on credit card purchases at AH...
Quite many uses their friend's/family's credit card, it's actually quite often that on registration there is different name & address than on the payment, a lot of times, almost all of them, it's the same city etc. and on some of them it's a business credit card.

I always thought that just about anyone in states has a credit card, but it seems that no, it's not like that. Don't know then how strict they are on giving credit cards if you have debt, mortgage or something like that. Atleast, here in Finland the condititions list is quite long and brings up jokes like "if your wife's mom's littlelittlelittlecousin wears pink underwear, we may not give you a credit card", uhm...

Currently Moneybookers & Credit Cards are automated & directly accepted at AH, and i'm thinking that i should expand, especially when i look at 2checkout pricing: 49cents + 5.5%, is quite darn much!
someone spoke about ePassPorte, i wonder would it be easy to integrate to AWBS, anyone done this? Perhaps i could outsource it.

Oh yeah, as i now have come to credit cards, i've been seeing some virtual credit card adverts lately, if anyone of you have tested these kind of services, please comment about it!
All i've seen looks not so reputable & quality, like this one: Card444

Paypal policies better than before

I just noticed that Paypal has stopped forcefull charging of user credit cards, like they used in before, just like many stories tell us at PaypalSucks for example.

I had couple of fraudulent orders a while back, now Paypal decided to refund that amount of money to the account from where it was stolen, but not force charge that cash out of my account.
Now my paypal account says happily -128€ lol x)

That allows people if they need to choose a proper time to change it back to positives, which is very good imo. Think about it, it's about end of the month, you have like 200euros for next 2 weeks or so, and bills to pay are around 100€, then paypal takes something like 135€ from you... Now, how you gonna pay your regular bills & eat for that 2 weeks? There is no way.

I bet this policy has come around because of some complaint against PayPal (there is SO many of them always going on, lol), and i really think it's a helluva good policy for John Average.

and for someone like me, it's a principal that it needs to be approved by me. Hell, i was thinking that if they force charge me, even i'd pay it, i would go & do a chargeback, then contact paypal saying this is no good, you can't do something like that, and pay it in a week or so :)
Just to make my point 'clear' to them.

HostingSpeeds.com

This is rather intresting, we are having some insane speeds!
Check it out at: http://www.artichost.net/pageload.php?id=742
Look at the link... it's loading time for the 100kb in seconds, yes, that's right 3.9 to 4.8ms loading times, now that's impossible right?
Actually no, it measures rendering time of the page, simply put: how long it takes to load from HDD, process the PHP within, and when it's ready to be sent to user.

When you compare to others in their website, that's many times faster, actually on the website it shows 0.00s because it hasn't been made to show that low values.

Now, this is not anything new for me to see a simple page rendered that fast, what is odd for me is how all the other hosts have that high??
Do they have all bloated servers? Unoptimized software? Too many clients per server? too many HDD transactions compared to speed?
Beats me!

I don't know, if you know, please comment about it :)

As far as i know, those all hosts should have way lower times, but i guess then not.

As for network response time, i'm already working on to get it faster, i think part of it is caused by my firewalling, i have unusually large tables for firewalling rules, more chains than usual etc.
The pro of having the way i have: trouble makers stay away :)
What i did? APF + BFD.
APF stands for Advanced Policy Firewall and BFD for Brute Force Detection. When BFD detects a brute force attempt, it automatically adds a rejection rule to firewall thru APF.

Initially i got upto 50 e-mails per day warning about brute force attempts, then most of the trouble makers got banned, and now it's way less :)
I'm always looking forward making my system more secure, and adding more monitoring capabilities, and am currently looking into setting up a Nagios monitoring system, expanding to also client servers, a free added service for all clients in future :)