(click the image below and see it live)

Have a business but need a marketing plan to drive more business? Had a virus or crashed hard drive loose all your data? We can help with both. For the entire month of July we are offering our services for 50% OFF!, thats right, no catch. Follow the links above to find out more and save today.

As Somebodyfix.me is strongly focused on small business web design, and growing that business without spending a fortune on ground up webdesign(costing hundreds  vs. thousands)…we noticed you have been busy…SO, what have you guys been doing? Growing your business! and so have we.

Today

Our most common hosting plan is our $7.95/mo plan, and would be the same server experience you would receive if you just went out and purchased 1yr of hosting from any of the major hosting companies. (although, we don’t require 1yr upfront to get the $7.95/mo price, we do all the server setup as part of the web design cost, etc, etc…

Starting Now

As your company grows in popularity (a later post will discuss) it becomes more and more relevant to have a website that performs top notch all the time. You websites are on whats called “shared hosting”, which would be the equivalent to living in a dorm that has shared bathrooms/kitchens. Most of the time, the bathrooms and kitchens are not full, but if everyone is trying to get to them at the same time, its slows down to a halt. Our new server is called a VPS server, and all the sites that I host, no longer have to share the “bathrooms/kitchens” of the internet, we have our own now. We used to share with thousands of people, now we share with 50+.

Search Engine Optimization

Google has recently officially added page load speed (how quick the home page of your site loads) to their list of criteria that controls how high (or low) your page ranks in Google searches. With your site on the VPS (no more dorm living) you page loads should be 50-100% faster!

What do you need to do?, Simple, nothing

Over the next 30 days or less, we will be migrating the websites from the “dorms” to the “private house”. You will likely notice nothing (we will do high volume sites during your slowest times), but possibly delayed email for up to 24hrs depending on your email setup. (if you just have your @yourdomain.com email forwarded to a gmail account, there will be no delay)

Several months ago, my blog post How I Incorporated My Startup was a hit in the startup community.

I explained how easy (and cheap) it was to get my startup incorporated on my own.  And yes, it really is that simple to register a C-corp in Delaware, but I honestly wouldn’t have guessed the mess that it would eventually lead to. Please learn from my desperate situation.

My dilemma started when my co-founder and I had to split and the startup we were working on pretty much died out.  About a month ago, I decided to finally close the corporation.  But I quickly realized that closing a c-corp was not as easy as opening one.

“So in total, you owe about $89,000 to the State of Delaware”

I almost lost my breath when I heard the operator say that. I had never even seen $89,000 before and only had a couple of hundred in the bank from what I collected working part-time jobs in college.  I also come from a working-class immigrant family and we don’t even have that kind of money. I had a million thoughts running through my head at the once.  Why was I stupid enough to incorporate my startup without knowing what I was getting in to?

But the business-man in me told me chill out and to get this situation figured out.  I was told that closing my corporation would require me to file my annual reports for 2010 and 2011, which, because of the amount of stocks that I requested for the company, would cost this huge sum of money.

Research, several phone calls, and four different operators later, I was told there was another way to calculate my annual reports and taxes, and that was based on my “par value”.  Long story short, I recalculated my annual report taxes, and thankfully, the par value was small enough to bring the total to around ~$1200, but some additional paperwork would bring the total to around $1600.  Which is still a lot of money for a college kid who reaped no benefit from the corporation.

At the end of the day, what I really want to leave you with is that as hackers, a lot of us try to ‘hack’ together solutions out of habit.  But there are some things that we just shouldn’t try and hack together on our own.  There are some things that require professional consulting and advice.   Had I not put a small par value for the stocks, I would’ve actually had to pay that $89,000.  One mistake on my corporate forms could have resulted in years of debt for me.

Truthfully, I thought I could ‘hack together’ a C-corp, but I didn’t know what I was getting in to.  I wish I had understood that earlier, because I’ve been sucked dry of money and although I am thankful that I owe significantly less money, I have still not been able to pay off it all off to the state of Delaware to dissolve this corporation.  I made a big mistake and I’m paying the consequences now.  Please learn from my desperate situation.  Be smart and choose your battles wisely.