I opened the doors to the world with a Facebook announcement on Friday, February 12, 2010. The next morning at around 10:00 am I had my first customer.
It is now March 11, 2010, a full month later and I have five more accounts and some good leads. I’m not including family, friends, personal sites, or existing clients – just new clients. My first month has me averaging one account a week. I’m super stoked!
I was thinking maybe an account a month – not five a month. I’m a little bit surprised but I shouldn’t be. I developed a plan and now I’m working the plan and it’s paying off. I know an account a week doesn’t seem like a lot, but it is a great start for my first month.
I know that business will continue to grow as long as I offer a competitive product and offer great service. Word of mouth is a wonderful thing! Offering great service is the key! It is the one thing that will set me apart from my competition.
Even though it’s been a better month then I could have imagined there have been a couple of hiccups along the way.
I had to do a restart of Apache last Tuesday because it was serving pages slower then snot! Thirty seconds to render a static page with a single header tag and text! Totally not acceptable! The server load was hovering around the 6 percent mark. Memory use was minimal. There were no network problems. All I could figure was there was something wrong with Apache. A /sbin/service httpd restart fixed it. Total slowness time: 1 hour.
The most notable issue was a sudden change made at Verisign on March 5th concerning DNSSEC that affected how major Internet providers resolve domain names. Because of how my DNS zones were set up, connectivity was interrupted. I did not have A records set up for ns1.executivewebhosting.com and ns2.executivewebhosting.com and needed to add these. Once I corrected the DNS zone, all domains started working again when DNS propagated a few hours later.
Why was the change made? Even though I was within DNS guidelines and things just “worked”, VeriSign separated the authority for .net and .com, which broke any sites that were dependent on loops between them. If a domain name’s zone file has an NS record without a corresponding A record, a third party can create their own A record for your NS record. That means they can redirect traffic to a location of their choosing, a major security loophole. It goes to show why I should make sure the contact details (both whois and SOA) are correct and working.
I learned DNS is one of my weaknesses that I need to fix if I want to offer the best support around! I had no clue I was doing anything wrong until my DNS broke. I had been stumbling through DNS without really understanding what I was doing and why. I am now reading the documentation on Bind to try and learn more so things like this do not happen ever again.
The nicest thing I discovered is that my clients are the best I could have ever hoped for. Every one of them has been patient with me as I’ve had to fix things and have shown me great support. My clients have expressed verbally (and with their money) that they want me to succeed so I’m still around in the future to take care of their web sites!
Now, I ask you, how great is that? A big “Thank you!” to all of my clients! I’m truly blessed.
