If they really do have 2,000 Pro members at $49/mo or $399/year, that's around $1M/year provided there's not egregious churn and depending on the monthly vs. yearly mix (I suspect there's a majority of monthly subscriptions). Those are their self-reported numbers but the service seems well executed and I have no reason to doubt their data. Impressive in just a year (here's a post about their premium launch), as is the conversion rate out of their 70,000 member base. They do a good job at spelling out the value of their subscription product, in fact I might give it a shot. It's refreshing to see people who don't buy the hype about ad revenue trees growing to reach the sky. See also some notes on how they built up traffic those last couple of years.

A few months ago, a rep at Rackspace (one of our two hosting companies at the time) laughed at me when I unfavorably compared their bandwidth rates to Amazon's. I mean, he actually laughed. I probably got started in the IT business before the brat even got out of high school. They chose to have a different business model than Amazon, told me the smug fuck. Well dude, when a behemoth such as Amazon, which probably spends more on IT each year than your company is making in revenue, choses to enter your market, you pay attention rather than dismiss it outright. I guess your business model is "charge ten times what Amazon charges for the pretty much the same bandwidth, only insult your customers for the privilege." How about paying a little respect?

So Racketspace at the time strong-armed me into renewing for another six months to avoid bandwidth overuse that was mostly their fault because of poor application monitoring. They wanted to charge us thousands of dollars for traffic between a web server and a database server that we had put on the same LAN on purpose! The bottom line is, we'll be finished with Rackspace in a few weeks (still a few domains to migrate) and I've made it company policy not to do business with them from now on. Memo to Rackspace: Economics that are impossible to stop. (Well firing the biz dev people in charge of our account would do the company well too, but I suspect their behavior was par for the course for a company whose support reputation is way oversold.) I'm sure Rackspace works for some people, if you like being gouged with bandwidth rates from 2003 that is.

For people looking for hosting, if you don't have your own sysadmin, Pair.com is a much better host than Rackspace. We have our own sysadmin now though, so we're in the process of leaving pair.com too since they don't provide root access on dedicated leased servers, which if you ask me is crazy. We get much more powerful servers for the same price at Canvas Dreams and can fully administrate them, save for remote rebooting I'm told, which should be rolled out soon (insert protocol name I can't remember).

My friend Tig and I are proud to introduce Defense Industry Daily, a niche blog/online trade rag dedicated to defense contractors and procurement managers. Like MarketingVox, the publication is medium-agnostic and accessible on the web, by RSS and by email (the later will be introduced shortly). DID is edited by Joe Katzman of Winds of Change fame who's up to a great start. Did you know about EPA-approved nukes?

Expect more such niche B2B blogs from us at our deliberately slow and quiet pace. Most people are excited about getting $2-10 CPMs and that's great. Advertisers in the defense industry are welcome to get in touch with us to inquire about our rates and formats - we believe we'll quickly attract the right audience for them. Feedback on our content (focus and tone) is of course welcome as well.