So many books talk about how entrepreneurs did this or did that, but it's all about the team. I didn't do jack compared to my counterparts. I found a few super motivated kids my age who wanted to join in on the business venture, and we split the work out depending on where our skill sets were. I did business, sales, marketing, and intermediate level tech support. Alan was a hardcore techy. Tyler filled in for both me and Alan. This brings me to my next lesson from when I supposedly ran a business back when I was 13: Your team matters more than you do. Make them happy, and they'll save you when you need them most.

Mishap #1: (4 months in business, 300 customers) I was driving down the freeway with my family on a rainy day in July. We were driving up the Jersey Coast, going to our next vacation destination. All of my responsibilities were temporarily designated to one of my co-founders, Tyler, and I received a terrible phone call:

"Hey umm... our servers are down! All of our customers are bitching at us!"

Oh. Bloody. Hell. We had downtime for the next 48 hours and eventually found out that one of our customers, once again, was phishing. In other words, somebody with an account on our primary machine was pretending to be PayPal and sent out fake emails. All of this from OUR server. This cost the company a few hundred dollars in revenue and thousands more in potential business, but it was a good lesson that I learned young. a) invest in security, b) figure out ways to get your customers online if such a problem ever happened, c) compensate them for having suffered through your stupidity, and d) be transparent and honest as to what happened. We failed to do all of the above when we needed to. Fortunately, we learned from these mistakes. We ended up giving out heavily discounted services and emailing updates to customers when they suffered through our careless mistakes.

Mishap #2: (9 months in business, 700 customers) I was in a hotel room on December 31st a few years ago. It was 11:59 and 15 seconds (+/- 10 seconds) and suddenly I get a phone call. Of course, another problem while I'm trying to enjoy my vacation. Co-founder Tyler tells me that some f**khead hacked into all of our servers and wiped off our clients' accounts. Not. Funny. Except this time, we learned from our mistakes. My other co-founder, Alan, was also a nerdy Asian. He was brilliant. An absolute genius. He found out what happened and he patched the problems up within 15 minutes by reverting to our backup machines. Since this was new years, nobody was looking. We were so fast with getting things back online that not a single customer sent us a support ticket. This brings me to my next super important lesson: Always critique yourself and learn from your mistakes. If something terrible happens, (such as if some dickhead deletes all of your customers' accounts,) then learn. Figure out what happened, patch it up, and promise that it'll never ever happen again in the future. And if somehow it does, you're going to lose business.

More to come on my stories from when I was a stupid, arrogant, teenage entrepreneur!

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor while partying like a rock star.

From Valleywag: How is it that major retailers aren't prepared for black friday and cyber monday? Sears.com went down after having "high volume," but that's just sad, considering that this weekend was huge for sales.

Not only should they be prepared for a huge traffic spike, but they definitely should embrace internet sales more. Brian Solis suggested that internet retailers make huge sales that happen from midnight until 5AM on "Cyber Monday" - only problem being, major retailers are scared that it'll take away from their retail sales. While the excuse is to be expected and somewhat understandable, there are plenty of people like me (and Brian) who wouldn't bother waiting on line at such an early time Friday morning just to save some money. If we could buy from the comfort of our own homes, that would be amazing. Not to mention, I'm much more compelled to add things to my shopping cart if all I need to do is click.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor.

Most of you have probably heard about the terrible oil spill that happened in the San Francisco Bay last week. It's terrible - wildlife is dying, and over 1,500 people are working around the clock to clean this mess up.

Everybody is dwelling on the stupid Cosco Bussan container ship that caused this problem. Afterall, it's probably one or two dumbass human beings who led to this hapening, right? Let's look at the bright side:

For all we know, this may bring about change in how things are done in the future. We'll be better prepared for future oil spills. People who feel passionate about fixing this will try to bring about permanent change in policy. If an oil spill 10X worse is to happen a year from now, we'll be much more prepared because of this one event.

This relates to the Rackspace.com dilemma below. The downtime Rackspace experienced happened because of one dumbass driver who crashed his truck. I don't see any pluses to this situation, but if Rackspace saw this downtime in its earlier days, it could have prepped itself for when the company grew to the large scale it is today.

With my hosting company three summers ago, we had a terrible DDOS attack that put offline a few thousand websites. We lost clients, we lost money, and we were left with a tarnished reputation... but hey, we learned from this. We made everything secure for if this was to happen in the future. We grew 1000% in the next few months, we were sure to spend time patching up all of our customers' machines, and not a single customer experienced a security related problem.

So stop dwelling on the past if you can't go back... there might be a positive benefit for all you know!

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor.

It's a pity that Rackspace, a company with a stellar reputation for uptime and "Fanatical Support" experienced hours of downtime for clients in the Fort Worth data center. After putting in millions of dollars into infrastructure, how could something like this happen?

First, disclosures: I used to be happy Rackspace customer. I studied the way they did business and implemented it in my own dedicated server solutions business back in 2004. I'm friendly with the founders/former management of Rackspace and Serverbeach, and I've learned so much from their advice.

Just a few weeks ago, Serverbeach experienced a power outage. They took the necessary steps to get people back online within a few hours, but it was sure to cost clients thousands of hours of man power and money to fix. The damage is still there - downtime puts full time businesses out of order.

When a hosting company goes down, so many levels of the business chain are hurting. For example, I used to have servers at Sagonet, and when they had problems, all of my racks there were down. When my racks were down, thousands of websites were shut off from the world. Thousands of websites shut down mean that not only are my clients mad at me, but their clients are mad at them. And those clients may have to use these websites to serve THEIR clients, and so on. The loop can go on forever, and it all comes down to a datacenter hickup.

At that point, there's nothing you can do but wait for the machines to come back online. And once they're online, a shit ton of complain emails are bound to go to the datacenter, the leasers, the resellers, the clients, and even the clients of the clients. Companies like Rackspace who manage both the datacenter and the actually sold services are forced to compensate for lost time, or face terrible press and a huge loss of clientele.

It's particularly frustrating for Rackspace that all of this happened from a stupid truck accident that brough a transformer down. The open letter says that they had to shut some infrastructure down just to get to the accident victim. I'm sure the high level Rackspace clients wouldn't have minded leaving that poor soul to suffer if it meant keeping their websites running.

When I was in the business, problems weren't as terrible, because I targeted small businesses. Many of them wouldn't even notice downtime! Rackspace, on the other hand, serves clients such as Motorola and JC Morgan Chase. And when their services go down, the entire world is bound to know.

I'll give Rackspace credit for doing the right thing. They wrote an open letter to their clients, took responsibility, and promised compensation.

Unfortunate for them, their reputation may be somewhat tarnished from this stupid accident.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor.

Serverbeach was awesome enough to contact me just an hour after my blog post below. Here's what the community evangelist, Charnell Pugsley wrote to me:

The current situation: All our guys are out there now doing nothing but bringing servers online and the power is stable.

Within the next few days, we will be investigating what's taken place and coming up with a solution to keep it from happening again. We'll be following up with all of our customers in the Virginia data center with an official explanation soon.

... and then provided me my compensation in the form of credit to future invoices. Not bad, considering I didn't have to do anything more than just write this blog post and email her!

In any case, this is way better customer support than most I've seen in the past. When shit hits the fan, it's often difficult to get compensation let alone receive a reply from any company representatives.

Well, cheers to ServerBeach! I'll continue to be a loyal customer :)

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, SimonsRockers.com, and Jessicamah.com.

Ugh. ServerBeach killed our server this morning at about 4AM PST. Their support forums tell us there was a power outage, but then our mysql server wouldn't boot up and all of that means lost users and lost revenues over a stupid power failure.

Our first reaction was to go ape shit and yell at them, but having been in the hosting business before, I understand what they're going through. Most of this isn't directly their fault, but they do promise us almost perfect uptime. Serverbeach hosts companies such as Youtube; and when infrastructure goes down, a lot of money is lost by everyone. Even if the root cause of the power failure was environmental, fingers will be pointed at ServerBeach because of their promises of superb service towards businesses.

Although I did say I'd forgive them, I would like some reimbursement. Their SLA reads:

In the event ServerBeach fails to meet the Replacement Guarantee or customer experiences Infrastructure Downtime or Network Downtime as outlined herein, provided Customer follows the procedures outlined herein, ServerBeach will apply a credit ("Credit") to customer's account in an amount equal to five percent (5%) of the Net MRC for the affected account for each half hour of downtime or fraction thereof. "Net MRC" means the monthly recurring charge for hosting service for the server experiencing the issue excluding any add-on or optional services which are not included as part of the standard hosting plan but are included as part of such customer's monthly recurring charge.

That's just lame. I want 3 months of free service!!! Now I remember why I got out of the dedicated server business back at age 14... because I had to deal with customers like me.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, SimonsRockers.com, and Jessicamah.com.