Wes Linda

Well, it’s always fun when we incorporate major transitions / changes in our lives.  More amazing is how they can disrupt anything that you have planned or wish to achieve.  The incident that helped completely remove any focus I had on losing weight and staying fit was our decision as a company to move our clients to a new hosting company.  If you ever own a business, and think about doing this, I highly recommend NOT DOING THIS!

A little background on how we arrived at the need to switch hosts.  Roughly 6 years ago we as a design firm made the decision to have a managed hosting environment where we could fully control the offerings that we were providing our clients.  We were looking for an easy to use and manage solution that would work well for us and our clients.  Based in Baltimore, we were also looking for a company close to us that we could have a solid relationship with.  During that search, we found Alabanza with a reseller only focus and a great technology platform made the decision an easy one.

As time progressed, Alabanza grew in size and became a target for purchase in 2007.  Unfortunately, they found a partnet in Navisite.  After months of planning, Navisite makes the decision to move the Alabanza Datacenter to Andover, MA.  In November 2007, this transition was attempted.  We’ll keep this short, but a migration could not be screwed up any more than this transition was.  Hundreds of thousands of domains were down for days, many up to a week.  This was the first clue that we had been moved to a poor solution, and as time moved forward that fact became more and more obvious.  Missed deadlines, unkept promises, outsourcing of support to India and unprofessional sales reps added to the frustration.

We tried to get out shortly after that move, but unforutnately we were under an annual contract and didn’t provide enough notice to get out a year ago.  More unkept promises, lack of communication, and lack of current technology forced us to move hosts starting a little over a week ago.  We chatted with other companies that had left Navisite and decided on LiquidWeb as the provider of choice.  A solid solution, a fair price and Heroic Support.  The move was a real challenge, but the support team at LW was there the whole time and really helped us make the move.  Our hats off to them.

Soooooo…with all the fun and stress that has been the last two weeks, I’ve had no focus on weight loss and hope that I haven’t killed my progress too much.  We’ll find out in the morning and start fresh then.  It’s been a blast!

So, I’ll keep this one short and sweet.  Why?  Because I don’t have anything good to say!  I’m weighing in at roughly the same weight as last week, mostly because I’m not eating great, and not working out enough.  Shocker…I know!  My dedications that I added last week are yet to be followed.  It’s like I need something to beat myself up about.

Anywhoooo…since I don’t have anything good to say, I’ll say nothing at all.

This weeks’ weight was the same as last weeks, 231.5lbs.  Better luck next week right?

So, a little over a month ago, we announced a contest offering a new web site to a company in need.  Suprisingly, we didn’t find many takers, but that’s okay.  The economy is booming so we’ll assume everyone is doing great.

All joking aside, we did receive an inquiry to our contest that really stood out to me.  It is an unfortunate example of a web designer gone bad, and not providing any real quality to a user.  So lets take a look at our winner, and their business model!  This will be a brief introduction…we’ll work up a full analysis with our winner when we begin the project.

Our winner is Beth Shields and her business is WoeRings.com!  WoeRings is a business focused on helping women encourage each other during difficult times.  We’re going to give her web site a complete overhaul and help her understand how to build her online business to be a success.  Stay tuned!