Know your audience.

I was ridding down the street the other day when I saw a old friend. I like the guy he has been keeping his web based company going through good and bad and making a profit along the way. He took good care of me when I worked together and I appreciate what he did for me. We started to talk about work stuff and I told him I wanted to buy him a beer and pick his brain about importing some stuff. He was pretty keen about it and we started talking about web services and the abundance of CRAP services in America. He started to tell me he is opening a branch in America and I should talk to them about hosting some of the new services I am working on. I said sure and told him we would get together later. I rode off, and became irritated by our conversation as I replayed it in my head. The reason I left his company was we ran under 2 different philosophy's. His customer control and handling situations as they arise with codes and buzz words. Mine build a solid server and service .... and there will be less problems. I knew it was time to move on when we sat down to buy 1 server, and I could not convince him to pay about 200 dollars plus or minus to buy a extra HD and the run a HD's as a mirror. His argument's were he never had a hard drive fail, and he was going to make all the servers mirrors of each other. A theory we discussed but could never archive due to my inexperience and his unwillingness to try anything that he didn't "think" was a good idea like rsync. My argument was it server mirroring (not clustering) is a waste and will never work in that small environment and more importantly we never had a hard disc fail.....yet! Regardless we went our separate ways and now I gained quite a bit in experience and more skill at running a server and server based services. I talked to one of his employees and about 6 months earlier and they are still in the same boat. Single servers with mission critical data on single discs. I appreciate a man for his skills, but please appreciate mine. I needed some business expertise, and he has that, but why when I know more about his infrastructure and how to trouble shoot it or fix it would I even think about paying him or anyone else to host my stuff? Know your audience and play to them, other wise you will just irritate them. E./