A flavor of Ensim's flagship control panel software WEBppliance, the new product is named WEBppliance Basic for Linux and is geared toward webmasters managing their own dedicated Web servers. The product is list-priced at $149, with a Windows version currently being considered.

The fact that Ensim, one of the largest and the best funded virtualization vendors, is releasing a product that essentially manages customer migration from shared and virtual server environment onto dedicated servers, is a signal that a new trend is under way in the Web hosting space.

With monthly prices for dedicated servers falling from $200 last year to under $100 this year and, in Ensim's estimate, to a $50 level next year, the migration from virtual to dedicated platforms seems inevitable.

"A virtual server is a piece of a server, so a year ago virtual servers occupied the space of everybody who wanted to pay less than $200 for a dedicated server," said Steve Dauber, Ensim's vice president of marketing. "Today they occupy the space of everybody who wants to pay less than $99 for a dedicated server. As the price for the dedicated server continues to drop, the market for the piece of the dedicated server will continue to contract."

As a result of this dynamic, Web hosts are facing unprecedented demand for dedicated servers, and are moving away from server consolidation through virtualization and towards managing more stand alone servers than ever. This trend is opposite to what Ensim sees in the enterprise, where virtualization is developing according to the initially charted scenario of server consolidation.

The challenges that major Ensim partners like ATI, Rackshack, ServerBeach, Affinity Internet and others face when managing this newfound dedicated server demand is helping end users manage their hardware and service plans. Most control panels are designed to aid end users in these tasks have been built with professional users in mind, and are geared towards tasks like managing resellers or setting up billing profiles. Ensim turned its attention to novices since it wanted to give its existing WEBpliance Pro customers another product - WEBpliance Basic.

The added value is that WEBppliance Basic is only one window different from WEBppliance Pro, meaning end users migrating from a shared or virtual platform to a dedicated server won't have to learn new tricks as they switch from the end user view on Pro to a different interface on Basic. The $149 price point is in line with the $50 a month pricing dedicated servers should be getting next year, according to Dauber. This means that while Ensim is selling Basic licenses to its existing Pro customers at $149 each, and end users won't be paying extra for their dedicated server service GUI interface.

For more information on WEBppliance Basic, visit ensim.com.