Bill On Site Blog

It’s a new year, and time for a new strategy. We value our customers’ opinions at Bill On Site, but it sure would be nice to have more opinions to value. Honestly, we don’t get much feedback these days, but that probably has something to do with the lack of customers, too. Something about Bill On Site just doesn’t gel with people, but that’s okay, because we have a plan.

For a limited time, Bill On Site will be available totally free! That’s right, no charges and no restrictions. Sign up for an account and use it to your heart’s content! The only catch is that this isn’t a “permanent” free thing, we will start charging again, just as soon as we’ve figured out exactly what it is everyone’s looking for, and made their dreams come true.

See, that’s the biggest news here, honestly. We’re not just making Bill On Site free for the sake of our health, we’re doing it so that we can get feedback – what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s needed, that kind of thing. We want to turn Bill On Site into an essential tool for your business. We want it to be exactly what you need. We need your help and your participation to do that, so we’re making it as easy as possible – free accounts for everyone!

Plus an extra-special bonus: Anyone who signs up during this “free” period will get a special permanent discount when we switch back to paid accounts. That’s right, you’ll get a special rate on whatever rate plan you choose forever, just for having been signed up during this period.

So go ahead and sign up now for your free account, use Bill On Site, and let us know what you want to see added, changed, or removed.

More news will be coming in the coming days, so keep your eyes peeled here for updates!

Amid fanfare, the cheering of adoring crowds, and a chorus of overjoyed small business owners the world over, Bill On Site was launched today.

Well, that’s not exactly true.

For one, the fanfare would have violated local noise ordinances, so it was cancelled at the last minute. The crowds lost their way, and the overjoyed small business owners were actually, you know, working like they ought to be, so they couldn’t be there either.

And actually, Bill On Site has been live and online for a week now, just with “Beta” tags splashed all over it. Some folk have actually managed to find their way to it, even though it was in a kind of “stealth mode,” which is rather neat.

But today, we’re taking off the Beta tags, rolling out the advertising, and actively encouraging people to sign up and try it out.

“What is Bill On Site?” I hear you ask. A good question!

Bill On Site is a web-hosted invoicing application that has a specially-tuned alternate invoice that’s perfect for your mobile phone. This means that you can use your mobile phone to send invoices to customers while still on site. No more blurry carbon copies, no more misread handwriting, no more expensive equipment leases!

Interested? Go ahead and give it a try. All accounts come with a free 30 day trial, and we don’t even ask for payment information up-front, so you can see if it’s exactly what you’re looking for.

Around November of 2008, I had a neat little idea. “Cell phones are everywhere,” I told my roommate. “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could use those to conduct business? Like, pay with them at the cash register using software communicating over bluetooth, or exchange money between friends, or bill and pay for things like pizza deliveries, computer repair, or uh, snow shoveling?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Though 10-year olds may not have a cell phone so much.”

“You’d be surprised. What about landscaping and yardwork in general, then? There’s a large number of adults who make a living doing this on a larger scale.”

“Well yeah, then. That’d be pretty cool. Man. The future, right?”

“Right,” I said, and not much more became of that. For about a month.

I was sitting at my computer, tooling around with various frameworks for PHP and trying to think of a project I could use to really evaluate them, when it hit me – I didn’t have to wait for the future for that stuff I’d been talking about. I could write it right now!

I mean sure, the bluetooth stuff was a little out of my league. For that, you have to partner with banks and get them to install server software, then get them to roll out hardware at grocery stores, corner stores, drug stores – all over. And then you’ve got to convince people to download, install, and set up your software on their phones. And then you have to convince ‘em to actually use it instead of just pulling out their interac card. Clearly, this is a solution in search of a problem.

But sending invoices from your mobile phone? Now there is a very solvable problem that can pretty clearly make life easier for a large segment of people. And I can do that! Like right now!

See, there are a lot of smartphones sold in North America. I define smartphones as “anything with a reasonably capable web browser and access to the internet.” If you’ve got a Blackberry, or an iPhone, or if your phone is running Windows Mobile, chances are you have a smartphone. But the point is that a huge number of people in North America can access the internet from their cell phones.

The problem with using these phones to send invoices is invoice software on the web isn’t focused on the mobile user. They’re targetting people running Firefox, or Opera, or Internet Explorer 8, or Safari. And while this means you can do all kinds of fun things with Javascript and Flash, it also means that if you try to browse these sites on a mobile phone, it’ll take forever to download the page, and then you’ll be scrolling forever to try to find what you need to enter in the invoice because the designer was thinking about gorgeous huge 1600-pixel wide screens and not your cell phone’s 320 (if you’re lucky).

So I began Bill On Site. It is not a complex problem, it just needs to be executed properly. I’m putting a lot of focus on making it very, very easy to send an invoice from your mobile phone. A clear, simple interface, so it’s always obvious what you need to do. Simplified workflows so you can cut down on the amount of information you need to mess about with on-site. Small page sizes to ensure that pages load quickly and you’re not standing on someone’s doorstep for fifteen minutes waiting for some silly logo to download AGAIN.

If you do landscaping, or repair work, or really anything that requires you to issue a bill from a customer’s site, watch this space. Just think – no more triplicate forms! No more mistakes when transcribing paper bills! No more needing to manually keep track of who has late or unpaid invoices! No need to lease expensive billing equipment just to send a simple invoice to a customer and collect their payment. With Bill On site, you’ll be able to do all this from your mobile phone.

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Keeping copious and correct backups of important data is crucial, folks. Losing last year’s tax records is rough. Losing your vacation photos from the time you tightrope-walked across the Grand Canyon is awful. But losing community or customer data is inexcusable. There are many ways to keep your data safe, and if you’ll grant me a moment of your time, I’d like to discuss a few of the methods we use at Bill On Site.

Mirroring

This is the most dangerous backup solution out there and has absolutely ruined people. What? A dangerous backup solution? It’s true. Mirroring is dangerous because it is generally useless and yet lulls people into a false sense of security.

What is mirroring? Glad you asked. Mirroring involves making a straight, 1:1 copy of any data you write, as its written, and putting it somewhere else. Say, on another drive or another machine or even in a whole ‘nother warehouse. The idea here is that if one drive/machine/warehouse explodes, you still have a copy somewhere else to rely on.

Sound, yes. And in fact, Bill On Site has a database mirror that we can rely on if our main database does implode. But sadly, this is where a lot of backup procedures stop, and this is where the danger lies.

For example, a flight simulator community relied on manually mirrored databases, and when a hacker got ahold of the credentials for both servers (presumably the same credentials, or at the very least not treated separately), he wiped both servers and now their data is gone forever.

Journalspace – a 6-year-old company – relied solely on mirroring to their doom, too. Nobody’s coming forth as to exactly what bug/hack caused their entire database to be overwritten, but their mirroring software dutifully overwrote their backup too, nullifying 6 years of journals at a go and breaking thousands of hearts.

Mirroring is a good start, but you can’t end here.

Snapshots

A snapshot is a picture of how something looked at a point in time. So, for example, if you took a snapshot of your database every night, the very worst you could ever possibly be out is 24 hours of data. We use snapshots at Bill On Site, only more frequently than once a day. (Who wants to lose yesterday’s invoices, really?)

And much like how you wouldn’t throw out your snapshots of your vacation from ten years ago because you just had a vacation last week, you wouldn’t throw out your snapshots from a week ago because you just took one yesterday (only for entirely different reasons, I know). Your snapshot from yesterday could be corrupt, or worse, your entire last month’s worth of snapshots could be subtly corrupt in a way that you don’t notice at first. You want to have them all available to restore from, Just In Case.

Offsite backups

Where to store those snapshots? Somewhere else. That’s right. You really don’t want to store your snapshots on the same server as the rest of your data. What if that room caught on fire and took your server with it? You’d have no backups and be ruined, that’s what.

An excellent place to store these backups is Amazon’s S3. You’re charged based on how much bandwidth you use and how much disk space you take up, and since snapshots happen infrequently, this is not a lot of money. If you’re rather concerned about money, you could download your oldest backups, burn them to a couple of DVDs (so you can store them in different locations, natch), and remove them from S3, saving you a few dollars a month. Just so long as this critically important data isn’t all in one spot, you’re much better off.

Different credentials

A whole lot of people get their bank accounts and Paypal hacked because they use the same username and password for their email as they do for their more secure financial logins. Guessing email address passwords is really easy if you know anything about your target – you just fill out the “forgot my password” form, enter in some easy-to-research personal information, and bam. Email account compromised. From there, you can get certain services to just email the password to that service to you in plaintext. (Bad! Bad! Bad! But it still happens…) And then you can use these passwords to log into still other sites because generally people only use one or two passwords.

Don’t think it could happen to you? It’s exactly what happened to Sarah Palin during the election. Some young kid guessed her birthday (wikipedia), zip code (wikipedia + online postal service), and where she met her spouse (wikipedia + some shrewd guessing = “wasilla high”). Suddenly her email account was open to the entirety of the internet, and access was given directly to a bunch of “fun-loving hackers.”

(If you know anything about Anonymous, you’ll know that “fun-loving hackers” is just about the most polite thing that can be said about them. Really, Anonymous makes up the underbelly of the internet, but that is perhaps a topic for another day.)

Realy, you have to make sure your important credentials are different, so that if someone compromises your main server, they don’t instantly gain access to all your backups as well.

Testing Your Backups

Though apocryphal, there’s the ever-popular tale of the computer repair technician visiting a customer whose system had crashed to restore a backup. The technician gets there and asks them to describe their backup process, and is told by the secretary that at the end of each day, she just drags the little “Desktop” icon onto the CD ROM icon, and it backs things up automatically! Of course, things are seldom that simple, and it turns out that for the past three years, she’d been meticulously backing up solely her Desktop folder – where absolutely no documents of importance were stored.

Now, had this company tested their backups, this wouldn’t have been an issue. It would have been caught on day one. Which is why everyone should test their backups – not only when the system is first implemented, but also on a regular basis. Make sure everyone is familiar with the process, and you’ll have much less downtime when things DO happen.

Summary

Proper backups are critical to the continued success of any company that stores any form of information, and they are never as simple as “just doing” one or two things. There are a great many things to keep in mind when considering the safety of your backups, and even the things listed in this article are merely a good starting point.

At Bill On Site, we take data security seriously, and you should too. If you are in charge of any amount of critical business data, and any of the above is news to you, then you have some learning to do. Read a book, take a course, or hire a professional, but do something before the worst happens while you’re unprepared.

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And so begins the life of the Bill On Site blog.

Expect:

• Thrills!
• Chills!
• News and information about the Bill On Site Service!
• Useful information for small business owners!
• Possibly spills, but only if I can’t clean them up before posting.

Tune in to keep up, sportsfans!  Well, and even those of you who aren’t into sports. Just click on that orange “RSS Feed” button on the right, and we’ll keep you right up-to-date.