Thanks to all of you for your business and support and to our great team here at Roland Schorr for making it happen.

You can reach Ben M. Schorr at bens@rolandschorr.com or by phone at 928-526-3970. You can follow him on Twitter @Bschorr

Who Does It?

99% of it is from cut-rate SEO companies who somebody paid to try and get them a better ranking on Google. Since these jerks have no real skills what they do is hire a bunch of cheap foreign labor to go on every blog they can find and post crap, complete with the URL of the site they've been hired to pimp, in hopes that it will help get them better Google rankings. It doesn't work, the comments are moderated so the spam never sees the light of day, Google is too smart for that, and it just wastes everybody's time and gets potentially useful features (like comments) turned off.

So...for now you can't comment on any of our posts here, sorry. If you have a comment feel free to post it on Twitter. I'm @bschorr. And if you meet somebody who says they do cheap SEO...you can thank them for killing our comments.

This week Microsoft has awarded Roland Schorr & Tower CEO Ben M. Schorr with the "Most Valuable Professional" (MVP) award for the 16th straight year. Ben has been supporting Outlook, Exchange, OneNote...heck, the whole Microsoft Office suite as well as Office365, Windows and many other solutions for businesses world-wide for nearly 22 years. He's very honored to receive this award as recognition for his role in supporting the business and technology community once again.

Six years ago today three partners formed a new consulting firm in Honolulu, Hawaii that rose from the ashes of a Swedish-based firm that two of the partners had worked for. Since then we've helped a lot of companies and grown from one office to three. We've travelled all over the world and met a lot of nice folks.

We'd like to take this opportunity to thank our clients, staff, vendors, partners and supporters for six great years.

Looking forward to the next six years!

Estin can be reached at estinm@rolandschorr.com.

The unrest in Egypt and resultant Internet brownout (roughly 10% of Egypt's connectivity is still up, so it's not quite a blackout) serves not only as a point of political and human rights concern, but also as a reminder that Internet connectivity can be subject to disruption; even on a national scale.

This is just another reason why, if you're hosting, or considering hosting, mission-critical data or applications in the Cloud, that you need to understand WHERE those servers are located.  If your data is outsourced to a data center in Egypt right now, you may be having some issues.  There are a lot of countries around the world that are politically unfriendly or unstable and many of them are in a position to offer very cheap data hosting.  Unfortunately some cloud providers, in the interests of keeping their costs down, may be willing to overlook the risk of government action, and outsource their own data storage to those countries.

Just another reason, before you sign a hosting agreement, to ask your prospective provider WHERE on the planet they will be hosting your data.  And yes, backups too.  Get it in writing.