A couple of months ago I began evaluating web meeting services.  I had used one before, I can’t remember which one it was, but it worked well. The only issue was you couldn’t host  meetings on a Mac.  A few of the competing services allowed you to do this so I set out to find one.  I signed up for some trials and they all seemed to work ok.  It kind of came down to Citrix GoToMeeting and the WebEx meeting center.  They both seemed to do what I needed.  Low and behold I receive this e-mail from Jeffrey Mulholland:

Tomorrow is the quarter end for WebEx. If you are interested in our core service of Meeting Center, I can offer you your first month of service for free if you sign up by tomorrow.

Great!  They’re being pro-active, they want my business both good signs for a ongoing service relationship.  I had him sign me up.  During that first month I was in the process of moving and didn’t get chance to use it too much.  During the second month I setup a handful of webex conferences.  Each time, something else went wrong.

Bad Service

One time, my screen wouldn’t refresh for anyone viewing it unless I accessed a drop down menu.  So every time I navigated to a new page I had to go up to the drop down and ask everyone on the call if they could now see the updated screen.  Made for a very painful demo.

The next time the teleconferencing was horrible.  There were massive delays, one person would finish and different people would hear that person at different times.  Everybody was unsure of when to speak and people kept getting cut off.

Variations of these problems continued.  Ok, not so great a service.  It’s not good, but not the end of the world.  I’ll keep using it as I shop around for an alternative.

Bad Usability

Throughout the service it had been difficult to navigate.  The meeting organization system seemed very clunky.  When the usability (or lack there of) really shined though was when we got a paper invoice.  That’s right, for a web service that we signed up for online they sent us a paper invoice.  How annoying.  And for $69.  Ok, let’s go setup paperless billing and pay this w/ a credit card.   After what can only be described as a process I get to the point where you have to register to be able to see / pay your invoice online.  Yes, that’s right, I already have a login, am the only user aka the admin and have a complete control panel (confusing as it may be), but now I have to register.  Ok, fine.

Yup.  The error message says it all.  After going through several web interfaces to try to get to support, I finally dig up a sign up e-mail giving me my user name that has a direct support e-mail address in it and send them an e-mail letting them know of my problem.   As of starting this post, I had received no response.  In the middle of writing it I got a response telling me that they had now associated my e-mail address w/ their billing system.  This was 5 days later.

Bad Support

In the mean time, given the bad service and terrible usability of the service, I decided it was best if I just flat out cancel it.  Well, this is when I really got irritated.  One of the worst things a web service can do, in my opinion, is make it difficult or impossible to cancel.  There is no information online that I could find on how to go about this.  There was a lot that talked about MeetMeNow (their other product), but nothing for meeting center.  Finally, I decided to just fill out the support form.  In the middle of it, when I selected it was an “emergency,” it popped up w/ a phone number.  I decided to just expedite this process and pick up the phone.

I was directed to a call center in India.  The representative told me I had called support and I needed to talk to another department.  Thankfully he transferred me.  When the other representative was on the phone the accent was so thick I could barely understand what he was saying.   Not that it matters a lot, but in my current mood it really made the process even more unpleasant.

After telling him I wanted to cancel and after being asked telling him all the problems I’ve had with the service, he agreed to go ahead and cancel it.  He then came back and said, ok, you need to give 30 days and then it extends to the end of the next billing cycle, so the soonest I can cancel the service is on July 27.  Are you kidding?  I responded.

No, sadly he was not kidding.  So, they’re milking me for another $140 for a service that never even worked for me in the first place.

I write all this for one simple reason.  If you are weighing your options and considering one of these services, heed my experience and do not use webex meeting center.  I have subsequently had serveral good experiences w/ citrix go to meeting and would recommend them any day over the webex product.

Recently I’ve become more interested in the “Rackspace Cloud” as a viable solution for our clients needs.  Traditionally we have maintained dedicated servers w/ traditional Rackspace and hosted our clients sites / applications on there.   I have had no problems, so I have been hesitant to even take a look at other solutions.  Recently, however, as we’ve begun doing more Django applications in addition to our traditional work load of ASP.NET & PHP sites, I was turned onto Sicehost.  They were a perfect fit.  Then, low and behold, Rackspace bought Slicehost!   This seems to have evolved into what is now the Rackspace cloud.   So, naturally, my curiosity was peaked.  This was further spurred along by a recent friendfeed conversation.

I began to ask myself, could we realistically move away from traditional dedicated servers to virtualized servers and exist entirely in what is known as “the cloud”, while maintaining the same level of dependability that our clients have come to rely upon?  If we could then certainly the sheer scalability potential and flexibility would be worth it.   So, I began to take a closer look.

First, it is helpful to point out the three services that comprise the Rackspace Cloud aka Mosso:

Cloud Servers

This essentially seems to be the Mosso branding of what Slicehost offers.   The main difference being the Mosso service is a more pure pay per use model.  In other words you pay for the instances hourly.  You pay for your bandwidth separately.  Whereas with Slicehost it is a bundled offering w/ monthly charges for the servers and a set bandwidth that comes w/ the monthly fee.  Only Linux flavors offered.

Cloud Sites

This service is sort of like merging a type of traditional hosting company w/ cloud computing.  It promises a hybrid structure being able to deliver ASP.NET side by side w/ PHP (as an example).  Given that the Cloud Servers only offers Linux flavors, this would have to be capable of hosting our ASP.NET sites.

Update: I was recently asked if you could use Cloud Sites with Django.  From what I’ve read, you cannot because you don’t have access to mod_python – the python support is just CGI scripts.  For more information check out this post:

The perl and python support is just generic CGI script support. So there’s no support for mod_python, and therefore you can’t run Django.

Cloud Files

This is essentially the LimeLight CDN offered in an on-demand fashion coupled w/ the Cloud Sites / Servers offering.  In other words, if you have media files that you want to push to edge servers for quicker loading by the end user, this can simply be “enabled” to provide that on a simple per-use charge.

So, given the above services, several questions popped up.  Today I was able to chat w/ one of the support representatives and here are the answers:

Is there external access directly to the SQL Server 2008 database?

Yes.  Given the IP address of the SQL server you can access the database directly via SQL Management Studio.  Or, in our case, we have a scheduled process that runs against a SQL Server database.  This could run on a dedicated server still and use the SQL Server 2008 instance while the web app runs on the Cloud Sites.

What type, if any, firewall is available ?

With Cloud Sites access is limited to HTTP and FTP(S).  With the Cloud Servers only software firewalls (IPCHAINS).  No hardware firewalls are offered.

When signing up for the backup service, is the database also backed up?

I forgot to ask how this is handled w/ the SQL Server 2008 – I’m sure there are backups, but can a single DB be restored if say there is data corruption for some reason?  Unsure, I will ask and update this post.

With MySQL on the Cloud Servers, only file system backups take place.  So, if you want to backup MYSQL in any other way that simply having the DB files backed up you’d have to put in a cron job to do MYSQL dumps so those individual DB files could be backed up from the file system. With Rackspace traditional dedicated servers there is a MySQL agent that essentially does this for you.

With the “hybrid” system can I use a .htaccess w/ mod_rewrite commands w/ an ASP.NET web app?

Here I didn’t quite understand how this “hybrid” system worked.  After discussing w/ the support representative what happens is you still chose either Linux / Apache or Windows / IIS to host your web files.  The difference is that Windows / IIS also has PHP / Python enabled so you can also use those tools in addition to ASP.NET.  The Linux flavor doesn’t support ASP.NET.  As such if you want to run ASP.NET and PHP side by side, you have to pick the Windows / IIS flavor for that domain and then you can use PHP as well.  But, you wouldn’t have access to .htaccess for things like mod_rewrite which are available in the Linux / Apache world.

This ended up being a deal breaker for me as we use the Helicon Tech ISAPI Rewrite module to give our Windows / IIS based sites mod_rewrite capabilities.  We use this quite extensively and simply must have the ability to put mod_rewrite rules in the .htaccess files for our ASP.NET sites too.  If this was available, I think we could make it work and switch completely to the cloud.  Until it is, we will need to maintain our dedicated server for our ASP.NET sites.

Incidentally, if you are wondering why Amazon EC2 was not mentioned here, it is primarily because the Amazon service is ephermal which means that the instances can pop up and down.  This always seemed to be a challenge when assessing it against our client needs.  There is a good comparison between Amazon EC2 and Mosso Cloud Servers on the Mosso site.

Conclusion, we are going to start using the cloud for our Linux needs, but we will keep w/ dedicated servers for our Windows ASP.NET needs, for now.

My company, tipit, focuses on web production work which means we architect, design and build websites and web applications.  Recently we have had some extremely satisfied clients offering wordpress as a turnkey content management solution.  Recent versions are truly powerful and a few custom plugins can mold it into a system to manage whatever type of content you might need to manage for your website.   In fact, this is a great, great tool for small businesses.

In the coming months, we plan to start offering this as our primary solution to help small businesses utilize the power of the Internet to market their companies.  It’s great because there are already plugins available for a variety of social networking / real-time web systems allowing the business to harness its customers as a community.  Scoble hits on this in a recent post. Most businesses – especially small ones – look like their website was built in the mid 90’s.  It’s time for an update and using open source software like wordpress, especially if you base a design on an available theme, the business can get one powerful website w/ the ability to use a multi-tude of web marketing tools for a very reasonable price.

To further emphasize this, noupe has a post about 25 unique uses of wordpress as a CMS.  The flexibility is astounding.  We look forward to being able to energize main street w/ our efforts!

Alex Wilhelm has a great post encouraging the government to invest in startups instead of funding insolvent mega corporations.  Small business aka main street is the backbone of America and it can be the phonix that rises from the ashes and spurs the recovery.