[I submitted part of this post as PingZine article. Since then, I've decided to give it a different ending.]
Some time ago, I had a long discussion with Serguei Beloussov, SWSoft’s CEO, on what web hosting is. I thought of web hosting as a verb, meaning “to provide infrastructure for making users’ content Internet accessible”. Under this definition, Google would be a web host for offering Blogger. MySpace would count as well. Maybe even LinkedIn would qualify.
So I disagreed with Serguei’s assessment that web hosting hasn’t gotten its fair share of attention from the mass media and the investment community. I’d just read a New York Times article on the proliferation of blogs (37 million and counting!) and the popularity of social networks (68 million members on MySpace alone!). And “new hosting” companies like YouTube, Six Apart and FaceBook recent closed fresh rounds of venture capital funding within weeks of one another. Web hosting isn't neglected, I said. It's just evolving.
But during Serguei’s jam-packed, standing-room-only keynote address at the SWSoft Hosting Summit, I finally understood what he meant. Serguei thought of web hosting as a noun, meaning the community of hosting providers that SWSoft has served since 1999.
You belong to this group if you offer “traditional” shared, VPS and/or dedicated server web hosting. You focus on the mass market, not the internal requirements of a large enterprise. Your customer base is demographically and functionally diverse, not concentrated in narrow niches such as job seekers or photography aficionados. You’re up against infrastructure challenges, including rising power costs and shrinking data center inventory, not to mention head-on competition from what Serguei calls The Monsters.
Microsoft is in beta with Office Live, which offers free hosting with free domain registration. Google could easily launch an umbrella hosting product that aggregates multiple web services under a domain name. Visitors could view blog posts, photo albums and maps on the front end, and authorized users could share calendars, to-do lists and web-based spreadsheets on the back end.
It doesn’t help, either, that more and more venture-funded startups are offering your prospective customers free, fast and easy web presence. If MySpace doesn’t worry you, maybe Tagworld should. Its 1.9 million members are building not just cookie cutter profiles, but multi-page websites.
The web hosting community, says Serguei, needs to unite. It’s up to you, collectively, to keep the industry relevant and help it stay competitive against The Monsters. To that end, he recommends service differentiation.
While Microsoft and Google might make significant headway among entry level website owners, their target market is unlikely to encompass advanced users who demand scalability, redundancy, and a high degree of control over their hosting environments. Serguei pitches virtualization as a solution for meeting these requirements. His vision is for a system that today runs on clustered web and database servers to be deployed using redundant virtual environments. It would require less hardware, less power, less data center space. The goal is to lower the price point and simplify sysadmin logistics for complex hosting – a category in which the web hosting industry faces no competition from outsiders.
Of course, having fended off The Monsters, there remains the challenge of setting yourself apart from other hosting firms. Part of the answer, Serguei says, might come from OpenFusion, an integration platform to which SWSoft will migrate all of its products. OpenFusion’s consolidated API and pluggable UI are fully open to third party developers. SWSoft’s goal is to create an ecosystem in which an ever-broader menu of building blocks can be used by hosting providers to deliver customized services.
Ecosystems, by the way, are all the rage these days. FlatBurger is working on one for the DotNetNuke world. Tagworld is positioning itself as the repository of Flash widgets for social networking sites. Even the Monsters are in on the game. Microsoft recently launched Windows Live Dev, which features APIs and code samples to help developers create gadgets that run on and mashups that tap into its Windows Live suite of services. And Google recently added an Ajax toolkit to the Google Code site, which has APIs for just about everything. The Monsters' love affair with developers is actually great news; they've got to host those mashups somewhere! The industry is going to make it. Like I said, it's just evolving!
