Alex Le’s Blog

Check this out and see if you are American or not.

I woke up this morning, found out that my lastproxy site was down, and so are all of my other websites hosted on the same accounts. I was so upset and got on the phone right away to call 1and1.

The lady from 1and1 responded politely about the status of my account, saying that the “admin” had decided to move my account to a different server. I was so mad and angry at the moment, but I tried to keep my temper down. I demanded for an explanation from the 1and1 side - as I haven’t received any advanced notice or emails from them about the usage of my site. The lady put me on hold for about 40 minutes (!) and got back after talking to her supervisor and the “admin” guy, saying that they have had put my account back on, but the “admin” would send me an email afterwards explaining the situation. Fine. An hour after that, I received a somewhat threatening email from them:

Dear Nhat Le, (Customer ID: 91XXXXXX)

Recently we have noticed that your web site(s) is consuming a
disproportionate amount of server resources. Because of this, we have
had to move your account off of the shared hosting server to an
auxilliary server. We now request that you consider purchasing a Managed
or other Dedicated Server in order to continue hosting with 1&1
Internet.

The decision to move your account was made by the system administrators
in order to improve the quality of service for the rest of our clients
on the shared server from which you were previously hosted.[Why I wasnt’ notified in advanced? You managed to always charge me my money way before I even know about it, so why can’t you let me know in advanced?] The
resources consumed by your account threatened the ability of that server
to capably operate as as a shared host, so it was required that your
account be moved in order to mitigate server load. [By “mitigating”, you mean hacking into my files and disabled it? I will consider to take more actions on this too.]Though we could move
your site back to the original shared hosting server, it is not
recommended. Your account activity has demonstrated that your site
deserves its own server to better suit its performance needs. [Yeah, I’m moving off right now to my own VPS. Thank you!]

Please visit 1and1.com to review the server products we offer. You will
have one (1) month to make a decision and migrate your account over to a
1&1 server or another host provider. [I’m taking action now! And read my lips, I’m not buying anything from 1and1 ever again] You can choose to return your
account back to the shared server, provided that you take steps to
reduce the load generated by your websites. If the account has to be
moved off the shared server system again you will only have the option
of purchasing a dedicated server account to continue hosting with 1&1
Internet.

Please reply to this email promptly. Further questions/comments should
be directed to admin@1and1.com.

Thank you for your compliance in this matter.

–
Sincerely,
John A. Fernandez
Customer Compliance Operative
1&1 Internet Inc.
Internet.

So they decided to automatically move my site off to a difference server even before notifying me. That’s a pretty stupid and bold move that 1and1 mase. Frankly, I’ve been happy with hosting with them (I’m a 3+ years customer, have recommended 1and1 to friends too). After yesterday when my files got hacked into and today with the closing down of my site, 1and1 just suddenly become a crook now.

I did call them up a week ago asking them SPECIFICALLY about the CPU USAGE POLICY, they told me that anything happened, they would let me know ASAP. I still had the email confirmed my talk with the guy from the support staff. So much for such a promise. You just broke it, 1and1. I really want to file a BBB compliant on 1and1’s reckless business practice. After all this mess has settled down, that’s the action I would take to show 1and1 how to treat customers.

Their advertising scheme is too good to be true: my current business plan got 1Tb transfer - that’s a boat load of bandwidth that a huge, huge (mega) site would take a month. And if your site is that popular, you should be on your own dedicated server already. 1and1 is basically offering the same service for 1/10 of the price of a good dedicated system. The deal is just too good to be true. So the catch is when your site got a little popular, they will FORCE you to upgrade by threatening to close down your site. This is really their business practice. They spend money on flashy, multi-page ads on magazines and at the same time, squeeze hard-earned money on the little webmaster guy who got hooked. 1and1 means they one big bad crook company against one of you.

The only thing that would cause me big trouble is transferring all of my domains to Godaddy. That will be a big pain in the neck as I have about 15 domains hosted on my 1and1 account. What a mess they are causing me. I just wasted my day for all of this non-sense.

My take on this: watch out for 1and1. And don’t sign up with them if you want to do serious hosting. Get a VPS or dedicated instead!

I have long realized that I really enjoy reading magazines offline. The computer screen just doesn’t make the cut for me. I love laying on my bed, flipping through page after page looking for new ideas and innovations.

Early on last July, when I was at the Airport going back from California, I picked up the June of the Business 2.0 magazine and skimped through it. I eventually bought it to read on the plane. Well, it was a good $6 or $7 that I spent on the issue as I read and enjoyed every bit of it. So I went ahead and order a subscription for 2 years for a measly $10. I thought that is dirt cheap. 2 years for 24 issues which means it’s 41.7 cents an issue. I know that postage costs quite a bit these days - 39 cents already for a normal envelope! So basically they just give away the magazine because the advertisement subsidizing for the cost of printing and other expenses. Anyway, this is extremely cheap. But I found something even better.

I was just bored today so I hop on Ebay looking for magazine subscriptions. I found a 1 year PC World magazine subscription for $8.99 with no shipping. The price off the official PC World site is about $20 bucks, more or less. You can get a little cheaper than this if you have the special promotion. But for a new subscription, I remember I paid about $12 or $15 the last time I ordered it. Guess what, I bought the subscription. And there are tons of other computer-related mags subs on Ebay too. And I thought it’s cheap. I was blown away again.

I found (and bought) a 3 years subscriptions for Entreprenuer magazine for … take a guess … $6.98 ($1.99 + 4.99 for shipping). It’s 19.3 cents per issue! That is even less than the postage! How can this be possible? Well, I don’t know but one thing for sure, I’ll enjoy my subscriptions for years to come.

Ah, and I am currently bidding on a 1 year subscription of National Geographic for $1.50 but it seems that I’ve been out-bid while typing this post. No worries, I’ve just put in a snipe for it. Let’s do the Ebay’s way of magazines subscriptions!

Check out this artilce at instructables.com about making a solar fan.
Incidentally, I just bought 2 solar fans for 2 of my friends for $14.99 a pop plus a hefty $7 something for shipping. The package is still in the mail but this raise the interest of the relevance of the instructables’ usefullness and its articles and community’s growth.

I have known about instructables a while ago as it’s another web2.0 company, and you have to read about some web2.0 companies at some points in time (I regularly follow UnderTheRadar.com and SiliconeBeat.com blogs.) The idea of instructables.com is such a good one that everyone knows that someone’s gonna do it. There are lots of people out that with interesting ideas and pet projects that they are willing to share, and there are even more people who’ll be curious to keep on reading what’s on.

Even though Wikipedia provides a way of free knowledge contributions, one thing for sure is instructables.com handles users’ input much better than wikipedia.com as there is a higher level of community-driven factor. Moreover, instructables.com has better support for graphics and images to make the artible more visually attractive and clear (the on-photo-comments is a great feature to have) as a picture worths a thousand words. Comments are generally welcome, making the community interaction even better.

I’d say instructables.com’s success in terms of scaling up and a stronger community driven by the noble purpose of knowledge sharing is guaranteed, it’s just a matter of time and words of mouth.

I’m pretty surprised at the current news about Ebay’s strategy to ban Google Checkout on their site. Ebay have been buying a lot of keywords from Google AdSense, millions, as the related Mercury News article cited. But since Google is putting out both indirect and direct competitive services, I suspect the relationship now is merely because Ebay want to leverage Google’s popularity to help drive more customers to its auctions. This strategic relationship will sooner or later be aroded. Make it now as Ebay ban Google Checkout.
There are reasons why Ebay ban Google Checkout, a Paypal alternative. Google has planned to take losses to launch its Checkout service to attract more users. Checkout charges a lower percentage and a lower transaction fee than Paypal does. Ebay Power Sellers with thousands of items listed everyday in turn can save lots of money by offering G-Checkout side by side with Paypal. Hence Ebay can potentially lose lots of money. By banning G-Checkout, Ebay want to slow down the acceptance rate of Checkout and prevent this competitive service from reaching a critical mass that Paypal currently has attained. The question is how long this strategy can work and in turn, how it will affect the Ebay-Google relationship.

Recall not too long ago when Google launched Base, there were rumours about it launching Checkout. Now with Base and Checkout, whose rate is cheaper and leveraged by the Google technology and powerful, people-trusted brand, Ebay is facing a cirtical threat. Investors have seen this coming and translated the incoming threats into the plummet of Ebay’ stock. In January, the stock was valued at a peak of $46.77. At the current time of writing, Ebay stock is $26.97 a pop. That is a 42% decline! On the other hand, the GOOG stock has done very well for this year. GOOG attacked the $400 region, fluctuated a little bit down to $350 but has since headed up north. At this time, GOOG is $426.05.

Ebay should be criticized on its strategies. While competitors such as Google and Amazon constantly innovate with the releasing of new services, Ebay remains pretty static and slow in terms of innovation. When was the last time Ebay launched a new service? - exactly! Ebay’s business model has changed very little for, well, the last 4 years. Yes Ebay did try to expand its business to VoIP with the purchase of Skype for a whopping $2 billion something but little did change on Ebay auction pages. Skype still remains only a little banner at the footer of Ebay pages as a separate business entity. Skype is awesome on its own and Ebay is missing out big time in capitalize the potential of Skype for its auction business. Or is Ebay so busy with squashing out phishing that it has forgotten to innovate?

To sum up, with the heating-up competition from the giant Google, Ebay will have to do more than just the traditional auction service. Ebay has to expand its auction business either by adding more creative business ideas, diversifying itself technologically, or forming more powerful partnerships. Until something happens, Ebay stock will be very likely to suffer.