September 25, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Hosting provider NaviSite (navisite.com) said Thursday that it has launched a new line of dedicated hosting offerings aimed at small and medium-sized business customers, marking the first foray into that market for the publicly-held enterprise hosting provider.
NaviSite deals typically in the high-end enterprise hosting space, a market that many dedicated hosting providers either covet or are actively pursuing. NaviSite says the idea behind the new service is to apply that expertise in managing solutions to the SMB space.
"We see a gap in providing enterprise quality and enterprise class services to the SMB market and at the SMB price point. And that's something we really wanted to capitalize on," said senior vice president of global delivery Sumeet Sabharwal, in an interview with the WHIR last week. "We've been looking at the SMB space for a while, but - other than the acquisitions we made last year - until the early part of this year really didn't have much of a presence there."
NaviSite's press release points out that SMBs are "increasingly competing with larger enterprises" and require the same kinds of technology services, often to overcome their comparatively limited resources.
The new dedicated hosting offering is built on "the latest technology," which includes Windows Server 2008, Linux and VMware ESX. The hardware sports dual hard drives, RAID, Intel Xeon server grade processors and intrusion protection and other security features.
Not interested in competing in the low-cost unmanaged portion of the dedicated server market, NaviSite built its solution with a higher level of management, and at a higher price point. Pricing for the company's physical dedicated servers starts at $199 per month.
Las week, the company introduced its AppStructure cloud computing platform, and that technology will carry into the new dedicated offering, as well, supporting a virtualized dedicated hosting plan starting at $149.
The company has set up a separate section of its website from which to sell the dedicated server offering. That section will bring NaviSite, for the first time, into the business of selling online. It even includes a smattering of "order now" buttons on the main page.
"All the servers come with management," says director of product management William Toll. "NaviSite is really bringing that enterprise infrastructure and management approach to the SMB. We don't subscribe to the idea that a server should be in a data center and unmanaged."
Each server, says Toll, comes with a suite of free monitoring and management services, including ping monitoring and hardware monitoring. They also come with OS patching and antivirus.
Interestingly, NaviSite feels that the products it is bringing to the dedicated hosting market - or perhaps more specifically the SMB market - fill a gap that isn't addressed by the existing offerings in that very competitive business.
"I know there are players who have large footprints out in that space," says Sabharwal, "but we truly feel that they either make it too complex for the SMB audience, or don't provide that enterprise value proposition - they don't come bundled with things like RAID, intrusion protection and antivirus."
