Hosting 365

Price may be an important consideration when evaluating hosting options, but increasingly, price is being standardised, with annual plans from 37.75 providing ample resources for the average web site.

However price alone is a very poor comparison metric. Features are generally compared when looking at price - but again, this metric is mis-leading, as many small web hosting companies vastly oversell their capacity - so from a customer point it doesn’t matter if they tell you you’re getting 1gb or 100gb - it’s on the same server.

The best metric when signing up for a hosting account is infrastructure. Will the network collapse? What is the backup and restore policy? What hardware is your web site on and how redundant to failure is it? What level of guaranteed support do you get? Is it 24/7?
Now, if you can find a host with good price, good feature specs AND great infrastructure you’re sorted. Hmm … I wonder where you’ll get that …

Ever wonder why Hosting365 is Ireland’s largest and fastest growing hosting company?

Yeah, me too, and I SHOULD know! Anyway … today Danny Briem (one of our night engineers) found the answer and suggested I post it here. Thanks Danny!

So, issues understood, competitive analysis done, my work here is complete!

Credits: VGCATS

It stuck me earlier as I was speaking to someone about equipment financial deals with suppliers and banks that the hosting model is very similar to it - although with far more added value.

A financing deal basically allows you to purchase an expensive piece of equipment - say a 5000 euro server - and pay it back over a period of time. This saves the company cash flow and also allows the company access to more ‘assets’ (inverted commas as the equipment is not as asset until it’s owned) which they will use to help grow or streamline the business.

In the case of hosted services - servers in particular, as it’s most relevant to the example above - a company can lease a server over a period of time (same benefits as above) AND get the additional benefits of managed services (staff expertise), IP connectivity (a good data centre will have lots of redundant and carrier neutral bandwidth), fast upgrades/repairs (based on agreed SLA’s), and most importantly, a hosted off-site server in a world-class data centre that can provide intra- or inter-net facilities.

I wonder then, when it comes to technology, should data centre businesses try to compete with the banks and equipment vendors when it comes to leasing deals? There is potentially no server software that can’t be provided as a hosted application now, once the customer office has a broadband (or equivalent) connection.
The hosting providers value-add is so much greater than that of a financial house, it would seem logical for IT Managers to consider this option when looking at their 2006 budget provisioning. Lower costs and increased service provision … win/win!:-)

Gartner reports (no link, sorry, read it on REAL paper!) that the role of the CIO is to change from being predominantly internal in focus to a more external outlook, challenged with helping company competitiveness and growth.

The report peaked MY interest because it 2 of the technologies it mentions that will be key in 2006 are ‘mobile workforce enablement’ and ‘collaboration technology’. Guess what? They’re both hosted applications, or ones that hosting will play the part of facilitator and infrastructure provider to.

Collaboration can only really be achieved thru on-line applications. The days of the shared network drive are dying (thank goodness!) and hosted applications are providing a variety of functionality (enterprise management, customer relations, logistics - now even desktop applications like email, word processing and project management). Technologies such as blogs and wiki’s allow companies to communicate and share project / product / business information internally or externally. The primary benefit of these is access-anywhere, and edit without local application requirements.

Which leads nicely to the second technology - mobile workforce enablement. The CIO’s role will be to provide the hardware and software to facilitate an increasing mobile workforce. It’s no longer only sales reps and maintenance workers that are out-of-office, teleworking, offices at multiple locations (and outsourced offices or managed services providers located off-site) and just keeping in touch with the office out-of-hours. This means providing services like push-email, portable phone numbers, and access to what were traditionally in-office applications like file servers, CRM and Enterprise software.
On the business side, the report states that one of the key 2006 priorities will be controlling enterprise operating costs. Music to MY ears! The model we take allows CIO’s to procure a high-end cluster of dedicated servers with hosted office applications, disaster recovery options and managed services support (or any customisation of that of course, up or down scale), for a monthly fee that is a fraction of the captial expenditure normally required. That model saves CIO’s both cap-ex costs, and internal staff resources. Hey, of course we make money off it to, it’s the outsourcing business model - providing Internet Infrastrucutre and associated services are OUR core features, not yours, so why try to build it yourself when we’ve invested millions in people and facilities? Just like we don’t try to write our own operating systems for our servers, we’re quite happy to use best-in-breed systems that already exist!

I think hosting companies will move aggressively into this space - building on their data centre infrastructure to provide value-added services and pre-packaged solutions. It’s a win-win for both customers and the hosting company as they have the expertise and facilities to provide the hosted applications CIO’s will need to enable the key drivers of changes mentioned above.

Congratulations to the 17 year old who created ZooomR, what someare calling a ‘FlickR killer’. But while what Kristopher Tate has created may technically be a fantastic application, and currently provide more features than FlickR, it’s unlikely to cause any harm to the photo site.

Why? Critical mass. Social media is about sharing and connecting. If I create an auction site better than EBay will it work? No. Because I need the critcial mass of people selling things, and people looking to buy items.

I must admit, the ’single sign on’ style (you don’t need to sign up, just log in with GMail, OpenID, Livejournal, etc.) and 15 languages is really cool; as is the meta-data abilities and geo-tagging functionality. But unfortunately cool isn’t enough. Buzz is what’s required - and not buzz amoung a few geek bloggers (myself included obviously!).

The trolls no doubt will cite Google, FlickR itself and other small scale projects that ultimately become huge and toppled industry behemoths as examples - but that’s much more the exception than the rule. Especially when you consider the timeframe - 3 months - and some of the features - Google Maps - that can easily be replicated; whereas Google had ’secret search sauce’ the others did not, and PayPal was very much first to market with a GOOD service.

This post is starting to look very negative, and that’s not the idea at all. I’m not trying to say the small guy will never succeed - just that there’s so many Web 2.0 apps that are being developed for next-to-nothing and in short timeframes, with no resources behind them, and competing for the same users, that the nature of social media means that only a small handful can survive - and thrive.

I think the hosting industry is moving this way as well. It’s easy become a hosting company - just buy some servers and resell space on them. What’s not easy is become a GOOD hosting company - and provide a quality support service on reliable and redundant infrastructure. What we’ll see over the next few years is a consolidation of the hosting market - with bigger hosting companies snapping up the little ones (or just their customers). The reason I say this is the critical mass one again. When a hosting company reaches that critical mass in customers it likely has the resources - it’s own data centre, secure finances to fund required infrastructure, and a wealth of expertise in staff - to offer both a better service, and because of economies of scale, better prices.

If you consider Bowman’s Strategy Clock, the ultimate position to be in is the high-quality, low-cost segment in a growing industry with high barriers to entry (at data centre level. See Porter’s 5 Forces for a great model on Competitive Analysis). Not blowing our own trumpet here (okay, clearly I am!) but because of our success, we can offer superior service (I can back this up … challenge me, I dare you!) at a lower price - that’s just what Economies of Scale does for a business, and hosting is no different.

I’ve diverged a little bit from the ZoomR story … but the point I’m trying to make is that WHEN you’ve got resources, and you’re not being complacent, it’s very hard for a start-up to profitably compete - unless there offering a serious increased value-add (i.e. not something the competition can duplicate / replicate in a matter of weeks).
For a more balanced review you can read Micheal Arrington’s review of ZoomR here!

On the 11th of March Ireland’s first Blog Awards ceremony was held in Dublin City, and to great success with over 160 participants!

We sponsored the category for ‘Best Personal Blog’ which was won by ‘that girl’ from thinkingoutloud. Below is a photo of the prizegiving - you can see it was a pretty informal affair! The photo below is me giving ‘that girl’ her award, and looking on are Piaras Kelly moblogging it and Tom Raftery on his right, who took loads of photos we’re looking forward to seeing on Flickr!

It was an enjoyable night, great to catch up with some of Ireland’s bloggers and techies, and fair play to Damien Mulley for what I know is hard work in organising an event!
You can see the blogosphere’s rants, raves and reviews at Technorati and in the Flickr pool.

EDIT: Photo credit to Tom Raftery. I replaced Robin Blandford’s one in case he asked for royalties! Thanks to BOTH Tom and Robin for taking photos, nice to have some evidence of the night!

There’s been lots of talk in Bubble 1.0 and Bubble 2.0 (that’s now!) about SaaS : Software as a Service (i.e salesforce.com, Microsoft Live), and it seems now that business, software and infrastructure have caught up with the IDEA of it, SaaS companies are becoming successful.

I came across an article by Nicolas Carr (of ‘Does IT Matter‘ fame) called ‘Here comes HaaS‘ and it strikes me that the dedicated servers model we use (and many other data centres) is exactly this.

Google Define doesn’t have a technical definition for it, so I’ll explain it here in plain English, or I’ll try! Rather than purchasing a server, installing your OS and other applications and connecting it to the Internet (all of which involve capital expenditure, and are on-going labour intensive), HaaS means for a monthly payment that is a fraction of your normal cost, a business can lease a server, with managed services support, standard OSes and bespoke application deployments, and a boat-load of connectivity.

For example, we sell a dedicated server - your own machine, which you can do with as you please (within reason on course, we have an acceptable use policy), install OSes and applications, and provides you with fast (and lots of) bandwidth - for only 59.95 a month! When I joined here first I couldn’t believe that, if I add the cost of buying my own computer and a simple broadband connection, if would be more than this a month, and my own machine in a data centre for this cost - WOW! Of course NOW saying that makes it look like I’m pimping our own products!
What’s important to know about Hardware as a Service is that it’s really relevant to you. Why? It takes away pain, it saves money, it provides access to dedicated resources (people and infrastructure). Moreover, I believe Haas is the enabler that will change the face of Software-as-a-Service. With Microsoft’s SPLA licensing, which effectively makes access to high-end software a lot more affordable, and of course, the Open Source OSes and applications, using the HaaS model, a relatively small monthly fee can provide you with office server funcationality, for literally a small fraction of the cost doing it in-house would be.

Watch the HaaS space, I think it will evolve into a H+SaaS model where bundled solutions will be offered rather than just empty-shell machines. There’s a business opportunity here for software companies to package and license there applications in the H+S-aaS model, and charge on a per-user / per-domain basis.

Late last week we launched a new web site - phew! You’ve no idea (actually, most of you probably do!) how much hard work goes into creating a new site from designs to content. More importantly, we spent a long time discussing the new hosting plans and features.

Typically Irish hosting companies have provided a fraction of the specifications of our US counterparts, for comparable prices, and that’s probably driven a lot of Irish web hosting abroad - and to a point, rightly so. Obviously we think you should host your site in Ireland - so you can MEET your hosting provider, CALL on support during office hours and SPEAK to a real person that can help you.

BUT … we realised that it’s not enough to tell people they should host in Ireland because it’s better for their business; price / feature comparison’s were not in our favour. That’s changed now.

In fairness to the Irish hosting market, the resources just aren’t there to provide the same level of service as the bigger US hosts. And also in defence of Irish hosting companies, many international hosters vastly OVERSELL their infrastructure, making feature promises that would be impossible to keep should they be tested.

As I’ve said, that’s changed now. Wanna know why? We’ve built our own data centre. (I’ll upload pics in another post … my shaky phone cam quality doesn’t do it justice!) That means that we can offer really low prices and deliver on the features we promise. And yes, it costs us less than our competitors, but we’re passing these benefits on to you, instead of profiteering and buying company-Ferraris
So as of last Friday our new plans are competitive with US hosting plans - both on features and on price. Oh, and we also provide free, FREEPHONE support (during office hours) to ALL customers … even the ones paying 3.75 a month!

I hope this equalises the Irish & EU market a bit with the US, and of course I also hope it helps us continue to grow and get EVEN MORE competitive!

We’d love to get some feedback on these new plans and prices. Is it enough? Is it more than is required? Have we matched the price/feature set well? If you’ve any suggestions on plan specifications or individual features you’d like to see … please tell us!

The whole goal of this blog is to get YOU to TELL US what you want. We do our best to use our crystal ball, but wouldn’t it be great if our customers helped us do better? And from a customer point, wouldn’t if be great if you could tell suppliers what you wanted and then (within reason!) get it? We think so.

There’s been lots of rumours and reports over the last couple of days about a leaked presentation on the Google site which talks about an on-line backup service that replicates users entire hard drive.

Personally I’d love a service like that - I’ve about 80gb stored on my disk and on-line backup, for free, of the entire thing, would be fantastic! However there’s a number of logistical problems people seem to be forgetting:

Upload bandwidth : even the best broadband providers still have sluggish upload speeds, which would make mirroring a hard drive a mammoth initial task, and that not taking into account quotas. Okay … once that’s done an incremental sync or differential sync would be easier.

Google launched free analytics to all Adwords users a couple of months ago, in less than a week they pulled the sign-up as it was killing their network. Fair play, there able to offer 2.5+gb storage to all GMail users, but think about it - what percentage of users come anywhere close to that level? On the other hand, even the most basic PC users would have a few gigabytes stored on their hard drive. I don’t believe the Google network, huge as it is, has capability anywhere near required for this.

The cost of providing this service would be exorbitant. The average cost per gigabyte is below 1 euro now, and you can safely assume Google has that down to probably 50 or 60 cent. Add to that the huge computing power that would be needed to serve all these files - even with large storage arrays. Even if Google only launched the service in Ireland, and a paltry 10,000 people signed up and backup up an average of 15gb, that’s 150 terabytes, and while doable, I think highlights that to provide this service to the global Internet community would cripple any EXISTING network.

In my opinion the presentation was real - it was one of the engineers ‘Free Fridays’ mini-projects and he dream’t up this idea. It’s probably on file somewhere and when Google completes buying bandwidth and has a capable infrastructure, it’ll be considered then.In the mean time, if you really want on-line backup, we offer 2gb for 8.95 a month with a desktop backup client. Of course since I work here I can use our NAS on my server … hehe Actually though, I do recommend a NAS, DAS or even just RAID for any servers customers, your data and web site is just too important to trust to a single hard drive.

A lot of companies are guilty of over using the phrase ‘world-class’ when it comes to their products and services - ourselves included, so I know I’m in a glass house here! Businesses used to say ‘guaranteed quality’ all the time, but that’s a given now - if you’re service isn’t ‘quality’ you won’t have a business for long. Of course, we think we are world class so it’s okay to say it.
In terms of hosting companies and data centres though, what does world-class mean? We think to call a data centre ‘world class’, it has to have the following:

• Global peering for best IP transit
• Multiple fibre providers for both greater bandwidth and redundant connectivity
• Resilient power - electricity provision, UPS and batteries, and diesel generators
• Great staff - people with the knowledge and experience to run all the elements of a data centre
• Enterprise hardware - network hardware and servers that are capable of running 24×7 efficiently and effectively
• Bulletproof Security - cctv, access control, manned security, biometrics

Of course there’s a lot more, but these are the essential points.

Now, for a hosting company to call it’s infrastructure ‘world class’, we think it’s very simple - it has to own it’s own data centre to the above specifications. Not rent space in one, not outsource to one, actually own and operate one. Why? Because that means that the company has the abilities to fix any issues on-site in real-time (not through remote access or a third-party technician). It also means that the hosting company has really talented staff and a depth of skills (since there’s a lot required to run a data centre) rather than just being a sales outfit with minimal support and no access to YOUR server.

Of course the other benefit of working with a hosting company that has a data centre, is you can actually go and tour the facility, meet the people, see your server, and decide for yourself if the company is good enough for your business. I don’t think any firm should host a web site with a company they haven’t phyisically been to - it’s just too important to be done on-line with no viable proof of the hosting companies ability to deliver on it’s promises.

On that note … I’d like to extend an open-invitation to all readers to come in and take a tour of our facilities. Coffee and cake is on me!

For a more formal and detailed version, you can read about our data centre here.
What do you think? What does it take to be a world class hosting company? Give us your feedback and we’ll do our best to meet your suggestions.