Liam Eagle: LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

I’ve heard it said many times that Web hosting
is not a technology business – that it is
a service business, or that it is a marketing
business. Well, those statements are only
partly true, and only really useful in making
a certain valid, but selective, philosophical
point. Web hosting is indeed a technology
business, insofar as building supply stores
are in the lumber business, or movie studios
are in the movie business. That is to say, Web
hosting is technology.

It is the great irony of the Web hosting
business that an industry so technologically
forward-thinking is, behind the scenes, such
a mess. For all the advanced technology employed
by hosts, much of it is held together
with a patchwork of home-brewed band-aid
solutions. For all the work Web hosts put into
making their customer’s experience seamless,
the integration of their own business
processes is sorely lacking.

Poor integration isn’t just an ideological
problem for Web hosts. It’s a practical performance
problem. As you no doubt tell your
customers, your technology staff should be
spending its time building and enhancing your
product, not struggling to keep it running.

With this issue – the integration issue – we
set out to take you through some of the
varying theories of integration in Web hosting.
The developers building the tools you
use are aware of the need for you to better
integrate your hosting platform, and they’re
working to make that easier for you.

Integration problems exist across the
hosting spectrum, perhaps most notably at
its highest levels. In a conversation with the
Web Host Industry Review, Web.com CEO
Jeffrey M. Stibel describes his efforts since
joining the company – then known as Interland
- to right a ship whose biggest problem
was integration.

Regular WHIR contributor Dennis McCafferty
discusses a potential means of integration
in his feature on the eff orts of control
panel builders to build additional specifi c Web
hosting functions into their solutions, and to
develop seamless integration with third-party
suppliers for the tools they can’t build.

Some hosts, of course, would prefer to
choose for themselves the tools they assemble
into a hosting platform. And for those companies,
the process of integration will require
an anchor. In his feature on billing platforms,
WHIR regular Wayne Epperson discusses the
eff orts of billing platform developers building
their solutions to be that anchor.

In the Web hosting business, solid integration
isn’t a luxury; it’s a necessity. That is
- an efficient business isn’t a means to being
a competitive Web host, it’s a prerequisite.
Hopefully, reading this issue will help to provide
you with some of the ideas and motivation
to make back-end integration a priority
in your own business.

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