greg smart

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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We have recently been going through the development process on one of our larger projects this year and seem to have hit the content delivery wall. As I have finished off the css, graphics, PHP framework, 3-tiered navigation (etc…) I began to look toward content delivery from my client. We have been talking about this for months, have repeatedly gone over how and where to start with the content development and have been following up consistently via telephone, email and in-person meetings. Still, no content.

First of all, this is not an issue limited to any single client. Content creation and delivery is always a difficult task. Here at Pleth, LLC we do not develop content in-house. We either leave this to the client or will bring in content writers from outside firms. The problems reside with the former. Clients often say they want to develop their own content, but rarely deliver on this in a complete and timely manner.

As I searched for resources on this topic I did come across an interesting article that spoke to effectively tackling these issues: The Cure for Content-Delay Syndrome, by Pepi Ronalds.

Most writers enjoy researching their topics and crafting their prose, and for this reason, many writers are less than enthusiastic about shaping someone else’s words… Editors are taught to weave disparate voices into something more professional, and they can quickly identify and prevent common errors—particularly on multi-writer projects. They are taught the fine art of helping writers improve their work and have a strong eye for detail. Where writers often like to start with nothing, editors expect to start with a pre-existing body of work, and generally enjoy shaping it into something stronger.

As I reviewed the article above I realized that what is required is a role player with strong editorial skills. Someone that can take content, provided in-part and haphazardly, and shape it into a finished product. Although the addition of this roleplayer does increase the bottom line for clients the necessity becomes apparent with an empty site and launch deadlines looming.

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