July 24, 2002 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- The Web hosting business, analysts and executives agree, is no longer a nascent industry. Suffering from greatly-reduced investor confidence and a drying-up of funding, hosting service providers have been forced to take a more responsible approach to finance and confront the shortcomings in their business models.
According to Andy Schroepfer, president and founder of Tier 1 research (Tier1Research.com), those shortcomings commonly involve inefficiencies in the companies’ operations. "A lot of the managed services that were originally offered," he says, "were not fully baked into processes. Companies kept throwing people at the problem, but you can't scale people."
The new efficiency, says Schroepfer, will come from the automation of many of the processes associated with the delivery of hosting services. "Service providers will be forced to adopt processes that allow them to be scalable," he says. "The ones that don't scale or adopt those tools will continue to go out of business."
Though service providers are only recently experiencing the do-or-die push toward automation, the delivery of such software and platforms is already a competitive industry, with market-leaders like Ensim (Ensim.com) and Plesk (Plesk.com) claiming a considerable share of the business, and between them automating an impressive number of Web servers.
With the contest already underway, some of the up-and-comers of automation have chosen to make their mark by focusing their attention on the processes and functions that have yet to be automated by the established, available solutions.
One company working to gain ground in automation, is SWsoft (SW-soft.com), developer of the HSPcomplete platform. SWsoft says its solution differentiates itself from others on the market by extending its focus back through the hosting provider’s business processes in addition to the requisite infrastructure management.
HSPcomplete, which saw version 2.0 released this month, is a set of processes built on the backbone of the company’s Virtuozzo partitioning software. Virtuozzo’s dynamic partitioning function allows for the creation of hundreds of "virtual environments" on a single server, each with dedicated-like functionality including its own root access, OS and the ability to install applications.
"Many HSPs grew too fast and built up their infrastructure too quickly to develop business processes," says SWsoft vice president of business development, Craig Oda. "This problem is becoming more apparent as competition heats up in the HSP space. We think they will continue to struggle until they adopt scalable automation tools to reduce their costs and enable them to process large numbers of customers."
HSPcomplete has seen the most traction with small and medium-sized hosting operations, offering an efficient, cost-effective means of starting in the business. More than 30 customers currently use the platform to automate their hosting services.
One such customer is hosting provider AWorldWideMall.com (AWorldWideMall.com), which currently serves about 1,300 customers and manages approximately 3,500 Web sites. The company has used HSPcomplete for three months to automate the management of virtual environments for shared and dedicated hosting.
"I was looking for something kind of bulletproof that would allow us to give the customer complete control and root access," says AWorldWideMall.com CEO Andy Barth, "but not let them interfere with anybody else. HSPcomplete did that."
While SWsoft is already pursuing its place in the hosting automation market, other developers are still laying the groundwork for their entry into the fray. New Zealand-based developer SiliconBlue is ramping up to release its automation solution OcoLoco (OcoLoco.com) in the North American market.
SiliconBlue says its product is unique because of the angle from which the company approached its development. "We automate on the basis that what we're producing is a Web site," says CEO Peter Maurer, "We use the concept of 'how do you to produce a Web site?' as the premise of our automation. And then we worry about the infrastructure underneath it. It's an upside-down design philosophy."
Built from the processes designed to run SiliconBlue’s hosting business, OcoLoco is an open platform, accessible through a Web browser, and able to manage either Linux- or NT-based infrastructure with equal ease. "We don't force-fit anybody," says Maurer. "The last thing we want to do is put anybody into an environment they can't get out of."
OcoLoco can be interfaced with customer-written applications using the platform’s application product interface, and can be delivered by SiliconBlue either as an appliance, or as an ASP solution.
Also well-suited to the small or medium-sized host, OcoLoco is designed to manage the relationship between the provider and Web developers as a channel for customer acquisition. "We want to allow them to provide a very efficient and productive environment for the developer," says Maurer, "so that developer is motivated to go and sell hosting on that provider's infrastructure."
As hosting providers are forced to automate their businesses, there may yet be room in the market for solutions that work to further the concept of automation.
While SWsoft has only begun to capture its share of the automation market, the company feels HSPcomplete has proven its worth through the experiences of its users so far. And though SiliconBlue has yet to launch its OcoLoco solution commercially, the product has been working successfully for the company, which itself hosts approximately 1,000 Web sites. "It's been our complete proof of concept," says Maurer.
