I read about this on Bert Amijo's blog. 3Tera CEO Vlad Miloushev did the math:

1. Google's infrastructure consists of 500,000 to 1 million servers.

2. Google's Q4, 2006 revenue was $3.2 billion. On an annualized basis, that's $12.8 billion.

If you divide #2 by #1, you'd get $12,800 to $25,600 of revenue per server. If you take the average and divide the amount by 12, you'd end up with $1,422/month in sales for each server. Google spends about 10% of its revenue on operations, which equals $142 per server.

As a point of reference, let's consider HostGator's announcement that it will expand its presence at The Planet. HostGator currently leases 1,700 servers, which are home to 500,000 websites. That's 294 sites per server. If HostGator collected as little as $4.84 from each site owner, it'd generate more revenue per server than Google!

HostGator's cheapest service plan costs $6.95/month, but it allows customers paying $9.95 or more to host multiple sites. Which most - including HostGator's 10,000 resellers - do. So Brent doesn't have Larry and Sergey beat. Yet. But while I was doing the calculations above, I remembered a conversation with Lenkov from SiteKreator. Thanks to some kind of caching magic (which ISP-Planet discusses in this article), Lenkov's software can support up to 30,000 simple websites on a two CPU machine.

Let's say Brent springs for a quad core Clovertown from The Planet, hosts only 15,000 websites, and charges each site owner $1/month. This would put him ahead of Google in terms of both revenue/hosting expense ratio, and sales per server.

ISP-Planet says SiteKreator can be licensed for an "unpublished fee". I'll have to ask Lenkov about that...

ThinkFree is way cool! I signed up for an account earlier this week, and its web-based spreadsheet, word processor and slide presentation apps work beautifully. TJ Kang, the company's founder, has been developing office productivity software since the 1980s, and it shows.

Founded in 1999. ThinkFree spent its early years as a desktop software company. Its online edition was released in April 2005. Now the LA Library offers it on 2,200 computers across 71 branches, and NHN, a Korean telco with 20 million subscribers, has integrated the product with its email system. In addition, over 250,000 individual users have signed up for accounts.

Unlike Zoho, which offers an amazing breadth of hosted services, ThinkFree focuses on three applications - but makes them available in more forms than you can imagine. Let's count them:

1. The ThinkFree-hosted edition
2. The server edition (for self-hosting by enterprise customers and on-premise hosting by telco and ISP partners)
3. The iPod edition (so that you can travel with your sales presentation, but not your computer)
4. The USB edition (which allows you to edit documents on someone else's computer without leaving any trace of your work after you disconnect)
5. The upcoming premier edition (which allows synchronized online/offline document editing), and
6. The also upcoming SMB edition (which allows companies to create groups for different sets of employees to share different documents).

All of the above offer round trip compatibility with Microsoft Word/Excel/PowerPoint.

But I think what makes ThinkFree really, truly awesome is the company's idea of what SaaS should be like. VP Marketing Jonathan Crow says that one of his most important priorities is DocExchange, a shared repository of user-submitted documents. Because there's more to online collaboration than sharing documents with people you already know. It's also about leveraging and building upon the enormous amount of collective knowledge out there - knowledge that would have been inaccessible without SaaS. SlideShare and Swivel will have to watch out; as DocExchange evolves, ThinkFree users will be able to view public slides/datasets/documents - and reuse them on the spot.

This is as exciting as Amazon's EC2 machine image sharing announcement earlier this year. As Amazon puts it, sharing accelerates community-wide innovation. Not coincidentally, ThinkFree's document viewer runs on EC2, and DocExchange files are stored on S3. (SlideShare is an S3 customer as well.)

Earlier today Dennis Howlett wrote that being a Connector (in the Tipping Point sense) is part of every service provider's job description. Some connections are specific (you could introduce two customers to each other), others are sort of self-organizing (SlideShare making customer A's knowledge accessible to B, C and D through tags, auto-recommendations, etc), and still others are implicit (Freshbooks making aggregated invoice data available to customers within the same industry).

In the future of SaaS, I think, winning vendors will get ahead by being the best Connectors rather than the snazziest technology providers. (Which is why biggest community wins.) ThinkFree is well on its way. Google will most likely catch up. And Zoho; I'd bet on that. 1&1 CEO Andreas Gauger tells eWeek that he hopes to generate more SaaS than hosting revenues within 3-4 years. Could it happen? While he's got a sizable customer base, he's far from being in the Connector business. If I were him, I'd give TJ a call :)

I've been reading a lot about OpenID, a free, decentralized framework for managing digital identities. You start with an URI (think of it as a master username) and store your password and other creditials with an OpenID provider. You can then log into any OpenID enabled service with your URI. The service will fetch whatever credentials it needs from your identity provider.

Simon Willison wrote a great post on cool things you can do with OpenID. My favorite is restricted single sign on. Simon suggested that if everyone in an organization had "username.internal.example.org" OpenIDs, all internal apps behind the firewall could be configured to grant automatic access to such users. This eliminates the hassle of creating/deleting accounts on each service for incoming/departing employees. Couldn't GoDaddy use a similar method to apply the same logins across its many services?

I'm also intrigued by Kai Hendry's comment that maybe OpenID can be used for brokering payments. This would allow access pass holders to view content, download songs, etc across multiple sites. Not that this technology isn't already available, but OpenID would save subscribers from having to keep track of different logins for different networks.

Anyway, Microsoft announced last month that it would make Windows Cardspace interoperable with OpenID. A couple of weeks later, AOL announced its support as well. SixApart is in (in fact, OpenID creator Brad Fitzpatrick also developed LiveJournal, and is SixApart's chief architect). And Digg. And ImageShack, WordPress, Technorati, SmugMug, 37Signals...

Recently I signed up for isabel.wang.name as my OpenID through FreeYourID (which I read about on TechCrunch). If nothing else, they managed to sell me a .name domain. My question is, why isn't 1&1 in this market as well?

I keep reading about Twitter everywhere. It's a service that lets users post 140-character-or-shorter updates on what they're up to. If you scroll through the public timeline, you might not immediately conclude that Twitter is a must have business app. (A few minutes ago, xboxbetty was eating chocolate and BrianWarren was making coffee. And as you can see, I am writing a blog post about Twitter.) But as LifeHacker points out, it can be a nifty communication tool.

1. You can use Twitter as a shorthand newsletter. The example that LifeHacker gave was a video store, whose employees can post new movies now available for rental, holiday business hours, limited-time sales promo, etc. Likewise, web hosting providers can keep customers posted on network status ("some DC2 circuits scheduled for maintenance @ 2-3am") or announce new products ("this just in: quad core servers for $199!"). As Amazon's Jeff Barr puts it, the 140 character limit forces you to be brief without wasting time on formatting. Customers can stay up to date via your RSS feed, which is both more reliable and less intrusive than email.

2. Twitter could also be useful for managers who are responsible for scheduling sales or tech support coverage, especially if your reps are scattered across multiple locations. You can subscribe to a feed that aggregates your entire team's real time updates ("running 15 minutes late", "leaving for meeting, back @ 3pm", etc), which they can post via SMS (or a web browser, or IM or an internal app that you integrate with Twitter's API).

3. Lastly, LifeHacker recommends Twitter as a to-do list, but Anne Zelenka says it might be better as a "already done" list. For instance, if you and your two partners are traveling to three different cities, you can use your aggregated Twitter stream to keep each other informed on important events that don't require follow-up action ("contract signed with Company X", "new batch of switches will be delivered next Tuesday", etc). It reduces email clutter and is more flexible than IM; each member of the group can catch up at his convenience.

Technorati, CNN, BBC Video and Google News all have Twitter channels; shouldn't you? It's free, it's super convenient - and according to Kathy Sierra's "Asymptotic Twitter Curve" (which I came across via David Terrar's blog), it might help you capture a little more of your audience's attention.

During an early 2004 customer gathering, former EV1 CEO Robert Marsh asked attendees whether they'd be interested in putting multiple servers on the same private network. I still remember how their eyes lit up. 100Mbps server-to-server connectivity? Oooh yeah!

I had a similar reaction to this announcement on SoftLayer's new "customer exchange". SoftLayer says every single one of its dedicated servers is now deployed with a secure gigabit connection into its private Meet Me Room. Imagine scenarios like Zoho's integration with OmniDrive, or tools from Flickr, del.icio.us, etc that automatically output users' content on their TypePad blogs. SoftLayer customers can now jointly develop these sorts of cross-site interactivity without incurring bandwidth charges for data transfer between their systems. How cool is that?? (Better yet, SoftLayer actually saves money by keeping traffic between customers within its private network instead of paying for packets to travel in and out of its data center.)

Earlier this week, AlertLogic CTO Misha Govshteyn and I had a discussion on customer service via his blog. I think we came to the agreement that while investments on delivering an exceptional customer experience can pay off big time, your ROI is contingent upon having an outstanding product (which itself is a key part of the customer experience). SoftLayer is a great example of how hosting providers can combine both.

By the way, SoftLayer's mobile portal is another customer-friendly new feature. In addition, the company recently launched a new data center with 500 watts psf of power capacity. It also upgraded its Verio and Internap uplinks to 10GigE.

I hope SoftLayer's upcoming projects include an application directory where customers can find partners for creating mashups with. (I think this could become a powerful sales tool as well.)

That's what this very funny blog post from RedS Swoosh says. I came across it through Read/Write Web, where Richard McManus points out that Mark Cuban of the Dallas Mavericks is a Red Swoosh investor.

Red Swoosh is a free P2P CDN. Content owners "swoosh" their content by adding "http://edn.redswoosh.net" in front of URLs. Visitors must install a desktop client in order to access swooshed data. Files are downloaded or streamed from up to 30 peers who previously requested the same content.

Johnny Cakes, Red Swoosh's probably non-existent "Downloader in Chief", read on the BBC that Apple has sold 1.5 billion songs and tens of millions of TV shows and movies through iTunes. He calculates that...

* 1.5 billion songs x 5 MB = 7,500 TB
* 25 million TV shows x 700 MB = 17,500 TB
* 25 million movies x 2 GB = 50,000 TB
* 75,000 TB x $200 per TB in Akamai bandwidth = $15 million, which Apple could use to:

* Buy the world a Coke
* Give away 100,000 iPhones
* Buy 3,750 Segways and a lifetime supply of hot dogs
* Buy Sealand

Red Swoosh is not the only P2P CDN. The New York University-operated CoralCDN is free as well (and doesn't require a desktop client); Fark, Slashdot and Digg are all occasional users. The Coral team has been collecting data on the distance between web users and their DNS resolvers to determine how efficient it is for CDNs to make IP-address-based matches between end users and cache servers.

There's also Metalink, an open standard that bundles P2P files AND HTTP/FTP files on multiple mirrors into one single format. If a server becomes inaccessible during a download, Metalinker will automatically switch to a different location. It's even able to download segments from different sources at the same time. OpenOffice and openSUSE (among many other applications) are available via Metalink.

If you have hosting customers who need more bandwidth than they can afford, work with them to evaluate these options instead of canceling their accounts. If enough high-bandwidth users start offering P2P content, it might buy you some time before you have to fire up the next batch of 10-GigEs.

Scott Gilbertson at Wired's Monkey Bites blog has two interesting bits of software news:

1. A team of international researchers recently completed a study on the economic impact of free/open source software (click here for 287 page PDF report). The authors determined that current free/open source code base (which has been doubling every 18-24 months) would cost 131,000 person years and over 12 billion Euros to reproduce. The estimated amount of donated programming effort is worth 800 million Euros per year.

Commercial firms have invested 1.2 billion Euros on open source, creating 565,000 jobs and generating 263 billion in annual revenue. Services related to open source software could reach 32% of all IT services by 2010 - and free code could account for 4% of European GDP by then!! By the way, less than 10% of American software developers work at proprietary software firms. More than 70% work at end user companies. This means there's a high potential for developers to be hired for open source related work.

2. A South African company offers a service called Freedom Toaster. It's a self-serve kiosk for distributing Linux and open source software to local developers who don't have access to necessary connectivity for downloading large files. Its motto is "burn free".

Speaking of open source, Don Dodge from Microsoft reports that Aras, a Massachusetts software company, is open sourcing its code - which was built on Microsoft's .Net and SQL Server! I had no idea that's possible.

So Apple announced the new iPhone yesterday. I got this photo from Engadget; it's one of dozen's they've got.

What does the iPhone have to do with web hosting? Nothing, I thought. Until I read Raju Vegesna's comments: the iPhone runs OSX and Safari. It's got built-in WiFi. Its owners are going to "regularly and practically" use web apps. Raju says this makes Safari support a priority for Zoho.

It matters to you, too. And your customers. Liam built a .mobi site a few weeks ago. It's easily viewable on my Blackberry Pearl - but by this June, there might be a lot more web browsing on the iPhone versus the Pearl.

Newsweek, the mainstream-est of mainstream media, says 2007 may be the Year of the Widget. Business 2.0 agrees. In keeping with the times, Host Gator announced earlier that it's got a widget!

While I'm impressed with Brent's hipness, I'm not sure his new and useful tool (which allows visitors to rate a site's speed and site owners to view a map showing visitor locations) qualifies as the kind of widget Newsweek has in mind:

"Chances are, there are certain websites that you monitor throughout the day: to check email, weather, stock portfolios or sports stats. But, thanks to widgets, taking multiple steps to track down this info may seem woefully outdated this time next year. These mini-applications are simple bits of code, easily dragged onto a desktop or pasted into a personal page, where they are constantly updated with whatever information you want."

Some widgetized companies mentioned by Newsweek include Flickr, whose "badges" allow members to display their latest photos on other websites, and UPS, which offers a package tracker. An ecommerce merchant, for instance, could update customers on shipping status while keeping them on its website.

In other words, widgets help blur the boundary between the outside world and your website. In the old days, either a visitor was on your website, where he had access to your content - or he wasn't/didn't. But now it's possible to extend your reach (as GoDaddy has with its Firefox domain search plug-in), or bring external resources to your audience without sending them away (as Netvibes holds the attention of 5 million+ users with its 578 modules).

Anyway, Host Gator is moving in the right direction, and I hope they go farther down the widgets path. For instance, why not widgetize its customer interface, making it more than just a place to check stats and view billing history? If you can make VoIP calls, find late night bar food and do whois lookups from one single Netvibes screen, wouldn't it be neat to have the same functionality within Host Gator's control panel?

PS - Unrelated story on widgets... I started my personal blog at GoDaddy. The price was right, and their reps were *exceptionally* helpful when I had an issue with subdomains. But after a couple of months, I left for TypePad - where I'm paying 3x more for 3x less bandwidth! What happened? Widgets. TypePad supports soooo many; GoDaddy's Quick Blog (at the time, at least) had inflexible templates that didn't allow you to embed 3rd party widgets. Every other blog had Flickr photos, Feedburner counters and Technorati search boxes; I wanted them too!

I held off on recommending 1&1's site builder to a friend for the same reason. With all the neat toys she can spruce up her site with, I didn't think she should settle for an isolated bucket of bandwidth and storage space. My preferences can't possibly be unique if you're reading about them in Newsweek?

Everyone's talking about Microsoft's soon-to-be-released Windows Home Server ("WHS"). It's a new operating system that's based on Windows Server 2003 (future editions will be based on the upcoming Longhorn Server). Microsoft's current plans are to offer it on an OEM-only basis. HP and others will start offering hardware packages later this year.

Bill Gates unveiled the WHS during his keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show. He envisions a server in every living room, so that Microsoft can "give you connected experiences 24-hours a day". It will monitor security patches/virus definitions/drive health/etc on all Windows PCs on your home network, and back up all of their data. It also offers Zune and XBox connectivity, so you can use it to store all of your music/photos/videos for easy access from any Microsoft-powered device. Wired calls it total convergence.

And of course, content stored on the WHS will be available over the Internet! The product preview mentions a "free customizable Windows Live website", and CNet reports that customers will get "personalized Internet addresses with no monthly fees". In other words, why sign up for a hosting account - to which you have to go through the trouble of uploading your data - when you can selectively web-enable whatever home-hosted content you wish?

The WHS' storage methodology is pretty nifty, BTW. Ars Technica reports that users won't see a C:\ drive - just a single, expandable storage pool. The capacity of any internal, external or USB drives on any computer can be added to the central store. WHS duplicates all data across two or more disks for redundancy. In addition to automated, incremental file backups, WHS takes scheduled snapshots of client systems, with which customers can perform full restores.