Posts Tagged hosting
How to Jump Ship from GoDaddy to a Better Web Host and Registrar [Web Hosting]
How to embrace remote meetings
Consider this: managers spend between 30 to 80 percent of their time in meetings and more than 50 percent of them consider many meetings to be a “waste of time.” Ninety percent of managers attribute the failure of most meetings to a “lack of planning and organization,” and most managers have never been trained on how to host a productive meeting. When you add in the complexity of leveraging the Internet for hosting distributed meetings online, it is even more difficult to ensure a successful result. Without some amount of preparation and planning, remote team members can feel disconnected, disregarded and even unwelcome in meetings.
At oDesk, our in-house full-time employees work from home at least one day a week, and we’re regularly collaborating with a team of about 250 remote contractors who act as a crucial extension of our internal team. This has forced us to study how to make meetings work for all involved.
We’ve found there are three steps to a successful online meeting:
- Be sure you need a meeting to accomplish the desired result
- Establish topics and their time allocation, roles and processes (planning objectives, information sharing, problem solving, decision making, relationship building)
- Assess your meeting afterwards (results met, process adhered to, relationships strengthened)
We started by defining the roles involved in making a remote meeting work: the organizer, coordinator, presenter(s) and attendees. Each role has its responsibilities to the team, and by defining those roles, we’re able to ensure accountability for each meeting’s success and seek out ways to continually improve the remote meeting experience. Adopting these roles has allowed us to make sure members of a distributed team are as active, included, and productive during a meeting as those who are on-site.
Organizer: Setting the stage
Someone needs to make sure the meeting will accommodate all participants. The format of the meeting will largely depend on the needs of the group and the goals of the meeting. The meeting organizer works with the presenter to ensure that the right format is chosen and prepared ahead of time.
- Where will we hold the on-site meeting? Generally, this will be a conference room or office large enough to hold all the on-site attendees, with the technology necessary to accommodate remote attendees.
- What kind of access do remote attendees need? Is audio sufficient, or do they need video of the room? Do they need to be able to see slides or other materials?
- How will remote attendees “dial in”? This means choosing the platform of the meeting, which can include a bridge line, Skype, or a desktop sharing/presenting platform such as GoToMeeting.
- How will we communicate when and how to attend? Invitees need to know when, where and how to attend the meeting. If remote attendees need to have a login to register or to download and install a plugin, the organizer makes sure they are aware of this potential roadblock and are prepared in advance.
- Is everyone clear on the roles and their responsibilities? Make sure all attendees are aware of the presenters and meeting coordinator, and share the agenda and best practices with them.
Presenters: Adapting to the environment
Presenters must remember to take into account the remote participants. When you’re explaining concepts or an initiative to a distributed team, will there be visual aids? Do you intend to show something on a computer screen? Does it need to be seen live, as you manipulate it, or can you send a copy of the material, such as a PowerPoint presentation, to remote participants so they can follow along? Prior to the meeting, the presenter should work with the meeting organizer to make sure they—and the facility—are prepared technically to present via local projection and remote platforms.
During the meeting, presenters should:
- Log onto their presentation platform five minutes early to address any technical difficulties.
- Welcome everyone and ask remote attendees whether they can hear and see appropriately
- Make sure to verbalize throughout the meeting what attendees should be seeing (slide number, visual cues, etc.) to help flag sharing problems quickly.
- Ask whether the remote team has any questions. It can be hard for remote participants to interject or notify organizers of their desire to speak. Give them equal opportunity to contribute by offering them the floor at meeting/slide transitions.
- If a contributor is not near a microphone or speakerphone, repeat the statement or question yourself to ensure remote attendees can hear all conversations (since you’ll probably be best situated for microphone pickup).
Coordinators: Keeping everything on track
Identify a coordinator before the meeting. This person makes sure that the technical side runs smoothly and is prepared to respond to challenges as they arise. The meeting coordinator can also be the organizer, but should not be a presenter. If presentations are being made from more than one location, there should ideally be a coordinator in each place. Also, the coordinators should be members of the department presenting the meeting, to ensure that they’ll understand the material being presented, even if they’re distracted by the on-the-fly back-end management.
During the meeting, the coordinator:
- Facilitates an instant messaging group chat with remote team members, including updating the conversation regularly as problems are recognized and addressed. This IM session allows remote members to communicate technical difficulties or other distractions that need to be addressed without interrupting the meeting flow.
- Handles all troubleshooting requiring local action, such as adjusting microphones, encouraging speakers to talk louder, refreshing slide screens, etc.
Attendees: Ready to go
Attendees have a role to play in keeping the meeting running smoothly, as well. They’re responsible for:
- Logging onto the platform five minutes early to address any technical issues prior to the meeting.
- Communicating difficulties during the meeting to the coordinator via the chosen instant messaging channel.
A note on having a solid platform
Often a simple phone call and speakerphone is sufficient, but make sure any printed material, such as an agenda, is also shared with remote participants before the meeting. Depending on your presentation needs, more involved platform options include:
- Dial-in conference bridges or direct-dial phone calls
- Skype (video and voice chat)
- Shared documents (Google Docs)
- GoToMeeting/GoToWebinar
- WebEx
Whatever platform you choose, adapt your presentation to the platform’s strengths (don’t try to present a PowerPoint over a direct-dial phone call), and make sure that everyone is prepared. Check in with remote attendees afterward to make sure they had a positive experience, and work on ironing out wrinkles as they’re identified.
At oDesk, we’ve been refining our techniques for years, and we’re progressing toward meetings that are every bit as easy as having everyone under the same roof — sometimes even easier. More importantly, we’ve made sure that our remote workers are able to fully contribute to our success at least as well as if they were in our office. Which is the whole point of what we do, after all.
Gary Swart is CEO of oDesk. He has more than 17 years’ experience leading remote and local teams as an executive at Intellibank, IBM and Pure Software.
Image courtesy of Flickr user Joe Shlabotnik
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Will.i.am Hosts Dean Kamen’s Robotics Championship [Video]
HP planning Veer launch party for May 2nd, AT&T cuts webOS 3.0 developer cake May 12th
We still don’t have a solid release date for HP’s tiny Veer — we’ve been told it’s “coming around the corner” and will be here “soon” — but if we were the guessing type, we’d say that the pint-sized webOS 2.2 smartphone will hit the market on or about the 2nd of May. That’s because a PreCentral reader stumbled across what looks like an official invitation to an “HP Veer Launch Party Event” in Los Angeles on that very date, and it’s typically fairly difficult to launch a handset without a handset to launch, if you know what we mean. Still, this looks like a business-to-business event, so we wouldn’t circle your calendar quite yet — but if you’ve already got that red marker out, you might want to put a X over May 12th instead. That’s the day that AT&T is hosting a webOS 3.0 developer webcast — which might be worth attending in and of itself — but is particularly noteworthy given that HP hasn’t announced carriers for the Veer or SIM-slot packing HP TouchPad just yet.
[Thanks, Brian L.]
HP planning Veer launch party for May 2nd, AT&T cuts webOS 3.0 developer cake May 12th originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 17 Apr 2011 17:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Finding a Reliable Web Hosting Company that Works Wells
Have you uncovered the best web hosting yet? Selecting a web host for your site is just like selecting a life partner. This is because it is of the utmost importance. Finding the right one will make things easier for you. However, picking the wrong one will make life very hard. The purpose of this article is to help you decide on a web host that not only meets your needs, but is also reliable in every way.
First and foremost; be sure of what you you’re looking for before you actually choose a web host. Determine your plans well in advance to see whether your web host will be able to live up to your expectations or not. If you’re a blogger or a webmaster that has plans to make it real big in the industry, then by all means choose a web host that accommodates all your future needs and plans. Choose a company that not only is reliable but is also able to give you room to grow. Pick a web host that allows you to utilize the expansion options that you need in the future for your website. Taking care of this task is extremely vital. This is because when your website eventually succeeds, being able to change your web host will not be that easy. So it is always a smart move to be well prepared before you are forced to endure this situation. This is so that your website will continue to grow without experiencing any problems.
Secondly, before you agree to using one particular hosting company, check out their services on a trial basis first. A majority of web hosts on the web will have a strong backed guarantee with their services. In addition, they will give you a trial period so that you can test the waters before making a purchase. Simply put, the better hosting companies about very transparent about their services. They are very well known for providing their new customers with trial offers. This is one of the signs that this web host is credible. This says that it is worth giving a good shot.
Among the best web hosts that meets this criteria is Hostgator. Not only are they dependable and offer good value, they also have terrific customer support too. Research any Hostgator review and you can look yourself.
Last, you should constantly look at your web host. Why bother? So that you receive everything that was promised to you in the hosting company’s package. You have to be concerned about things such as the uptime, the time that the webpage loads, the amount of bandwidth used and other important items. If you suspect that something is not working properly or living up to your expectations, then let your web host know about it. The sooner that you handle these little things, the better things will be in the end.
All in all, this article describes how to choose a web host company and the items that you should remember if you plan to avoid problems in the future. Although there are numerous web host companies to choose, spending the time to research them and ensure that they are reliable will make a big difference in the long run.
Main Web Hosting Aspects That Must Be Learned
Just two words about web hosting.
Up to day many people have heard about web hosting. But only a few of them try to understand it properly. In most cases people can understand only two main things closely connected with web hosting. They are accommodation and access. Once a particular personality get started dealing with this certainly a time to learn it appears. Some time has passed and up to day hosting as a kind of Internet services has undergone significant changes. First the stability of access increased significantly. Secondly hosting equipment has undergone certain changes. It’s a positive factor I suppose. Third, the technical support for users has turned into a very clear structure, which is engaged precisely in customer support without the necessity to send them to all places with their idiotic questions.
Fourth, hosting providers have become much more demanding with regard to the protection of customer data. Previously, the safety of your page on the server completely depended only on your foresight. You simply had to store a date copy of your site on your home computer. Now you can’t face such problems in most cases. Fifth, the contemporary conception of web hosting has to include a wide range of various types of additional services such as mailboxes, databases, scripts, statistics, protection from spam and viruses, mailing lists and so on.
And with all this wealth of services this can be yours for a very small cost such as 5 – 20$ depending on the disk space and certainly a set of provided services. I should emphasize that at this level the cost of similar packages of services with different hosting providers differs only slightly. I can’t say that the best web hosting packages cost 10$ while another one 30$. The difference is usually just two or three dollars and no more in most cases. But don’t forget that just a couple of dollars per month can mean a very substantial difference in the level and types of services provided.
When a particular user being tempted by a prospect to save two dollars a month switches to a new hosting provider, suddenly it turns out that there is a bad tech support there accepting requests only from 11 to 17, except weekends. Certainly they keep silence now. They don’t respond at all. May be the electricity is cut down or something else. But it’s evident in this situation that there is no protection for the provider and all services are dead. Is it because of extra two dollars a month? I think that you shouldn’t sacrifice your nerves in this case. You’d better stick to more expensive but more reliable service. These two bucks aren’t so worthy to worry about. Got it? So get started with this knowledge.
Today many brands hide behind a lovely notion as best web hosting. Though this positive notion helps to make more sales, the term of best web hosting is very vague.
What is in the nutshell?
Surely one can talk about uptime, reliability, support, peculiar tech features – and all this will be up to the point. But best web hosting is far beyond, and in simple terms this is about the place where you have no problems when hosting your web site or blog.
Today we live in the world where knowledge quickly enhances the quality of our life.
Due to this if you are properly armed with the knowledge in your topic you can rest assured that you will in any case find the solution to any bad situation. So, please make sure to get back to this site on a regular basis or – the easiest way to take care of it – sign up to its RSS feed. In such an easy way you will have a direct shortcut to the latest informational updates here. Blogs can be helpful, you just need to understand how to use them.