We have been, I daresay, rocking and rolling with our WHIR webinars since late last year. Attendance has been growing, peaking at more than 100 total attendees at our “Building a Hosting Cloud” webinar with VMOps and ReliaCloud session late last month.
The objective at the moment is to bring your attention to a couple of things – the first of those being the webinar we have scheduled for Tuesday, February 16, and the second being the availability of our past webinars, archived on the site.
For next week’s webinar, I’m going to be moderating a panel discussion, officially titled “PCI/DSS Compliance in the Hosting Industry.” Our panelists for the session include representatives of two e-commerce software platforms that service web hosts – Rick Wilson of Miva Merchant and Craig Fox of Pinnacle Cart – and one representative of a hosting provider focused on compliance, Stacy Griggs of MaximumASP.
The session will take place at 2:00 p.m. Eastern time, on Tuesday, February 16. These details and others are available at our WHIR webinars page, but if you want to register right now for the webinar, here’s a direct link to that page too.
Obviously, there is plenty we plan to discuss, with the July 2010 compliance deadline looming. But potentially more significant to you is the fact that we’ll be including a lot of time for user questions. Attend the webinar live, and you’ll be able to put your questions directly to the panelists, and find the answers you need about PCI/DSS compliance.
While I’m at it, if you have a question you’d like me to put to the PCI/DSS panelists, please feel free to post it in the comments section of this blog post.
Now, on to the archives.
I want to bring your attention to the growing volume of information available in our webinar archives – every session we do is saved on the site, so you can watch them at your convenience in a video player.
To give you a taste of what’s available there, a few of the panelists from past sessions have put together some answers to some of the questions that were submitted in the course of the sessions – including some that we weren’t able to get to during the webinar itself.
First up, here are a few from Shannon Williams, VP of business development at VMOps, from the session “Building a Hosting Cloud,” which, as I said, is available in the archive. In this case, the discussion revolved specifically around the functions of VMOps’ platform for building a computing cloud, and the related hosting product.
Is the account billing interface a regular part of the product? Or is it third party or optional?
The VMOps Cloud Stack provides detailed usage records on how much capacity a user is consuming in terms of storage, VMs, networking, IPs, etc. Typically this is integrated with a hosting providers existing billing system and converted to invoices.
What host OSes do you support?
VMOps supports any host OS that can run on X86 processors. Typical examples include Windows 2003, Windows 2008, Ubuntu, CentOS, RedHat Enterprise Linux, FreeBSD, Debian and Open Solaris.
Can we have more explanation on the small/medium/large choices – and how that is billed per hour?
When a service provider launches a cloud, they decide what type of VM configurations they want to sell. These are defined in our product as a Service Offering, and consist of the amount of CPU, RAM, and storage. A typical cloud might have 3-10 different service offerings that a customer can select from, each with its own price. These prices can be billed at whatever interval a service provider chooses, though hourly and monthly are by far the most common.
Would be interested to see the admin console, and how easy it is to configure. Can we see this anywhere as a demo?
The VMOps Cloud Stack includes an extensive administrative console, and we’d be happy to provide a demonstration to anyone who is interested. To request a live demonstration, please visit this link.
For formatting’s sake, we’re back to Liam blogging at this point.
Prior to that webinar, we did a session in December called “Selling Your Hosting Company,” which featured Frank Stiff of Cheval Capital, Eric Furlow of Furlow Consulting and internet attorney David Snead. This session, also, is available on the webinars archive page, but you can click here for a direct link to the “Selling Your Hosting Company” session.
Following this session, Frank Stiff put together a collection of answers to user questions, and posted them on his site.
Eric Furlow also sent over a list of some of the answers he sent to attendees of the session. Lest this post become overly long (it’s going to break 1,000 words as is), I’ll include a limited selection of questions and answers from him.
Are buyers interested in hosting businesses that are $50,000 in sales without infrastructure?
Yes, there are 100’s of buyers of customer bases like this. If would be much harder to sell if it had infrastructure a buyer has to deal with post closing.
Are Canadian hosting companies worth more or less than US firms?
Canadian hosting companies are worth more to Canadian hosting companies and US hosting companies are worth more to US hosting companies. There are plenty of hurdles in doing cross border deals. Having said that hurdles in cross border deals are not insurmountable and deals happen all of the time.
Does the quality of hardware affect the sale value with a dedicated hoster?
Absolutely, if the buyer believes the equipment is older, he/she has to forecast capital expenditures sooner rather than later in the financial proforma. Also typically customer churn is higher with older equipment as customers continually demand newer more powerful equipment. Having said that, if a seller has older equipment in most cases it doesn’t make sense to upgrade prior to a sale. It is not worth the cost of the equipment to increase the value of the deal especially if the buyer owns newer servers he is going to migrate the customer to anyway. There is a big market for older equipment where the seller or buyer can dump the old servers.
Could you talk about the interest of buyers acquiring hosting companies in Latin America?
There is a high level of interest in web hosting companies in Latin America especially from buyers in the US. Anywhere in the world where there is economic growth, there is demand in web hosting, hence demand in purchasing web hosting companies.
