Cloud Hosting Series, Part 5: Do You Sell Cloud?

As a hosting company we hear this question all the time, but it usually misses the mark of what hosting consumers are actually asking for. And a misunderstanding about what hosted Cloud services are and do can lead to solutions that might not fit the problems customers are trying to solve. So what do consumers actually mean when they ask, “Do you sell Cloud?”

Due to the server-centric types of products that hosting companies have typically offered, when traditional hosting consumers ask if a hosting provider “sells Cloud,” they are likely asking if that provider offers a Cloud IaaS solution when, in fact, their needs might be better served with a PaaS or even SaaS solution. Confused yet? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Let’s take a minute to look at these terms to try to understand a little better just what Cloud has to offer the hosting consumer.

IaaS
IaaS—or Infrastructure as a Service—refers to the now ubiquitous “server in the Cloud” concept. With an IaaS solution, you receive a virtualized server OS and a generalized application stack on top of it (such as a LAMP). This basic unit of hosted Cloud IaaS is known as an instance, and it can be delivered on top of virtualization technologies such as Xen, KVM, or even Virtuozzo Containers. With IaaS, everything beneath the OS installation and the virtual networking provided with it (i.e. the virtualization software, the hardware, and the physical network build-out) is a “black box” to the end user, which is fine because few users have a real need to interact directly with the server hardware.

PaaS
Platform as a Service is a conceptually higher layer than IaaS. In PaaS the operating system joins the hardware and virtualization as part of the black box that users cannot see into. The end user simply interfaces with a programming language such as php, Java or Ruby. PaaS offers this programming environment—the platform—to the user.

Anyone familiar with these terms knows that this is something of a simplification of the IaaS/PaaS relationship. After all, the definitions of these terms are somewhat of a moving target in the industry right now. For an interesting article that illustrates some of the nuance of why simple definitions do not always suffice, click here.

SaaS
There’s another higher-order layer that is important to mention and will come up again later in our discussion: Software as a Service. In SaaS, a single application such as WordPress is exposed to the end user. The functioning application itself is the service while everything beneath it that makes it run is hidden from the end user. WordPress is a great example of SaaS when hosted on wordpress.com.

So, if you’re wondering if you can buy a highly scalable virtualized Cloud instance to move your server into, the question is not Do you sell Cloud? but Do you offer a hosted Cloud IaaS solution? But is asking whether you can move a server into the Cloud, really the right question?

To be clear, one -aaS is not better than another, each just targets different levels in the technology chain to solve problems. In fact, SaaS and PaaS solutions are most likely delivered on top of IaaS—and SaaS may be delivered on top of PaaS. The key is to know what you’re looking for and shop accordingly. Do you need a turn-key solution for a single application that stresses ease-of-use and low maintenance? Look at SaaS for that particular application. Or do you need a highly-customizable environment from which you can build one-off applications? Look to PaaS for a single programming environment. Or look to IaaS for the ultimate in flexibility to design your solution.

Some of you may remember in Part 2 of our Cloud Series I discussed some of the truly awesome new possibilities with Cloud hosting technology, and the associated learning curve: the ability to divorce the application from the OS and the hardware and have many instances working in tandem to accomplish a greater goal, each instantaneously scalable and clonable to meet traffic demands on the fly. This is where Cloud IaaS shines.

To be sure, individual applications can be custom built on top of IaaS server instances and tap into the incredible scaling some Cloud solutions offer, but being able to leverage a PaaS or SaaS solution allows you to skip some of the complexity of having to build a one-off solution in an IaaS environment. As the future of Cloud unfolds PaaS solutions that are specifically tailored to languages like Java, Ruby and PHP as well as SaaS solutions that offer turn-key application environments like WordPress, phpBB, and Magento will become the norm.

So, back to the original question, “Do you sell Cloud?” The answer you receive to that question may not provide you with the information that you really need when choosing a provider. However, you will quickly be able to home in on the right answer and provider if you know what you’re looking for, or if you find a provider who is willing to work with you to help you determine the optimal solution for your requirement.

Photo by Liber

Cloud Hosting Series, Part 4: With Cloud, the Era of Overselling is Over

In my last blog post for ServInt’s Cloud Series I talked about some of the true potential of Cloud Hosting. But how do you know if the Cloud hosting provider you’ve chosen will be able to make good on their promises for scalability, bandwidth, reliability, etc.?

One of the reasons non-Could hosts fall short in our industry is overselling. Not all hosts oversell their products—ServInt never has and it never will. But many hosts, especially in the shared space, buy resources and then resell multiples of those resources under the assumption that most people weren’t going to use everything they were being sold.

And for the most part, shared hosts can get away with overselling by simply dumping customers who push the limits of their infrastructure. Every VPS host out there has stories to share about customers calling them up and asking for a solution because one of the big shared hosts has just turned off their server and told them to find another provider. These successful customers—the customers that need and demand the “unlimited” offerings many shared hosts brag about, are the customers the hosts don’t want. Because overselling and customers with serious hosting needs don’t mix.

Until recently, most of those customers ended up in VPS land. And it was—and continues to be—a great choice for many of them. A quality VPS host partitions hardware and sells the discrete blocks to customers with guaranteed minimum performance and burst resources to boot.

But some less-reputable hosts also oversell in the VPS environment. With the resource needs of VPS customers—not to mention the prices being paid for service—a customer expects what they’ve paid for, and rightly so. But all too often promises of CPU, RAM and bandwidth fall short when a shady VPS host oversells packages on its network.

As Cloud Hosting continues to mature as a movement, that’s going to change drastically. Hosts used to overselling who get into Cloud Hosting will quickly learn that Cloud just doesn’t work that way. Where some hosts can hide their overselling with VPS, Cloud hosting’s very nature doesn’t allow this.

I recently had an interesting conversation with a friend of mine in the industry. He shared an analogy with me that I want to pass along, as I think it helps illustrate the major technological differences between traditional hosting and Cloud hosting on the back end—the part that few customers actually see.

He described the following three models:

Shared Hosting
Dedicated Hosting
Cloud Hosting

He said that if you think of hosting infrastructure as being like seats on an airplane, in a Shared Hosting environment you could oversell—you could have 500 seats on a plane and sell them to 700 passengers, knowing not everybody would show up for the flight.

In a Dedicated environment it’s one to one—meaning that if you have 500 seats you can sell them to 500 passengers.

In a Cloud environment, if you have 500 seats you can sell them to… maybe 400 passengers—because some of those passengers might need more seats mid-flight.

Cloud brings in an era of UNDERselling!

Now here’s the thing: in today’s environment as a host, overselling doesn’t mean you suck, but if you suck there’s a good chance you oversell. As more and more hosts move to the Cloud, the hosts that suck now will really suck then.

A well-run Enterprise-class VPS infrastructure is the closest parallel to a well-run Cloud—more so than Dedicated and much more so than shared. Because a host needs to have inventory available for customers to quickly scale. They—we—need to have ample burst resources available at all times so that when customers need more power in the middle of a busy day, or when one gets on the next Oprah, we’ve got it covered.

True Cloud hosting provides—among other things—even quicker scaling than VPS, therefore spare resources need to be available in even greater quantities to handle that. A VPS or shared host that has trouble helping customers scale now will have more trouble in Cloud. Underselling is not new, but it is a fundamental element of the Cloud Hosting model.

So what does this mean to you, the customer?

It’s important for customers to understand what kind of investment a hosting provider is making when it offers a Cloud solution. Does this company have the infrastructure and expertise to back up their new product? Do they have a track record of providing new technologies that aren’t just techie-cool but are also functional from a user perspective, scalable and there when you need them?

And make no mistake, while the hardware and software are new, they run over the same network infrastructure that VPS and dedicated run over. So evaluating the capacity—and competency—of a Cloud hosting provider’s network and support for VPS (or dedicated) will give a customer a good sense of how robust this new Cloud solution will be.

 

Photo by Liber

Cloud Hosting Series, Part 3: Making Hosting Better… Not Just Bigger

In part 2 of our Cloud Hosting Series, ServInt CTO Matt Loschert made some interesting comparisons between VPS and Cloud Hosting.  One of the things Matt said was “Cloud Hosting creates a world in which server instances are transient and disposable. The instance is no longer important — the communication and cooperation between instances is.” Pretty dense. Still, it got me thinking because this notion is at the heart of the promise of Cloud Hosting.

I was still thinking about it when I showed up to the local deli for a sandwich yesterday. I usually go around 2pm. Yesterday I went at 12:30. The place is tiny and normally sleepy-quiet. It’s just the owner at the counter and her son working the register. Frankly, I’ve sometimes wondered how they stay in business. But yesterday, an hour and a half earlier than I usually go to lunch, the joint was PACKED – and three times while I was there I saw groups of people come to the door, look at the line and walk out. Most of the time the owner’s just sitting on her hands when I come in. I realized that at 12:30, her business is MADE – but it’s not maximized.

So what does this have to do with Cloud Hosting? Well, the number one goal of Cloud Hosting seems to be the ability to achieve new levels of scalability. My deli experience serves to remind that the challenge of scalability to a business is not new.

ServInt has been a pioneer in finding solutions to the needs of customers who need to scale, sometimes quickly. Our entire VPS and Dedicated lines have been built to allow customers to expand and contract their single server at will. With the tech we employ today you can do things you can’t do in the real world. In an enterprise-class VPS world my little corner deli could simply grow in size to meet demand by calling the landlord—in this case a hosting company like ServInt—and ordering up a bigger space. One simple move later and the deli could handle the increased number of customers.

This has been a revolutionary and tremendously successful model, but it’s not without its problems and inefficiencies. The VPS model relies on manual configuring by the hosting company and time to complete any necessary migrations. The promise of a well-designed Cloud Hosting platform offers a tempting improvement on this.

To be fair to VPS, new improvements are continually being developed that bring these basic Cloud benefits into the VPS realm. In fact, there is a lot of pressure in the industry for companies like ServInt to call what we do with our VPS products “Cloud Hosting”. After all, when well-designed and backed up by high-end hardware, VPS has high-redundancy and incredible on-demand scalability at the core level AND the individual resource level. It doesn’t fit every technologist’s dream list of what a Cloud Hosting offering should be, but what does? It’s Cloudy and that’s good enough for some people.

Imagine what it would mean to my deli owner’s business if she could rely upon scaling technologies like the ones that I’m describing here. When the deli is packed, the owner hits a button and the deli magically gets bigger. When the rush ends, the owner hits another button and the new store shrinks back down. The landlord simply bills the deli owner rent and utilities based on the size of his restaurant at any given time. It would truly allow her to maximize her business. This kind of scaling may be fiction in the real-world, but in the Internet it’s very real – and available today. You can achieve that kind of rapid scalability right now, by either purchasing a scalable platform such as a VPS, or a Cloud instance configured to be used like a VPS.

But as Matt pointed out in his post, this benefit—while enticing to many—does not realize the true potential of Cloud technology. What VPS—and Cloud utilized like VPS—provides is the ability to take a single store, and either during a special promotion or just during the peak time of the day, turn it into a much, much larger single store. What Cloud Hosting promises you’ll be able to do is to take that single store and, instead, turn it into five, ten or one hundred identical stores working both independently and interdependently, increasing both redundancy and scalability in the process. At some point, no matter how big a single deli you build, if that deli becomes infinitely popular that one deli will eventually be too crowded to handle its business effectively. But if you turn that one deli into a whole chain on the fly… that’s another matter.

But here’s the thing – right now that kind of scaling doesn’t work right out of the box. Right now it takes coding. And so, frankly, a whole lot of people are getting Cloud instances and using single-instance scalability – basically using a Cloud instance like a VPS. And that’s fine for many.  This industry’s next steps will be in taking the true scalability promise of Cloud and making it attainable to a general business consumer. Once we do, we’ll truly achieve what Matt Loschert was talking about when he described a world in which individual server instances are transient and disposable. Once that is achieved, so will incredible levels of scalability, to greater degrees than we have imagined — and incredible levels of redundancy as well.

So just how does a hosting company build out a Cloud solution? Coming soon in part two of this post, I’ll talk about what providing businesses with the ability to scale like this looks like behind the curtain from a nuts-and-bolts perspective.

Photo by Liber

Cloud Hosting Series Part 2: VPS to Cloud?

I have to admit, I’m a bit baffled by some of the messages I’ve heard coming from our competitors and from customers recently about what Cloud Hosting means to our industry. I often get questions from customers and read advertising from other hosting companies that equate Cloud Hosting to being the obvious replacement for dedicated server or VPS hosting. We hear things like, “upgrade to our Cloud solution” and “host your website in our Cloud,” as if your website wasn’t working on its current platform, or with the advent of Cloud, your website would stop working all of a sudden.

Don’t get me wrong, Cloud Hosting has its place in the market, and it will become increasingly relevant with time. In fact, as a platform, Cloud will become a necessity over the next few years. But, right now – are you ready for it?

In the SMB realm, our industry continues to sell hosting as it has since pre-Cloud days. It’s all still server, VPS, or instance focused. Everything goes back to a software architecture and design philosophy that places the greatest emphasis on managing your operation on the server level, and automating as much of that operation as possible, hence the the proliferation of control panel software over the past 10 years. Control panels attempt to simplify web hosting management, a task that was previously highly technical and arcane, requiring deep knowledge, typically gained after years of experience.

If, as a customer, you think of Cloud Hosting through this server-centric lens, you won’t reach the promise of Cloud. You can have your server in the Cloud, but it won’t give you and your hosting company anything more than a way to more quickly and flexibly provision and bill for VPSs. If you’re looking at hosting the way most do who have been consuming hosting services in the era of mass-market server virtualization, Cloud Hosting offerings in the market today can seem marvelously underwhelming. It’s virtualization with provisioning automation, or — put another way — it’s hosting where provisioning control has been given to the consumer.

Okay, so then why does anyone care about Cloud? What has truly captured the attention of the industry is not what Cloud Hosting currently is for the SMB community, it is the promise of what it can and will be. Cloud will revolutionize hosting, but not in the way that some seem to assume right now. It is not going to make server management more simple, or optimize the software platforms of today. And it won’t simplify your life. Cloud will, however, make possible a paradigm shift in the way that applications are hosted on the Internet.

What makes Cloud revolutionary is the mental shift that it allows in developing web-based applications. The ability for the hosting consumer and/or software developer to control resource provisioning allows development that goes in a completely new direction. Cloud Hosting creates a world in which server instances are transient and disposable. The instance is no longer important — the communication and cooperation between instances is. The developer writes provisioning logic into his application because, by breaking the functional requirements out into logically separable parts, he can build a system that can auto-scale to meet individual application requirements.

The problem is that many seem to assume that they’re going to bring their old applications, control panels, and knowledge to the Cloud, and that it’s all going to work even better. That’s not really the case. You will
be able to bring these things to the Cloud, but they will not take advantage of the true benefits of the Cloud. One solution to this problem is time – time for developers to begin writing applications to Cloud APIs and using technologies that allow for simple inter-server cooperation and synchronized data sharing and manipulation. This will naturally occur over the next few years, and it will come as a result of the creation of new development frameworks that make splitting hosting tasks into logical chunks a simple process.

Ultimately, Cloud Hosting is cool, and it is revolutionary. But right now, if you want to rush to the Cloud, ask yourself what problems you are trying to solve and who are you relying upon to solve them. For your own sake, make sure you know how your Cloud vendor will improve your operation. Otherwise, you might just end up getting sold a good old dedicated server “in the Cloud” — which you might even pay more for.

Cloud Hosting Series, Part 1: A Marketer’s Perspective

 

A few weeks ago, I traveled to San Jose, CA, where I attended the “Cloud Connect” conference. Cloud Connect is basically an annual symposium where the biggest players in the cloud industry gather together to talk about what’s coming next for the Cloud. Analysts opine, accountants report, Fortune 500 CTOs brag, consultants take notes, and those of us who are already deep in the trenches of the virtualized data center industry scratch our heads and wonder how any of this applies to “ordinary” businesses.

In later blog posts, our engineering and operations guys will get into the technical/management nitty-gritty of Cloud hosting. For now, I just want to share the following summary of what I learned at Cloud Connect, which I hope will set the stage for some of their comments:

1. Extremely large enterprises are now getting very serious about the cloud. What was a buzz phrase last year has turned into a real storage/processing/hosting option for some of America’s largest companies.
2. These companies don’t know how to approach the cloud. Should they go with a “private cloud” — i.e., a virtualized private platform that ensures security, but provides little to no economic benefit? A “hybrid” platform, where they keep certain apps and data behind lock and key, and burst out to the cloud only when necessary? Or should they go whole-hog and move everything to companies like Amazon? Most seem somewhat paralyzed by the choice.
3. The real adoption of cloud — even in the Fortune 500 universe — is still very modest.
4. Having said that, enough hyper-enterprises have moved into the cloud for industry bean-counters to be able to analyze some real data about computing resource efficiencies at those companies. This data has led analysts to conclude that at the enterprise level, cloud savings are very real, and can be very, very significant.
5. There are dozens of clever startups that are trying to turn the generic, SMB-hostile resource platforms offered by today’s cloud companies into more useful products. In my opinion, where these companies are succeeding, they’re offering only partial solutions to huge macro-level problems — and you still have to be an extreme early adopter to make sense of them.

So that’s the story as far as generic cloud services are concerned.  Much of the same story applies to companies that are marketing hosting “in the cloud.”  For the most part, they’re targeting their services at customers with the ability to take a bare-bones, science-project technology and develop it to meet their specific needs. That means hyper-enterprises with seven-figure IT budgets and early adopters eager to take a whack at a new, unproven platform. If you’re not one of those companies, good luck finding a cloud hosting solution that works for you “right out of the box.”

I’m a marketing guy, so I generally tend to be one of those “glass-is-half-full” people. For now, though, that’s my honest assessment of the current state of the Cloud in general, and Cloud hosting in particular.

Next week in part 2 of our Cloud Series: “From VPS to Cloud? Redefining Hosting” by ServInt CTO Matt Loschert.

 

Photo by Liber

Explaining Cloud Hosting: A Blog Series on the ServInt Source

Cloud Solutions.
Cloud Hosting.
Public Clouds.
Private Clouds.
Hybrid Clouds.
Cloudy… Cloudish… Cloud-like.

Is anyone else confused? The Internet industry has been buzzing about the potential of “The Cloud” for a while now. Here at ServInt we’ve been offering easily scalable, highly virtualized, business- and budget-friendly hosting solutions for years — and yet, as some of our customers have noted, we don’t currently offer anything we actually call a “Cloud Hosting” product.

There are lots of reasons why — and we think it’s time to share them with you. Over the coming weeks and months, the ServInt Source will be featuring some of our key Cloud-focused staff members reflecting on the state of Cloud hosting today and where it is heading in the future.  We’ll be sharing strategies, explaining technologies, and debunking some pretty widely held myths.  It should make for interesting reading.

Hopefully, when the smoke clears, we will have answered the question that many of you have been asking:  what does Cloud hosting mean for me?

Photo by Morbuto

Check out the cPanel Podcast Interview with ServInt’s Christian Dawson!

Earlier this year at HostingCon 2010, cPanel’s Lindsey White sat down for a chat with our COO Christian Dawson.  They discussed his presentation at HostingCon, “Oh My God, We’re All Gonna Die”, and his general take on current state of the hosting world.

Is it just me, or does Christian sound like he’s being interviewed on NPR? :-)

You can listen directly from the cPanel’s podcast page, or you can download the podcast directly below.

DOWNLOAD

“Oh My God We’re All Gonna Die” – HostingCon 2010

A couple weeks back, I mentioned that I would be speaking at the HostingCon 2010 conference in Austin, TX. I also mentioned that I would post the presentation here for all to see after the conference and I want to make good on my word. The presentation is posted below (after the jump).

The title of my presentation is “Oh My God We’re All Gonna Die”. While the title is intentionally provocative, the message is, I think, pretty optimistic. Our industry is changing rapidly, while we’ll be forced to innovate and compete on a whole new scale, it will mean a leaner operation for businesses and better and more affordable services for end users.

Since there is no video of the presentation (sorry about that), I’ll try and sum it up as best as I can here.

Read more

VPS: 6 years On All 6 Cylinders

In all the hullabaloo of HostingCon events this week, I nearly forgot that yesterday was the 6-year anniversary of ServInt’s VPS offerings. Passing that landmark day there was fitting. A lot of the folks we partnered with to create our VPS products were there, particularly Parallels, and it’s an excellent reminder of just how far we’ve come as a provider as well as a company.

ServInt has always considered itself a managed hosting provider first, with the vehicles we actually use to deliver those services an important concern, but ultimately just a technological envelope. We learned very early on that the most important part of a company is its people and we’ve been really, really lucky since then with our efforts to attract great people. VPS technology, and more specifically Virtuozzo, has been very good to us and we’ve been able to create powerful, unique products that have evolved immensely over the years.

There are a lot of really great things happening in hosting right now. We now have viable, virtualized alternatives to dedicated servers such as our own SuperVPS line, pairing the speed and control expected from a dedicated box with the reliability and scalability of a VPS. Cloud is on the horizon in some form or another, promising new ways to deliver content and store data and with it will come a new wave of entrepreneurship and a pay-as-you-go business model that is fueling a new generation of startups and industry leaders. A lot of this hasn’t come to fruition but it will be great to be a part of this industry as we all figure it out.

6 years ago, we had no idea what the industry would hold for us. Who would have thought that an online bookstore would become one of the most progressive cloud storage companies in the world, or that a small Russian software development firm would build the technological backbone of our most popular product?

So in 2015, when we’re driving our flying cars to work and scarfing down Jetsons-style breakfast tablets, who knows what will be fueling the internet?

I for one, can’t wait to find out!

Clouds and Wax Wings

Lifehacker, one of my favorite blogs of all time, had a great article earlier this week on the “hidden” dangers of cloud computing.  I’ve been digesting it for a few days and thought I’d add perspective from a web host.

To me, the current frenzy over cloud computing reminds me a bit of the story of Icarus, whose haste in gaining flight pushed him to create wings of wax only to die after they melted mid flight.

Gina Trapani, a fantastic writer, was primarily talking about Cloud services as opposed to Cloud hosting, however there are parallels between the two concepts.

Gina’s article mentions privacy as a primary concern for cloud users. She quotes an Op-Ed by Jonathan Zittrain in the New York Times:

Thanks in part to the Patriot Act, the federal government has been able to demand some details of your online activities from service providers – and not to tell you about it. There have been thousands of such requests lodged since the law was passed, and the F.B.I.’s own audits have shown that there can be plenty of overreach – perhaps wholly inadvertent – in requests like these.

On the cloud service she’s right, however on the hosting side, things are a bit more complicated.  Title II of the DMCA gives Online Service Providers (Including ISP’s and Web Hosts) a ‘safe harbor’ clause essentially protecting the host from having to monitor everything that is on a particular server.

Basically, a VPS server is treated like an apartment building.  If the police are investigating a murder, the superintendent will neither give them the entire building to search, nor will he search for the murder weapon himself.  With a warrant, the superintendent can allow the police to search a particular apartment, but he himself is not held liable for the murder that occurred on his property nor is he responsible for finding any relevant evidence.

The same idea applies to a hosting company and, say, a VPS. If the police have the proper court documents, we can give them ALL the information on a particular VPS, but we cannot and will not look inside the VPS and hunt a file for them, and we also cannot and will not give them every VPS on a server.

This is, of course, an enormous distinction to make, Gena writes:

To search your house or office (including documents stored on your computer’s hard drive), cops need to obtain a search warrant. To get to the information you’ve stored on a third-party’s web servers, they only need a subpoena, which is easier to obtain. This kind of search can also happen without your knowledge.

It is true that with an appropriate court order, authorities can gain access to a server without the user’s knownledge, they cannot however gain access without OUR knowledge.  ServInt’s policy has always been that we will tell a customer everything that we can under the law.

On the cloud, there are still some serious concerns about the viability of the platform, in fact they are the same reasons why ServInt hasn’t yet implemented its own cloud solution.

Latency is still a huge problem, lack of command-line access continues to be an issue, and good luck to those who need to make changes to Apache…it might be easier to disarm an atomic bomb.  All of these are compounded by the very real security and privacy concerns in current cloud implementations, especially cloud services.  That doesn’t discount the technology, nor does it imply that cloud services are bad per se, they are just fledgling.

The goal of a technology company should be to create a product that provides a solution so great, that what it lacks seems wholly irrelevant. As cloud solutions continue to represent the future of the industry, providers and customers alike must heed Icarus and be careful not to fly too close to the sun.

Photo used and altered under Creative Commons License, courtesy of flickr user pensiero.

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