I’ve been playing connect-the-dots with the following bits of information:
1. Some time ago, Alert Logic CTO Misha Govshteyn commented on my “functional hosting” post that he’s not sure there’s such a thing as functional hosting. Photobucket, YouTube, Live Journal, etc are software companies. They live and die by the ingenuity of their software developers – not the content storage which they happen to provide as one of many features.
2. The two blog posts I’ve most enjoyed writing were about the evolution of eBay’s and MySpace’s architecture. Misha was right. Neither could have made it to where they are today without having exceptional software development talent on staff. Each has been able to rewrite its entire platform time and again – while giving millions of users uninterrupted access to a complex service with countless moving parts.
3. The Planet is facing a bit more challenge on a similar-ish endeavor. Unanticipated glitches forced the company to put its just-launched customer portal on hold and roll back to separate legacy interfaces for The Planet and EV1 customers.
I’m not mentioning this to give The Planet a hard time. I think you’ll agree that they’re not a software company. In that respect, they’re more the norm than an exception within the web hosting industry. Traditionally, the duty of a hosting provider has been to consistently implement a standard set of provisioning/support/billing procedures – rather than to churn out 200,000 lines of new code every single month. But is that an adequate scope of work going forward?
4. I started thinking about this after reading Egenera CTO Peter Manca‘s comments about yesterday’s Sun/Intel deal:
“The bottom line is that it’s no longer about the hardware… customers can play hardware vendors off against each other and get the lowest pricing as a result. Whoever happens to have the hottest chips at the time of purchase will win. If every hardware vendor supports both AMD and Intel, all the better, as that means more vendors to play off each other… Software is where the real value add is. Companies that just sell inexpensive servers as their only value have a difficult future. Taking these commodity components and adding real value on top is where the future lies.”
Peter’s talking about Sun and HP and Dell, of course – but doesn’t his assessment apply equally to web hosting providers who sell bandwidth/storage space on such gear? And if so, should The Planet and its competitors move beyond hardware – beyond professional services, even – into the application space? After all, Webmail.us said it picked Amazon rather than Rackspace as its storage vendor because Amazon has a web services stack that Webmail.us could build on top of…
PS – I hope The Planet is offering legacy EV1 customers a discount on new servers while it readies the combined portal for re-launch. If someone has to use two separate interfaces to manage new versus existing servers, they might be that much more inclined to look beyond their current provider.
