You Grow, We Grow

As the new series of Dragons’ Den on BBC2 starts it seems that some people in this world are doomed to keep repeating the mistakes of others without learning anything from them.  Every year it is the same without fail, someone will make a pitch to the Dragons and their website instantly becomes unavailable – robbing them of publicity and more importantly, customers.

Even Worse…

It gets even worse when the website is your business!  Last night you may have seen The Present Club do their pitch to the Dragons, like thousands of other people I thought I’d take a look at the website – although more to see if it was still working than anything else.  Unfortunately like so many before they had not prepared themselves adequately for what is probably the largest amount of publicity they are likely to receive in the short term, loosing themselves many potential customers and showing themselves in a poor light to any potential investors – You have to remember that an offer on Dragons’ Den is not binding and may not go ahead once due diligence is completed, but other people may be thinking they are a good business to be involved with (Despite what Duncan Bannatyne may think, you need to keep your options open to get the best deal if things don’t work out)

What can be done?

If you find yourself in such a situation, where you’re going to appear on TV, or your product/service will be featured prominently on Radio/Magazine/Large Event then you need to talk to your web hosting company as soon as possible and ask them what they can do to help you cope with the increase in visitors to your site – of course some of these things will not be free, but as a business person you have to work out the cost of lost customers.

The Maths

If your appearance on TV brings in 200,000 visitors to your site and you usually convert 3% of visitors to customers then that’s 6,000 new customers for you – But only if your website is up and running.  Maybe 5-10% of those will come back the next day to take a look at your site, so now you’re only talking about 300-600 new customers – that’s a significant drop.  If your average sale is £20 then that’s a difference of £114,000 at the worst case (£120,000 – £6,000).

Can You Afford To Throw Away £120,000?

If so then you probably don’t need to be reading this blog post at all and congratulations, you’ve done very well for yourself.  If like the majority you can’t then you need to sit down with your web hosting supplier (or better yet, give us a call about our business web hosting and dedicated servers) and work out a plan – even if it’s only for a temporary increase in capacity for your website.  There are a great many things that can be done, quite a few of them for free that can help your website survive an increase in visitor numbers and help you capture new customers – for <1% of that £120,000 of new business you could potentially increase the capacity of your website by 3-4x, if not more in some cases.

I’d Like To Know More

If you’d like to know more about how we can help you with your web site hosting problems then please get in touch with us to discuss our business hosting solutions.

How do you backup?

Hopefully the answer isn’t “we don’t”, hopefully you at least take backups to a server in your office, or to disk and keep it in a fire safe.

Data is the key to all businesses, without it there often is no business left, or it soon goes out of business quickly after a data loss – so looking at backups is something you should do right now if you haven’t, and if you have then you should review the situation every year to make sure your current system still meets your needs. Could you survive without payroll data? Without your customer lists? Without your inventory data? Without your emails? Work in progress?

Not just servers

It’s not just servers you should think about taking backups of either, more often than not employees will store critical data on their desktop and laptop PCs, even if company policy says not to. Even if all of your data is stored on a server, you need to think carefully about where you back it up to – we’ve seen a lot of people fall in to the trap of, “Well it’s got RAID so it’s fine” or “It’s got a USB drive attached to it” and leave it at that. RAID isn’t a backup mechanism and a locally attached USB drive isn’t going to help when it’s burnt to a crisp with your server, under 2ft of water or in the back of someones van!

We have the solution!

This is where we can help you, we are proud to announce the launch of our new Protexia^® DataSafe backup service providing affordable, secure data backups for servers, desktops and laptops.

• Secure: Files are encrypted before leaving your machine with AES, TwoFish or 3DES and sent to us over a secure encrypted data connection
• Fast: Files are compressed before sending, only changes are sent
• Flexible: You can have multiple backup sets with different backup schedules and retention policies
• Cross Platform: Supports Windows, Linux and Mac
• Easy To Use: Windows and Mac have easy to use graphical interfaces for managing backups from the machine and all clients get a web based interface for managing backups and restoring files
• Databases: Supports backup of MS SQL, Oracle and MySQL Databases
• Email: Supports Lotus Notes and brick level MS Exchange Backup

We are providing free 30-day trials of Protexia^® DataSafe with 50GB of storage space ahead of our full launch. Once you’re happy with the service at the end of the trial you would pay:

• £20/month + VAT for the first 50GB
• £15/month + VAT for subsequent 50GB blocks

If you have any questions about the service or backups in general then please contact us.

As many of you will already be aware (we’ve already applied for some of you) Nominet (the organisation that runs the .uk domain name space) is releasing a large list of previously reserved domain names – most of these are either single or double character domains. At the moment we’re in the open landrush phase – so anyone can apply for any of the remaining 2640 domain names.

How much does it cost?

Nominet charge a fee of £10 + VAT per domain name for applying for a domain name – if you’re the only one that applies then you’ll be allocated the domain name, if more than one registration is received by June 15th then it will go to auction. If you’re successful at either stage then KDA will charge our usual fee of £14.95 + VAT per domain name to register it for 2 years.

How do I apply?

If you’d like to apply then you’ll need to open up a support ticket with us, as we’re currently doing all the reserved domain applications manually – so we can make sure everything runs smoothly. Once we’ve submitted the request, we’ll send you a code, which you’ll need to enter at the URL we provide – this will allow you to pay the £10 + VAT fee to Nominet.