State of Uncorrupted, Act 1

It’s been a while since I contacted everyone to let them know the “State of Uncorrupted.” Since I’m using WordPress now, I might as well make it a post for everyone to see.

A lot has been happening “behind the scenes” with Uncorrupted – some good, and some not-so-good.

Business License and Tax Exempt Status: A few months ago, Tara from Deal Seeking Mom posted something about MyCorporation, a new service by Intuit (the Turbo Tax folks). They were offering a coupon that enabled customers to incorporate their business for free . They took care of all the paperwork and sent it out to me to sign. They even paid postage to the State. It was a great deal, but it has been a long process. I incorporated Uncorrupted as a Non Profit. I’m still waiting on the State to give me the business license. However, once I have that, I can apply for my federal/state tax EIN and then apply for Tax Exempt status. Realistically, I’m still ~5 months away from being a legitimate & legal Non Profit.

Server Migration: Leasing servers from a Data Center in Florida was a great way to get started, but ultimately it just wasn’t for me. Some administrators swear by cPanel, but I found it to be extremely bloated and slow. It took what should have been an amazing server and turned it into something my wife’s desktop could out perform. It didn’t matter how many config. files I tweaked. The server always failed to perform at an acceptable level. Aside from that, services would hang and take website offline randomly. While this is to be expected in the long run on any server, the rate at which it happened was completely unacceptable. To top it off, no useful log entries were made so identifying the problem and taking corrective action wasn’t possible. While considering my options, I decided that in the long run it would be more cost effective to purchase servers and place them in a nice data center. I began my search locally, with the idea that if something were to happen I could head to the data center and take corrective action. But rack space, power, and bandwidth in the DC Metro area was absurd. I was able to find a decent data center in Michigan that would take the servers for $50/mo each, but technical support was billed at $200/hour. I’ve not ever needed tech support before, but if a drive were to crash or a power supply were to go down and I couldn’t get up there to fix it myself, the cost would be very high. A few days later I got a call from a huge data center in Reston. They gave me a short list of some of their clients who could possibly help me out. I spoke with several of them before I contacted YellowFiber.com. The owner, Zak, was excited about the vision I have for Uncorrupted and offered me a significant discount on the services he provides. He’s extremely knowledgeable and incredibly helpful. I won’t bore you with the details, but I finalized the configuration of one of the “new servers” I purchased and began migrating client accounts within a few days of speaking with him. Overall, the migration has gone without a hitch. I’ve only got 2 clients left to migrate – I plan on doing that early Saturday morning.

LiteSpeed: It’s not free, but once again the folks behind it were more than willing to cut me a break on the price (20%!). The benefits to this terrific product far outweigh the price. You can see my Litespeed Post for more details

Control Panel: I’m a pretty smart guy, but this has been a thorn in my side. I have made a significant amount of progress: users can manage domains, dns, and ftp accounts, but implementing a solution that would allow clients to add additional domains appears to be beyond me. Not being one to give up, I spent more time on this than I probably should have. A couple days ago, I decided to see what else was out there (as cPanel is not an option). I found a few products that looked nice, but when I started looking under the hood I found the same problems that plague cPanel. I kept going back to DirectAdmin – it’s a lightweight product with a very active community behind it. The prices listed on their website were a bit high, but I found out that if I offered dedicated servers as a service @ Uncorrupted, I could get access to “Internal Pricing,” which equates to about 50% off. I emailed them and mentioned that I’m running a non profit, but don’t yet have my tax exempt status. They indicated that they have no problem upgrading me to the internal pricing now, but when I get my tax exempt status they’ll give me as many licenses as I can use – for free. Great product, great price!

Server Migration, Act II: Ah, yes – it’s always something, eh? Fortunately, this will be transparent for everyone. Once I have one of the new servers configured with a control panel, I’ll migrate everyone’s accounts over. Since I control the IP Block, you won’t have to wait for DNS to sync up or any of the normal “issues” associated with moving servers. I’ll do this all behind the scenes, but it will involve a brief period of down time (less than 10 minutes). I’ve been charting bandwidth utilization and it looks like the hours between 2am, and 5am are the least busy, so I’m planing on attacking this then. This won’t be for a couple weeks. Yellow Fiber is in the process of provisioning a new rack in the data center and we’ve got some space there. Rather than incur additional downtime sometime in the future to move the server, I’ve elected to wait until everything is configured in this new rack. This also gives me plenty of time to test a few control panels, rest assured that things will work well for me (behind the scenes), and provide the clients everything they need on the front end. Everyone will be contacted prior to any changes.

Business and Communication Skills: I’ll never master these – I’m a geek, what can I say? Fortunately, I have a wife who is a great writer and can proofread the emails & posts I send out to everyone. Unfortunately, when I’m troubleshooting an issue for a client, I don’t have time for her to proofread my emails. When I was a client at web hosts, the one thing that would turn me away quickly, and without hesitation, was the lack of details or canned responses. I promised myself that when communicating with clients, I would be as detailed as possible. I’d identify the problem, provide them commands or other things they could test to help me further identify it, offer up any troubleshooting measures I took, and the outcome of those measures. This is all well and good, and I can only assume is great for the clients, but couple that with my lack of inter-personal skills and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. I hear my emails can come off condescending & rude, which is the complete opposite of what I’m trying to accomplish. If you get an email from me and you get a similar feeling, please ask me about it. I promise I’m trying to help and doing everything I can to get the issue resolved (be it a problem on the server, a problem with your connection to the server, or even a problem a visitor is having getting to the server). Some of these things I can fix on the server, but more often than not, it’s an issue somewhere else that I’m more than willing to help resolve. I am absolutely sure every one of the Uncorrupted clients would agree that I try to do whatever it takes – you won’t find that dedication anywhere else.

An example of my bad business skills: I was excited to find the data center I mentioned earlier (50/mo per server) and told a few people that with this migration I hope to drop the monthly subscription fees by 30-50%. Unfortunately(?), for the good of everyone @ Uncorrupted I decided against this (as explained above) and am unable to lower prices right now. This is still my primary goal however, so what I plan on doing is this: once Uncorrupted becomes self-sufficient (and we’re SOOOOO close), I can begin dropping prices by a buck or 3 (for everyone) each time a new client signs up. This does a few things: it will encourage each of you to advertise more because each new client lowers everyone’s monthly cost, AND if you are the one to refer them, you’ll get the affiliate bonus (we’ve already had 3 referrals!).

New Servers, ACT II? It looks like we may have another new server (or 2?!) in the future. A very generous person/company has graciously offered to donate these to Uncorrupted. I’m still blown away by this and hope it all works out. I’d rather not give a bunch of details just yet, so expect another blog post in the future, should everything fall into place.