As an entrepreneur for 5 years, I’ve always held onto the belief that no one could do the job as well as I can and my clients would never tolerate anyone else coming to help them out. Over the last year or so, I found that belief wasn’t really serving me or my clients well. I found myself exhausted and approaching burnout. Because I believe so strongly in providing the best computer service experience to my clients, I knew that I needed to make some changes.
Once I made that decision, a great thing happened. A former colleague contacted me about a possible employee. I spent several months interviewing, background checking and just putting them through my paces. As it turns out, I’ve gone ahead with hiring this person and I look forward to the benefits my clients will experience with additional support.
Feel the fear and do it anyway!
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Last week I had a call from a client who was reporting slow internet speeds. In particular, their yahoo email start page was really dragging. I arranged for a remote session to see if I could find the cause easily. I also instructed the client to reboot their modem, router and switch. Nothing obvious came up in my troubleshooting session so I arranged for an on-site visit.
After performing some routine maintenance, I stopped and just looked at the problem with a “beginner’s mind”. As I watched the page load ever so slowly, I noticed in teeny tiny writing at the bottom of the Safari window “resolving host….” As the light bulb went off in my head, I said to myself it’s DNS!
I called their ISP to see if there were any particular issues with the standard DNS servers. Of course their answer was no and that their servers were working just fine. So after using this very cool utility from Google http://code.google.com/p/namebench/ I replaced AT&T’s DNS server entries with Open DNS which was reportedly 300% faster.
Wow, what a difference. It’s pretty rare that I change the DNS servers from the ISP, but I’ll be doing it more often after this experience.
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