Hosting 365

In short, the EURid allowed bogus and phantom registrars to game the system; many registrars took payment for .eu names they were unable to secure and are now refusing to refund the payment (they probably shouldn’t have charged the person until the domain was successfully processed anyway!); the EURid system collapsed under the weight of requests (how was this not predicted and extra hosting infrastrucutre leased for the first month?); and TONS of intellectual property, business names and trademarks have been stolen.

What’s inexcusable is that .EU represents the largest economy in the world, and with all the TLD’s and ccTLD’s introduced in the past few years should have had ample information on how to correctly define the process and provision adequate hardware.

I still don’t believe that .EU will take off, despite a lot of commentary that .EU will rival .COM, and that most registrations are for brand protection rather than new business. As I said in a previous post - what market does .EU service? Not Europe anyway - with all the various languages to cater for, ccTLD’s are far more appropriate; and certainly not the intercontinental / global market - which is serviced effectively by .COM.

By way of example … when was the last time you visited a .US site? And what’s the difference in .US and .EU?

I see next month PC Live will be publishing a feature called ‘Ultimate Home Security Suites’. Unfortunately I think that it will be wholly focussed on DPIU software. That is, applications one Downloads, Purchases, Installs and Updates.

These applications are acceptable at best in a corporate environment, where updates can be pushed by the IT department, but the majority of home users don’t have the time or expertise to figure out which application to use for security. And although most applications provide an ‘auto update’ feature - many still require user confirmation or reboot permission, and because home users use their machines less frequently, they are at risk while all the updates are being downloaded.

The solution of course is SIMPLE! Okay … that’s not entirely true … but a huge portion of the solution can be made less reliant on the user. For example, hosted spam and virus filtering will prevant any viruses coming to your computer through email. Admittedly there’s still the Windows Update and Firewall issue, but by securing your email remotely, one of the major security gaps will have been plugged.

Why is online better? 2 reasons. Firstly, it’s on-line - as in, not on your computer - so viruses never actually reach your machine to have to be detected and removed (presuming your virus scanner catches them). Secondly the update process is no longer the end-users burden, as the on-line service will always have the most up-to-date spam list and virus definitions - making it more accurate.

For the past few months businesses could claim ownership of .EU domains if they had company registration or trademark documentation to support this claim - and 300,000 European Union wide did so.
On April 7th this pre-registration phase ends though, and anyone can register a .EU domain name.

Predictions are flying back and forth on how many domains will be registered, and how much of an impact .EU will have. To be sure in the first few months, many businesses will register a .EU to protect their trademark, and the hype will doubtless generate a few more sales, but in the medium-long term, what impact will the .EU TLD (top level domain) have?
First of all, where country domains such as .IE, .CO.UK, .NL and so on, do moderately well, that is primarily because they are VERY focussed on a specific nation. Whereas .EU is aimed at the entire European community - which is difficult to target on a single domain - because of the many languages involved.

I’m not sure where .EU fits in to be honest. As I said, a ccTLD (e.g. .co.uk) promotes the web site within a country - but where does .EU promote? .COM is arguably a better top-level or primary domain extension, as it’s generic and globally applicable. The .EU domain is really only useful for a company doing business ONLY in the EU and actually THROUGHOUT the EU (as oppose to within the business’s own country - in which case .be/.nl/.ie would suit better). And it’s more likely that a business would be international (EMEA / APAC) than just EU, as it’s actually easier do business with nations whose primary language is the same as the country of origin.
hosting365’s predictions on .EU registration numbers : the impact will be similar to that of .info and .biz : lots of hype, but the majority of registrations will be companies registering all TLD’s as a trademark protection exercise, and still using .com or the ccTLD as their primary domain.

We’re really pleased to annouce that we are launching (right now … this is the launch!) a ‘Free Blog Plan’ as part of our hosting services line-up!

The features are straightforward - the plan comes with Wordpress and K2 as default (K2 has a hosting365 logo and link to our site … but you are free to change the theme or customise the existing one as much as you like, and at no cost), 100mb of web space and the ability to use your own domain name.

So what’s the big deal? There’s already a number of companies offering free blogs - but to my knowledge we are the only one to offer totally free hosting, with no ads (our logo is there by default … but you can change this) AND at your own domain name. Using your own domain is probably the most important feature and key differentiator for the plan - as it’s a premium service for most other offerings.

You have to register your own domain name (plug: register365.com!) or change your DNS settings to our nameservers if you want to use an existing domain (all this information will come in a mail after you sign up)

Now … to pre-answer some of the questions. Why are we doing this? I’ve persuaded the CEO that providing this kind of service to the blogging community is a far better use of the marketing budget than print advertising etc. How can we do this? We’ve got this great data centre and infrastructure. Okay … if we suddenly get 10,000 signups we might have to hold new plans until we get more hardware to support it.

And I’ll pre-empt any questions about the signup process now - after you signup you will recieve an email with your account details (control panel access) and DNS settings. This using our existing hosting system and not a custom designed solution - so when you login to the control panel you need to install wordpress. It’s a one-click install that’s as simple as the normal Wordpress install so don’t panic!

The only real restrictions are that this is a blogging plan only. You can hack it to provide free web site hosting … but if you do that we’ll disable the account. Business Blogs and Personal Blogs are most welcomed!
So … without further ado … signup for a free blog !

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!