Just looks like an online reseller to me. Especially when you look at their yearly accounts, good enough for them but I seriously doubt they have their own infrastructure.
http://www.endole.co.uk/company/SC390957/ceejay-software-limited
The US is definitely not trusted. 
I've personally taken the view of not trying to offer a service like this, or pretending to be big enough to offer it.
The client will eventually catch you out, It's better to be upfront with them that you provide x/y/z and another provider will offer q/r/s instead.
Cloud@Cost looked amazing on paper, yet many of us from experience have shunned them (rightly so) I would encourage you to trial/test out different providers VMs before going anywhere near offering them to a customer.
@scottalanmiller said
It's not, really. Because it runs on KVM you can always take a backup and restore to any hardware with KVM without doing a P2V and you can always to a P2V to disparate hardware. So there isn't any lock in.
Ok, but the Scale model says you don't need to know how to do that. It's entire selling point is simplicity and ease of use.
Can't remember off the top of my head, I'll order one just for curiosity.
@Carnival-Boy said in Your Time Is Valuable:
I get frustrated when I'm paying a consultant $1000 a day to sit and watch something install or download.
It's not a bad consultant generally, it's a bad understanding of the relationship.
This is the fallacy of businesses understanding how to use technical labour. They want to pay for the person to be giving 100% of their time and attention to task X. Even though task X has 0 business impact (Setting up a new server for example) so a lot of consultants do sit on their hands because the client wants a physical person in the room doing the job a lot of the time.
I completely agree with you it is wrong but I'm hearing it from project managers for IT services all the time, the client wants it.
Now, the client has not seen how the right way of doing IT works so they don't know of the alternative but consultancy done right can be very cost effective but until the businesses learn to manage the relationship consultants will continue to do 1 job per day, when they can sit on their hands installing something like server 2012.
This is why the MSP model looks so good because you get fixed rate, many tasks and other things. When really it is not.
Actually, I wonder if I should hire friendly actors, pack them off to site, keep engineers offsite remotely to do the real work and the actors would cost less than having an engineer.
It's literally a holding hand exercise. Some tasks have to be done on site yes but for most IT things these days?...It's a joke.
Another amazing one, consultant pulling a high per hour rate, offers to change the graphics cards in desktop machines....the client feels that he is doing them a favour but then the bill for the extra hour comes in. Or they could have had a desktop tech (£50 an hour) versus a level 3 consultant.
@IRJ said in The Four Things That You Lose with Scale Computing HC3:
If there is one thing I've learned in IT, go with reliability over cost everyday of the week. Even thousands of dollars is minimal when you are in the heat of having critical systems go down.
But sometimes you pay for the perception of reliability at a higher price.
Why wouldn't they? Windows Phone is currently irrelevant because of the app eco-system.
If the developers won't come to the phone...then bring the apps to the phone.
I personally much prefer the Windows hand-set style to IOS but the lack of apps I use routinely stops me going there.
And if they can bring the mac app store apps to Windows, that'll only make it even better for Windows users.
@travisdh1 said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@Minion-Queen said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
I just looked it up. I have talked to about 175 restaurants over the last 4 years. Usually they need an hour of our time to put up Access Points. That's it. Any aspect of IT is not something they worry about. Small town single location least of all. Sure once in awhile one will call to ask a quick question. But Staples is cheaper and they aren't paid by their customers because of IT stuff. They are paid to cook food. IT is the lowest thing on the list.
One of the biggest chains we talked to (international and over 400 locations world wide). They have an IT department, 1 guy can handle it all. He calls on us for consultations for infrastructure upgrades. But one guy can handle 400 locations and he isn't even full time IT. He also handles new product purchasing (choosing new craft beers for locations etc).
I was going to do a public wifi system for one of the local restaurants. Planned to get 3 APs in and configured in 2 hours at most, and with Ubiquiti the entire quote was $500. Would've covered the entire place, and most likely the parking lot as well.
Instead of me spending an evening putting this stuff in, the local cable company did it for free. Of course they only put a single AP in, so only about 1/2 of the restaurant actually has a signal, with 1/3 of the space actually having a usable signal. Yeah, great advertising for your cable company, especially when someone like me realizes that runs on a DSL connection (really, what were they thinking?)
Hmmm.
In some spaces, I wonder what the cost of a Ubiquiti access point is and offering a free managed wifi service? In exchange for a captive portal with advertising potentially...
@aaron said in Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for Q2 2016:
Hey guys. As an IT person for Backblaze, I wanted to share our latest data on hard drives in our environment. There's a handful or so spinning disks in the farm
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-failure-rates-q2-2016/
Raw data is available there too.
BackBlaze B2 is now my main choice of backup targets for data which can leave the UK.
Keep it up!
Their RMM uses an install based console, why not a web browser console?
I'll give it a week for a few to dive into it.
@scottalanmiller said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@Breffni-Potter said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@travisdh1 said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@Minion-Queen said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
I just looked it up. I have talked to about 175 restaurants over the last 4 years. Usually they need an hour of our time to put up Access Points. That's it. Any aspect of IT is not something they worry about. Small town single location least of all. Sure once in awhile one will call to ask a quick question. But Staples is cheaper and they aren't paid by their customers because of IT stuff. They are paid to cook food. IT is the lowest thing on the list.
One of the biggest chains we talked to (international and over 400 locations world wide). They have an IT department, 1 guy can handle it all. He calls on us for consultations for infrastructure upgrades. But one guy can handle 400 locations and he isn't even full time IT. He also handles new product purchasing (choosing new craft beers for locations etc).
I was going to do a public wifi system for one of the local restaurants. Planned to get 3 APs in and configured in 2 hours at most, and with Ubiquiti the entire quote was $500. Would've covered the entire place, and most likely the parking lot as well.
Instead of me spending an evening putting this stuff in, the local cable company did it for free. Of course they only put a single AP in, so only about 1/2 of the restaurant actually has a signal, with 1/3 of the space actually having a usable signal. Yeah, great advertising for your cable company, especially when someone like me realizes that runs on a DSL connection (really, what were they thinking?)
Hmmm.
In some spaces, I wonder what the cost of a Ubiquiti access point is and offering a free managed wifi service? In exchange for a captive portal with advertising potentially...
We've totally thought about that and our guess is... worthless. But, you never know. But it would be hard to got get confused with the ISP.
It depends on the venue and who you are targeting.
If I go into a conference centre which is aimed at businesses and said "here's a bunch of APs on loan, you already have the cabling, we'll put it in, all we ask is users fill in a captive portal which has our branding on it"
Compared with the cost of traditional advertising which is really high price for low return, I wonder how targetted things like that would work...
The clue is in the word social media, if people don't talk about your content, it won't go anywhere. Whether that's likes, comments, shares, if it's just a let's drop a ton of money and look at the view count climb, that's not the way to do it.
It seems a bit too much like the Spiceworks model.
Give away a free app but make it compulsory to join the community/get adverts.
I'll try the product in a lab but I'm a bit wary of it.
@JaredBusch said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
Remember that a MSP is but one type. Going consultant is a completely different model.
And far far more effective if you want to provide skilled IT solutions to businesses.
@IRJ said in Facebook Ads:
One problem with Facebook ads is you get no unity in the interface. You are not really offered targeting like that on mobile, and you have to know where to look for it on desktop.
https://www.facebook.com/business/help/162528860609436
Namely power editor.
@StrongBad said:
I assume that using a fake email will work? Or just a spam account.
Ha, the worst nightmare of these marketing products. Fake data.
"Look we have 1 million trackable leads!"
"Um...they are @zoo.com addresses"
@guyinpv said
But I don't see why there is an "argument" at all? What is the argument?
Quite frankly, I don't understand why there is an argument about these definitions in the first place. The whole world is in sales. If you do "work", that means other people pay you for stuff, therefore you are in sales, you have to sell your services first and foremost.
As I said earlier.
If you cook food once in your life, are you a chef?
If you play an instrument once, are you a musician?
The really GOOD sales guys, the guys who do a lot for us, sales is their career, their profession, something they do practice and hone like a good tech.
How could you compare someone who bakes a cake once to a "baker" who does it day in, day out as their main profession?
That's why I'm getting hung up on the definition because it's wrong to label someone an X based on something they do little of.
I missed this...
Should there be an offers page as a sticky topic with links to threads like this?
@Aaron-Studer said:
@scottalanmiller I went around and around with them yesterday, and they said $50/month was the minimum for all packages.... Maybe the person on chat was confused.
I've had that before, Switch to emails, put it in writing, then they'll relent. Rackspace are terrible for hard-upsells.
https://mangolassi.it/post/76551
If you wanna see an epic screw up, read the first 2-3 replies.