There are two industry associations in The Netherlands:
• Dutch Hosting Provider Association (DHPA)
• ISPConnect

The DHPA, founded October 2007, is an association focused on the larger internet service providers. Members are top ISPs including KPN, Interoute, Rackspace, Leaseweb and IS. Membership rules prevent small companies from joining the association and therefore it’s a small yet professional group focused on lobbying.

ISPConnect, founded November 2006, is different: every ISP can join. In just a year, over 50 small and medium enterprises joined. Goal of ISPConnect is creating a powerful voice and represent the industry’s SMEs in government and industry lobbying. ISPConnect had it’s first big success in the aftermath of the numeric landrush of the NL zone, controlled by not-for-profit organization SIDN.

There has been criticism on ISPConnect, claiming the association does not represent the hosting industry because the members are no market leaders nor industry players. Another brought up issue is that some ISPs do not share the opinion of ISPConnect.

Companies large enough to meet the tough requirements will choose to join the DHPA, it’s a small and privileged group and a matter of prestige to list your company among the top dogs. Smaller companies can either join ISPConnect or decide not to join any industry association. Although companies as SWSoft, Interconnect, Interlab and COMBELL are able to join DHPA, they have chosen to join ISPConnect. Next to these companies, ISPConnect also has members outside the typical webhosting sector.
Where DHPA is backed by the reputation of their members, ISPConnect still has to fight for it’s existence. Smaller ISPs do attack the associations board.  The lack of cooperation in the industry hurts us all in the end.

It’s very important the voice of small companies is heard as these differ from those of industry leaders. Every entrepreneur, every voice counts. The openness of ISPConnect is important to the industry.
There should be no uncertainty whether to invite DHPA or ISPConnect as a representative of the industry. Their presence in decision making is vital for the success of both organizations. As their preferred members differ, cooperation between DHPA and ISPConnect is important.

The government is playing with our businesses. New laws restrict our companies in several ways as more responsibility is put on our shoulders.
But not only the government is an issue. Organizations as SIDN should also be forced to listed more to the industry as it’s important we do not loose our competitive edge. For example, the less time and effort we have to put into domain registrations, the lower the pricing will be and the more domain names can and will be registered.

A very powerful message of ISPConnect is the offensive started in the aftermath of the numeric landrush in the NL zone. ISPConnect released a short but thorough report on the failure of the landrush and it was quoted in the press. The president of ISPConnect got the opportunity to create a voice for the represented part of the industry with a very successful outcome.

The relative young age of ISPConnect allows members to voice their opinion and influence the direction of the association.
As an industry association, ISPConnects is here for all ISPs, not only it’s members but the whole industry. Government organizations do not talk with separate companies, their preferred counterparts are industry associations.

Last but not least: ISPConnect is not only a lobby organization; it’s also a networking platform, something reached through the regular member meetings.

Even if personal opinions differs from ISPConnect’s official standpoint, I encourage every independent small and medium hosting company to join this association and make their voice heard.

That is a bad hit for the community … That servers were always full and people loved it …

The issue began with gamers using hex-editors to enable 32 slot mode in the beta of TF2.  Valve would update the serverside software every other day to break this hack. After a week a mod was released that allowed every server to run 32 slots without file editing. Large parts of the community moved on to 32 slots for public gameplay. In a response, Valve started the censorship of the ingame serverbrowser. As servernumbers stayed up, playernumbers started to drop. TF2 is still in beta, but as the game is released only to people who bought the game (in the Orange box combo pack), there is absolutely no difference between beta and gold for the players.

All source games are technically great for modifications; new maps, mods, plugins are all easy to integrate. This is the first time Valve tries to stop a new modification and limit the gameplay in a way they shouldn’t.

No problem, except the website startpagina.nl used to be a website like dmoz.org and used to have quality links. Now the website is filled with links to 404 pages and companies that went out of business years ago.
And the webmaster of the startpagina subsite? He’s connected to one of the new smaller GSPs added on the site.

GSPs and ethics

More people in the gamehosting business have a complete lack ethics and this is a direct cause of the mistrust of customers in the companies. On our helpdesk this has a direct influence on the customer contact; customers think they’re dealing with a one man company, customers think they won’t have to pay the invoices and some even try to order our services to see if we deliver without being paid. Fraudulent orders are up to 25% during school holidays.

While trying to compete with the other GSPs many of the smaller companies try to look big: they say they own their own datacenter, have 10+ employees and announce they host a tenfold of servers as in reality. This messes up the customer experience so bad they distrust the complete gamehosting business. It takes great investment in customer service to convince the customer of the quality we can offer.

A year ago I wrote a column for Dutch game website Gamert. It tells the story of a GSP review website. Three months after the website went life, over half the companies listed were out of business. GPSs come and go and there is only a select group of gamehosters over 2 years in business.

Two years, what’s two years for a business?

A very good initiative is GameserverCheck.de. They offer reviews of gameserver companies by their customers, but also a “Vor-ort-check” where GameserverCheck visits the company, talks with the staff and lists all important data of the company.

The GameserverCheck website deserves an international version.

Popular gadget blog, Crave (by c|net), actually bought one laptop, but found out they were charged 150 euros instead of 150 dollars. There are no shipping charges and the company selling the laptop even installs the laptop with the keyboard setting of the country that was specified at the shipping address when ordering.

The company does not have telephone support, because  ”the phone lines are temporarily closed”.
Now, if no telephone support, no physical address, the pricing, the mix-up between euros and dollars and the custom keyboard layout per shipping country for this pricing doesn’t ring a bell, what will?

Maybe the fact the company isn’t registered in Sweden, but in the UK. The UK Companies House registered the company just two weeks ago. The company has been registered trough a Swedish company called companyregistrations.se. For only 3500 SEK, 380 euros,  they will register your company on their UK address. To register such a company, you don’t even have to show up in person, you can just send a copy of ‘your’ passport to the contact person in the UK, who will take care of every administrative issues.
Payments are only processed online and there is a 4 week period between payment and scheduled delivery, enough time to collect the payments, even from credit cards. How fishy can it get?

Now the question is: should a news website link to this kind of websites?

If news websites do not make clear it could be a fraudulent website, they will generate new sales. I guess a little bit additional research would do the trick. Shouldn’t a real news reporter contact the news source first instead of copying a press release?