Hosting 365

That’s a moot point for a hosting company obviously - if the company HAS infrastructure of course it will boast about it, if not, don’t expect a detailed explanation of the Data Centre facilities on their web site.

But what about web applications and business or community web sites?

Would it foster more trust if you published information about the hosted services you have? Is that relevant at all?

I actually think it is - depending on the site. Basic sites that serve content to people, no matter how busy, will require good hosting, but to the people browsing the site that’s irrelevant. However communities, e-commerce sites, business and especially technology forums - these users do care about the web site and having some information about what infrastructure it’s hosted on would not only provide a better sense of security and reliability to existing users, but also help provide a measure of ‘trust’ for new users.

The same goes for web applications - it’s unlikely I am going to store any sensitive data (emails, credit card details, files / photos) or any data that I want to be able to gain access to, securely, at any time, from any where (that’s the basic tenet of a web app in fairness), with a web application provider that I do not have some level of trust in. Publishing some details (of course I’m not suggesting publishing anything that might actually give away too much info and have the opposite security effect!) of the hosting platform the application is served from, would give SOME peace of mind (of course financial and competitive feasibility are business considerations as well).

In all this rambling, to try and distill it, what I’m really saying is that any web site that has a user base (not a people-who-browse-only base) should publish data security, network connectivity, and server/platform resilience and redundancy information within their ‘about’ section. This is of course, like Hosting Companies, provided that the site in question is actually hosted in and on some good infrastructure!

If there’s any interest in this I’m happy to write and publish (under a Creative Commons license) some white-label data sheets and information on our data centre and network infrastructure that you (you, being hosted in here of course!) can edit, cut+paste, butcher and re-publish on parts of your own web site.

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.

HP have made big announcements over the past few weeks about consolidating their many data centres and operational locations into a far smaller number. One has to wonder why HP, among others, are centralising all their infrastructure?

Clearly it makes financial sense to reduce overhead while maintaining or improving performance - which is the goal of these types of infrastructure consolidation.

The fact that HP, one of the largest IT companies in the world, is embracing this strategy, is an endorsement of one of our key messages - hosted applications.

Take a standard business with a couple of in-house servers as an example. The servers probably act as a file store and email platform. There is most likely a tape backup solution that the MD or resident IT-guru (who is full-time in a sales or admin role!) manually runs the backup, rotates the tapes and brings one home every evening; and there is a maintenance contract in place which guarantees repair / replacement SLA’s.

The consolidation strategy is one of reducing un-needed infrastructure. For a small business to have their own servers and most likely no full-time IT staff is lunacy. For starters the capital cost of hardware and software licenses is a lot, as well as the maintenance contracts and internal labour required for bug fixes and software patching.

We are trying to educate the market to the hosted application alternative. In this scenario, an Internet Infrastructure Provider supplies the machines, software licenses (hurray for SPLA!), power and IP connectivity. The IIP also guarantees better uptime and repair SLA’s than is possible in-house. Furthermore the backup can be automated and sync’d to an off-site (another data centre) location. The real carrot of this solution then is not only that it is demonstrably far superior, it is also massively cheaper - as there is no capital outlay, and only a minimal monthly spend (our Financial Controller - Ken Pierce - has a good Cost-Benefit comparision analysis on this … which we’ll hopefully make into a web-enabled tool soon).

Clearly the industry believes hosted applications (Software as a Service - SaaS - some call it) are the way forward - with Microsoft (whom long derided anything not based on a local PC) embracing it with their SPLA licensing scheme.

The greatest challenge is in educating the market - moving visibly equipment off-site has a perception of risk, even though it’s actually being moved to a better facility!

Oh dear god - how have 6 months passed us by this fast? We’re half way through 2006, it’s the middle of the summer, and I haven’t blogged in a month - thankfully there is a reason for this.

On the negative side, the reason isn’t that I have been kitesurfing in the Caribbean for a month!

Seriously, I hate those ‘Sorry we haven’t been blogging, but we will again very soon’ posts, so I think it’s important to update everyone on the amazing amount that’s been going on in hosting365 - albeit behind the scenes, which has been defeating the purpose of this blog!

Last Tuesday evening, at an event in the Westbury Hotel in Dublin City Centre, we launched ‘The Solution to Ireland’s Regional Broadband Proliferation Issues’. As Ian Bayly, our partner Motorola’s representative at the event said, ‘This new service will connect the unconnected’. I’ll go into it in more detail in a separate post, but basically it’s an ASP or Franchise service that enables communities and entrepreneurs to build a Wireless ISP business - as we provide all elements of it - from billing and CRM, to IP backhaul and canopy - a ‘total business solution’. You can read more about it here.

So that took a little bit of time to get launched But of course I’d be lazy if that was the only thing that stopped me from blogging!
Since my last post hosting365 have been to Poland, interviewed developers and designers, looked at office space, researched registering a business, hired a serious coder and a fantastic designer, rented an office and begun the process of officially incorporating a company. Hard to believe that in a month we’ve managed to get a business researched, started and running in another country! So, without further ado, let me launch our ‘Polish R&D Cenre’ which is responsible for all new product development and systems integration. Of course our Polish business plan doesn’t end there … but the rest of it will have to remain top-secret for now.

Since we decided in late May that sleep was for losers, that mean’t we coud also work on getting our Exchange service ready to launch. It’s been long-in-the-waiting, and there’s a few weeks left, but I can’t help giving away a sneak preview of it! The reason it’s taken so long is that we aren’t just launching a hosted Microsoft Exchange platform … we’re actually launching Ireland’s first fully integrated (read single sign-on) hosted Exchange, Sharepoint, Live Communication Server and Blackberry Enterprise Server (in bold because I love my Blackberry and can’t wait for everyone to get one so they also don’t get to sleep outside work hours!!). Office collaboration is great, but so expensive for SME’s, so by using SPLA licensing and taking the hit on a large install ourselves, we can offer an Enterprise-class office solution like this, starting from 9.95 a month !!

So we’ve been busy, it’s fair to say, and believe me we have a lot more in the pipeline. Yes this post is blatantly pimping hosting365 - but from the work we’ve achieved in the past few months, and the amount of great projects that are currently in development in here, I feel no compunction in the slightest about raving ‘We are the Greatest !!’

And if you think this post was ‘out-there’ wait till I start raving about our upgraded ‘obsessive’ customer experience department

To our staff, contractors, vendors, partners and especially customers and readers … thanks for working with us and enjoy the rest of the summer !

Iron Mountain have ‘lost‘ 2 truck loads of tapes in the space of a month. There’s a few reasons why this is a huge story and a significant hit to their customers business as well as their own.

The data on the tapes can be cracked, as they admit ‘using sophisticated equipment’, which really means someone with know-how can do it. Depending on what the data is, it may be used for all types of fraud by the thief, as well as the fact that the backup data copy is now gone and there a security hole to be plugged here until it is replicated again.

Of course if you have any sense you wouldn’t touch tape backup any more - it’s an antiquated technology. It rely’s on a poor medium, manual processes, and has logistical issues. Backing up on more reliable media like a redundant array of hard drives through a VPN in an off-site secure data centre makes much more sense. (heehee … and guess who can provide this for you? !!)
And the great thing about this Moore’s Law business is that the kind of system I just mentioned is not only FAR FAR better than tape backup, it’s also cheaper to do. Faster … more reliable … easier to access and restore … automated and secure : it boggles the mind that many CTO’s and SME’s still consider tape backup a viable solution.

I don’t think it comes as a surprise to anyone to hear that Irish SME’s find IT too complex, but the results of a survey commissioned by o2 are music to MY ears!

The results highlight that 21% of businesses are turned off by virus issues and 15% are fed up with spam.

Why is this good for us? Reference my last post about hosted anti-virus and anti-spam services taking this pain away for businesses. Of course an SME isn’t going to have IT resources in-house to maintain and update the security of employees desktops (unless it’s an IT SME of course) and therefore relying on an internal IT ‘handyman’ to manage this on top of his existing work is a process doomed to ‘delusions of adequacy’ from the start.

Why not outsource this pain? Give it to a company who invests in world-class systems and provides 24×7 support and uptime for your email … screening out viruses and spam? Of course I’m pimping our wares here, but the fundamental principle to mean is the logical choice. Aside from all the other benefits of on-site engineers, great infratructure and access-anywhere email services, the annoying spam and virus emails will be banished - and it’s likely a cost-benefit analysis would show massive savings over using internal email systems.

(Ken our financial guy might have something more numbersy to say about that!)

Hosted Anti-Virus is more secure and reliable than local machine software, because the virus never even gets to your PC and you are not responsible for regualr updates.

From Business and Finance

McAfee customers were left bewildered recently when their antivirus program began attacking legimate third-party applications as malware. The problem was caused by an update that McAfee issued for its popular antivirus software, with hundreds of executables wrongly flagged as W95/CTX, low-risk Windows 95 malware. Among the applications affected were Microsoft Excel, Flash, Google Toolbar and Adaptec drivers. McAfee published a list of about 330 programs known to have conflicts with the update, but experts have speculated that the true figure is much greater. Operating systems across the board were afftected by the mistake.

This is just one example of the many ways local Anti-Virus software can let you down. The primary issue of course is that unless you are in a highly controlled corporate IT environment, the responsibility for protecting your computer is actually yours - not the anti-virus software provider. This is because you must make sure the software is up to date with the latest definitions.

Hosted Anti-Virus is by no means perfect … since it really only protects your email … but the majority of incoming files to your PC do originate via email. If you protect your email service with a hosted anti-virus service, any infected mails will be detected and quarantined before they ever get to your machine, preventing any threat of an infection.

The auDA - Australian Domain Name Administrator - deregistered domain names matching the names of the two miners that were freed.

The auDA’s policy is similar to the IEDR except that it’s retroactive - as in, you can automatically register any domain, but as the policy states, you must be able to demonstrate a reasonable claim to it (trademark / registered business name).
Maybe this is a better model for the IEDR - let people register any .ie domain name, but if it looks suspicious, or if there is a compliant about it - request the relevant documentation from the registrant, and if they can’t provide it - delist the domain. This would allow the .ie system to be automated, making it a lot more efficient for purchasers and registrars, as well as reducing overhead work for the IEDR themselves (which in turn could help bring some price parity with the TLD’s, and grow .ie numbers)

So a system of ‘policing’ rather than micro-governance.

(From the Herald Sun)

Although called by many ‘arcane’ and ‘bureaucratic’, there are some benefits to the IEDR policies.

For example, a school rang our support line today wondering if there was anything she could do about an adult site with a domain name the same as the school she worked for. Realistically there’s not, as the name isn’t unique, although there’s no doubt the school had more right to it than a non-work-safe site.

Typically you can call your .com/net/org site anything you like. While some will argue that this is a right - you may not name your business with such freedom - it must pass the companies office screening procedure. Why should a domain name - which is essentially the same as a company name, trademark, or registered business name - be given unlimited leeway? At least the IEDR practice ensures some trademark and business name protection, and also assures against serious issues like adult sites taking names associated with schools. Aside from protecting business trademarks (since you have to prove ownership of the name you are trying to register), the policy also protects consumers from fraudulent people trying to capitalise on the brand value of other businesses.

Don’t take this post as a defence of all things IEDR, clearly there are other issues, and I’m sure they are working on these.

It’s funny … when I joined hosting365 I had just setup Roundcube as my webmail client (I was a customer before I became an employee!) and it took about 30 mins (and I’m not a techie!), so naturally I thought it could be deployed within the same time for all customers.

Clearly I was wrong … there’s so much more to consider when innovating for a 30% of the Irish market than when playing with webmail for 1 person

However, after much work and testing (remember Roundcube is still beta) we’ve launched it for ALL OUR CUSTOMERS!

Just go to webmail.hosting365.com, and enter your email address and password - it’s that simple! No need to enter domains, no need to go through control panels.

In case you’re interested, the reason it couldn’t be launched in 30 minutes, is that we process 40 million emails a month, so you can image the impact of a IMAP based webmail client on our infrastructure!

Innovation is hard .. much harder in a big company .. but it’s worth it, and as you can see (ref: FREE BLOG PLAN !!!!) we’re really trying.

Expect to see more innovations over the coming months! In fact, why not use this blog for what’s it’s really mean’t - and post in the comments the kind of innovations YOU’D like to see from a hosting company. PLEASE!!!