(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — In mid-September, reseller hosting provider Verio (www.verio.com) unveiled its “Advanced Business Hosting” solution, which presents a re-imagined hosting solution for small businesses.
This new category of web hosting was the product of market research headed by sales and marketing vice president Steve Renda, who made some interesting findings by looking at Verio and its customers. Breaking down current usage of Verio products, Renda said, “Three quarters of our [reseller channel] revenue was not from our web hosting or shared services but was our virtual private services being re-purposed to serve web hosting.”
Renda said Verio identified seven different use cases, noting that businesses’ hosting needs ran from a simple business card website that just showed the company’s address and contact information to enterprise-type applications that feature highly customized sites with deep integration, and possibly some sort of proprietary technology.
“Businesses would start maybe fairly simple but then they would progress through ever-increasing needs,” he said. “Two things seemed to drive that – one was that the business was growing and succeeding – and every small business owner wants that – and the second was that as they became more familiar with the use of web services and an online presence, they became gradually more accustomed to wanting to do more. [They] became aware of the ability to do more – things like e-commerce, like more dynamic content and more advanced applications – as they moved up the stack.”
Knowing what end users were looking for in web hosting, the logical – yet difficult – task was to make an offering that provides a shared-hosting-type framework that offers the guaranteed resources, dedicated containers, security and resources offered by VPS solutions.
Verio senior director of products Mark Fleming helped turn these market realities into an offering that could handle all these demands. Utilizing Verio’s VPS technology, Fleming led the creation of an offering with guaranteed resources that can be scaled to meet specific businesses’ needs using three dedicated containers for website, email and database hosting.
“We can tune the memory and CPU,” he said. “Somebody can scale and grow just where they need it, more like a cloud-like environment.” It also features security-hardened applications, secure email, security monitoring and automatic patches and updates, providing customers with more security than a traditional shared hosting plan.
The private resource containerization also makes the service more reliable by separating each website from other sites on the server, making them unaffected by other websites’ traffic, email demands or a corrupt database.
Renda says Advanced Business Hosting comes just short of being a “cloud” service because it doesn’t offer automatic scaling. He says that is the next logical step, but also that the controls in place make it easy for users to provision added resources as they are needed.
Verio offers three unique flavors of Advanced Business Hosting, which are all available through the company’s reseller channel, with attached end-user prices suggested by Verio. At $9.95, the “Foundation Web” is a simple turn-key solution to host private email and up to four unique websites. “Professional Web” at $29.95 provides more resources and flexibility for e-commerce, and multi-media, as well as private database server space, and the ability to host up to eight unique websites.
At $84.95, “Advanced Web” gives users the ability to maximize all available email, web server and database resources to cover periods of high usage and growth, and provide the highest level of turnkey performance without migrating to a private server solution, as well as the ability to host up to 16 unique websites.
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