Utility-Model Web Hosting? Sounds Great!

About a month ago, I was meeting with the ServInt Marketing team, discussing the fact that — while we have a relatively high proportion of customers who will shout from the mountaintops about how much they love us (thanks, guys!) — the vast majority of our customers are silent throughout the length of their stay with us.

This topic was top of mind for us because we were in the process of designing a full-time staff position dedicated to customer outreach and relationship management — and we were frankly wondering how useful such a position would be if, in fact, people didn’t really want to engage with their web host unless something went wrong.

We began contemplating the possibility that our customers see us the same way they see their electric utility — i.e., they only think of us when their service is interrupted, or when they open their bills each month.

From a marketing perspective – trying to build brand loyalty and attract new business through referrals – this may sound like a bad thing, but it doesn’t have to be.  It’s possible to offer a commodity service on a utility model and still have your customers love you — and one sector of the utility industry is particularly good at this.

The American rural electric utility industry is made up of about 1,000 electric cooperatives — small, non-profit, consumer-owned utilities that serve the needs of the 10% of Americans who live in areas largely beyond the reach of investor- or municipally-owned power companies.  Because these co-ops are owned by the households and businesses they serve, an extraordinarily high emphasis is placed on providing impeccable, personalized customer service.

These co-ops invest in community business development, constantly enhance their infrastructure with systemic upgrades, and — despite their small size — are frequently the first in the industry to deliver new technologies that lower costs for their customers.  The result is a peculiar anomaly in the business world:  these are regulated monopolies that enjoy fierce customer allegiance — utility companies that are actually loved and appreciated by their customers.

ServInt isn’t a cooperative.  But it turns out we operate a lot like one:  frequent, free infrastructure and service package upgrades, customer/community-centric decision making, personalized service geared towards making our customers’ businesses succeed — the similarities are striking.  And because of that, I’m not afraid of the similarities between us and the electric utility industry when it comes to customer engagement and feedback.  We love talking to our customers — but a healthy silence can be a good thing when it’s coupled with fierce loyalty.  Bottom line:  if it turns out that web hosting is seen as a utility-grade service these days, at least I know we’ve modeled our business after the right segment of that industry.

Photo by ykanazawa1999

ServInt, GoDaddy, SOPA and the Fight to Save the Internet

In the wake of a well-publicized boycott campaign against GoDaddy, hosting providers are racing to try to come up with their stances against SOPA. I am proud that we don’t need to do that. Our stance on SOPA, its sister bill PIPA, and the bill from whence they both came COICA, is well known. We have spent much of the last year not just railing against these bills but trying to do something about them.

The well-intentioned goal of SOPA is to go after piracy, which is noble and very important. But piracy is something that needs to be handled smartly, with a laser-focus. SOPA isn’t a laser, it’s a wrecking ball that if enacted is likely to destroy hard-working legitimate businesses more frequently than it does pirates. SOPA allows people merely accused of ‘contributing to infringement’ to have their business taken from them. Pirates will maintain back-up plans in case they get their resources pulled – it’s legitimate businesses that will suffer most. SOPA will be used for censorship and as an anti-competitive tool. It will stifle innovation, and is one of the most dangerous bills I have seen in my two decades in this industry. Read more

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.

What exactly is “Managed Hosting”?

Sometimes, as industries evolve, they spawn new jargon that only means something if you’re inside the industry. To outsiders — even potential customers — these turns of phrase can seem confusing at best, and downright mysterious at worst.

So it is with the term “managed hosting.” Search the web for a definition, and you’ll get 10 different answers from 10 different companies. As ServInt’s Director of Managed Services, I want to take a minute to explain what managed hosting means to us. You may find that our definition is more expansive than those offered by our competitors.

Let me start with a pet peeve of mine. It really bugs me when web hosting companies use the terms “support” and “management” as though they were the same thing. They are not.

Support is reactive. It’s what you provide when things go wrong. It’s important, but if your goal is to achieve maximum uptime, support alone doesn’t help much — because it doesn’t avert catastrophe; it simply restores order when things go wrong.

Management — and, by extension, managed hosting — is proactive. It avoids problems. Here are some specifics from our to-do list at ServInt:  we provide compatibility checks; custom requirement analyses and one-on-one product and platform consultations; custom software installations; port, service and system monitoring; OS system patches and upgrades; and personalized technical advice and assistance. In other words, we don’t just support our customers when things go wrong; we manage the hosting of their sites to try and prevent things from going wrong in the first place.

Web hosting is a service industry. There may be lots of technology behind the solutions hosting companies offer, but the service they provide is what really differentiates their solutions. That’s why you see company after company touting their level of customer service as “heroic,” “fanatical,” “stupendous,” and so forth. Service sells! All I can say is: ask questions. Make sure that when they say “service,” they mean proactive management — not just support — of your online business.

One last thing: to get the most out of your relationship with your managed hosting service provider, stay close to them. Let them know when you’re expecting spikes or surges in traffic, or when you plan to launch a new app on your site. Inform them when you roll out a killer marketing plan, or when your site’s “high season” is about to begin. That kind of information will help them help you.

 

Photo by Karen Eliot

The more things change, the more they should stay the same. Sometimes.

My name is Fritz Stolzenbach, and I’ve been leading marketing and business development efforts at telecom/Internet industry companies like Intelsat, Hughes Network Systems and the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative for more than 25 years.

I’ve been integrally involved in the rollout of some pretty cool broadband/rich media products and services over the years, including DIRECTV, HughesNet and the Connexstar enterprise WAN service. I’ve launched dozens of B2B, B2C and Fortune 500-facing products and services in my career, and I’ve run more than a few companies of my own.

Now, I’m starting a new chapter in my professional life, as the Vice President of Marketing at ServInt.

So why am I here? Basically, I’m here at ServInt because I love this company. The people who work here are smart, love what they do, and are easy to work with. But probably the biggest reason why I decided to join ServInt is because I think this company is about to change the face of business-grade web hosting — again. I know this because I’ve spent a lot of time with the mad scientists in the engineering department, the guys on the front lines in the MST — and I’ve had some very long, very interesting conversations with the people who sit in the corner offices here. Bottom line: amazing things are going to be happening at ServInt over the coming months and years, and I want to be a part of them.

One of my priorities is to keep you up to date on the latest developments in the Marketing and Business Development department — so you’ll be hearing more from me as my tenure at ServInt unfolds. Our to-do list is pretty straightforward.

1. We’re going to help design products that meet urgent, real-world requirements of the global business community.
2. We’re going to forge new strategic relationships with companies who can help us deliver the best possible products and services to our customers.
3. We’re going to market and promote our products and services aggressively, but truthfully and with integrity.

In short, we’re going to do everything we can to help this remarkable company reach its fullest potential, while staying true to its roots.

Now — I want to address something that may be on the minds of folks who like things just the way they are. I know that for some service companies, growth can be the kiss of death — and growth is at the core of my job; it’s what I do. Let me assure you that everybody at the executive level in this company is in total agreement: we will not pursue market growth at the expense of service quality. Period.

From my perspective, ServInt’s great market differentiator is the personalized, high-touch service it provides its customers. Losing that advantage would cut my marketing and business development efforts off at the knees — and I can’t afford that. So, don’t worry — nothing will change about the level of service you’re used to receiving from us. We want to grow, and (with your help) we’re going to grow quickly. But, in the ways that are most important to us — the ways that define us as a high-quality customer-care enterprise — we’re going to remain exactly the same.

Explaining ServInt’s New KickStart Team

When I started at ServInt more than six years ago, one of the first lessons I learned was just how critical first impressions were to the customer experience. ServInt’s new Kickstart Team, a division of our Managed Services Team, is committed to making hosting a website as painless a process as possible. Here’s a little background on who we are and why we do what we do.

Read more

Introducing ServInt’s New Blog Server Line!

Yesterday we told you about SPORTSbyBROOKS, one of ServInt’s most popular blogging customers.

If you didn’t catch it, Brooks talked about the harrowing burst of traffic he experienced when he broke the infamous Tiger Woods story last November. After one phone call, ServInt built Brooks a custom solution that more than quintupled his previous resources, and we did it over Thanksgiving Day weekend!

So, needless to say, we have a great wealth of experience with high traffic blogs.

That’s why we’re excited to talk about our new Blog Server initiative! After consulting with our most popular blogging customers, we built the foundation of what we think will become the premiere blog servers in the world.

Our Blog Server line is a modification of our existing VPS, SuperVPS, and Solo Series products. They each feature the traditional LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack and come pre-loaded with cPanel/WHM. Most of the unique features of this line happen on the backend, making it even easier — not to mention faster — for us to upgrade VPS and SuperVPS customers with popular sites on the fly. This technology also allows us to further optimize the virtual environments on our Solo Series Dedicated servers which combine powerful Dedicated hardware with the flexibility of virtualization.

Because WordPress is the most popular blogging software in the world right now, we’ve rolled out our new line with WordPress in mind. New customers will receive a detailed, step by step instruction guide on getting set up with WordPress along with their server turn up information.

While WordPress is certainly the most popular application, it is by no means the only one. Our Blog Servers are fully compatible with competing software such as TypePad, and can also be loaded with apps like Drupal or Joomla should you prefer to grow your blog in a different direction.

The point is, the choice is yours. Try getting that level of flexibility from free blogs.

What we’d like to make clear with this announcement is that it is, at its core, a foundational addition to our products. ServInt’s Blog Server line is proof of our ongoing commitment to what we believe to be the future of news and opinion on the web, and we’re incredibly proud to be a part of that.

Check out ServInt.net/blog for more info!

Data Centers and Your Hosting Business

The data center is the most important tool in a web host’s arsenal.

That might sound painfully obvious, and it is, but for those looking to get into this industry it’s an important item to remember. Competitors brag about which bits of software they use to push product out the door but they often forget to mention the necessity of maintaining a powerful, scaleable, stay-in-business-able data center to actually store that information.

After our most recent expansion into ServInt LA, I thought I’d share a few insights into the choices we had to make when building our infrastructure to give folks a better understanding of our corporate goals as well as offer advice to those looking to get into the hosting biz.

Here goes.

More after the jump…

Read more

Next Page »