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Jason is kinda tall

Edward Gaa from Globat took a photo of Jason Silverglate and me at the W in Chicago. I can't believe we've known each other for 10 years.

Jay is founder/CEO of FortressITX/DedicatedNow and such a rock star! He, Nick Blozan from 3Tera and I did a "how to sell hosting" panel at the very, very end of HostingCon. I thought it'd just be the three of us hanging out in an empty room, but a whole bunch of cool people came, including Jeff Hinkle from GNAX - whom I lost all kinds of business to while working at EV1Servers. He should have been speaking!

Another old friend I ran into (thanks to Demand Media!!) was Steve Heflin from Afilias. His previous company, Domain Bank, sponsored my Web Hosting Magazine pre-launch party at Fall ISPCON, 1999. Thanks, Steve, for being a part of that wild dotcom adventure...

Let us go and make our visit

My 10th grade English teacher made the whole class memorize The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, a T.S. Eliott poem about... the relationship between web hosting providers and SaaS. No, really.

Do I dare
Disturb the universe?

So Prufrock is a lonely guy who is intrigued by romance but hesitates to make a move. He ponders over "a hundred visions and revisions" but ultimately concludes "No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be..."

Web hosting companies, likewise, are fascinated with SaaS. As 1&1 CEO Andreas Gauger tells eWeek: "web hosting is becoming more and more of a commodity play... In three or four years, SaaS will overtake the revenue we get from hosting." But in the meantime, 1&1's website calls bandwidth and web space the "core features" of its service.

After all, bandwidth/web space are traditional web hosting providers' bread and butter. At a time when the commodity hosting business seems to be humming along, is it really worth it to reach beyond the industry's shared/VPS/dedicated comfort zone?

Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?

And yet... Who can resist the allure of analysts' optimistic projections? Or Salesforce.com's $4.72 billion market cap? That's 7.27x annualized revenue compared with Web.com's 2.06x or Savvis' 2.50x. (Poor Savvis. Its valuation fell by 25% in July!) The Planet, for one, seems to be paying attention. Have you seen how "SaaS Hosting" is at the top of its Managed Hosting service catalog, four spots above "Website Hosting"?

Still, my Texan friends don't seem any better equipped to engage with SaaS developers than Prufrock is to pick up girls. The Planet's view of "SaaS business challenges" encompasses only infrastructure issues - which is only a small subset of what's on a SaaS CTO's mind. For instance, check out Bill Boebel's blog post on why Webmail.us moved its storage from Rackspace to S3. Amazon has web services he could leverage to build stuff faster!

Why can't traditional web hosting providers understand that time is sooo often more important to customers than money??

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.

Speaking of Amazon, I've been told time and again that S3 and EC2 are "not web hosting". Same goes for Office Live. Or Google Apps. Or MySpace. Or Flickr. Or Salesforce.com. Or Demand Media's ChannelMe.tv. Not. Web. Hosting.

But do end users care? Do developers? 265,000+ people have signed to to build stuff on Amazon's platform. 7,000+ attended Salesforce's developer conference last year. Besides, didn't Andreas - CEO of the largest hosting company in the world - say that SaaS will overtake commodity hosting within 3-4 years?

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

If you work for a company that's in the commodity hosting business, you could weigh SaaS risks and opportunities in Prufrock-like isolation - or come to San Francisco on September 5-7!

At last year's Office 2.0 Conference, I got to talk to hundreds of SaaS developers about their infrastructure *and* business challenges. Your product manager should have been there. And he ought to be there this year. He (and every other attendee) will get an iPhone, which might help him meet girls, even as he figures out how to lure in more SaaS customers. What could be better?

PS - Early bird registration ends on July 31; the ticket price will go up by $500 starting Wednesday. Office 2.0 is produced by Ismael Ghalimi, who is the CEO of Intalio and keeper of the Office 2.0 Database. Check out the list of SaaS providers, end users and VC investors who have already signed up. See you there! :)

My HostingCon Slides

Back in DC after 3 whirlwind days in Chicago. Posts will resume as soon as I've recovered from the information overload. In the meantime, here are my slides from the Web Hosting Metrics workshop (click here for full screen version on Slideshare; you can download the file there too!). A big thank you to everyone who came out sooo early Monday morning! :)

On evangelism

Last November I wrote that an evangelist like Amazon's Jeff Barr is what The Planet (as well as any other traditional web hosting provider) needs to succeed survive. A few weeks ago I was very excited to see that SoftLayer has given my friend Kevin Laude the title of API Evangelist. And yesterday, The Planet announced that it's got an evangelist too (and his first name is also Kevin). Very cool!

Kevin Hazard says he's here to provide corporate transparency. And to "improve the user experience on our corporate site and in our order process." Which are great starting points, but I hope he will take on a much broader role. For instance, he could...

1. Maximize both The Planet's and his own "surface area" through not just blog posts, but also building networks on Linkedin/Facebook/other communities and sharing media on Flickr/YouTube/SlideShare/other services

2. Play an active role in local developer groups (of which there are plenty near The Planet's home base)

3. Attend relevant conferences (some great upcoming opportunities include OSCON, Office 2.0, Web 2.0 Summit... After all, every developer and web app startup needs hosting?)

(BTW, Chris Brogan has a really good post-event follow up guide)

4. Track down and subscribe to as many customer/vendor/partner blogs as possible, and participate actively in these communities

Kevin says an evangelist is someone who listens, but I think Seth Godin has a better job description: it's like "being the head of a big trade association, but without the bureaucracy and tedium". It's about "seducing stragglers into joining the group" and "balancing huge amounts of inbound correspondence without making people feel left out". Which is pretty much what Jeff Barr does. If Kevin wants a fan club (like Jeff has), he will have to measure up!

PS - On a somewhat related note, Rich Miller over at Data Center Knowledge writes that Savvis is marketing its data center tours like rock concerts. Sun's Black Box tour is pretty sexy, too. Check out those crowds in Vienna! Does The Planet's new evangelism program represent a shift away from steep discounts towards more up to date forms of Internet infrastructure marketing? Stay tuned...

Numbers are good

Hillary Stiff, David Snead and I are organizing a HostingCon workshop on metrics that impact web hosting profitability (in terms of both operations and valuation). Hillary (who has bought and sold more web hosting companies than you knew existed) will share insights on key factors that make some deals worth more than others. And David (whose law practice represents just about every web hosting company you've heard of) will moderate a discussion on how web hosting providers such as Web.com and Endurance International measure their performance.

I will spend a few minutes in between talking about metrics that most web hosting folks probably aren't keeping track of. Let's start with market definition: in the face of declining search volume for "web hosting" and "dedicated servers", should web hosting marketers reconsider their astronomical AdWords bids and consider associating their businesses with more of-the-moment keywords?

Next is the related and also important issue of reputation management. 1&1, for instance, has multi-page ads in just about every print magazine I read. But if I Google its name, I would learn on page 1, #4 of the search results that it's the devil. Glancing through the comments, it seems this blog post has attracted the attention of many other unhappy customers. Should someone from 1&1 have made an effort to engage these folks?

Last week I mentioned another unhappy example, which would be much easier than 1&1's predicament to rectify - if those involved so choose. A lookup of GoDaddy COO Warren Adelman's name shows that he still works at long-defunct NeoPlanet. (At least instead of displaying parked ads, WarrenAdelman.com now points to GoDaddy's executive bios page.)

Something else I find not quite right is the discrepancy between the business models of web hosting directories and web hosting companies. TheWHIR and TopHosts, for example, monetize each and every website visitor - often multiple times! In contrast, many web hosting providers have similar Alexa/Compete/Quantcast rankings, but generate zero revenue from 90%+ of their website audience. Is there a way to make better use of this asset?

Lastly (at least for now), I will ask the audience to consider what constitutes a "good" customer. Many companies monitor each user's resource consumption (bandwidth/webspace/support and billing staff's time, etc), tenure and the amount of referral business they generate. But as John Nigro commented on my other post recently, vendors should consider the real value each customer is getting:

"When you are in charge of selling business tools and you don't know what your customers do, who are the most successful customers using your tools, etc. then you are failing. It's very frustrating when someone in charge of a product cannot name even 1 successful customer using that product. All they can tell you are sales figures, conversion rates, etc. The data and indicators of product use are so readily available but rarely leveraged to increase customer satisfaction and value."

Anyway, these are just a few preliminary thoughts. I will probably think of additional points before the session (which is at 9am on Monday, July 23). I'll also make up some slides and post them.