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Selling to a buyer need is a classic marketing challenge, but it gets progressively difficult to penetrate with "customer need" driven messaging in a noisy, crowded and often undifferentiated space like web hosting.

How many web hosting providers today fail to mention that they are affordable, scalable, reliable and secure hosting? Virtually none.

Is the allure of these benefits really the reason Amazon ECC has so much buzz? Unlikely.

People are lining up for the Amazon ECC for other reasons:

1. Amazon ECC is highly differentiated from the hosting space by design, which allows them to get cute with their messaging. ECC is built on some sort of mythical infrastructure that scales without effort and never goes down. No one really knows exactly how scalable or fast it is, but it really doesn't matter. Buyers already have that perception and Amazon isn't about to change that by publishing technical details.

2. The pricing model is unlike anything we've seen in the hosting space. More important, it appeals to startups to rapidly prototype proofs of concepts to demonstrate that their business plans hold water without deploying any capital. The amount of time these startups have to prophetize the virtues of Amazon ECC is inversely proportional to the size of their customer base. All of that adds nicely to buzz creation.

Elastic Computing Cloud is a fascinating service and I think Amazon has a winner on their hands, but I seriously doubt that adopting "affordable, scalable, reliable and secure" messaging is a game changer for hosting companies.

Hi Misha, Dedicated servers are NOT scalable and reliable, and customers know that. But like Amazon's EC2, Data Return's "Infinistructure" sounds highly differentiated as well. 200-core Opteron processing array, anyone? And there's no reason why "Infiniservers" can't be offered with EC2's pay-per-use pricing. It all boils down to Data Return's product management/marketing choices.

In other words, I don't think EC2's allure is 100% attributable to technology features. The folks at Amazon really gave serious thought to what web app developers are looking for. In contrast, many web hosting execs (including myself, when I worked at EV1Servers) have no clue who their target audience is. "Small business owners", is what most of them say, or "IT professionals". They assume that because dedicated servers is what they've sold, clearly dedicated servers is the right reference point. But is the average "small business owner" or "IT professional" really so attached to the idea of a dedicated server??

As a generalist software engineer, I'm commenting on this from at least an altitude of 10,000 feet. The connection Isabel made between business<-->customer perceptions in sports recreation on the one hand and those same perceptions in web hosting on the other, fired a few neurons re: a more apocryphal yet pertinent quote, supposedly by Ray Kroc or some other former McDonald's executive:

"We are in the real estate business. The only reason we sell hamburgers is because they are the greatest producer of revenue from which our tenants can pay us rent."

Questions then for the web hosting cognoscenti: who is -- or will be -- the McDonald's of web hosting? What web product is -- or will be -- the revenue-fat virtual hamburger?

Ok, I'll concede. I think you're right here.

It does drive me crazy that ECC is so nebulous. What does scalable really mean? If an entire rack of servers loses power, will my service still stay up? What if the entire data center goes out?

Maybe I am just not their target customer.