It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way......

Apologies to Charles Dickens for appropriating his classic opening paragraph but the words could also be the operations guide for DigitalBeat.Com's former web hosting company. The web host was acquired by a larger company about a year ago and seems to be on a mission to trim its customer base.
Their lack of planning lost them many customers last summer when what was supposed to be a three hour data center consolidation turned into as much as a week outage for many of its acquired customers. Then last December they decided that the DigitalBeat physical servers were too old to support their current offerings and the site would be moved to a newer server, again minimal downtime and transparent to DigitalBeat. They made the move on a Friday afternoon. The site was down until the following Monday. Calls to their technical support revealed that they basically had no staff that could actually do anything available on the weekends - by Saturday afternoon we had determined that their DNS configurations for the server and database were pointing to incorrect IP addresses so we basically had no service for 3 days until a real tech support person showed up in their office the following Monday to make the maybe 10 second change.

Now, the last week of May, we were again down for most of the week - numerous calls over the first 12-15 hours got nowhere - they did not answer their phones and then when customer service finally came around there was no information (other than we're working on the problem) for two more days.

Thankfully we had pulled DNS management into our control after the December outage and by the time our former host had come back up we had rebuilt the DigitalBeat site on new servers with our new hosting company Dotable (much thanks to Aussie Bob and the Dotable team who actually understand what it means to be a service business and have been invaluable in getting the site up and running). We switched DNS to the Dotable serverts over a week ago and finally dropped our old host yesterday (they weren't getting any traffic anyway since the Digitalbeat.com name was no longer going to their servers).

To those readers that may be thinking that you get what you pay for well the old host was about 3 to 4 times MORE expensive than Dotable, our new host, and provided far fewer features and lets just say that Dotable has real tech support while the old host never really figured out the answering a phone and writing a trouble ticket was not the same thing and did not replace competent skills, planning, and effective administration.

This is more of a quick note than a regular blog entry but I couldn't resist posting this since DigitalBeat is in the business of enabling WiFi solutions but it's worth a post just to note that the tide has probably turned on WiFi connectivity and cellphones.

The current (Feb 14th, 2008) NY Times Circuits article Trying to capture that iPhone flair talks about this weeks Mobile World Congress, which is a major cellphone industry trade show and gathering. The focus in past years was on phones that flip, twist, shoot photos and walk the dog (well maybe not the last one).

This year the cellphone manufacturers, to no ones great surprise, are going after the iPhone. This means slim, sexy, touch screens AND built in WiFi. You can read the article if you want to see where the industry is heading (at least for the rest of 2008), but the WiFi angle is clearly heating up.

If there was any doubt before about the value and growing number of WiFi capable devices out there then the NY Times article should dispel any remaining doubts.

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Hello and welcome to the DigitalBeat Openhouse blo. For the most part these blogs will cover small business issues and making productive use of technology. Our client base is real estate professionals and the small retail business. To the extent that a real estate professional is often a small business operation as well, there is some synergy between the two definitions and I hope the blog will be both topical and informative. A good way to start off the Openhouse blog, is with a quick introduction to how wireless internet access works since DigitalBeat's flagship "LocalHost" product is wireless based on this technology, this blog entry may satisfy some questions on "how does the technology work"?

The wired path to Wireless
Generally, in order to connect to the internet you need a wired
connection. The wired connection up until 10 years or so ago, required a phone line, either switched (which means your regular home phone line) or dedicated. Dedicated connections like Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) can work on top of your plain old telephone service (POTS) or have a literally dedicated phone line connection to a location at your local phone company office. Today, while DSL still exists, many consumers and small businesses get their Internet Service through their cable wire. Up until a few years ago you either connected your computer directly to your ISP's equiipment (router/modem) or if you were a business (or technically adept homeowner) you would connect your computer to a wired Local area Network jack (lthey look like a slightly larger than normal telephone jack). If there was no computer jack nearby (or your spouse did not want to see cables running over the floor/ceiling) then you lived without a network connection at that location. Then came wireless

 

<b>Wireless networks</b>
A wireless connection, also called a wifi connection, is based on radio waves. The same radio technology that powers am/fm/cb radios, phones (cellular and cordless) and televisions. A radio transmitter and receiver is either built into your wireless device, or is built into an aapter card. The computer's wifi connection translates the computer data into a radio signal and the computer <b> transmitter </b> sends the signal to a receiving station (the wireless router). The wireless router<strong> receives he signal and transforms it from an analog radio signal back into a digital (computer) signal where it is sent over a physical wired connection to other computers (local or over the internet). The response from the other computers comes back with the wireless router receiving the information, transforming it from a digital computer signal into a radio signal and<strong> transmitting</strong> it to the computer's wireless adapter receiver. The receiver converts the analog radio signal to digital so that the computer can process the information.