Pride

As another year comes to a close I can’t help but feel an immense sense of pride in all that we have been able to do with Own Web Now this year.

Some of it sucked. ExchangeDefender v3 overhaul which saw the most instability I have ever seen on a network (then again, I’ve never seen/worked on a network this large) and the v3.1 upgrade which helped us please our MSP partners and stay a step ahead of the threats. In May we had a rough time getting AhSay to scale with what we were trying to do, failed backups are never a pretty thing. Communication, communication, communication and billing, billing, billing – still the two outstanding nightmares that keep me up at night.

Most of it rocked. We opened new data centers. We launched the record four new product lines. We automated an ungodly amount of processes. We opened new offices. We started doing business in new countries. ExchangeDefender is bigger than ever and better than ever – in spite of the amount of junk mail quadrupling we have been able to lower the amount of SPAM our customers see by 48% in 2007. The Offsite Backup offerings let us take our network and data center operations to a new level – no longer dealing with tapes, no SANs or all-in-one bucket (SAN in the same rack as all the other systems) pitfalls, we have a true distributed storage platform so when you plug your server in you don’t need to worry about it. The rise of virtual services has been explosive, we now host more SBS than anyone on earth and at $99 a month we’re delivering customers the SBS experience that costs thousands of dollars to do in house – and we do it same day!

This did not happen as an accident or without sacrifice. I have given up my Paris Hilton lifestyle of being at every conference and every event. We’ve cut a lot of webcast, podcast and digg.com shenanigans. Our marketing efforts are nearly non-existent. I had to take a break from Shockey Monkey and Thieving Weasel development. Public facing IM, inbound and outbound calls and lots of other interruptions and distractions had to go as well. More focused DC development activity and scalability planning nearly crushed additional NOC plans. All so we can get Own Web Now to where it is now.

It’s been a hard year. I think we mostly made the right decisions and my only regret is that we didn’t work harder.

So now we sit around and straighten out our billing, beef up our documentation… and brainstorm… How do we do better in 2008?