Now granted, some of our clients and some of our works deal with adult materials, but none of them illegal, based on the vague anti-pornography laws we have here. Just how vague? More is explained in this news clip.
Now, some unscrupulous people under the guise of Investigative Journalism are trying to destroy the business our good employers and we are trying very hard to establish by taking that vague law and twisting it to serve their selfish evil schemes.

I’m not going to beat around the bush and I’ll come right out: They are extorting money from our company and trying very hard to make our working conditions miserable by disrupting our work schedules, through intimidation and harassment by their paid goons or associates and threatening us through trial by publicity (why else would you have a camera crew in hand?).

Our employers have had enough of this and decided to stand up for it, knowing we are not doing anything illegal. You can read how we scored some points in this news article here.

Now we’re guessing this is something their egos couldn’t take, so they are getting back at us, always some sort of unauthorized raid (no search or arrest warrants) is going on, treating us like we’re effing criminals, treating our female employees with disrespect, disrupting our outsourcing business and scaring off potential clients in the process. Like most of my peers, I’m fed up. I have to take action. What better way could I have done? Who can I turn to? Who can I trust? If some government agents are on the take, if journalists of high regard like the Tulfos can threaten anyone with trial by publicity if they are not happy with the amount of payola they receive, what other options are left at my disposal?

How about trial by exposé? I’m going to expose their wicked ways through blogs, the one media they could not control. To destroy what little credibility they have left, credibility they probably acquired through intimidation, threats and manhandling little folks like us.

So I’m humbly requesting those of you who’ve read this, especially Filipino artists among you, to please repost it in your blogs and other journals. Through this minor effort, I want to show them that not all of us can be intimidated and are willing to stand up to being bullied. If no one else’s going to stand up against these extortionist bullies now, who will? I do have a seething hatred for bullies, don’t you? I’m hopeful too, that this post may reach some of our still honest government agencies and maybe they could take action against these people.

The fate of 400 talented Filipinos, people that are only trying to earn an honest living in their own country, hangs in the balance. Please, we need your support.

Enough is enough. We’re taking the stand.

By an anonymous writer from iweb

I reposted this from another blog, I am not the author of this blog post, pero ito masasabi ko… if there is no law on pornography, then I see nothing wrong in what they do. Next thing na masasabi ko from an Internet marketing point of view, since target market naman nito, hindi naman mga taga Philippines, kadali lang ma-block ang Philippine-based IP addresses. So no one in the Philippines can see the site. So wala nang problem ‘di ba?

I decided to time my actual reboot. I was running on one of my servers this setup:

• Intel Pentium 4, 2.4GHz with 512KB cache.
• 2GB Memory
• 80GB UDMA Hard Disk
• LAMP setup running cPanel

And I decided to ping my services and check each one every 30 seconds as the server reboots.

• 2 minutes - Server is up but Apache is down.
• 2 minutes 30 seconds - Apache is up. MySQL is still down.
• 5 minutes - MySQL is up.

So clients with static websites should be happy already after in less than 3 minutes. Websites dependent on MySQL will have to wait 5 minutes in the reboot. And with the rising popularity of CMS packages like Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and forums like phpBB, IPB, SMF and vBulletin and all other dynamic websites may get them irritated and forced to call you. The more clients you have, the more possible irritated client call you may get. Assuming you get a client complaining every 15 seconds, in the 5 minute downtime, you will have about 1,200 complains.

Does this happen in reality? Well I really don’t know. I current have about 400+ clients and during reboot, although I get a client complaining every 15 seconds via text, phone, SMS and email, they are usually just from 3 to 5 clients complaining and following up every 15 seconds.

Additional note: Most of the time I say I have 99% uptime, as do many hosting companies do. If they ask why you were down and you said you have 99% uptime, how do you defend that? I believe 99% uptime can always be viewed monthly of even annually. If you do the math, even with 3 whole days down within a year, and the rest of the year the server was up. You still get 99% uptime. But of course you would never want that to happen. And it is nice to spread your downtime to a few minutes scattered all throughout the year. S**t happens, even big companies get downtime, and it will all boil down to customer support, damage control and value added services that keep them stay. If you have larger amounts of capital for expansion, better back up systems will keep people happier and stay.

As I mentioned my 2007 SEO New Years Resolution in my SEO blog, I basically said I will not concentrate on sales and rather on building up my business process systems. As growth happens, and adding in more clients without a good foundation just makes things more complicated. I am no business management major and started a career first as a Chemist. And even it I have been running a business since 1997, I still consider myself a business newbie.

Since 1997 and the line of services have grown from plain web design to domain name registrations, web hosting, web design and development and internet marketing where my clients now include 400+ domain name registration clients, 280+ web hosting clients, 50+ web design and development clients and 5+ internet marketing clients through SEO. Something that I believe is not impressive at all considering I still have a job and have been doing this for quite some time.

Unfortunately, with the large amount of competition, prices cannot be brought up that high to a level where I would decide to live on my business alone. I still work and is still dependent on working for the man. But with the amount of clients, adding more is just confusing. Thus this is where I am dedicating my 2007 to my business processes.

Project Management and Collaboration - I had the opportunity to play around with some project management software from previous jobs and other contractual work as well as using my own installations of dotProject, Basecamp, QuickBase, and others. Although all seem to have some strengths, they all do not seem to be sufficient enough for my purposes. I thought of making my own, but the ratio of money I make to time to make my own may not be a wise decision if there might be the right tool fit for me. Right now, I am considering on checking the power of:

• Achivevo
• ACollab
• eGroupWare
• more.groupware
• phpGroupWare
• Streber
• WebCollab

Customer Relations Management - I was looking into two CRM software: SugarCRM and VTiger. Based on research many forums, I have seen people say SugarCRM runs better and is more stable. But I have also read that SugarCRM’s main power comes in add-on modules that are not free. Right now, I am going to try VTiger and give it a shot and see how it goes. And their software seems to be very promising, and is excited about it.

Accounting, Asset Management Software and Inventories - These sound like tools for the rich who have a lot of money and assets. Well actually not, since in any business you have to deal with accounting and taxes you pay the government. Cheating taxes is the great thing you should never do and the best way to minimize taxes to know what you need to do. A consultant is always good to have that specializes in tax deductions. As for software, I am considering on looking more into Quickbooks. As for Asset Management Software, this pertains not only to equipment but with people as well and should work hand-in-hand with overall operations and project management. With the size on company I have, I do not see the need for it right now, but it should be something I am aware of that I may need for the future. Right now, I eyed on any good Asset Management Software and most are really intended for large companies and can be very expensive. I have seen a cheap one by AyaNova, although their website seems to be a bit suspicious. With their old website for AyaNova CE 1.9.4.4 looks better than the new next generation AyaNova V.3. The next generation version looks like a cheap website make by some kid learning how to make websites.