We have a guest on Friday—Lou Honick, CEO and co-owner/founder of HostMySite.com.
Today's class is oriented towards learning about Web Hosting, and coming up with some questions for Lou.
Lou is a local guy—he's a 1995 graduate of A.I. DuPont High School. Lou is also graduate of our program—he graduated "cum laude" from UD, with a BS in CS, in 1999, in the top 10% of his class. While he was here, he took courses from professors you may know—Dave Saunders, Vijay Shanker, Errol Lloyd, and John Scoggin, for example.
And, according to a bio from ISPCON 2005 (a conference for Internet Service Providers):
"Lou Honick is the chief executive officer and co-founder of a successful multi-million dollar web hosting company, HostMySite.com. Honick and his business partner founded HostMySite as a customer-focused provider that grew from their dissatisfaction with the state of the hosting industry in 1997. Today, with a strong emphasis on customer service, HostMySite operates a number of successful shared and dedicated web hosting brands with more than 30,000 clients in all 50 states and more than 35 countries worldwide. Lou entered the University of Delaware in 1995 and earned his BS in computer science in 3½ years while concurrently starting HostMySite. More recently he won the Small Business Administration 2004 Delaware Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award. The success of HostMySite.com over the last seven years prompted the construction of a second datacenter. Lou and his partner successfully designed and completed a state-of-the-art 12,000 sq. ft. hosting facility in April of 2004."
By Googling "Lou Honick" I also uncovered the following:
Instructions for this step are at the link for H02, and you get an individual grade for this part (20 pts).
Discuss the eight "on topic" questions that your group came up with, and as a group, choose the best question from among the eight.
Come up with a succinct subject line that summarizes the question well, with as few words as possible. Put your group number at the front of that subject line.
Example: "G03: Are wombats good web hosting customers?"
One person per group should post that question on the discussion board marked P02-best questions.
Before you post, see if any other group has already posted a question that is very similar with an earlier time stamp. If so, then choose your second best question, and post that.
In the end, there should be one question per group, with no duplication.
You may have your discussion by email, chat, or discussion board. I've set up 10 discussion boards on WebCT for this purpose. Unfortunately, there are only four chat rooms available in the WebCT interface, and they have to be "shared".
If you choose to use chat, I suggest that your group "meet" on the WebCT chat board or discussion board initially, then move to an instant messaging platform of your choice.
Some common problems folks have with the interface:
In addition to getting regular credit for today's assignment, I'll give extra credit (in the form of choice points) to the groups that came up with the top three best questions as judged by Lou.
We'll ask Lou those questions on Friday. We'll also leave time for some open questions as well, in case you think of questions during his talk.
If you have extra time, choose one off-topic question from your group, and post that on the same WebCT discussion board, P02-best questions.
Put this in a separate posting with a subject line of "Off Topic Question, G01", etc.
I'll award 10 choice points to each member of the group with the best "off-topic question"—again with Lou Honick doing the judging. (We'll split those points if there is a tie).
Up to 20 pts for each team member that participates.
The grading criteria are the same as for H02, except that there is only one question, so point values are doubled.