We have a fair few ideas of our own, of course (he’s going to need that coffee…), but we’d really like to hear your suggestions too – it’s you that uses our website, after all!

What do you like about the current website? What drives you up the wall?

Do you like the colourscheme? Loathe orange and love green?

Is there something you can never find? Something you can’t see the point of? Something you’d love to see? Something you’d miss if we got rid of it? What about the customer control panel – think we can organise that better?

I’ll discuss all of your ideas with Shaun and our Head of Marketing, so consider the comments box a suggestion box and have at it! You’re also welcome to tweet your ideas – you’ll find us at www.twitter.com/DailyInternet.

When do you perform your maintenance?

We perform this overnight on the last Wednesday of each month. We have a set period as this means we can always make sure we have the correct staffing present to make sure any maintenance goes as smoothly as possible.

Any different tasks that crop up requiring non-urgent maintenance will be added to this monthly schedule.

What sort of tasks do you perform?

Generally, it’s housekeeping. We need to make sure our platforms are always up-to-date with any new patches and releases and optimised to run as efficiently as possible.

Keeping on top of all this means we can schedule in some planned maintenance (often with no noticeable effects to customers) and ensure we do not ever risk a situation occurring where unmaintained servers start suffering from performance issues, or a worse case scenario of unscheduled downtime.

Will the maintenance always involve downtime?

No, the majority of the maintenance will not be noticeable to the majority of customers.

Our shared hosting is all load balanced and run in large clusters, so our sys-admins can work on one particular cluster whilst the others carry on serving as normal. The days of single-points of failures are generally in the past for most shared platforms.

Some work to specific VPS hosts or certain network aspects may involve unavailability, however we always keep this to a minimum.

There has been maintenance on dates other than the last Wednesday of each month. Why’s that?

Basically, we need to make a judgement call when a new issue develops.

If something is fairly minor and will not have any negative effects, it’s fine waiting until the monthly window to fit into the normal schedule.

If something poses a risk, however, we have to decide if we need an interim maintenance window rather than waiting until our next scheduled maintenance window.

The classic example here is new security vulnerabilities in operating systems. When these are announced then they really need addressing straight away or we would be putting customers at risk. It would be irresponsible of us to drag our heels with something like this if the maintenance window was not until a couple of weeks away, as that’s a couple of weeks we would be leaving our customers vulnerable.

I hear other providers don’t have as many maintenance windows as Daily. Why is that?

We can’t speak for other companies specifically (firstly because I don’t know their internal policies and secondly because I don’t want to get into trouble!), but the example I often give to customers who ask is this:

- How often does your home PC have a new Windows Update?

Forget about service packs, let’s just say security updates for windows, networking, IE, bug fixes etc. There’s probably a few a month at a guess. It’s just the same on servers in this respect (if not more so).

Now if there’s a new security update for, let’s say IIS 7 on Windows VPS, then that’s going to be the same for IIS7 at Daily.co.uk or any other company running that system.

If you think that it’s bad that Daily are scheduling in maintenance to address a known security vulnerability and it’s good that another company are leaving a known vulnerability active on their systems, then just play that through in your head for a few minutes and think of the implications. Is it really that good that for the sake of avoiding a planned maintenance window at times designed to minimise disruption, your site and data is at risk from exploit?

Let’s put it another way: If the brake warning light on your car dashboard comes on, do you get your brakes checked or do you just take the bulb out of the warning light? One scenario means you have to get your car into a garage and then carry on as normal; the other scenario means you’ll probably carry on fine with the “out of sight, out of mind” attitude until you find yourself whizzing across a roundabout with no brakes looking like you’re in the Batmobile.

The fact that you’re not being told about a problem does not mean there is not a problem. Any sys-admin who sticks his or her head in the sand and hopes a problem goes away is turning their network into a hacker’s paradise!

So do not all providers keep their servers and systems updated?

Again, we couldn’t comment on specifics, but if in doubt – ask them.

Most companies should be able to list any of their recent updates and the reasons for them and you can then see for yourself what sort of durations you are looking at.

If you have a VPS, then also check to see if they do even perform updates themselves. Hopefully they do on the hosts and hardware, but you may be required to manage any updates yourself within your VPS.

So does Daily perform maintenance too frequent, too slow or just right?

It’s not an exact science, but to summarise:

- We schedule a monthly maintenance window in which any non-urgent tasks can wait to be carried out at once.

- If anything urgent comes up in the meantime, we’ll perform high priority maintenance if there is a valid security risk or if performance could be decreased significantly by leaving it until the monthly window

- We also make sure that as much maintenance as possible is seamless. Downtime is always a last resort

When it comes to risk taking, everyone has different ideas of what’s acceptable but we always act as is befitting of a responsible host.

If anyone finds any maintenance an inconvenience, we do apologise – that’s not our intention. However we’d like to think you can sleep sounder at night knowing any outages are always as short as possible in periods you know about in advance, rather than trying to access your services in the middle of the day and finding them off-line!

So, two questions for you:

1) is there anything eShop/eBooking-related that you think we’ve missed?
2) now that we’ve worked some magic with eShop, what else would you like us to tackle?

Let us know – you can either leave a comment on this blog post, go and Like our Facebook page (it’s new, so we’re still working on it, but the more the merrier!) and start a discussion, or tweet us.

You’ll need some specific Sys Admin skills and to be interested in developing skills yourself, but you’ll also be given plenty of training.

Take a look at the job specification & application details and get it in touch if you think you fit the bill.

Look at all that lovely white space! We think these ads are much clearer, slicker and more focused – in other words, we think they’re a much better reflection of the no-nonsense bunch of people that we consider ourselves to be. We’ve taken out a fair bit of clutter, so it should be much easier to see what we have to offer, and we’ve drawn a bit more attention to our latest special offer and a reader offer we like to run to make it all the more relevant to the readership.

Drop us a comment to let us know what you think, and stay tuned for further creative tinkering…

Michael has previously worked with Abby Hardoon, who continues as Managing Director, in an extremely successful partnership from the early days of Abby’s first web hosting company, Magic Moments Design Limited in 1999, through to that company’s growth into Host Europe PLC in 2001.

We all look forward to continuing this successful relationship into Daily’s future.

Follow us at: www.twitter.com/dailyinternet

I remember when I initially signed up for my ‘phone then it probably took no more than five minutes to complete, but trying to leave was a whole different story.

After queuing on the telephone for over ten minutes I finally got through to someone. I explained why I’m leaving and that I had considered other alternatives to the handset I wanted, but I’d made my mind up so would just like to cancel.

The person I was speaking to then went into a sales pitch about some other ‘phone I could have. I stated again that I had already looked at this, but had made my mind up. However each response I gave was met with a “please hold” and treated to tinny hold music as the person I was speaking to presumably read through a script. This was most frustrating as all the questions they kept asking me were already irrelevant, as they would have known if they had just listened to what I had said previously.

When the sales pitch finally run out of steam, I can only describe the next line of questioning as an attempted guilt trip for wanting to leave!

I think I finally won out in the end with the following conversation:

Me: OK, do any of your phones have a lightsaber application?

Operator: I am sorry Mr. Supple. Can you better describe the application you are requesting?

Me: You know, a lightsaber! Like in Star Wars? I can wave my ‘phone around and it makes humming noises and goes “KISSSH” when I act like I’m fighting with it and I can have mock battles with other people in my office who have the same application. I can be a dark lord of the Sith purging the Jedi menace.

Operator: Please hold

<horrible rendition of Vivaldi>

Operator: We do have this other telephone. This handset has an industry leading screen size, it is very good

Me: Lightsaber?

Operator: No, but it…

Me: Ah, sorry – but I’m sold on this application.

The positive part in my little saga was that it proved to be a great reminder of how we do not treat our customers at Daily.

We always appreciate the feedback we get, as this helps us improve our service, but while we do make sure it’s the account owner doing the cancelling and quickly ask what the reason is so we can find out if there’s something we can improve on, we don’t make customers jump through hoops (often masquerading as “security measures”) such as getting people to send in multiple copies of signed faxes, hunt through well hidden links in control panels, go through 200 questions about how dare they even consider going elsewhere etc.

To me, if you treat customers right from the start, offer them the best service you can, take on their suggestions and ideas then they will want to stay and you will build a fantastic relationship which will last over many years.

If on the other hand your approach is to only wake-up when a customer mentions cancelling and to expect them to change their mind when they encounter your Krypton Factor style of completing a cancellation procedure, then you’ll find you’ll have quite a few people abandoning ship!

I’ve said in a previous blog article about Customer Service – the Daily.co.uk Way that the last thing I expect our customers to experience when they contact us is someone droning through a series of unnecessary scripted questions, or someone less concerned about resolving an issue than proving that the blame for the issue is not with them.

Following a recent case I was dealing with myself, I think it would be helpful to explain the process we go through at Daily when we are investigating a technical issue. Many people will have already had their fair share of negative experiences with other companies so it’s only natural that if this is the first time they have contacted us then they will be looking for similarities and may well expect any correspondence to go down the same dreaded path.

One of the most important factors we have when we are investigating a technical issue is being able to replicate the fault at our end.

Identifying the issue is often the first step in being able to resolve it. When we can replicate it, we can check the steps taken to result in the issue, see any error messages, alter any variables etc. Often once the issue is identified then it can be pretty straight forward in resolving it.

If we cannot replicate an issue at our end (i.e. we are performing the same steps as the reporter of the issue but getting a different result) then all this means to us is that we need to be looking in different places to find out why the reporter is seeing what they are seeing. Most likely it will be a localised issue somewhere that we need to isolate.

All too often, though, the response from other companies when they find out they cannot replicate the issue at their end will be along the lines of:

“Well it works here, so must be something you’re doing”

and then case closed…

In this industry it really isn’t that black and white and such an attitude only really benefits the person dealing with the query who may consider it as “Not our problem, goodbye, right – next ticket in my queue!”.  Meanwhile the customer who reported the problem will be in the same situation and I’m sure will think twice about moving their provider to another company more interested in helping them rather than denying there’s a problem!

We’re not delighted if we find ourselves on the receiving end of this sort of treatment, so the last thing we want to do is dish it out to our customers. So, rest assured – if ever we do state that something is working at our end, this is only the beginning of the problem-solving process, not the end.

“We apologise for the lengthy call queues while we try to connect you, however the recent severe weather conditions have had an effect on our answer times”

Now I’ve heard my fair share of excuses as to why companies just simply don’t pick up a telephone quickly enough, but this is the first time I’ve heard it blamed on the snow!

I had images of their telephones buried under a big mound of snow, or the handsets frozen onto the telephone unit, or even all their staff having snowball fights outside.

Putting cynicism aside, I would image they meant that their staff could not get into their office because of the knock-on effects to the traffic and public transport, so they were operating with reduced numbers. Understandable?

Not by a long shot I’m afraid…

Here at Daily.co.uk all our team have the ability to connect to our office remotely, so we have access to all our systems and can access our telephone system as well using ‘softphones’ (i.e. a software version of our telephone running on a computer with a mic and headset connected). If for any reason we can’t get to our office (be it the weather, closed roads or anything else) then we can be connected up in a matter of seconds

I myself am typing this blog article sitting at home with my laptop, with my telephone running and our Support ticket system and Livechat system open. After getting nowhere fast in today’s traffic jams due to the snow, I turned around, came home and logged in remotely.

The only downside to all this is that I will have to make my own cups of tea and I have a very nosy cat taking an interest in my keyboard.

So if you do hear anything daft when dealing with other companies as to why they don’t have any staff available because of the snow, then you may want to ask them what their contigency plans are and if they find it acceptable to have their customer service dictated by the weather!