I was talking to my friend Alex, who's a developer at a major web hosting company. Back in 1999, he said, all browsers acted differently, forcing site owners to use proprietary markup. But now that we've got standards like CSS and XHMTL, everyone benefits.
The data center world is unfortunately still stuck in the Dark Ages. Most hosting facilities are populated with a wide variety of hardware (Dell, HP, Super Micro, Sun...), on which users run many operating systems (Windows, Solaris, Linux, BSD). This means Alex and his counterparts have to code 100 different ways of remote rebooting servers, monitoring CPU utilization, etc. Wouldn't it be nice if there were an industry-wide API so that instead of IPMI/DRAC/iLO/ALOM, every machine at any hosting company understood the same language?
Whereas web standards have given rise to greater web design creativity, I'm afraid data center standards (through either the API Alex described or virtualization technologies that deliver a consistent user experience regardless of server-specific hardware performance) would make web hosting providers even more indistinguishable than they already are from one another.
Alex thinks good service will remain a key differentiator. As with the restaurant business, customers who are treated right will keep coming back. But imagine if every Italian chef in your town adopted the same pasta-making standards, guaranteeing on-demand availability of perfect spaghetti. Would fast and courteous spaghetti delivery become your sole criteria for restaurant selection? Or might you look for an ambiance that matches the occasion? Or beyond-the-spaghetti menu options?
Don't say this is where any similarity between restaurants and web hosts ends. Instead, check out the latest issue of Amazon's developer newsletter. Scroll two thirds of the way down and read the "Intro to Amazon" tutorials for C#, Java, PHP and Ruby developers. All are written by 3rd party experts who are actual S3/EC2 users, and each section contains case studies and performance optimizing tips.
You, too, could offer customers and prospects the specific experience they're looking for. As my other friend Jeff (who helped me close deals with and hold on to more EV1 customers than I can remember) recently pointed out, you've just got to start asking what they want.
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