(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Playing to its strengths as a hosting provider, Applied Innovations (www.appliedi.net) recently partnered with Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) to provide a year of managed enterprise-grade Windows virtual private server hosting to 500 sponsored web development and design companies participating in its WebsiteSpark program.
WebsiteSpark was designed to help web professionals from developers to small business owners, and drive new business opportunities through connections with worldwide partners and customers.
As one of the first companies to participate in the program, as well as a long standing provider of Microsoft-based solutions, Applied Innovations was a natural choice as a hosting partner, however, its commitment to small web-based businesses is something that makes this truly a beneficial partnership, for both clients and Applied Innovations.
“The website spark program is really tailored to web developers and web designers – we’ll call them web pros – that are small sized, and growing. And that has kind of been one of those markets we’ve really narrowed in on, and done quite well with,” says Applied Innovations founder and chief executive officer Jess Coburn.
Providing hosting to this sort of customers plays to its strengths, and, while Coburn genuinely believes that this project will help entrepreneurs and create jobs in what is coming to be known as a jobless economic recovery, he also hopes that this alliance will attract new customers. With no barriers to entry, a web pro could build a business with little overhead for the first six or nine months, and then order further services.
Coburn notes that other hosts may be resistant to giving their services away for free as though it were one of the cardinal sins of business – however, that is not the case.
“I don’t think a lot of hosts realize that it’s an opportunity to build a channel,” he says.
By offering services for free, smaller customers will likely buy more services as they grow and succeed, often creating hosting businesses of their own.
“We found that these customers in the past, these small web design companies started with a shared hosting account that they were reselling and grew from there eventually to multiple shared reseller accounts to a dedicated server to several dedicated servers,” he says. Now, the same can be done with a virtualized or cloud platform.
“We give them a low-cost entry to go from shared to that VPS,” says Coburn. “With the WebsiteSpark program, these customers immediately have to take on a VPS, either a VPS or dedicated server. And because of the price difference, the VPS is really a no-brainer for them. And he thought was that these customers are going to buy other services. One virtual machine’s not going to do it for them. They’re going to want more.”
And while the plan makes sense, a free service would do nothing to convert paying customers if the service wasn’t good. Applied Innovations has been developing expertise in delivering services efficiently, reliably, and cheaply to customers over many years.
“It really goes back to our relationship with Microsoft,” Coburn said. “We’ve been a Microsoft-only hosting company for the past 11 years now, and over that time we’ve built a relationship with Microsoft and really demonstrated we’re a good hosting provider for Windows.”
In fact, as part of the Microsoft deployment, Applied Innovations not only completed one of the largest-ever single client infrastructure build-outs in its more than 10-year history, but also deployed one of the largest all-Dell hardware based deployments on Hyper-V to date. And the infrastructure to back these virtual machines is powerful. Applied Innovations created the Hyper-V cluster exclusively with Dell hardware, including robust server configurations and a fully redundant, high-performance Storage Area Network.
Using virtualization technologies, Applied Innovations was able to create a solution that comes at a fraction of the cost of a traditional dedicated server. Over a three year period, dedicated servers proved to be more than five times more expensive than virtual machines, according to Applied Innovations research. Broken down, dedicated server hardware costs were 2.25 times more expensive, software costs (system center) were nearly 21 times more expensive to provide the same level of OS management and server monitoring, and the hardware solution would lack managed backups and high availability failover clustering available in the virtual solution. Furthermore, colocation costs were nearly eight times more expensive, and power costs were nearly 19 times more expensive.
And it doesn’t stop there. At the beginning of March, Applied Innovations announced that SmarterTools (www.smartertools.com) had donated $400,000 worth of software to its WebsiteSpark offering, giving small businesses participating in the Microsoft-sponsored program the business tools they need to succeed.
The new partnership with SmarterTools will provide each participant professional editions of the SmarterMail mail server, SmarterTrack customer service software, and SmarterStats Web log analytics and SEO software. The software bundle, also known as the SmarterBundle, is valued at $800, and is also distributed by partnered hosting companies with dedicated and VPS offerings.
“We wanted to ensure our sponsored WebsiteSpark businesses would be successful and offer not only a fully managed, highly available virtual dedicated server, but all of the components for a complete web hosting solution,” Coburn said. “Pairing the SmarterBundle from SmarterTools with the Microsoft Web Platform provided on our managed virtual dedicated server platform allows us to meet that need.”
No related posts.
