greg smart

I was recently reading the excellent Paul Boag article “The 5 Hidden Costs of Running a CMS” about the many pitfalls of Content Management Systems (CMS).

We all know content management systems (CMS) can be beneficial for most websites. However, they do come with five hidden costs.

Many think of a content management system as a magic bullet that solves all of their content woes. Unfortunately the cost of a CMS is greater than its price tag. Before making a decision about whether to adopt a CMS, or indeed which CMS to choose, you first need to be aware of the hidden costs. These include:

1. The cost of training
2. The cost to quality
3. The cost to functionality
4. The cost of redundancy and flexibility
5. The cost of commitment

In my opinion, the first two points are the most daunting and the hardest to relate to the customer prior to beginning the development process. Most recently we have been using the MODx system as a CMS. While training is always an issue I have found that the current incarnation (0.9.6.1) is fairly intuitive for a novice user. In a single, “light user” scenario I normally only need a single face-to-face meeting (if possible) and 1-2 short telephone support sessions.

The second issue I would like to address is the cost to quality. Although this can be a tricky topic, the TinyMCE default WYSIWYG editor present in MODx produces relatively clean code, allowing for easy modification to available tags to which my user(s) have access.

As far as functionality, redundancy and flexibility I think our capabilities have actually increased as we have implemented more of these systems. MODx is not just a CMS, it is a development framework that leaves me with capabilities I would not have otherwise had and it comes with a minimal commitment.

As far as MODx being the Pleth CMS of choice I would have to say that the jury is still out. There are many situations in which Wordpress or a custom CMS system is still appropriate, but to date, my personal preference is quickly becoming MODx.

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I was recently asked by one of our partner graphic design firms to write a note to a potential client explaining the rationale for Pleth, LLC’s pricing on it’s domains. As you may or may not know it is $29.95 annually and has been at that level since we opened our doors.

I thought I would share the bulk of the note since I think it may help demonstrate Pleth, LLC’s approach to managed web hosting.

First of all we never try to hide the fact that many of our price points are higher than what you can get through services like *******.

The primary reasons for the pricing differences are related to the services we associate with our domains/hosting. First of all we consider ourselves the caretaker of your domain, we monitor all our domains for renewal status. We have had customers that have unintentionally allowed their domains to lapse and their site/email stops working. It is also possible that, in that scenario, they permanently lose their domain — even to a competitor. Pleth won’t let this happen.

Many companies also don’t tightly control who registers their domain, often times the legal domain owner appears to be an employee who registered the domain on the company’s behalf and often that employee is gone as issues of ownership/domain control arise.

Another big issue is DNS management. At Pleth we manage the DNS for all the domains in our registrar account. This relates to all the settings for the domain and email to work. Without our services this is left up to the customer who rarely has the knowledge of the DNS system to manage this for themselves.

Another wrinkle with the DNS management is based on the fact that we maintain virtualized servers. We do this in order to leave ourselves nimble in case of technical difficulties. It is not unusual for us to move around domains/servers on our side in order to route around outage issues. If the DNS is not within our service and therefore not within our control it is possible that customer uptime could be affected as we perform all the technical tasks on our side that are necessary to keep things running smoothly. We have 4 people that directly manage this on our side, full-time, and not having control of the DNS can negate a lot of the work that we do day in and day out.

So, if you boil it all down, with “warehouse” pricing in a system like *******’s you are essentially on your own. With Pleth, you should never feel like you are alone. In fact, most of our customers never realize any of our management activities are going on at all.

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According to Barracuda Networks 2007 Annual Spam Report 95% of email traffic today is junk. At Pleth, LLC we have learned that one of the primary reasons customers choose to outsource their email hosting is to reduce the amount of spam that they receive.

The bad news is that the amount of spam is increasing every day. The good news is that with the Plethware Business Class Email Solution we can fight it.

The Plethware solution utilizes one of the industry’s most effective and highest performing anti-spam providers. We can filter an estimated 98% of the incoming spam that is received by our customers, every day.

That still leaves some spam that could pass through our filters. This is where we get a chance to be innovative and if you’re a Plethware customer you have the tools to help.

Here’s how: if spam email slips through our filters, click the “Report Spam” button in the preview pane of the email message. That message will be sent directly to our anti-spam service, which is used to build fingerprints that increase the level of your Plethware spam protection. These fingerprints are then pushed to our server in sub-minute intervals and are used to help increase the effectiveness of our filters. This feedback loop is yet another way we can work together to combat spam.

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