Recently I asked one of our employees to sign-up for several of our competitors product offerings. Before you jump to any conclusions, it was simply to test responsiveness of our competitors — not to get accounts and find out what features they offered :)

The first 24 hours:

3 Auto-responders from billing systems
2 Companies provided no feedback
1 account was provisioned

The second 24 hours:

We emailed the 4 providers we had not received logon information from.
1 Responded and provisioned our order
1 said our order was deleted due to fraud
2 have still yet to reply

The third 24 hours:

We again emailed all the providers with outstanding issues.
We received account details for our 3rd account.

After 3 days I gave up on the remaining providers. It was quite an eye opening experience to see how difficult it could be to obtain VPS hosting. We at Spry/VPSLink pride ourselves on nearly instant provisioning. Here’s a new video Pierre put together to show how easy it is to start hosting at VPSLink:

It is well worth investigating Google’s webmaster tools pages for a great resource in helping to optimise your sites – or SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) as it is known.

One of the features available is a robots.txt analysis tool.

Robots.txt?

Without turning this into a tutorial, robots.txt is a very important file. It can be configured to allow or disallow certain directories to be searched by various search engine spiders. It is not Google specific and is honoured by all the major search engine spiders. Very useful if you have, for example, an images directory that you do not want crawled and indexed by the search engines.

Putting the term ‘robots.txt’ (without the quotes) into your favourite search engine will produce some very helpful sites and some detailed explanations of what can and can’t be put into a robots.txt file.

So back to Googles robots.txt analysis tool. It used to be very basic and, if it encountered an error, only showed the first one in that line. It would not let you know of other errors in the line until the first one had been fixed.

Now those limitation have been lifted. A ‘new and improved’ robots.txt analysis tool is available.

Firstly, it now shows all the errors in a particular line of the file. This not only lets me know how bad I am at writing a robots.txt file, but it allows for quicker corrections to be made.

You can also test your sitemap.xml URL and enter relative URLs for quick and easy testing.

Do note that the changes you make in the robots.txt analysis tool are not actually made on your site’s robots.txt file. You will need to copy the changes to that file by hand.

However, it does make for very quick and easy testing of your proposed robots.txt file and with the addition of thorough error reporting, relative URLs and sitemap checking, this analysis tool could be very useful for the busy webmaster.

For further details (including other features) please visit the official Google Webmasters Blog entry.

Overall I think it was a well put together event, that presented a lot of opportunity to meet with other like minded professionals. I do feel that alot of companies were saying the same thing, or developing the same service/product that their competitors were. There was of course an exiguous amount of companies leading the way in innovation, however overall I believe that many companies in this industry are simply treading water. Either waiting to be bought out or grinding out revenue with their current customers for as long as they can. I do have to keep in mind though that many people in the industry like to keep what they are working on very close to the vest, for fear that the idea will spread like wildfire throughout the industry if it is talked about to much. The gossip that spread through the convention would rival that of my old high school!

All in all, HostingCon turned out to be just what I wanted it to be. A nice break from routine, a great networking opportunity, and some insightful lectures here and there from some industry leaders. I hear that they are going to have it in Chicago again next year. I wish nothing but the best for next year!

With all the iPhone hype today, this headline caught my eye this morning. “Last year, we spent more on Poland Spring, Fiji Water, Evian, Aquafina, and Dasani than we spent on iPods or movie tickets–$15 billion. It will be $16 billion this year.”

There are lot of really odd things going on in the world when you sit back and think about it. United States obsession with bottled water is definitely one of them. We’re willing to pay nearly 5 times as much for a bottle of water than we will for the equivalent amount of gasoline in many cases. Hasn’t everyone complaining about prices at the pump right recently? “If the water we use at home cost what even cheap bottled water costs, our monthly water bills would run $9,000.” More than a billion people on this planet do not have access to clean and safe drinking water, yet the US is the number one consumer in the world of bottled water.

For what it’s worth we do not have bottled water at Spry. We use a standard water cooler with re-usable bottles that are refilled on a weekly basis. I for one will think twice the next time I’m on the road and feeling thirsty though.

I stumbled across the Tux500 project this morning. “Our goal is simple: we want to collect community donations to enter a Linux sponsored car in the 2007 Indianapolis 500. We need your help! If less than 1% of the Linux community donates $1, this will happen… will you do your part?” As of writing this they’re still a long ways off — about $335,000 away. Spry will be making a donation to help.

The car qualified yesterday at 220.299 and will start from the inside of the 11th row next Sunday. I think this is an extermely neat idea, and find it a little sad that they weren’t able to raise more money. Being a gearhead I’ll be tuned into the race next weekend and hope that Tux makes it on the car!