As soon as I heard the news on Thursday of Steve Jobs’ resignation as CEO of Apple Inc, I knew it would re-shape my day.

Sure enough, it did. While I was already scheduled to write two stories for CSO Online, Crikey soon commissioned a Jobs piece. And in the afternoon I did two radio spots. This is one of them.

Tom Elliott was filling in for 3AW’s drive presenter Derryn Hinch, and did a perfectly competent job.

The audio is ©2011 Radio 3AW Melbourne Pty Ltd, of course, but it hasn’t been posted online by 3AW and this does act as a nice plug for them.

The cloud has levelled the playing field for business, says Amazon’s chief technology officer Dr Werner Vogels. Ten years ago, a start-up needed $5 million. Now, Vogels says, it’s “just $50,000 and a coffee shop around the corner”.

Vogels was in Sydney last week for a promotional event for the cloud-based Amazon Web Services (AWS). In a wide-ranging interview for this week’s Patch Monday podcast he discussed the cloud from both a business and a technical perspective, and responded to reports that Amazon may soon open an Australian datacentre and that the Sony PlayStation Network hack was launched from AWS servers.

You can listen below. But it’s probably better for my stats if you listen at ZDNet Australia or subscribe to the RSS feed or subscribe in iTunes.

There is a slight audio problem for the first few minutes of the interview, but it’s worth persisting.

(The conference room tables were rubbing against each other as Vogels moved his hands, elbows on table. It wasn’t very noticeable in the room, but the sound was transmitted mechanically up into the recorder via the tripod it was sitting on. I did notice after a few minutes and fixed things, so you won’t have to endure it for long.)

Please let me know what you think. Comments below. We accept audio comments too. Either Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733.

Yesterday I was the guest on Phil Dobbie’s BTalk podcast at BNet Australia, a CBS Interactive masthead. The topic? Information security for small business.

I covered quite a bit of stuff fairly quickly. The state of anti-banking malware. Virus protection for smartphones. Password management. Encrypting you hard drives. Mandatory data breach notification laws. And more.

You can see the podcast in its written context as a BNet blog post, A Security Breach is Only a Matter of Time. Or you can just listen below.

This podcast is ©2011 CBS Interactive.

You really have to wonder about PayPal. Every day they seamlessly process a squillion pissy little transactions from countless innumerate trailer-trash. Nice work. Then they ruin their reputation with Kafkaesque requests and oddly incompetent “service”. Like now.

“We need your help resolving an issue with your PayPal account,” they emailed me on 9 May. “We need a little more information regarding your organisation, since your PayPal account is registered as a charity or non-profit.” Huh?

As Gary Stark tweeted just now, “You, a non-profit? While that might not be your intention, it’s probably just about right.” That’s true enough. But I’m certainly not a charity or non-profit, I’m certainly not tax-exempt, and I’ve never claimed to be. I’m not even an “organisation”. And have never claimed to be.

By “a little more information” PayPal means photo ID, another document showing my address, a bank statement linking me to my bank account, confirmation that I’m not not a “politically exposed person”, and “organisation and payment information”, whatever that might be. But I’ve been travelling for the last fortnight and I’m not carrying all this stuff.

They’re also asking for one item I’m going to have trouble with. Proof of my tax-exempt status. For no such thing exists. As Leslie Nassar tweeted, “If you can’t prove you’re not who you’re not saying you aren’t, then no Internet Money for you.”

Back on 10 May I emailed service@paypal.com.au to ask why all this was happening. I told them that I’m an individual doing business as a sole trader, and have never claimed to be anything different. I received no response. Typical. My PayPal account is now “limited”. Which means frozen.

This morning I’ve contacted PayPal’s compliance team by both email and fax.

You are asking me to prove my tax-exempt charitable or non-profit status. Why? I am not tax-exempt, non-profit or charitable, and have never claimed to be. Never. An email to service@paypal.com.au on this matter dated 10 May went unanswered. Why? Your demand for proof of tax-exempt status does not include the option “But I am not!” Why? I do expect written answers to these “Why?” questions.

I’ll let you know what happens next. Meanwhile, do feel free to vent your own frustration at PayPal in the comments. I daresay I’m not alone here.

Priority Club is a loyalty scheme for hotels including InterContinental, Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn and others. So far, my experience has been frustrating.

I joined around a year ago because I sometimes stay at Holiday Inn properties. The other day I finally got around to making sure all my previous stays were listed on my account and earning loyalty points. It turns out that most of my stays aren’t eligible. Some loyalty.

First of all, they rejected one stay because it was back in July 2010. “The Terms and Conditions of the Priority Club® program states that adjustments to accounts will not be made more than 60 days after the statement date,” they emailed. Yet their website allows you to go to the effort of entering claims going back a year. And then have them rejected.

“As an additional courtesy to our members, we will try to research stays up to six months past the current date (rather than the statement date) for possible credit,” their email also said. “Unfortunately, the stay in Potts Point, Australia in July 2010 does not fall within these guidelines and is ineligible for credit.”

So it’s either 60 days or 6 months, depending on their… mood? I’m confused.

I emailed Priority Club to say this was… Well, I said, “Gee thanks. That really makes me feel welcome and that it was worth my time doing the paperwork.” Their reply said that the reason the July 2010 stay wasn’t eligible because it was too cheap. “You did not earn credits from the said stay as the room rate was steeply discounted,” the wrote. Indeed, it was a cheap lastminute.com.au Secret Hotel deal, where you only find out the name of the hotel once you’ve booked so their brand doesn’t get publicly associated with cheapness.

In order to get credit for your stay in any of our hotel chains, you must pay a qualifying rate. Qualifying rates include the Corporate Rate/Flex Rate, Best Breaks, Great Rates, AAA Rate, AARP Rate, Government Rates. The rates (including the 21-day advance purchase, weekend web savers and internet saver rate) offer a discount of up to 60% but also carry coding which automatically earns Priority Club credit.

On the other hand, the non-qualifying rates include the Industry Discount, Employee Discount, Internet Rate (third party website or pre-paid channel), Entertainment Rate, etc. Priority Club® Rewards does not issue credit for room rates that are discounted more than 30% off the hotel’s regular room rate.

So there you have it. Now I’m both disappointed and confused. Like who the hell pays full rates for hotels?

A final irritation was the mismatch between Priority Club’s friendly application form and the clumsy bureaucratese of their emails. That’s hardly unique to them, of course. So many businesses only apply the Magic Make-It-Clear-And-Interesting Communications Stick to marketing materials, not their routine workflow communications that customers end up seeing far more frequently. But it didn’t help.

If the embedded video doesn’t work, try over here.

Panellists were anthropologist Genevieve Bell, Intel Fellow at Intel Labs; Alistair Rennie, general manager of Lotus Software and WebSphere Portal at IBM’s Software Group; futurist Mark Pesce; and Adele Beachley, who is RIM’s managing director for Australia and New Zealand i.e. from BlackBerry Land. It was hosted by the ABC’s James O’Loghlin.

I was in the audience, invited specifically so I could ask a question. Indeed, I get one in at the end. You’ll see me in the front row with a silver MacBook Pro in my lap.

I found the whole thing fascinating. O’Loghin worked well as a host too, I reckon. But I was wondering why for a webcast we needed the full six-camera broadcast production style. Freemantle Media did a good job, don’t get me wrong. But it’s an expensive way of doing things. Oh well, it wasn’t my money…

Anyway, have a squizz and let me know what you think.

I’m reviewing the HTC Desire smartphone as part of the Telstra HTC Desire Social Review program.

Telstra has given 25 people, including me, a free HTC Desire handset as well as a bunch of credit on their Next G mobile network to provide “a mix of opinions and perspectives” on this so-called “superphone”.

Before we received our phones, we were asked to explain our expectations of the Desire. “We will be interested to compare this to your thoughts after the review,” said Telstra.

Here’s what I said:

HTC Desire is a “superphone”, eh? It should therefore integrate quickly and reliably into my workflows, and have the grunt to last a long working day. I reckon it could replace my laptop for staying in touch, coordinating my business and gathering media when I’m away from my desk. Android‘s meant to be “open”, so it should let me do things the way I want. I should beat my current Nokia N96 in every way.

Us reviewers will be using the hashtag #telstradesire so you can find our tweets, and Telstra will lead our discussions through a series of posts at Ben Bevins’ blog starting on Wednesday.

I’ve only just started to use the Desire. But here’s my initial impressions, along with a bit more information about what I hope to be able to do.

First up, despite the annoying hype about the Desire being an “iPhone killer” — why does everything have to be expressed in terms of mortal combat? — I won’t be comparing it with the iPhone. Mostly because I don’t have an iPhone. I also figure there’ll be other reviewers doing that particular comparison.

What I will be doing is seeing how much day-to-day work and play can be done on the Desire, leaving my MacBook Pro untouched.

Obviously there’s plenty the Desire won’t be suitable for, such as writing long articles and editing podcasts. But I’m guessing it’ll be fine for my extensive use of Twitter, quickly checking email and some routine web browsing. It’ll be interesting to see whether it can be used for lengthy reading sessions, managing my business through Basecamp, Kayako SupportSuite, Saasu for accounting, and WordPress and cPanel for the various websites I maintain.

I’ll also be seeing how good the camera is, for both stills and video.

I fired up the Desire, so to speak, on Friday and used it randomly for two days. My impressions?

1. The industrial design is good. The Desire sits neatly in the hand. The only annoyance is that I keep hitting the volume control with my left thumb. Maybe I’m holding it wrong.
2. There is no HTC synchronisation software for Mac, only Windows. Grrr. Have they just assumed that Mac owners will automatically get an iPhone and thrown in the towel?
3. The 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor is nominally four time as fast as the Dual ARM 9 264MHz in my N96, but the Desire feels much faster than that. Scrolling is fast, smooth and responsive, as is zooming in and out of web pages.
4. The built-in Twitter client, HTC Peep, didn’t seem capable of managing my heavy Twitter usage. I’ve installed the official Twitter for Android client and I’m much happier.
5. I’m so pleased to be back on the fast, reliable Next G network, rather than the shoddy Optus network through my current provider Virgin Mobile. Using the two networks side by side while on the train on Friday, Next G was there — even through some tunnels — while Optus dropped back back to 2G or even no connectivity at all in some railway cuttings.
6. I’m worried about battery life. Even with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and GPS turned off, it took just five hours for the battery level to drop to 50% when out and about yesterday. That’s a bunch of Twitter and occasional web browsing over drinks. Maybe I can manage the power better.
7. Browsing the Android Market is clear and simple, as is downloading and installing apps. Google Maps was the second download after Twitter for Android, and again the software is fast and responsive.
8. I’ve set up one email account to use IMAP to synchronise back to my own server at Prussia.Net. It only synchronises the Inbox, not the Sent mail. I moved an email to Trash, but it disappeared entirely. This doesn’t inspire confidence.

I’m about to travel across town for dinner, and I’ll play along the way. And tomorrow will be my first workday with the Desire. So to speak. That name is just so lame. I’m not sure whether I’ll migrate the rest of mye email just yet, but we’ll see how I go with everything else.

[Disclosure: I have been given a HTC Desire handset by Telstra free of charge to review. The comments expressed by me reflect my user experience and personal opinion.]

I’m off to America! Some tin-pot little IT start-up called Microsoft has invited me to visit their headquarters in Redmond, Washington (pictured) to find out what they’re doing about security, and in particular their Trustworthy Computing initiatives.

Now if you’re a crusty old network administrator like me, you may think that “Microsoft” and “security” in the same sentence is an oxymoron. A decade ago I was building Linux-based firewalls and, like so many people doing the same, I referred to Windows-based computers as “the targets”. And certainly the vast majority of the world’s malware is targeted at Windows.

But I’ve always though that the simplistic “Windows is bad, m’kay” was a bit, well, simplistic. Information security isn’t just about the technology, it’s also about people. Human factors are also the weakest link. And over the years I’ve found that people who throw around those tired platform-wars slogans usually aren’t up to date when it comes to the things they love to hate.

So, I’m off to Redmond later this month to spend three days with some of Microsoft’s engineers and developers, including briefing sessions with senior executives from Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Group.

There’s a lot to cover here, so what should I be looking at, do you think? The security of Windows Server, or Windows 7, or of Microsoft’s cloud services? Privacy issues? The fight against foreign governments, criminals and child abusers? Viruses and malware? Identity and authentication? What? You tell me!

What are some of the hard questions I should be asking?

Some of what I do will end up in a special edition of the Patch Monday podcast, and I’m also doing a “Letter from Redmond” for Crikey‘s “Letter from…” column. And I’ll be looking for more writing opportunities.

Dear Editors and Producers, is there anything you’d like me to research and write about? Please let me know if you’d like me to pitch some stories.

I’ll be flying out of Sydney on Monday 24 May, and will be in Redmond from Tuesday to Thursday that week, Seattle time. And yes, Microsoft is paying for the airfares, meals and accommodation, so there’s your journalistic disclosure.

[Photo: Microsoft's Redmond Campus, looking east, courtesy Microsoft Inc.]

Google, one of the world’s largest corporations, is in a trademark dispute with Australian web start-up Groggle. What’s the law here?

Groggle, based in Brisbane, is a “location-driven alcohol price comparison service”. It says its name is a play on words around the traditional Aussie slang “grog” for alcohol. But Google’s lawyers reckon their name infringes Google’s trademarks. Unless they reach an agreement by tomorrow it’ll end up being heard by IP Australia.

In the Patch Monday podcast this week, I chat with Cameron Collie, one of Groggle’s founders, and Kimberlee Weatherall, who teaches intellectual property law at the University of Queensland.

You can listen below. But it’s probably better for my stats if you listen at ZDNet Australia or subscribe to the RSS feed or subscribe in iTunes.

Please let me know what you think. Comments below. We accept audio comments too. Either Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733.

Are your data backups up-to-date? Are you sure? Have you tested them lately? Could your business survive an equipment failure, flood, fire or theft?

In the Patch Monday podcast this week, I take a look at backup options for small and SOHO businesses. Is it time to move beyond sticking a tape drive in your Windows Small Business Server? After all, terabyte hard drives are under $200, and cloud storage options are available for just a few dollars a month.

We hear from Sally McIntosh of PR firm Condiment Communications with her lack-of-backup horror story, and my mate Garth Kidd who does storage and backup stuff for the big end of town. He reckons it’s worth bringing this enterprise computing attitude to small business backups.

You can listen below. But it’s probably better for my stats if you listen at ZDNet Australia or subscribe to the RSS feed or subscribe in iTunes.

Please let me know what you think. Comments below. We accept audio comments too. Either Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733.

As I explained yesterday, the big cost in providing internet hosting is paying humans to provide support. However there are still some technical factors that affect the price, and that’s what we’re looking at today.

Most internet hosting customers would be familiar with the usual measures: the amount of storage space you get and the amount of data transfers (“bandwidth”) per month. Those raw measures of capacity are certainly important. You need enough capacity to meet your needs. But you also need to consider performance, reliability, scalability and flexibility.

Performance. The key issues here are whether you’re sharing a server or have your own, the performance of that server, and the performance of the network it’s connected to.

At the lower end of the market, shared web hosting means your website and mailboxes are sharing a computer with other customers — sometimes dozens, hundreds or even thousands. If you want a server computer just for your business, that’s called dedicated hosting. Obviously it costs more, but it does mean you have the computer’s total capacity. Other customers’ usage won’t affect your website. It also reduces the security risk.

There are other systems such as clustered hosting, where the load of many sites is spread across multiple computers, and virtual private servers, where it looks like you have a dedicated server but it’s being simulated — but that’s all outside the scope of this article.

Whether it’s shared or dedicated hosting, the server’s performance can make a difference. The apparent speed of your website will in part depend on the speed of the server’s hard drives and processors, the amount of memory (RAM) it has and so on, as well as the capacity of its network link. Cheap hosting providers may put many, many customers onto a relatively low-grade computer with poor network links. And a cheap data centre may provide less network capacity for a given number of customer websites.

Prussia.Net has been offering shared hosting with around 50 accounts and a total of 170 domains running on a relatively modest server with a Pentium 4 2.66GHz processor and 2GB of RAM. While this sounds small compared with a desktop computer, remember that servers don’t have to run a graphical interface. That said, this server is reaching capacity and that’s one of the factors that led us to review what we do. The server is in ServePath‘s data centre in San Francisco, which is provided with high-capacity data links to the internet.

Reliability. A system’s reliability is measured by its uptime, the percentage of time for which the system has been “up” and running. Sometimes it’s measured in the “number of nines”, for example “four nines” being 99.99% reliable.

Many hosting providers advertise 99% reliability, which sounds good until you realise that you could endure more that 7 hours of downtime per month and still be getting the service you’re paying for. That’s not good if those 7 hours take out a busy working day.

“Four nines” or 99.99% reliability is 4 minutes 23 seconds of downtime per month, and “five nines” or 99.999% reliability is a mere 26 seconds of downtime per month, or a little over 5 minutes in total per year.

Setting up such highly-reliable systems obviously takes engineering skills, planning and money.

Many hosting providers advertise 99% or 99.5% or 99.9% reliability, excluding “scheduled downtime” for systems maintenance. If you want higher reliability then you can expect to pay much, much more money. If a problem has to be fixed within five minutes, you can’t rely on someone responding to a complaint and then trying to work out how to fix things. Backup systems have to be set up in advance, with automated monitoring ready to switch everything over in the event of a failure.

Many hosting customers forget that even if their hosting server is, say, 99.9% reliable, the overall reliability of their website or email will depend on how their website has been built and what arrangements they’ve made for their web developer to be available to fix problems. The hosting server could still be 99.9% reliably serving out a broken website!

It’s also easy to forget that even if a hosting server is “guaranteed” to be 99.9% reliable, that may just mean you get your $29 monthly fee refunded if things go wrong. Again, not good if being offline for an hour means you’re losing hundreds of dollars.

Other hosting providers don’t specify an exact target reliability level, but simply take reasonable steps to keep things going. This is called “best effort” reliability. While “best effort” hosting is often quite reliable, there are no guarantees.

Prussia.Net’s data centre, ServePath promises a 10,000% Guaranteed®, 100% Uptime Service Level Agreement, which means that for every minute their network in unavailable they refund us 100 minutes’ worth of our monthly fees. However Prussia.Net itself offers only “best efforts” reliability, as we don’t have automated monitoring systems. In practice, we’ve experienced 133 minutes of unscheduled downtime in the last six months, which is about 99.95% reliability — but that’s more through good luck than planning.

Scalability. To give an overly-simply explanation, this is about how your internet hosting can cope with sudden increases in demand — for example if your website suddenly becomes vastly more popular than you expect, or there’s a sudden increase in email traffic. A cheap hosting provider might be running everything very close to full capacity, which means a sudden surge in traffic will cause everything to fall over.

There’s also a business angle to this. The hosting provider might offer a certain amount of base capacity, but anything over your pre-booked capacity might still be delivered — but at a vastly higher price than if you’d organised it in advance.

Hosting can also be provided “on demand” or, to use the current buzzword, though cloud computing. This is where the data centre automatically allocates more capacity as it’s needed, and just bills for usage. This is rapidly becoming the preferred method.

Prussia.Net’s hosting server is moderately loaded. We’ve coped with surges of email 10x their normal levels without problem. However this week we saw a massive spam surge at 32x normal levels and we struggled — although this was the biggest spam surge we’ve ever seen in more than a decade of operation. I’ll write more about that soon. I’m seriously considering just on-selling cloud services instead.

Flexibility. A computer can be configured any way you want. However to make it easier to sell its services a hosting provider will usually offer only a certain set of pre-defined options. This keeps the cost down, as staff just choose from a list. Some providers will be more willing to customise the set-up, but that will always be more expensive.

Prussia.Net has always been willing to customise a client’s hosting account however they want. Indeed, this was originally one of the key differentiators of our service. However this has meant keeping prices high.

You may well be looking at this and saying, “I’m a business manager. I don’t care about these technical details. I just want things to work.” What you’re looking for, then, is a “managed service”.

A hosting provider is really just renting out capacity on a computer or multiple computers in a data centre. Questions about what options are right for your business isn’t their concern. That’s the job of your CIO or your IT Manager. “But,” you say, “I’m a small business and I want someone else to figure this out.”

That’ll be the topic of the next article in this series, “IT support vs management vs consulting”".

Comments please. This is very much a first draft of my thoughts on this topic. If you have any questions or comments, please let me know.

Internet hosting prices are usually explained in terms of the amount of storage space you get and the amount of data transfers (“bandwidth”) per month. However the real cost factor is paying the humans who provide support.

Some technical factors do affect the price of hosting, and I’ll address those tomorrow in Internet hosting: the cost of reliability. But with storage and bandwidth prices always dropping, particularly when set up on a large scale, hosting is now so cheap that Google, say, or WordPress.com and many others can provide free hosting in exchange for advertising. Or in Google’s case with Gmail, monitoring your email to build a profile so they can target advertising at you.

No, the humans are the expensive bit, and the cost can vary dramatically depending on how that support is provided. Here’s just a few of the factors.

Response time. From the time you initiate a support request, how long is it until someone answers? A fast response means paying for people to be there, and if you want to guarantee that response time then you need spare people in case it suddenly gets busy.

Prussia.Net has been providing support for our internet hosting service with a target response time of one hour, but allowing it to be slower when things get busy.

Hours of service. Do you want support to be available 24/7? Even on public holidays? Then you’re paying for a team to work around the clock.

Prussia.Net has been providing support 24/7, 365 days a year.

Phone support? Or email and web support? Phone support is much more expensive to provide than support via email and the web. Phone support requires fast response times because clients don’t want to wait on hold, and staff who are good communicators. Phone support also ties up a staff member for the entire length of the phone call, whereas with email support they can fire off a suggested solution and then get on with something else while you try that out. With web and email support, you can also save time by sending a pre-written reply.

However phone support is interactive. Support staff can quickly ask a series of questions to clarify the problem. From the client’s point of view it’s often faster — especially if they don’t have the technical knowledge to write a clear, unambiguous support request.

Prussia.Net has been providing support via email and the web. However I’ve often ended up providing phone support anyway, which is outside our cost model.

Scope of support. Just how many things are the support staff expected to help you with? Say you were expecting an important email but it hasn’t arrived. There’s no fault with the hosting server, and the support staff can see the email sitting in your mailbox. Something’s wrong at your end. Is that now the end of the call? Or are they expected to figure out whether the problem is down to your internet connection or your Wi-Fi or your email program? If it’s your email program, are they expected to help you solve that problem? How many different email programs are they expected to understand? Just Microsoft Mail and Outlook? Apple Mail as well? Your iPhone? Other, less well-known systems?

Prussia.Net, as part of its internet hosting service at least, has in the past been a little vague about this point. In theory our contracted support provider is only meant to help you solve problems with the hosting server, not with the computers and networks your end.

Level of detail and customisation. When support staff send you a technical answer, do they link to appropriate documentation on the web, like a software manual? Send an outline procedure? Prepare detailed step-by-step instructions? What level of technical knowledge should they assume on your part?

Prussia.Net hasn’t had a consistent policy here, and I suspect it’s caused confusion.

Scale versus personalisation. A big support centre is better able to cope with sudden increases in demand, and can arrange to have common problems handled by less-experienced staff (see the next item). That reduces costs. They’re also more likely to have seen the same problem before and have a pre-written response. But the flipside is that you’ll rarely get the same person handling your requests. If the support centre keeps comprehensive notes that’s not so much of a problem, but keeping good notes takes time and time is money.

A big support centre probably won’t have any idea about your business and the way your computers have been set up, so unless you can explain that to them it’ll take a while to reach a common understanding. Conversely, a small support centre means that you’re dealing with the same set of people and after a while they’ll get to know you and your systems.

Prussia.Net’s support team is provided by Bobcares, an Indian firm which specialises in providing support services to more than 200 companies worldwide. Overall Bobcares has more than 300 engineers on staff and is responsible for supporting 3.5 million websites, but Prussia.Net’s needs are provided by a specific team of six people who handle us and a number of other clients — so you’ll tend to get the same people answering your questions. It’s a compromise.

Skill level of staff. 90% of support requests are a few common questions. The most cost-effective approach is to have less-experienced staff handle the initial contact (“first level support”), and only escalate it to more-experienced staff if it can’t be solved. First-level staff can also work from a set of scripted questions. If the scripts are written well, the staff members don’t necessarily need a technical understanding of what they’re asking.

Conversely, some providers have what’s sometimes called “business grade support”. With the most expensive providers, from the very start you’ll be speaking directly to a fully qualified and experienced network engineer. Not cheap.

Prussia.Net’s team at Bobcares is in the middle. Everyone has technical qualifications, but initially your request might be handled by a staff member with less experience. If their first email to you says they’ll need time to get back to you, that probably means they’ve had to ask a supervisor for help.

From a client’s point of view, the ideal support deal would be a specific person they could phone 24/7. An experienced network engineer who knew everything about their business and computer set-up, who’d answer immediately and start working on their problem. It ain’t gonna happen.

Even if a client were willing to hire a full-time network engineer at, say, $100,000 a year and pay their on-costs, that person still needs to eat, sleep, take time out for training and paperwork and take holidays. And one person can’t be expected to know about everything. These days IT is broken down into a number of specialities.

At the other end of the spectrum, if you’re paying $29 a month for hosting, the service provider makes maybe $4 profit. Dealing with just one technical support request kills the profit for that month, and the next three.

Yet in my experience most small businesses want something better than the low-grade support provided by commodity hosting providers. If an important business email hasn’t arrived, waiting 36 hours for emailed technical support won’t cut it.

I suspect that what most small businesses really need isn’t “hosting support” but “technology support” or even “technology management”.

Small businesses and their staff don’t have the skills to start troubleshooting a problem from the beginning, so they don’t know whether they should be calling their internet service provider (ISP), hosting provider, some technical support guy or the shop that sold them their computer.

I’ll expand on these thoughts in the third article in this series, “IT support vs management vs consulting”, to be published on the weekend. And as a bonus link, try my essays from the other year, There ain’t no shortcuts to professionally-managed IT and the cranky “I don’t understand computers” is not an excuse

Comments please. This is very much a first draft of my thoughts on this topic. If you have any questions or comments, please let me know.

[Update 16 April 2010: I should point out that the Prussia.Net service hours and response times I refer to here are for technical support relating to internet hosting. Prussia.Net provides other services, with different service levels, and this too has confused some clients because they didn't necessarily understand which service their question related to. For example, when we did general IT support, that was only available in (extended) business hours Monday to Friday, not 24/7. Administration matters were only dealt with during business hours, and with a 2-day turnaround. But clients would, and still do, send urgent technical requests to the administration email address -- and then wonder why it isn't addressed promptly. I'm not sure how you solve this.]

The perceived speed of your internet connection isn’t just about raw bandwidth. The National Broadband Network won’t automatically speed up everything.

In this week’s Patch Monday podcast, Steve Dixon from Riverbed Technology explains how inefficiencies in TCP/IP network protocols mean that latency can be as much of a problem as bandwidth. “WAN optimisation”, which is something Riverbed and others sell, can help.

And Kimberlee Weatherall provides some perspective on the controversial Facebook “news feed” patent for “Dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network” into perspective. She teaches intellectual property law at the University of Queensland.

You can listen below. But it’s probably better for my stats if you listen at ZDNet Australia — where you’ll see some of the comments already posted — or subscribe to the RSS feed or subscribe in iTunes.

Besides, you’ll get it faster than waiting for me to post it here.

Please let me know what you think. We accept audio comments too. Either Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733.

The cheque is for the $9.89 credit remaining on my account when I stopped doing business with Vodafone in November 2008. That it took so long to get that money is a story in itself, and it’s told over the jump.

The stupidity, however, is that after all this hassle Vodafone has made out the cheque to “Stilgherrian Pty Ltd”, as if I’m a company.

How does any competent organisation do that? Especially when there was no “Pty Ltd” in my account details? Especially when I specifically requested in writing for the cheque to be made out to “Stilgherrian”?

Fortunately I’m known at my local Westpac bank branch, so maybe they’ll allow me to deposit the cheque. I’ll let you know how I go.

Other people have told me they’ve had trouble getting Vodafone to refund money too, and had to drop the magic words “Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman” before they saw any action. While in my case the figure was less than $10, if Vodafone is consistently failing to pay out credits then it would amount to a significant scam.

Not good enough, Vodafone. If you owe people money, you return it to them. Promptly. Without questions. And if it takes longer than a couple of weeks you apologise for the delay.

Stilgherrian vs Vodafone

Back in November 2008 I closed my account with Vodafone and moved to Virgin Mobile. After everything was settled, I was left with a credit of $9.89.

No big deal, I figured they’d send a refund in due course.

However Vodafone had other plans. Over the following months they continued to invoice me, charging me $2.20 each month for mailing me a paper bill and nothing else.

My credit declined from $9.89 to $7.69 to $5.49 to… well, into the red again.

I figured that at this point Vodafone would notice that it was a closed account and stop being so silly. Surely they have a system that notices this sort of thing?

Alas no.

In December 2009 I decided to get in touch. Since life’s too short to deal with telco call centres, I sent them a letter.

[G]iven that I ceased being a customer of yours in December 2008 [it was actually November, but I was working from memory], I reckon it’s probably time you caught up with that fact and stopped sending me bills at all.

I reckon your next communication should be to wipe out this tiny debt – given that there was actually a credit owed to me, and you were just billing me for sending me bills. Yeah?

Vodafone never replied.

Then last month, instead of a $2.20 charge for a paper bill, Vodafone invented something new. A $9.91 “account admin” fee.

WTF?

I was not impressed. I sent another letter.

It’s getting beyond a joke now. Not only have you continued to bill me after the account was closed for more than a year, not only have you ignored my letter of 30 December (copy attached), you’re now just making up charges!

“Account Admin” for $9.91?

Bollocks.

There was $9.89 owing me when we ceased doing business. I was going to let that slide but, now that I think about, why should you get away with incompetence?

Please reverse all charges you’ve claimed since we stopped doing business in December 2008 and send a cheque for the amount owed of $9.89 made out to “Stilgherrian”. I expect this to be done within 14 days.

Well, 12 days later I got an email. Buried in the masses of confusing text generated by Vodafone’s customer service system was this confusing message:

I have adjusted the paper bill charges that appeared on your closed account.

The balance is now $0.00 and you will not receive any further statements from Vodafone.

Please note we are unable to refund the amount that was once on the account as Finance Team have noted the account that the refund was not applicable as the Bank was authorised to reverse the payment to Vodafone.

Unimpressed, I replied by email:

This sentence … “Please note we are unable to refund the amount that was once on the account as Finance Team have noted the account that the refund was not applicable as the Bank was authorised to reverse the payment to Vodafone.” … makes no sense.

There was once an accidental payment which was indeed reversed, but that [is] not what I am talking about.

I refer to the amount of $9.89 credit on the account as at 20 December 2008. I do expect that to be paid.

I know it’s a small thing, but if this sort of activity happen[s] across many customers it soon adds up, and it’s not acceptable. If you owe someone money, you pay it. You don’t make waffly bureaucratic excuses about “Finance Team have noted the account that the refund was not applicable”. You fix your processes, apologise for the inconvenience, and return the money.

This should be a simple matter, surely?

Also, your standard email response form is rubbish. “Recently you requested personal assistance from our on-line support centre”? No, I did not.

When will your cheque be arriving?

The cheque arrived yesterday. Made out to “Stilgherrian Pty Ltd”. Arsehats.