daverea.com

On occasion, when I’m presented with a few minutes of computing time not previously consumed by my to-do list, I like to poke around the web development scene. It’s been a long while since I’ve done any real web development – I fear all the CSS and PHP savvy I so painstakingly developed might even be on its way to obsolescense. Not that I have any time to get into the nuts and bolts these days, anyway!

Today, presented with the aforementioned “few minutes”, I figured I’d check out the hosting scene. I’ve been super-happy with AngryHosting (where daverea.com is hosted), so I haven’t had much of an occasion of late to go shopping in this area.

After visits to Angryhosting and Rackspace, I headed over to 1and1.com – and was very disappointed by what I found:

On the right, we have 1and1′s “Windows VPS” – which is their virtual private server product – adorned with a photograph of a polished professional holding an expensive ultraslim notebook. On the left, we’re presented with their Linux VPS … a virtual server that’s surely used by plenty of businesses for mission-critical applications … but it’s flanked by an image of a scrubby-looking guy in a tee shirt and ballcap, surrounded by piles of some manner of clutter.

Considering that Linux has managed to achieve about 50% market share in the web server arena (according to Netcraft, January 2007) and is the OS choice for over 77% of the top-500 published supercomputers in the world (according to this list), I think it’s probably safe to venture a claim that Linux is not just for scrubs. Sure, there are plenty of Mountain-Dew-drinking, techno-background-music, stereotypical late-night coders out there in the Linux world (I should know, I’ve been there) – probably about as many as there are stereotypical FPS or RPG gamers in the Windows world. To look at 1and1′s images alone, one might conclude that Linux is the choice for the world’s “un”professionals, while Windows Server 2003 is what the grownups use.

Whatever hosting business I might have thrown their way, 1and1 has officially lost. You don’t earn customers – and their loyalty – by depicting them distastefully (at least in a relative sense) in your marketing materials. This same attitude (on my part) is probably why I respond so poorly to media ads that focus on the product’s users, and not on the merits of the product itself. The approach is fundamentally distracted – but for some marketing reason inexplicable to an engineer like me, it works.

The bottom line, from my perspective, is this: it’s a server. The true customers (IT professionals and managers) arent’ giving 1and1 their hard-earned cash to make a fashion statement, they want a product that meets their needs. So rather than putting two nearly-identical bulleted lists in front of them, whose products seem only to be differentiated by the name at the top and the image in the corner, how about selling each product on its merits? Linux is every bit as “professional” and “enterprise-grade” a solution as the Windows VPS is (some, including myself, would say more so) – so at least give us some indication you recognize that.

PS – And where the hell is the Tux, people? If windows gets a logo, can’t you put our mascot on display too? OK, I’m really done now.