EPhost Web Design and Hosting Blog

Should I have two websites or one for SEO reasons?

March 30th, 2010

I met a criminal defense attorney while camping at San Elijo State Beach who asked me whether or not it is better to have a few smaller websites rather than one for search engine optimization reasons. I am often asked this question so I thought I would blog about it.

The general premise to be that the more websites you have the more success you might have in the search engines. In other words, you might be found in either more places or take two (or more) spots in the top 10 results of a particular keyword. My knee-jerk reaction is that it is better to have one website and promote the heck out of it instead. However, the answer really depends on you and your situation. You might also be wondering if Google (or other search engines) have a problem with this tactic in general.

From a purely technical/logistical/cost perspective the reason I say to have one website is because I find most customers have enough trouble simply building and maintaining their website and two or more becomes a heap more trouble. Consider these factors: cost of outside help, time to write content, cost to advertise two websites etc .. Think of each website as a brick and mortar store- do you have the time to manage both? So if you are capable of overcoming these challenges, and you have a lot of time, then it may be feasible to have more than one website. But what does Google think?

The primary goal of an search engine (especially Google) is to hands-down have the best search results for a given query. That said, it doesn’t help if all of the results are riddled with duplicate websites spouting the same company, content or products. So given this simple idea, if you are going to have multiple websites then you should not duplicate your content. If you are developer like me you might say that with some simple programming I can reorganize my content so that it looks differently. My response to that is that search engines go deeper than that so you really better mix it up.

Here is when I think (IMO) that having more websites MAY be warranted:

1) You have two businesses that are similar but truly different.
2) Your company has distinct product lines, each of which will fill an entire website full of content.
3) Your website has become so large that organizing it into multiple smaller websites is ideal.
4) You have language specific (localized) websites for which you would prefer to have country specific domains.
5) Your secondary websites are landing pages for a specific promotion or event.
6) You are required to have a landing page due to advertising issues.

Here are some reasons to have just one website:

1) You will spend less money for development and advertising..
2) You can focus all of your traffic on one website and have the benefit of cross-promotion.
3) You can just as easily syndicate your content across multiple mediums using RSS, Twitter, and Facebook.
4) It is entirely possible to focus your organic search results to come up on a variety of keywords.
5) You can deeply develop your backlink relationships and page rank to give your website a boost. Keep in mind that sub-domains are DIFFERENT websites– including using or not using WWW.

Here are the wrong reasons and some possible reprocussions of having multiple websites for the wrong reasons or doing it the wrong way:

1) You think you can murder your competition by filling up the search engine result pages (SERPS) with your company. This might backfire with your customers and piss off your competition who might try to make things hard for you. e.g. expose you to others, write bad reviews about you etc..

2) Duplicate content on your webpages might land one or more of these websites in Google’s secondary index. This is the area that Google puts supplementary content that it does not deem important. It is not easily seen by customers. Worst case, Google might sandbox or ban your company for some time.

3) The Stupid Reason: You have brained a business scheme whereby you will mass produce websites using stealth means, sophisticated technology to overwhelm your industry with your message. You have thought of everything including mutiple IP addresses from multiple hosts, multiple corporations, mixing up merged text as to appear different, and using different designs… for COMPLETE WORLD DOMINATION. LOL. I hear this about once a month and I just laugh. First, it never works. Second, if you took all that energy and worked on one website it would be a great website. Third, you are way late in the game to do this as it is an old tactic. Lastly, and the most obvious, if it were that easy everyone would do it. e.g. your competition. Google was invented to weed out the crap.

So, the answer to the question of whether or not to have mutiple websites is this: If you are doing it for the right reasons and have the time, money and technical capability to produce and maintain quality websites with unique and interesting content then by all means do it. Otherwise, it is probably in your best interest work on developing your website with additional content, features and general usefullness.

Tags: SEO, website
Posted in Web Design & SEO | No Comments »

Why you should upgrade your computer.

March 10th, 2010

If you are one of the masses that still running Windows XP on an older machine you should really think about upgrading because it’s a huge source of computer stress and hidden expense. I know you probably feel comfortable wrapped in a warm XP blanket on your trusty old machine. So what if your computer takes a few minutes to load a web page. I am sure you also recall the horrors of digging up printer drivers- so you say why bother- you only use it to surf the web and check your emails. Right?

Let’s start with the obvious reason to upgrade… Windows XP is a little over 8 years old! It was first released in October 2001. The same is true of Apple’s OS X which was released in March 2001. In either case, they have seen their days and are likely end-of-life by their respective vendors. Trying to find support for these systems is becoming scarce. Do you even have a coffee maker that is 8 years old?

Another reason to upgrade is because these operating systems can’t take advantage of newer architecture CPUs that are now available. So if you even if you upgrade your computer itself it’s likely that it won’t perform as good as it could. These new style CPUs run MUCH faster than before. You’ll see a huge increase in performance by upgrading both the OS and the computer. Add to this that software is continuously evolving and requires ever more resources from your computer.

Upgrading may make your life a tad bit more pleasant. Computer stress does exist and some of the common causes according to Morton C. Orman, M.D. (http://stresscure.com/hrn/common.html) are from “trying to get by on the cheap” and “unrealistic expectations”. That pretty much says it all. If you are banging your head against the machine you are probably doing it to yourself. You can’t blame your poor old computer and it’s 8 year old OS.

You are not doing yourself or your company any favors by staying on an older machine or running XP. You are behind the times. Don’t think you are savvy by trying to cut some corners. In the long run it will hurt you. Did you think that computers were going to stay the same? Not upgrading isn’t even an option. You will need computers now and you will need them 100 years from now. It’s just a cost of doing business today. Advances in computers and software dictate that every few years you are going to need to do some upgrades. However, if you are 8 years behind this becomes a formidable task, and a larger learning curve. It is far better to continuously upgrade your systems. The expense is the same in the long run but the result is that you will be more productive and ease into incremental training. Ever teach an old dog new tricks? It’s a huge hassle.

You might be concerned about the learning curve and the expense of upgrading your computer but in the long run it’s really going to make everyday a little easier. Websites and programs will fly open and you’ll literally move quicker and easier on the computer. You might even notice that some web pages and programs look and feel differently. You will find new tools to help you complete your tasks. I can tell you from personal experience that upgrading my computer last year really made a difference in the way I worked.

Image Details: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eurleif/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Tags: Business
Posted in Business | No Comments »

5 Cool Things About Virtual Servers

February 17th, 2010

In an earlier blog post I discussed some key concepts regarding how virtual servers work. Now that they are currently available you are probably wondering what all the fuss is about. Obviously they are less expensive and achieve the same goals as a dedicated server, but what cool things does virtualization offer?

1) We can virtualize any hardware based server in minutes.

This is probably number one on my list. We can completely virtualize a hardware based server in minutes. This is not only better for the environment (e.g. less power generated = less CO2) but it means that you can replace your outdated server without having to tear-down and replace your website. Your entire configuration is left 100% intact! This is great for someone looking to upgrade or would like to test out some new software.

2) Virtual servers can be built quickly.

Unlike a dedicated server, virtual servers don’t take long to deploy. We can deploy your virtual server quickly and likewise remove it when you are done with it. Think about it like a consumable resource. As such, if you temporarily need two servers to load balance your website during peak traffic times you can do it without the expense of large setup fees and time.

3) Virtual servers can be duplicated /copied / backup exactly.

Did I mention that we can virtualize your hardware based server? Well we can also duplicate existing virtual servers in minutes too. So if you want to stash a point-in-time backup of your server in case of emergency you can. If you want to test a special version of your website without the risk to your production environment you can.

4) Virtual servers can be extended quickly.

Need more RAM, HDD or Processor speed during peek times? Not a problem we can extend a virtual server with a few clicks and a restart. Likewise, you can downgrade it just as fast. What does that mean? Well it’s like renting a Ferrari for the day. When your date is over you get back in your more economical Prius (= less hosting fees) and cruise along.

5) Virtual servers can be moved easily.

Let’s say the host machine your virtual server is on needs maintenance. We can simply import your virtual server on to another host machine while maintenance is being performed with little or no downtime. Try that with a dedicated server. Your only choice with a dedicated server is to try to reproduce your entire environment by moving your files and configuration to another machine – it’s just not going to happen (easily).

As you can see virtual servers are a beyond cool alternative for those looking to get into a dedicated serveror to upgrade their existing hardware-based server. They really offer so many benefits over traditional hardware-based servers.

Tags: Business, Joe Rebis, virtual servers
Posted in Web Hosting | No Comments »

Google Caffeine

December 18th, 2009

As many of you know Google Caffeine is already rolling its way across datacenters and will culminate to full deployment sometime after the holidays. Google Caffeine is a new indexing structure for Google and aims to improve the user’s searching experience by serving up new and more relevant search results. New “weight” will be placed upon certain key website elements to better rank websites and take emphasis off of other elements. Ideally, this will produce better, more accurate, search results. It’s speculated that improvements to Yahoo and especially Bing, which may be taking away some of the search traffic, is the reason behind the change.

For people who have been updating their websites regularly with fresh original content, and generally maintaining their website, there is little more that can be done aside from putting more emphasis on the key factors below. However, if you have been slacking a bit in publishing new content or using black-hat SEO techniques you may be due for a rude awaking. Content that’s not updated relatively frequently Google MAY consider abandoned or just plain outdated and rank you differently. No doubt Google would like to shack out websites using black-hat techniques.

An industry expert put it this way to me… If you have been practicing good clean SEO techniques and have been actively working on your website there is nothing to worry about. All of the same SEO techniques apply.

Here is a rundown of some of the expected changes. Some have been verified as accurate and some as speculation. A quick rundown on Natural Search Engine Listings can be found here.

1) Improved Indexing Speed and Depth: Based on an interview I watched featuring Matt Cutts, a widely known Google Engineer, he stated that Caffeine should help Google index more pages faster. This may mean a focus on real-time results. This may also mean that previously un-indexed data may be uncovered. It could mean they won’t bother with slow pages and skip over them to get to more content.

2) Continued Emphasis on FRESH & ORIGINAL Content: This is really nothing new but apparently more emphasis will be placed on content. You should strive to achieve a few paragraphs of original content on each page. The content should be relevant to the product or service and targeted to your visitors. You should continue to develop additional content including video, audio, blogs, forums, press releases and start considering content for mobile devices. Your content should be brought up-to-date regularly and this should be reflected in your XML sitemaps. People (and Google) want current information- not outdated information from a year ago.

3) Site Load Times: Apparently one of the more talked about changes by Google has been more emphasis on site load times. The Official Google Webmaster Blog talked about specifically about site load times and that faster sites provide a better experience for searchers. You may want to consider dropping links to 3rd party tools which may be slowing your site down from time to time. e.g. Advertising, hit counters and even hot linking to images or videos on YouTube on key pages. This is an often under estimated performance enhancing idea that can be employed easily. Other ideas to improve site load times are image resizing and compression, chunking out unneeded Flash elements, GZip compression, minifying CSS and cutting back on unneeded JavaScript to name a few.

4) META Title and Description: If you are not doing this already you have got some serious catching up to do. Web pages should have a unique descriptive META Tile tag (under 20 words) and a full sentence description in your META description tag. The title and description should pertain TO THAT PAGE and keeping within the overall theme of your website. Yes, you should have a META keywords tag too, while less or no emphasis has been placed upon that tag in recent years it’s still vital to have it. Your keywords should be relevant to that page, and should contain keyword phrases in order the most specific to the most general. However, don’t overdo it by repeating too many of the keywords.

5) Highly Targeted Links (Incoming, Outgoing, Internal): A login time factor in getting ranked in Google has been in obtaining incoming links from websites with relevant content to your own. It’s unlikely this will disappear with Google Caffeine but will likely close the gap between what is relevant and what is not. So obtaining HIGH QUALITY RELEVENT links to your site will help you earn better ranking, but irrelevant links may hurt substantially. We’ve also heard that outbound links to relevant sites may become more important as well. This isn’t to say that you should run out and add a bunch of links to other sites but it does tell you that Google will be placing more emphasis on where you are linking to and if it’s relevant.

An often forgotten aspect of linking is your internal linking structure. You should work towards consolidating “areas of information” within your site to their own specific directories. Then direct internal links within that “area of information” but not to other “areas of information”. Of course, you’ll need to link to your top level “home” pages, otherwise, you run the risk of orphaning some content. All in all, consider carefully your overall site structure and links.

6) Other Potential Factors: There has been a lot of speculation on the effects of Google Caffeine. Here is a list of some of them based upon comparing old result pages to the developer beta release of Caffeine.

a) Possibly more emphasis on exact match domains.
b) Possibly better understanding of related terms.
c) Possibly considering domain authority (age etc) more.

All in all Google hopes that this won’t shake things up too much and change the SERPS too much. I wouldn’t run around saying the sky is falling but I might consider cracking open the HTML editor and getting some work done on your website.

Google Caffeine Comparision Tool: http://www.comparecaffeine.com/
(May be out-of-date)

Tags: Google, SEO, website
Posted in Uncategorized, Web Design & SEO | No Comments »

Holiday Ecommerce Business Tips

December 2nd, 2009

While Black Friday and Cyber Monday has come and gone, the holiday season has just started. Here are some tips to make sure your ecommerce website makes the most of the holiday season.

Tip 1: Check for Errors

The last thing you want to do is discover in January that something was broken on your website and it prevented people from completing online orders! Don’t laugh, I’ve seen it before. It’s important to review your website for errors at all times, but especially during high traffic periods. You might be surprised at what you find. Make sure the customers can get through the ordering process and that emailed receipts are being delivered.

Thorough testing is important. One idea is to make a X / Y grid. Along the side, list all payment /checkout methods and along the bottom list all browsers. The idea is to test all payment / checkout methods against all browsers. You could create a similar grid for testing special price tiers, give-a-ways or other such promotions. During your testing try different things- don’t always click the same checkout button (assuming you have more than one) and don’t use the same product during all of your testing. Lastly, it would be wise to actually test using a live credit card to make sure payments are fully accepted by the payment gateway (be sure to void these transactions).

Tip 2: Check for Omissions

You may be surprised to find that your website doesn’t explain your shipping terms or return policy. These are key things when someone chooses to order during December. If they can’t get their product on time or are confused by your return policy they’ll simply move on to the next store. They won’t even bother asking you. So, make sure that you explain exactly the who, what, when, where and how. consider things like your international orders policy. I have seen websites just stop getting orders around the 10th of the month because they fear they won’t get the product in time. I have also seen effective websites make more money by taking orders all the way up to December 20th for delivery by Christmas. Be clear and concise. Customer confidence is key.

Tip 3: Check with your Vendors

It’s likely that your vendors will also be busy during the holiday season so it’s important that your website is well stocked and ready to go. If you dropship, will your vendor be able to get the orders out in time? Are all products and options represented actually available? The worst thing you could be dealing with is wasting your time refunding orders because you can’t fill them. Remove product options that you can’t get or traditionally have to backorder. Otherwise, you may blow a whole order because one piece has to be backordered. Make sure that inventory is continuously updated on your website and in clear view of your customers.

Tip 4: Throw Out a Little Holiday Cheer

Posting some holiday graphics and promotional offers on your website is a great way to show customers that you are on it. They’ll notice your site is current and relevant, and not just a stale website sitting in cyberspace. It will also get people in the buying mood. Show customers how your product will make a great gift. Let them know if you include gift wrapping or gift cards. Essentially, you need to create a buying atmosphere to get customers excited to purchase. Consider giving away a small free gift in exchange for someone placing and order in December.

Tip 5: Post-Christmas

Christmas day isn’t the last word in the holiday season. Many buyers will be looking for post-Christmas discounts. You also have New Year’s Day, Valentine’s Day and Easter just around the corner. I would recommend that you have a newsletter sign-up form and let customer’s know that you’ll be sending special promotional offers after Christmas. If you have invested in some advertising this is a great way to double or triple your returns. If pre-Christmas sales were not as good as expected you might find substantial redemption re-marketing to customers and visitors who never purchased before.

Tip 6: Watch for Fraud Orders

For many ecommerce website owners, the holiday season is their busiest and most profitable time. You don’t want to tarnish that having to deal with fraud orders. Sometimes it’s so hard to resist a big juicy sale paid and ready to go. I know, it’s happened to me before. There it is, you want the money, but something is nagging you about the order. It’s busy so you decide to ship it anyway- bad. I’ve seen this so many times before both in my experience as a web host but also as a credit card processing representative. Keep in mind that by accepting credit cards you are responsible (financially and possibly otherwise) for everything that happens on your merchant account. Too many chargebacks could not only ruin your company financially, but you might also loose your merchant account (and the ability to get one later for a different business) permanently.

Today there are many technology options to help prevent fraud orders, but the final word usually comes down to common sense. One of the best ways is to create what I call a “loss-limit” for domestic and international orders. Don’t be mistaken thinking that fraud only comes internationally. Some of my biggest losses have been from orders right here in San Diego (and no I never collected). A loss-limit is an INTERNAL policy that says you will NOT accept orders over a certain amount (the amount you are willing to loose) for orders domestically and internationally. YOU have to determine what those amounts will be. For instance, domestically you say to yourself I can afford to loose a $500.00 sale and internationally a $100.00 sale. Thus, you will not accept orders over those amounts no matter what. Some things to keep mind mind when setting a loss-limit: 1) Chargebacks can happen up to 6 months (1 year in some cases) later. 2) What would happen if you got 10 chargebacks? 100? Can you afford to dish out $5,000.00 6 months from now? and 3) You are on the hook for that money until the chargeback period is over.

Tip 7: Advertise!

Just because it’s holiday season doesn’t mean you should layoff the advertising. Now is the time you will get the best results from your advertising. Unless you are dug in well with organic search results customers won’t just come knocking at your door. Get your website out there and seen by visitors. Remember Tip 5 above- sometimes re-marketing to your customers is just as, or more profitable than, during the holiday season. Take it from many successful website owners it’s important to re-market to your customers and visitors. It’s also important to watch how much you are spending on advertising, especially for Pay-Per-Click programs that offer a low rate to get involved but end-up costing a lot. That said, don’t be shy to throw out some cash to try to help your business.

The holiday season is an excellent time for ecommerce websites and is likely a big part of your overall bottom line. Effectively applying these tips will help ensure a profitable holiday season. Feel free to contact me support@ephost.com (Att: Joe Rebis) or post a comment for more tips or clarification. Keep in mind that these tips apply equally well to the rest of the year too!

Tags: Business, website
Posted in Business, Web Design & SEO | No Comments »

New Website Launched

November 6th, 2009

Well finally. It seemed like it was never going to be finished. I guess it’s a reverse lesson in web development for me. It’s a lot harder to write content and come up with offers than it is to actually build the website. Unfortunately, there is still a lot of work to be done in all areas of the site. Most especially, continuing to develop content and spruce up offers. I guess it’s going to be a work in progress for some time. Thankfully, it’s much better than before.

We are thinking to add a “community” area for customers and include a customer marketplace, and forums. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Tags: ephost, SEO, website
Posted in Web Design & SEO, Web Hosting | No Comments »

Why choose ColdFusion?

June 8th, 2009

If you are a professional web developer or an amateur looking to spice up their website you should know there are more options than PHP or ASP.NET to script interactive web pages. Adobe ColdFusion has been around for more than 10 years and is ideally suited to all levels of skill. I am pretty passionate about this topic because of the way ColdFusion has changed my life. I went from playing around with HTML to professionally building complex web based applications in a short period of time. Some of the stuff anyone can do with ColdFusion is amazing and simply a standard feature of the software.

End-users are sometimes intimidated by the ominous sounding name, and naturally have some objections. To clear things up here some some facts:

It’s free for the end-user.
It’s supported by most major hosts.
There are many ColdFusion Web Developers.
The developers that use ColdFusion are passionate about it.

To clear up some things for developers:

It’s free for the web developer.
It’s VERY easy to learn and can applications can be developed fast.
It includes all of the tools you need now and the in the future. e.g. AJAX without having to learn Javascript!
It’s made by Adobe and has built-in hooks with many of their products.

To address the last item in more detail Adobe makes Flash, PDF, Dreamweaver, Illustrator and Photoshop. Almost every web developer has one, if not all, of these core web development tools. Why not use the scripting tool made by the same company?

What makes ColdFusion so special is that it’s tag based. While more advanced methods of scripting are available in ColdFusion, most developers (pro’s or not) use ColdFusion tags to accomplish most tasks. In a nutshell they have incorporated all of the behind-the-scenes scripting into an easy-to-use tag.

For example, if you want to send an email using ColdFusion you write:

< cfmail to="someone@someplace.com" from="me@somewhere.com" subject="My Email Subject" > Hello this is an email sent from ColdFusion! < /cfmail >

Wow! That’s easy compared to PHP or ASP.NET. Generally it’s substantially less text to write- but in most cases it’s just plain intuitive compared to other scripting languages. Note: spaces have been added after the greater-than and less-than signs so it will display in this blog post.

For those of you who are current ASP.NET or PHP developers you’ll find this is the case with almost all tasks. If you are thinking that equals less abilities or less sophistication you’ll be surprised to learn about the plethora of available tag parameters, integration of OOP techniques, and web service components that are also available.

For amateur web developers this is an excellent way to jump right in and get the job-at-hand completed without learning complicated scripting techniques.

To learn more about ColdFusion visit Adobe’s website:

http://www.adobe.com/coldfusion

* Remember that that you don’t have to buy, or even download ColdFusion to try it, it’s already enabled in your EPhost web hosting account and ready to try today.

Tags: ColdFusion, website
Posted in ColdFusion, Web Design & SEO, Web Hosting | No Comments »

Natural Search Engine Listings

May 30th, 2009

I hope to be able to have time to ellaborate on this topic in the near future, but for now I have composed a few bulleted points to keep in mind when trying to get natural search engine listings. Afterall, this is the best kind of advertising for your business- FREE. They are in no particular order and all equally important.

Have about 300 on-screen words on your website’s main page (index page). Images and Flash cannot be read by the search engines- for the most part. We have noticed that some Flash is starting to get indexed when it contains text and embedded correctly. The text should contain your top 7-10 keywords.
When selecting keywords do some research as if you were one of your own customers looking for your product. Don’t try to target keywords that are too broad, nor so specific that they have no traffic.
Don’t try to conquer the world before your own neighboorhood. Work your way out. Start local, then regionally, then nationallyand finally internationally. You will be surprised just how well you will do locally.
Make sure your website includes an HTML “sitemap” and that there is a link to it on your index page.
Make sure you have a Google formatted (XML) site map and make sure that you have registered your site with them using their webmaster tools.
Make sure your website code has all of the proper HTML elements. e.g. META tags and properly formated.
Bury javascript inside Javascript (.JS) pages. Search engines read ALL of the text on your website. Having unneeded words (even in the code) will convolute the importance of your primary keywords.
Don’t waste time with tricks. Just write complelling interesting content forcused on “here’s how” not “buy now”. If people like what you have to say, they will linnk to your website or quote you.
Stay active on the internet and participate in industry discussion forums, community portals and other sites where you can obtain a link pointing back to your website.
Start your own blog and or forum like this one. Hopefully, someone will begin to link to your own content. Ideally, so will search engines.

By following this basic advice you will see an in crease in traffic to your website and increased visibility in the search engines.

Tags: Add new tag, SEO, website
Posted in Web Design & SEO | No Comments »

Virtual Server Performance Update

May 30th, 2009

It’s been about a month and our new virtual servers are running great. In fact, we anticipate that we can probably double the amount of virtual servers on the host system. We are very encouraged. We are begining to start performance tuning as some of the machines have slight lags while working in terminal services. However, it doesn’t seem to affect overall web server performance. Our monitoring logs show a substantial reduction in HTTP latency as compared to their physical counterparts. Our performancing tuning plans include enabling SpanningTree fast on the switch ports (helps increase recovery time if a port fails), upgrading the virtual NIC to the newer vmxnet virtual NIC, and by reviewing the HOST NIC’s and HDD to enable/disable recommened settings. Overall, we are pleased with the rsults so far and are beining to plan additional virtualization deployments.

Tags: virtual servers
Posted in Web Hosting | No Comments »

First Production Virtual Server Added

April 30th, 2009

I am very happy to report that we’ve recently launched our first production virtual server. The server was converted from a standalone dedicated server using VMware vCenter Converter, which is software that takes an exact image of a server and creates a virtual copy on the host server.

Virtual Server technology has been around for some time. We had previously setup a virtual server a couple of years ago, but decided to scrap the project because the ratio between the number of virtual servers and the cost of the host system was off. It was actually cheaper to use hardware based servers. Now, the ratio is there because of mutli-core CPU’s and enhanced virtual technologies.

This is a big step in the right direction. It will pave the way for us to consolidate our servers and reduce our power and rack space consumption. This is key if we are to remain competitive. In some ways we were disadvantaged because we have been in business so long. Newer startups, using virtual technology, have options that we never had. Virtually speaking, it might be possible to reproduce our core web hosting services on a handful of servers instead of 10x that many.

We hope to be able to offer customer-facing solutions using virtual technology within the next 3 months.