The onboarding process to become a part of the SoftLayer’s Community Development (Catalyst) team is pretty rigorous, and traveling to Dallas from Amsterdam for the training made it even more intense. In short order, I learned about the roots of the Catalyst program and why SoftLayer is so interested in investing in helping startups succeed. I got the low-down on the hundreds of companies that are taking advantage of the program right now, and I was inspired by the six incredible people who focus exclusively on the Catalyst program at SoftLayer … And Big Tex:

When the whirlwind week of orientation and training came to an end, I came to a solid conclusion: I am working at SoftLayer for a reason. I believe SoftLayer has the most kick-ass global on-demand technology platform out there, and our focus on innovation and automation is reflected in everything we do. On top of that, we give that platform to startups to help springboard their success. I get to work with a community of world-changers. Needless to say, that’s an amazing conclusion to come to.

As a member of the Catalyst team in EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa), I can provide signficant resources to entrepreneurs who are building awesome new applications and technologies that are making a difference locally, regionally and globally. Anna Bofill Bert and I work out of SoftLayer’s Amsterdam office, and we are fully dedicated to helping startup and developer communities in our region.

As a review exercise and a way to educate the audience that may be unfamiliar with Catalyst, I thought I’d bullet out a few of the main ideas:

What is Catalyst?

The SoftLayer Catalyst Startup Program provides:

• A generous monthly hosting credit toward dedicated, cloud or hybrid compute environments for a FULL YEAR (Ideal for dev-ops/next generation startup compute applications who want high performance from the start).
• Direct connection to highest level programming team at SoftLayer — Our Innovation Team. Participating companies get help and advice from the people that are writing the book on highly scalable, global infrastructure environments.
• Connection to the SoftLayer Marketing and PR Team for help getting spreading the word around the world about all the cool stuff participating startups are doing.

We reach startups by listening to them and meeting needs that all of them express. We are telling the SoftLayer story, networking, making friends, drinking too much and travelling like mad. In the course of a month, we went to Lean Start Up Machine in Rotterdam, Structure Europe in Amsterdam, Pioneers Festival in Vienna, HowToWeb in Bucharest and we managed to complete a quick tour of startup communities in Spain.

Like our peers on the US team, we partner with incubators and accelerators to make sure that when startups look for help getting started, they also find SoftLayer. We’re already working with partners like Springboard, Seedcamp, GameFounders, Startup Sauna, the INLEA Foundation and Tetuan Valley, and the list of supported communities seems to grow daily. When the portfolio companies in each of these organizations are given access to the Catalyst program, that means SoftLayer’s Catalyst customer base is growing pretty phenomenally as well.

What I actually like most about how we help startups is the mentorship and office hours we provide participating companies as well. SoftLayer was founded by ten guys in a living room in 2005, and we’ve got hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue as of 2012. That success is what the SoftLayer team is excited to share insights about.

Hustling is a major part of startup culture, so it’s only fitting that I feel like I had to hustle through this blog to get all of my thoughts down. Given that SoftLayer EMEA is a bit of a startup itself, I’m happy to be practicing what we preach. If you’d like more information about Catalyst or you want to apply, please feel free to hit me up: esampson@softlayer.com

We want to be part of your company’s success story.

-@EmilyBlitz

*Note: As an homage to Big Tex after the fire, we referred to our meeting as the “Global Catalyst Summit with Big Tex” at the Texas State Fair. We hope to see you back in action in 2013, Big Tex!

Don’t worry … it’s really quit simple. If you can use FTP (File Transfer Protocol), you can handle this bit of server management. Depending on the exact problem, we might instruct you to free up space by removing files in one of the following directories:

• /var/log
• /usr/local/cpanel
• /usr/local/apache/logs
• /usr/local/apache/domlogs

The reason these directories are usually overlooked is because they are not accessible by normal FTP users — users who only upload website content. When you upload website content to the server via FTP, the FTP user is limited to the directory structure for that website. Directories starting with “/var” and “/usr” cannot be accessed by these non-root users (The “root” user can access anything). And while root is a powerful user, for the sake of security, it is not normally allowed to log in over FTP because FTP is not secure … That’s where SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol) comes in.

Most FTP clients support SFTP, so you don’t have to learn a new environment to securely access any file on the server. Every FTP client is different, but I’ll illustrate with FileZilla because it’s free and available on Mac, Windows and Linux. If you don’t already have an FTP client, I highly recommend FileZilla. Because there are a few ways to use FileZilla to get an SFTP connection, I can share different options for you to try:

Quick Connect

The Quick Connect bar is the quickest way to connect to your server. Start FileZilla and look immediately under the toolbar for the Quick Connect bar:

Enter the hostname (IP address or domain name), “root” in the Username field, the root password in the Password field, and “22″ in the port field. Remember, port 22 is for SFTP, the same as SSH. Click the Quickconnect button to connect.

Using the Site Manager

The Site Manager lets you save your login details. Start FileZilla and you’ll see the following:

To open the Site Manager, click the left-most icon in tool bar or go to File >> Site Manager in the menu.

Enter an IP address or domain name for your server in the Host field, and select “SFTP” as your protocol. You’ll enter the root user’s login information, and you’re ready to connect by clicking the “Connect” button or you can click the “OK” button to save and close the dialog box.

If you just saved your settings and the Site Manager is not open, click the Site Manager icon again. From there, you can select the site under the “Select Entry” box, and you just have to click “Connect” to initiate the SFTP connection with your saved settings.

If you see a pop-up that warns of an “Unknown host key,” clicking the “Always trust this host, add this key to the cache” option will prevent this interruption from showing in the future. Once you click “OK” to complete the connection, your FileZilla screen should look like this:

Notice the “Remote site” section on the middle right of the FileZilla screen:

This area in FileZilla is the directory and file listing of the server. Navigate the server’s file structure here, and click “/” to access the top of the folder structure. You should see the “/usr” and “/var” directories, and you can explore the filesystem to delete the files technical support recommended to create space!

Message Log

If you have a problem connecting to your server by FTP or SFTP, the open area below the Quickconnect bar is the Message Log. If you can copy and paste this text into a ticket, you’ll help technical support troubleshoot your connection problems. Below is an example log of a successful FTP session:

Status: Connecting to server.example.com...
Response:   fzSftp started
Command:    open "root@server.example.com" 22
Command:    Trust new Hostkey: Once
Command:    Pass: **********
Status: Connected to server.example.com
Status: Retrieving directory listing...
Command:    pwd
Response:   Current directory is: "/root"
Command:    ls
Status: Listing directory /root
Status: Calculating timezone offset of server...
Command:    mtime ".lesshst"
Response:   1326387703
Status: Timezone offsets: Server: -21600 seconds. Local: -21600 seconds. Difference: 0 seconds.
Status: Directory listing successful

And here’s an example of a failed connection:

Status: Resolving address of example.com
Status: Connecting to 192.0.43.10:21...
Error:  Connection timed out
Error:  Could not connect to server
Status: Waiting to retry...
Status: Resolving address of example.com
Status: Connecting to 192.0.43.10:21...
Error:  Connection attempt interrupted by user

If you have any questions, leave them in a comment below. Enjoy your new-found SFTP powers!

-Lyndell

SoftLayer customers were given two internal tickets notifying them if they were to be affected, and when those tickets were created, the ticket system would have then sent an email to the admin user on that account. Additionally, our portal notification system was updated to show details about the window, and we created new threads in our customer forums to provide regular, centralized updates. We went as far as taking a few calls and meetings with customers to talk about their concerns with the maintenance timing and length because we know that any downtime is bad downtime in the world of hosting.

Saturday night, we had extra support on staff online, and our social media ninja was awake and letting the world know step by step what we were doing with real time status alerts. We wanted to be extremely transparent during the entire process. This was not a maintenance we could avoid, and we tried to roll as many different things that needed work into this maintenance without making a roll back impossible.

The maintenance itself went well, and as planned, most items that were taken down were back online well before the window ended. We ran into a few snags in bringing all of the CloudLayer CCIs back online, but even with those delays for a few customers, the work was completed by the time we committed to.

Now for the customer experience aspect. From reading various tweets from our customers, it seems like we should/could have done a few things even better: Been more proactive, sent standard email, attempted phone calls, etc.

While some of these options may be considered, not all are feasible. If you are one of the customers that tweeted, has blogged, is planning on tweeting, is planning on blogging or believes we’re being anything less than genuine and transparent on our social media platforms, I want to hear from you.

Please comment on this blog, tweet me @skinman454, email me skinman@softlayer.com, call me at 214.442.0592, come by our office and visit.

Whatever it takes, just contact me. I can’t put myself in your shoes and feel your pain on things like this unless we have a chance to talk about it. I look forward to our conversation.

-Skinman

When we get tickets from our customers oftentimes we’ll have to do extensive research to get to the bottom of an issue. As much as I’d like to claim to be a walking tech-dictionary, I’m a horrible liar. Google is a good friend to us, and points us to a wealth of resources. Around the internet there are plenty of white-papers, how-to’s, forums, and tech blogs. Where this gets interesting is when Google points us to a location hosted here at SoftLayer!

I look at this as an example of things going full circle. Customers helping us help customers. The beauty of the tech industry is there really are no trade secrets. The open-source community is great about assisting each other, and those who lean towards Microsoft have tons of tech forums, Technet and MS KB articles. Being able to host many of these types of sites is an honor to me, because we’re doing our part in assisting the IT Community as a whole.

-Matthew

I track growth in domain names every week. I think it indicates how quickly new small businesses are being formed. After all, what business can you think of today (large or small) that does not have some sort of web site? I can’t think of any. One of the things on any small business start up checklist today is the web site. Hence, most all of them register a domain name.

So what’s been happening with growth in domain names? Lately, it’s not too pretty.

With all the talk lately about stimulating the economy, one of the best ways to do this would be to encourage the formation of new businesses.

Some would argue that we need to fix the credit market mess to help banks be able to lend to small business startups. This couldn’t be further from the truth. How many small businesses do you know that started with a commercial loan from a bank? I cynically say that banks do not want to loan to businesses until the business can survive without need of a bank, and that was true even before the credit crisis. This was certainly true in SoftLayer’s case – when the founders were preparing for launch in late 2005, there wasn’t a bank anywhere that would touch the SoftLayer business plan. What I’m saying is that the credit crisis isn’t that much of a barrier to small business startups. Passionate entrepreneurs will find a way to get going.

But all the passion to start one’s own business doesn’t go very far in the face of the real barriers to starting a business. One of the real barriers that an entrepreneur must overcome is tax issues. Do they begin as a sole proprietor? A partnership? An LLC? An “S” Corp? Should they incorporate? All of them have different tax implications. All of them have to deal with either income taxes at the personal level or corporate level. Some have to deal with self-employment taxes. Others must deal with 941 taxes. Then there are state and local tax issues, such as the margin tax if you’re in Texas. And don’t forget sales taxes and property taxes either.

One of the strategies that allowed the Internet to cement itself in our society during the 1990’s was this: just let it develop without taxing it. Without that burden, the Internet took off like wildfire.

Ergo, if we’d like a bunch of new small businesses to get going, let’s ease up on the tax burden on new startups. This would cost the government hardly any money at all. Think about it – businesses that don’t yet exist do not pay any taxes. Workers that are not yet employed do not pay any taxes. Currently unemployed workers do not pay income taxes, except for a pittance on unemployment benefits. So allowing new businesses to form and employ workers and transact business “tax-free” for a defined start-up period would produce an EXPLOSION of small business startups.

How long should this tax free period be? Per the SBA, if a new business survives 4 years, they have a great shot at surviving long term. So why not give all new business startups a tax holiday for four years as they establish themselves? Can you imagine how big the tax base would grow as these healthy, strong 4-year- old businesses begin paying taxes?

It seems that the biggest issue facing our new President and his administration is how to pay for all the things they’d like to do. Let me suggest that expanding the tax base is the best way to grow government revenues, as opposed to increasing the rates on the current tax base. Allowing a flood of new businesses to take root and grow our tax base may be the best way to fund our growing public budgets.

Naturally, SoftLayer would be more than happy to assist these new businesses with our enterprise class data center outsourcing services so that the new businesses focus on their business plan – not their IT overhead.