1. From the Thomas Jefferson wiki:
"In the winter of 1802-1803, the summer's harvest of wheat was safely stored in barrels and barns. Monticello overseer Gabriel Lilly had to wait for freezing temperatures before he could harvest his next crop: ice from the Rivanna River. Every available neighborhood wagon was assembled to bring ice from the river to the newly constructed ice house..."
Jefferson made ice cream, drank chilled wine and astonished guests by putting iced-filled coolers on the table in July. Unfortunately, as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos might point out, such luxuries required a great deal of undifferentiated heavy lifting. Gabriel Lilly's hard work didn't make Jefferson's drinks any colder than that Heineken in your refrigerator. Which might explain why ice harvests aren't so popular any more.
2. My experience at EV1Servers was in some ways similar to Lilly's at Monticello. I spent long hours explaining to customers that while we instantly swapped out their failed hardware, their apps won't be back online for some time yet because we've still got to reinstall their OS, after which they could restore their data...
At the time, my understanding of "good service" was limited to being available and responsive and empathetic. But the ability to reach me 24/7 didn't make customers' lives any easier than a virtualized utility computing platform such as 3Tera's would have (disclaimer: I am on 3Tera's advisory board). Just as Jefferson never imagined that there'd be ice makers in kitchens across America, I had no idea it'd be possible for customer apps to auto-migrate themselves from failed hardware onto other resources on the network.
3. Bob Warfield's comment made me realize something troubling about Rackspace's attitude towards virtualization. (BTW, check out Bob's post on web hosting world domination.) Rackspace is selling its upcoming VMWare-based service like an ice harvest, which takes tremendous expertise and herculean efforts to coordinate.
Amazon and Microsoft, meanwhile, present their platforms as no-brainers: *of course* you can have redundancy and scalability! Ray Ozzie even promises low latency access to users anywhere in the world - at the "lowest, lowest possible cost". Which story do you think the public would prefer to hear?
4. As a former customer, I found Rackspace's Fanatical Support nearly as indulgent as Jefferson's ice house. My account rep was sooo amazingly attentive! But luxury is a concept that evolves with time.
Back in 2001, all I needed was a secure, reliable place for my totally self-contained code and data. But if I were to start another web-based business today, I'd want a hosting provider that offered application frameworks/APIs/machine images (and maybe even data sources!) I could leverage. I'd look for a community that provided opportunities for social networking as well as access to collective knowledge.
Sadly, it seems every traditional web hosting wagon has been called down to the frozen river. Oh well. Leave it to Amazon, Microsoft and perhaps Google/eBay/Salesforce.... to fulfill these new wishes.
5. Last night I had a long email exchange with Jason from Fortress ITX. He said compared with production-quality managed hosting, EC2 leaves so many questions unanswered. I'm sure early refrigerators also didn't deliver on every wished-for feature. Thankfully their inventors persevered instead of spending their time hauling heavy blocks of ice.
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