mattheaton.com

I had a customer that had complained about an issue directly to me via email. He was surprised that I was brisk with him. He felt that I didn’t give him the time and attention that he needed to properly resolve his problem. He was right and he was wrong. I have been doing web projects since 1996 in many various forms. During that time I have personally answered more than 50,000 email support issues. I never want to answer another support email for the rest of my life Thank goodness we have 60 other support engineers that are awesome at answering our customers questions. Support engineers aren’t burdened with accounting issues, or marketing issues, etc. They simply need to give their full attention to the customer.

I like to make myself available to our customers, but my emphasis is on growing the company. If I wanted to have fun all day at work I would do system administration, and do perl programming for 25% of my time. Unfortunately for me I am a MUCH better marketing guy than I am a perl programmer. I love growing Bluehost, but sometimes I just want to tinker. The problem is Bluehost needs me to grow the company and frankly that is what I do best. If you really want to succeed let people do what they do best, and you do what you do best. For the lucky ones they are one and the same and that should be the goal of everyone to combine those two things.

Do what you do best, and let others deal with their responsibilities without constant interference. That is one of the ingredients for success in my book!

Thanks,

Matt Heaton / President Bluehost.com

Its that time of year again where I write why I love my Mac(s) so much and why I think EVERYONE should use one. I got excited today when Apple announced their new 24″ IMacs. I like Imacs because they are small and do just what I need for a desktop machine. I wasn’t always a Mac fan, in fact I bought my first Mac only last March. I WISH I had done it sooner!

Lets face it, we live in a windows world. I wish we didn’t, but the cold hard truth is that everyone normally runs some form of windows. I knew that the newest Macs all run both Mac OSX and Windows so I thought if it didn’t work out I could just run windows on it. I haven’t booted into Windows XP except to let one of my kids play games on it in months. When I bought my first Mac I did it because I wanted to test Bluehost more thoroughly on a Mac. It was very painful for the first few weeks. Nothing worked as I thought it should. I could barely install any software. Then after diligent work on my part and a few weeks it all just clicked. I could NEVER go back.

Productivity matters! I can’t be fiddling around with Windows every three months when it gets infected with the latest malware or the registry gets screwed up. My time matters to me, and the last thing I want to do is reinstall windows only to have it gradually get slower every week I use it. For all those people out there who know exactly what I am talking about (everyone), Macs seem to have completely solved this problem for me. I love the fantastic designs of the Mac hardware, but the operating system is shear bliss to work with (If you take the time to learn it!).

Not all of the Windows problems are Microsoft’s fault. The myriad of hardware and software to support would put a strain on any OS. WAIT, that’s not true. Linux supports a huge assortment of hardware and it is orders of magnitude more stable than Windows XP. Basically I am telling all you Windows users out there (And I KNOW I will get tons of hate mail about this post ) that you should switch now and save yourself from the slow lumbering beast that is Windows Vista. My time is worth far more than the $300 I will save buying a PC instead of a Mac over the life of my computer. I type this as I reinstall (Again!) Windows XP on my wife computers since it is so infected with Malware/Spyware that it is completely unusable. Her Mac will be here in 7 days!

OK, Let me have it!

Matt Heaton / President Bluehost.com

A while back I had a conversation with a friend about what Bluehost would do if someone “huge” entered the market and starting competing directly with us. My friend’s specific thought at the time was that Google or Microsoft would enter the personal/small business hosting market and steal all of our business. What was my response? It was what any self respecting business owner would say to that kind of statement. Bring it on!

Hosting is ultra competitive. I think it interesting when people think that these huge companies could do what it takes to satisfy users at the ultra competitve price and service levels that our users demand. Have you ever called Google? Can you call Google? Their adsense department won’t even let you call them. Google is a complete joke on the customer service side of things. They are the pinnacle of arrogance with regard to the customer. It is obvious that they think you should be grateful for just doing business with them. Microsoft is a different story. They are completely profit driven and it shows, but they are also too big to be nimble enough to handle the custom requests of individual users.

So do we have competition? You bet we do! We compete with the best of them, but they don’t include companies like Yahoo, Google, etc. Yahoo and Google have hosting products, but based on what they have Bluehost and our peers like Ipower, Dreamhost, Lunarpages and others don’t have much to worry about.

Maybe I am the arrogant one? If so ,when Bluehost goes out of business would any of you out there give me a job? I am a nice guy – really!

Thanks,
Matt Heaton / President Bluehost.com