Hosting 365

Already Google are offering Gmail accounts at your own domain (still in beta) so it’s not unfeasible that they would offer free hosting (they already have Google Pages … which is a form of free hosting) at your own domain.

Would it wipe out shared hosting companies? Are we in hosting365 investing in other businesses to hedge our bets against this day?

In short - NO.

Unfortunately shared hosting is very commoditised - hence we offer plans from 3.75 a month - so yes, Google offering FREE versions of those plans would seem tempting. However virtually all customers need some kind of support - and a knowledgebase / FAQ just doesn’t cut it. No business will or should trust their on-line presence to a hosting vendor that does not provide dedicated support resources. And nothing in Google’s other product ranges would suggest that they would offer support - it’s just too costly.

Perhaps my view is naive since I’m in the hosting business, but I don’t fear Google offering free hosting, unless they also offer free, freephone support and email ticketing, 24×7. FREE and MANAGED SERVICES are not two phrases commonly associated with the same product. While we do provide a free blog plan (and support it mind you!), and maybe some day will offer free basic hosting - no business customer will (at least no one who values their web site or email) trust their on-line presence to a company they can’t get help from - no matter how reliable the uptime may be - the support required for individual web site issues is critical.

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 …

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.

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.