I love this time of year. The weather has chilled and the blazing heat of summer has settled, our home electricity bill isn’t $800 a month, and Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas are just ’round the corner.

As you’re all aware we have our Lunartics Blog, and I’m thrilled to report our second official newsletter is being released on time (yes .. ok it is late in the month but technically still in time for a September issue).

A special thanks to our contributors Tiara Rea, Todd Austin, Mitch Keeler and our newest writer Jeffrey Cohen! Be sure to check out his monthly “Lunar Legal” column created especially for our webmasters.

Please let us know what else you want to see and we will do our best to have it ready in time for our October issue!

*LP Goes GBP*

That’s right, Lunarpages just released Lunarpages.co.uk, a whole site for our British friends, with all pricing, add-ons, and additions in GBP for your convenience. Though we’ve been serving the UK and other international locales for many years, this website really marks our presence as a World Wide Web Host, and we are extremely happy to be able to provide it!

*LP Goes Dedicated*

Ever wish you had a whole website devoted to Lunarpages Dedicated Web Hosting solutions, with so many pages of so much information on server specs, gigabytes, data centers, and RAM, it’ll make you blush?

Well, welcome to LPDedicated.com, your one-stop web hosting source for all things Dedicated. At LPDedicated.com, you can take a tour of Data Center at One Wilshire, read about the 10 or so Dedicated Hosting solutions we can provide upfront, as well as leave your name and number so we can customize a plan that’s perfect for you. We recently introduced the Mega Dedicated and High-Performance Dedicated Plans, and we’d recommend everyone who’s ever drooled over server specs to take a look. These plans are designed for the gurus out there, with Managed Hosting options available on all machines.

We now also offer Dedicated Sales & Support, so give us a ring, take a look at the new site, and let us know what you think!

*LP Opens Data Center #3*

This is uber top-secret information right here – Lunarpages is about to open our third data center! We’ve grown at an incredible rate, and every day we add new accounts like nobody’s business, so we need some more elbow room to accommodate all of you guys. With two data centers already (one in Los Angeles, California, and one in Las Vegas, Nevada), we’ll be officially adding our third any day now, residing in sunny Riverside, California.

We had an interesting issue come up this week. A new client called us wanting to get an estimate for the preparation of a new “Terms of Service” agreement prepared specially for his web site. This client was in the process of having a new version of his web site developed and wanted the terms added before he launched.

In discussing the nature of his business I inquired about the development work being performed. The client responded by enthusiastically telling me that he was having most of the code for the new site developed by “some in Romania named Vladimir”. My client went on to tell how wonderful and responsive Vladimir was but that he had never actually spoken to him. My client’s level of confidence in Vladimir was impressive. He would communicate via email with to Vladimir who then code the project so that it was done within a few days. My client seemed very pleased with this arrangement, the price and the work product.

I inquired further as to whether there was any written agreement concerning the terms of this development project. Somehow I was not all that surprised to hear that there had been “nothing formal” created but that “everything was in the emails” and that he got along great with Vladimir so that he expected no problems.

Under US copyright law, if you have no agreement laying out the terms under which you engage another person to perform development work on your site there is a very distinct possibility that you may not own parts or all the rights to the work created. Furthermore, without a formal agreement you have no guarantee that the work is not taken from other projects owned by third parties that could at some point demand that you stop using the code or material or you could simply find yourself on the wrong end of a lawsuit. Even if your right to use the materials is never questioned you could well find the same exact code in use elsewhere on another customer of Vladimir’s web sites – possibly your competitor – and may learn that you have no right of any kind to prevent such use or any other additional use in the future. Furthermore, all agreements are not the same. If you are presented with a form by your developer or other vendor it is a safe bet that the form they present to you significantly leans in their favor and against you on significant terms.

Hiring counsel may constitute an additional expense. However, if you hire counsel to read and approve 10 such agreements it would likely cost you less overall than if even one becomes a problem that you are forced to deal with down the road. Banks and venture capital companies conduct a due diligence process in the course of providing any investment funding as would any potential purchaser of your company. Issues such as these are guaranteed to arise in the due diligence process and by then reaching Vladimir after 2 years of silence might not be as simple as you might hope.

The availability of solid legal advice on day to day legal issues and agreements is one of the best investments you can make for your company. Our client now has a solid vendor/developer agreement with Vladimir that establishes clearly that my client owns the exclusive rights to the portions of his web site that Vladimir created together with assurances that the works are original and do not violate the rights of any third party. He also has a new solid and effective Terms of Service agreement.

About: Jeffrey A. Cohen is a partner in the El Segundo, California office of Cohen & Richardson, LLP. Mr. Cohen can be reached at JCohen [at] InternetLitigators.com. The reader is cautioned that the information contained herein is not legal advice and is not a substitute for legal advice. There is no attorney client relationship created by this information.

Last year Tiara Rea shared a social web 2.0 site with me called Bestuff.com and I was hooked. The community is so much fun and you can share all your favorite things, and also vote on the other content within the site. Over the weeks I got to know the owners (a couple of Aussie guys) and just like a cyber fairytale, Lunarpages was proudly hosting their site.

A few months later I received a phone call from Rick Ross, introducing himself as having acquired the site. We got to chatting and he showed me their network of sites which included DZone.com and JavaLobby.org. I was totally impressed with Rick’s charm and dynamic energy, as well as his obvious passion for all things geeky.

Let’s face it… we are all familiar with sites such as Digg.com and Slashdot.org, but in my opinion DZone does it so much better, with quality developer content, less spam, and a fair shot at the spotlight. So you can imagine how stoked I am that Rick agreed to sit down and chat with me about his wonderful site!

But enough yapping… we should get started with the obvious question…

How did DZone come to be and when was it created?

In December, 2005 Matt Schmidt, Mike Urban and I were hanging out in our office talking about how we all really liked the concept of Digg, but how we all felt that Digg simply didn’t deliver the quality of links that real developers would be most interested in. We wanted a site that was specifically focused on developer links without any of the silly stuff that so often dominates Digg. With typical coder arrogance, we all foolishly agreed we could build it in a week. About six months later we were actually ready to launch DZone. Never count on software developers for reliable planning and scheduling!

How is DZone different than DIGG?

In a word, “focus.” DZone is laser-focused on developer topics, and our moderator team is not at all shy about nuking links that are off-topic. When we launched DZone, the “programming” sub-category on Digg was only about 3% of Digg’s total coverage, and recently it has declined still further. Programming and developer topics simply don’t seem to matter to the Digg audience, but they are the mainstay of DZone. Since last June, only 2-3 developer links per week have been promoted on Digg, while 30-40 per day are typically promoted on DZone. If you’re a developer wanting to stay current and find something fresh, then DZone probably has more to offer you.

How many active users are part of the DZone community?

That’s a tough question to answer because the overwhelming majority of any social bookmarking site’s users are never logged in. There’s something described as the “90-9-1 rule” of online communities which basically suggests that 90% of users will be almost completely passive, 9% will contribute occasionally, and the remaining 1% will do most of the heavy lifting. In general, I would have to say this rule seems to apply, but even the passive users are “active” in the sense that they contribute by viewing and clicking the links. On any given day DZone sends about 20,000 to 25,000 visitors to other developer websites, and that number is growing quickly. In its first year DZone sent more than 5 million visitors to other websites, but I won’t be surprised if we more than double that in our second year. We have had several thousand members participate by submitting nearly 50,000 links that point to over 10,000 unique domains.

Why do you think DZone is so popular?

That’s easy – it is the community. DZone has a truly amazing core community of members who contribute great links, vote on them, help us filter out spam and irrelevant links, and generally keep the quality high. Without these awesome community members DZone would be like a big room decorated for a party, but where nobody shows up. How much fun would that be? The technology behind DZone is clean and powerful, but there’s no question in my mind that the real success of DZone is a reflection of the awesome quality of our community members. These people sincerely care, and since they are prepared to work hard to make DZone a great resource, we feel we owe it to them to do the same. I’m proud to be part of the DZone community myself, and I have met some of the smartest and most innovative developers anywhere because of DZone. Some people would say we’re all just nerds and geeks, but I am glad to be one!

I was reading an article recently about DZone and it mentioned the lack of pagination on the site. Comments?

In April, 2007 we launched a major overhaul of the original DZone design, and we switched from traditional pagination to an Ajax-driven mode that employs what we call “just-in-time” link fetching. In effect, you can scroll through the links almost indefinitely. As you get close to the bottom of the list, your browser will hit our server and grab a new bunch of links and let you keep on scrolling (at least until you reach the very end.) Traffic numbers and trends prove unequivocally that this new mode radically outperforms the original mode, which provide more traditional pagination. In every significant metric the numbers shot higher with the new mode. Still, there’s just no such thing as “one size fits all” and some people don’t like this Ajax-driven system. For those folks, we have kept the original interface available. They simply need to visit and they’ll get the old form of pagination or they can also get the new one.

You’re regarded as one of the Java rock stars. How did this fame occur?

Must be a mistake. I’m a rapper. Surely you have seen me on MTV?

What other projects are in store for the DZone team?

Well, we have active development occurring along several fronts. Soon we will add support for video, screencasting and PDF documents into the core DZone social bookmarking application. These are much needed content-type extensions which will allow community members to share links to more than just web pages. We are also working on better integration between DZone and our own content communities like Javalobby.org and EclipseZone.com. We will be launching a suite of new content destination communities focused on a variety of cool developer topics like AjaxZone, RubyZone, VistaZone and so on. These will work hand-in-hand with DZone.com as our flagship site to deliver great, highly focused content to specific developer groups. Finally, we have a cool project planned for our DeveloperBlogs.com domain, where we hope to build a great network of (you guessed it!) developer blogs.

Congratulations on your newest acquisition Bestuff.com! Tell us more about it.

Bestuff.com is an exciting social networking experiment. It provides a unique visual navigation system where tens of thousands of people vote for all their favorite things in life. Words really don’t do it justice, so readers should probably just visit the site to play around and see whether they like it. The site is growing very rapidly, and we’ll soon be providing a Facebook application that connects to Bestuff. I think it will be even more exciting once our members can show a Bestuff collage widget on their Facebook pages to share the stuff they like best. We actually just made our very first Bestuff t-shirts yesterday, and the response from people who have seen them suggests they will be very, very popular. I’ll send you one if you promise to model it!

An excellent segue to some Amy interview fun! So Rick… we want to hear about your best and worst:

Road trip

Best: I’d have to change the names to protect the guilty! Most recently, my favorite road trip was my family’s return trip from Michigan to North Carolina this summer. We stopped in this crazy town in Ohio for the final Harry Potter book release party. The whole town had literally transformed itself to a Harry Potter and Hogwarts world. It was awesome.
Worst: Leaving NYC to move south. I loved living in the city, and I was terribly sad to move away. Fortunately, it turned out to have been a great choice, so I’m glad we moved.

Date

Best: When my very close friend, Elizabeth, and I took a walk on the beach on a moonlit, Spring night and she let me know she wanted to kiss me. We have now been married over 15 years.
Worst: My first date at 13 (early 70′s.) I took a girl named Susan Heneberry to a Yes concert, but we had nothing whatsoever in common. The first was the worst.


Flight

Best: Our “second honeymoon” flight to Paris on our tenth anniversary. At first the airline had screwed up and wasn’t going to have seats available for us, then they bumped us up to first-class! It was great.
Worst: Matt and I were flying home from San Francisco, and Northworst stranded us overnight in the Minneapolis airport for no good reason. That airport is really weird and desolate at 4AM.

Online moment

Best: There have been lots of great ones. A recent favorite was watching DZone send our one millionth visitor to another site. We have sent millions more since then, but I guess it’s true that your first million is the hardest to get.
Worst: Watching one of my early websites crash and go offline on Thanksgiving Day in 1997 because it had a sudden surge of traffic. That was an awful feeling.

Movie

Best: I love all kinds of movies. I’ll say “The Princess Bride” or “When Harry Met Sally.”
Worst: I can’t spare the brain cells to remember them.

Conference

Best: My true favorite was probably an Amiga hacker party in a mountain village in Switzerland about 20 years ago. Hundreds of the best European Amiga hackers had gathered, and it was an incredible experience. I miss the Amiga.
Worst: A Java conference in NYC almost immediately after the 9/11 attack. I traveled on one of the first flights into NYC after they let the planes start flying again, and the whole event was very sad. The conference was a success, however, simply because it was the first one that proceeded as planned after the disruption of the terrorist attack.

Thanks so much for taking the time to chat with Lunarpages, Rick!

I know you guys are probably getting tired of hearing this…but we love WordPress here at Lunarpages!! In fact, I doubt there’s a web host out there who could possibly adore the blogging tool as much as we do. Not only do we offer the latest versions of all the necessary tech specs (PHP4.2+, MySQL 4.0+, mod_rewrite Apache module, etc) you’ll need to be able to run WordPress and offer you a one-click install as a member of Lunarpages Web Hosting, but we’ve also got a handy 1-2-3 tutorial written by our own Mitch Keeler that’ll help you install the theme of your choice. Oh, did I mention I created 9 new WordPress Themes for your downloading pleasure?

Because I definitely did.

To prove our undying adoration for WordPress, I have created these new WordPress themes and templates for you guys to check out. Feel free to download them and install to your own WordPress blogs, and if you have suggestions on what kinds of themes you’d like to see in the future, please do not hesitate to let me know so I can get to work.

Here at Lunarpages, we’ve done a variety of interviews with some of the most influential people in the web hosting, design, and internet trades. From Craig (of Craig’s List fame) to Eric Meyer (the infamous CSS guru), we’ve covered many of the people you recommended to us. However, we have been leaving out some of the best people in the industry, the people who really make web hosting (and Lunarpages specifically) what it is today – our staff members!

So how hard do you really think it’d be to wrangle a couple minutes from one of our Junior Systems Administrators for a quick interview? Apparently, it’s really hard, as I tried to set this interview up months ago and it took Andrew Delira until several days ago to get back to me. But I’m not bitter.

So Andrew, you are literally one of the busiest people we have working here at Lunarpages Web Hosting. What exactly do you do?

Better question: what don’t I do? I answer customer support tickets, grab calls, monitor servers, set up shared and Dedicated servers, as well as miscellaneous projects like seeking out vendors for all our kinky data center hardware and working out prices with specific salesmen. Most of the time, that means telling them the price they need to charge us ~  I’m lways looking into new technology, seeking out new datacenters for Lunarpages…that’s just a bit – the rest is uber top secret.

How long have you worked for Lunarpages?

5 months away from the big 3! Someone ought to throw me a party.

Statistics show the following is a proven fact: working for Lunarpages makes you cool. Would you agree, and is the rumor true that this is the main reason you work here?

Of course – if you don’t work here you are not cool… Okay, just kidding, but it really does help with the ladies.

Do you have a life outside of Lunarpages? Be honest.

Unfortunately not anymore! When I go home after work, all I do is hibernate.

At night, which of the following would you rather be doing: taking a long walk on the beach, snuggling up with a fellow Lunarpages employee, or caressing the newest tech gadget on the market? (please keep it PG for the kiddies)

I would have to admit, taking a long walk on the beach to buy the newest tech gadget from someone on Craigslist sounds pretty good right about now.

What was the first computer you ever owned?

The very first computer I owned was an Apple Classic, the little square one about the size of a shoe box with a tiny monitor that is most likely the cause of my jacked-up eyes… I remember playing Oregon Trail on that for hours and hours and always dying from dysentery. Ah, those were the days. I actually still have a Mac, too!

Do you have favorite sites you surf to on the internet?

Myspace.com is definitely a fav, mostly because it’s addictive. Also, Apple.com for obvious reasons, and lately iPhoneHacks.com has been on my top 10 list.

Do you have a website hosted with Lunarpages?

Yes I have do (AndrewDelira.com); however I haven’t updated it in about a year and a half. *shameful smile*

What’s more important to you in a web host: uptime or price?

I would have to say price, seeing as my site isn’t very popular, but if I had a million visitors/day, I’d go for uptime. It all depends on what you’re using the site for. A good web host (i.e. Lunarpages!) will offer both.

What would you do if you no longer worked for Lunarpages?

Ugh, what a nightmare! If I no longer worked for Lunarpages, I would totally be living under a bridge in New York. I love New York, so I keep telling LP we need a DC in NY!

And lastly, Amy’s favorite question/scenario: Imagine that the internet is GONE. OMG, what would you do??

Another nightmare! I’d probably just eat, sleep, and watch talk shows all day long.

Well Andrew, thanks for finally making some time for us – I know the customers really appreciate hearing from someone who takes care of their servers all day long.

If you guys have any suggestions for future staff interviews, please let us know!