Earlier this decade, my wife owned some web hosting businesses. She's not very technically-oriented, so when customers called in with support questions, I usually answered the phone. It was a hobby for me, idle hands being the devil's playground, and as an agoraphobe, I don't get out of the house often, and I really enjoyed talking to customers.

We started by building some websites that were fairly successful and profitable, but we kept switching hosting companies, because none of them were very reliable. Finally, I told Blondie that we needed to get our own server, because when we weren't online, our regular visitors would go elsewhere - and we didn't want them to decide they liked "elsewhere" better. We only really needed about 20% of a server, so we started a hosting company that catered to WebTV customers, called Paul Ding Homes. Paul Ding was a name I'd used for decades as a newspaperman, and when I went online, that name was the one I used, to protect my wife's privacy.

Better Than Nothing

I set the prices too low on Paul Ding Homes hosting. Since we were selling hosting that otherwise would go to waste, that wasn't the end of the world, but I didn't want to waste money and effort promoting it. Instead, we started a second hosting company, called Amish Hosting. Calling it Pennsylvania Dutch Country Hosting would have made for a really long URL, and besides, it appealed to my sense of humor - and presumably, that of our customers. Amish Hosting was geared to computer users, and we only offered one package, a whopper, telling customers that the whole idea was that they didn't have to worry about limits, and the price was low because most people wouldn't begin to use all they were allowed. And by asking people to buy a year's hosting in advance, we were saved the hassle of people who only buy one month's hosting because they figure they'll be kicked off the server right away for spamming, anyway.

Amish Hosting was going pretty good, and we got a second server, which started to fill up as well. We were just about to do a big promotion, and see how big Amish Hosting could get, so we got a third server. Just then, though, Domania went down.

Domania was the first hosting company for WebTV users. WebTV is like a computer without a hard drive, so sites had to be built online. The owner of Domania had died of a drug overdose, apparently a suicide, months earlier, and his mother had been trying to run Domania, and she didn't know the first thing about what she was doing. She trusted someone she shouldn't have trusted, and Domania's server was vandalized. His mother contacted me, and asked me if I could help put Domania back together, or at least grab people's websites, so they didn't lose all they had.

Swamped

I shouldn't have done it, but I worked 22 hours a day for nearly a week. Blondie asked me to give up, thinking that it was going to kill me, and her judgment was better than mine. I knew I couldn't trust the old server; the vandals might have compromised something so they could get back in. I got a new server, moved everything over to it, and went to work putting the custom software, software used to build websites right on the server, back in order. The sites were serving files, and the basic minimum editing functions were in place.

And then I went to bed, and nearly slept around the clock for the next three days. Blondie kept coming up, listening to make sure I was breathing, and kept asking if she shouldn't call an ambulance. I survived, anyhow.

And Blondie ended up buying Domania from the founder's mother.

Some Was Shredded

There were a lot of special programs on the server, files to manipulate images and music, and PDF files. They were not easy to figure out, and it took months for me to make sure that they were all running, and didn't have security holes for the vandals. I set up a forum, and did a lot of sweet-talking on the phone to keep customers happy.

Domania lost a lot of customers when the vandals broke in, but slowly, surely, they started coming back, as well as computer users who'd previously had WebTV, and were looking to have a website again.

Meanwhile, we were neglecting the promotion of Amish Hosting, and Paul Ding Homes was so marginal that we stopped accepting new hosting customers there, and was encouraged existing PDH customers to migrate to Amish Hosting accounts.

I Was Going Downhill

There's a difference between a hobby to keep busy, and being worked to death. And I wasn't working 40 hours a week, not by a long shot, but I was spending enough time on hosting that I stopped enjoying it. I wanted to cut back. PDH, though, was nothing you could really sell to anyone. Having to pay for three servers when Amish Hosting really only needed a little more than two, that made Amish Hosting less valuable than it deserved to be. That fifth server, though, Domania, was a gem.

My health was deteriorating. My doctor insisted that I stop helping Blondie with the hosting, and Blondie wanted me to stop as well. My body was telling me they were right. Blondie demanded that we sell the businesses. I ran across an ISP in New Jersey that was interested. They didn't know anything about WebTV, though, and I was afraid that they'd not be able to manage Domania. What made things difficult was that Blondie didn't want to sell the other websites, only the hosting businesses, and we didn't have any financial statements that showed only the hosting.

There were three other hosting companies that specialized in sites for WebTV users. One was run by a guy with a server running off cable. The reason nobody does that is that cable bandwidth is asymmetrical, and while stuff arrives down from the internet at great speed, it goes up to the internet at incredibly slow rates. A second one was run by a guy who doesn't seem to get along with anyone. I didn't want to deal with him. The third was a teensy-tiny hosting company, run by Burt, a guy who seemed to be fairly personable.

I asked Blondie what we should do. She said that I had spent so many hours on the phone with customers, that we had to take care of them or I'd forever feel guilty. The folks in New Jersey were happy to plunk down cash, but we made a deal with the guy with the teensy-tiny company. He didn't have the cash to buy, he said, so Blondie suggested giving Burt three years to pay off the companies, and in case he felt like the companies weren't worth enough, that third year was optional. He said he didn't even have enough operating capital. We ended up giving Burt three months before his first payment, and loaned him $1,000 for server leasing.

I Felt Satisfied

I had second thoughts about the whole thing. I was going to miss all my friends. I still miss them - although my health has improved somewhat.

One of the things that had made Amish Hosting so successful, and was very popular with Domania customers as well, was a toll-free telephone line. A lot of our customers phoned us in order to pay with their credit cards, because they didn't feel comfortable with entering the numbers into an online form. The toll-free telephone line was a lot cheaper than I thought it would be, and really worked out well for support. When a customer sends in a support form, he doesn't know how to describe the problem, and what he wants done. By the time you write back and forth to figure out what needs to be done, you spend an hour on a problem that can be resolved on the phone in 5 minutes, because you can ask the customer questions.

Burt decided against having a toll-free phone number, though. He didn't even want to publicize his regular phone number. And he told people they had to pay through PayPal. I got phone calls from concerned customers, and I suggested that they give the new guy a chance.

Server Specs

I had assumed that Burt knew what he was doing when it came to servers. They need to be tuned in order to give good performance. Moving a site from an overloaded server to an underloaded server can make a big difference. Burt started having servers go down on him, for lack of attention. It's not a time-consuming matter; it took perhaps 10 minutes per day for those five servers. If a server goes down, you look at the log file to find out why. Apparently, he didn't know that, and didn't have the sense to ask.

Domania was offering static hosting, which is to say, just files and pictures, not CGI or PHP. For that kind of hosting, you need a lot of connectivity, not a lot of CPU power. He moved things from five smaller, slower servers to a single big server - but now files were having to share one ethernet card instead of each of the five servers having its own ethernet card, all the cards having the same rated speed. I'd kept CPU load to a maximum of 0.8, with the individual servers. That's fine; it means the server is using 80% of its CPU capacity. His new server rarely goes over 0.2. Duh. And the advantage of having the CPU goof off 80% of the time instead of 20% of the time?

So you work the math. He's paying a lot more for servers. Customers can't call in their payments by phone. Instead of generating enough profit to make the payments we'd worked out with him, with some left over to spare, he's losing money.

It's Been Months

In fact, it's been about a year and a half, and we haven't seen a single solitary penny from Burt. But tonight I got a disturbing phone call from a former customer. It turns out that Burt has shut down Domania's server.

He hasn't enough customers to make Domania profitable, so he has deliberately shut down the server to, as he put it, to "get people's attention", that he needs more money.

Now perhaps I have been doing this wrong for half a century, but if you haven't enough customers, it probably isn't a very good idea to screw them over. The customers that he still has, they have paid him in advance for hosting. What do you suppose the odds are that these customers are going to encourage their friends to buy hosting from Burt?

The smallest size that Domania offered was $54 yearly, but I recently discovered that he offered a special a few months ago of 18 months for $35. If you have fixed costs, and you haven't enough customers, cutting the amount each customer pays you is going to cut your total revenue, unless you can get new customers at the lower price. But where are these customers going to come from? WebTV is shutting down this summer, and Burt has no idea how to promote the business.

It's My Fault

I cheated him, Burt says. I lied to him, he claims, in order to get him to take the hosting businesses off our hands. Now let's take a quick look at this. If Blondie had sold the business to the ISP in New Jersey, we'd have the purchase price in cash. If we'd have simply gone out of business, we'd have zero. By selling the business to Burt, and loaning him $1000 on top of that, Blondie is $1000 out of pocket. Does that make sense?

He says that Domania, Amish Hosting, and Paul Ding Homes were worthless, and I knew it, but when I suggested that he return the businesses to Blondie, he declined to do that. They've all lost customers, so if they were worthless before, they are even more worthless now, so why does he want to keep his hands on them?

The fact is, it is my fault. I should have investigated further before Blondie sold the business to Burt. I knew he was weak in server maintenance, but I had no idea how weak. I didn't bother to get a commitment from him to continue to make it easy for customers to pay him. I didn't show him how I'd attracted customers from Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia to Amish Hosting, without paying a dime for advertising. I didn't point out to him that lowering prices doesn't lead to increased consumption of hosting, when customers already have far more space than they're using. There was a reason his teeny-weeny hosting company was teeny-weeny, and it wasn't that he was a genius at business.

After Burt blackmails his customers into paying him loads of money, he says, he's going to turn the server back on. But that'll never happen. So there are a lot of Domania customers who are going to be POed at me, because I told them to trust Burt. They should be POed, because I misled them. Not that they need to be POed; I'm plenty POed at myself in the first place. I wish we had Domania back, so that we could fix it. It's not a bad little company, and it could be nicely profitable.

And the worst thing is, I promised the founder's mother that I'd keep Domania alive, as a memorial to her son.