Often people ask me about Lou Honick, founder and former CEO of HostMySite. Lou retired from HostMySite about a year ago, so I thought I would interview him for this blog. As you can see from his responses below, Lou has been very busy since he left HMS.
Stacy – Now that you have left HostMySite, what are you up to?
Lou – Currently I am flipping houses. While I briefly went into retirement in December of 2008, it didn’t last. By January I was out buying houses and renovating them with my brother-in-law. Originally, we had the plan that we would buy one house, fix it ourselves, sell it, and buy another. It didn’t quite work out that way. We purchased 21 houses, have 11 employees, a 4000 square foot warehouse, and we’re rapidly expanding the operation to scoop up opportunities in foreclosures. The great thing about it is that we’re really fixing up some beat up neighborhoods and helping some communities that really need some bright, renovated homes to get them moving in the right direction.
Stacy -Do you see any similarities between what you are doing now and hosting.
Lou – No.
Stacy – What do you miss the most about being away from hosting?
Lou – Don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t miss hosting. I miss the people I worked with. The people at HostMySite were incredible and sometime after June 4, 2011 I hope to work with a lot of them again. However, hosting itself is an incredibly stressful business and looking in the rear view mirror I can see that I didn’t really have all of my priorities straight. I’m grateful to have gained the right perspective early enough in life to make the right changes. Life is better when you leave work at a decent hour. Hosting is a 24x7x365 business, and the demands it places on your life are really not reasonable, at least if you want to do it right. You won’t see me returning to that business anytime soon, and if I ever do, I doubt we’ll be calling it “hosting” by then.
Stacy – What do you miss the least about being out of hosting?
Lou – Like I said, I don’t miss much about the nature of the business. I miss the people. Both the team at HostMySite and the great people I got to know in the industry. Don’t count out a new venture that gets me involved with the industry again, but it is in no way shape or form web hosting. Even if I didn’t have a non-compete, I wouldn’t do it.
Stacy – What do you see as the emerging trends in hosting, any new technologies that you think will be transformative?
Lou – Well, I hate to say I told you so, but things are going about exactly how I thought. Cloud and SaaS. Really we won’t talk about SaaS independently anymore; it will just be an outgrowth of cloud. Dedicated hosting is dying, soon to be dead. A few years ago during the HostingCon keynote panel I made that call when asked if I thought shared hosting would go away. I said of course not, dedicated hosting is what will eventually go away once cloud and SaaS get traction. It is still early, and there is a long way to go, but it is clearly where things are headed. Everything about technology and our society points in that direction. Every day we place more emphasis on efficiency. Virtualization. Power efficiency. Dedicated hosting is a waste. Co-location is an even bigger waste. Companies that get that will survive. Those that don’t, well, good luck. It’s not the end of the world – I mean if AOL manages to still sell some dial-up today, I’m sure you will always have some business. Jim Cramer on Mad Money caught a lot of flak for dissing Equinix and saying that companies will need less datacenter space, not more. There were some flaws to his arguments, but I’m not sure he’s entirely wrong. To those in the industry who just dismissed his comments with a chuckle and a wave of their hand, maybe you do so at your own peril.
Stacy – Feel free to add anything else you want.
Lou – My life’s dream is currently to build the Millennium Falcon out of Legos. I have the kit, just need to find some time to build it.
