Back in the late 1990s, I used to run a web hosting directory called ISPcheck. I sold ads to early web hosting pioneers who, for the most part, set up email accounts and provisioned web space by hand. When cPanel, Plesk and Ensim came along, some of them said they had no use for GUIs. Their businesses were doing just fine with what they’d got. None of those folks are around any more.
I was reminded of my old friends during an email exchange with someone from a dedicated server provider I greatly respect. I sent him a long list of new developments that worried me: the 4 million gigs of RAM in Google’s cluster, for instance. And an article in the Economist about Amazon’s S4 (Tim O’Reilly‘s name for Fulfillment by Amazon; S4 = simple storage service for stuff). His response?
“Since we are immersed in the industry, it is easy to get caught up with the next flavor of the week. But 95% of our customers don’t have a clue about these developments… I still think that the hosting business (as it looks today) has a long life ahead of it.”
The problem is, I think our customers might know more than we do about the next flavor of the week. In addition to the Wired/Economist articles I’d mentioned, Amazon’s hosting initiatives were recently written up in a few other popular venues. (In particular, check out what former Exodus VP Research Niel Robertson has to say.) I really don’t think we can count on 95% of the market to believe that dedicated servers are state of the art.
Amazon’s primary value proposition, by the way, comes not from its $0.10/hour pricing. What matters much more is its virtualization technology. You can create images of web/app/DB servers and deploy multiple instances of each at will – without having to go through the looong process of provisioning hardware, installing the appropriate OS, updating/securing/configuring the system, then finally uploading your data. What sounds easier?(*)
In other words, complex hosting has arrived at the same turning point that shared hosting reached in 1999. If you aren’t a believer in manually setting up each and every shared hosting account, you shouldn’t be spending time at the data center VLANing bunches of boxes, either. It’s too much trouble and you can’t do it fast enough.
In response to my post on Adobe’s new document hosting service, David asked whether web hosts need to compete with every application provider out there. We don’t need to *be* Adobe or Salesforce or MySpace or whatever – we can just offer them great hosting. If that’s the path we pursue, complex hosting will become the high volume business that shared hosting is today. And it’ll have to be just as highly automated.
(*) 3tera has a even more convenient solution than Amazon’s! You won’t even have to go through the trouble of deploying virtual web/app/DB servers. Instead, whole entire applications become self-contained logical entities which you can expand and collapse at will, or redeploy with a single click. While I recently joined the company’s advisory board, I started writing about their technology way back in August, before I had any contact with their team.
3tera’s is certainly not the only solution; several other hosting providers have developed their own. One way or the other, the grid computing/virtualization combination is something I think every dedicated server provider needs to look into, before it’s too late.
