Shared Hosting in the Cloud?

[Rodney-E2]

So I have a little shared hosting company. Am I crazy to think that I should be providing all our shared hosting service in a cloud such as amazon ec2 or the new rackspace offering so we focus less on the hardware, datacenter, network and more on the customer and the experience given to the customer?

Would it be crazy to offload our entire operation onto something like this?

[mark]

At this time, it wouldn't make much financial sense. I also own a website hosting company (www.phirefast.com) and have put a lot of time and effort into researching it, but I'll take the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" stand for now, personally.

[mario]

I think it really depends on what the focus of your business will be. For example I can think of a shared hosting company that has grown tremendously without running their own equipment.

The cloud will bring great advantages and challenges up ahead, there are many reasons to look to hosting in the cloud first and foremost depending on where your business is at today financially it may make a lot of sense. Also in a traditional shared environment scalability is an issue in the cloud that is not a problem.

Over the next few months the cloud will definitely define the way of computing especially with the exponential growth of data capacity/computing growth.

[silverlining]

Firsr and foremost, let's not confuse Rackspaces offering called mosso with cloud computing. This offering is actually a vmware or xen based virtualization platform. Both have some similar features of grid/cloud computing but the tehcnologies are very different.

Vmware offering take a single server and chop them into a series of smaller servers. Vmware saves companies money by making use of available processing and memory utilization. Additional features allow virtual servers to be moved to new servers through container based technology and fast deployment of new virtual servers through templated based deployments.

Mosso offers reseller based hosting with hardware based load balancing, vmware, and most likely a san based storage device. They have the same issues as other hosting providers when it comes to single users abusing resources. Recent offerings from Mosso include limited transactions per account. For a $100 a month it is a descent offering, however nothing that special, just good engineering and their own basic control panel.

Amazon should be mentioned here, but not really built to be an easy to deploy platform for shared hosting.

3tera has what I would consider the closet cloud computing offer that acutally takes multiple servers and makes them appear as a single cloud based server. 3tera supports centos, cpanel, plesk, and a few other distros.

Now the question posed was, is cloud computing meant for shared hosting. In all cases the answer to this is yes, including virtualization, grid, and cloud offerings that have capacity to support your needs. Having the ability to eliminate hardware failures and provide infinite scalability are two major benefits that should be considered as true benefits.

I have hands on with all technogies that I have discussed, if you have further questions, don't hesitate to ask.

[silverlining]

Sorry for the typos I did this post via thumbs and my blackberry.

[mark]

No problem, it's a great post regardless. Thank you for opening my eyes, everyone.

[jsmart]

Hello,

just to make sure you guys don't figure out who i am and think I'm trying to hide and insert spam... i'd like to say upfront, I am the Dir. of Operations & Customer Support for 3tera.

that being said..

I think one of the fastest growing segments in cloud computing is the hosted arena. I have seen and used most of the "cloud offerings" out there today, and have helped to implement hosting based cloud offerings based on the 3tera platform.

what the cloud gives the hoster is something unique, no matter which "cloud" you are discussing. It gives you the ability to offer on-demand services to your customers that range from virtual servers to fully configured applications stacks.

AND it allows you to do this without the need for huge upfront capital expense layouts for hardware and datacenter space.

we all think today, well most people, in hosting of traditional sense, where you offer dedicated servers and maybe even slices of a server using plain HW or xen/vmware servers.

In reality the cloud makes it easier to branch out of the traditional markets to offer things like low cost multi-site DB replication, or ready made clusters, or virtual server farms, or...... that most hosing providers would never have even considered even a year ago.

I truly feel that "cloud" computing in its many various forms will liberate us smaller hosting providers and allow everyone to compete at the same level in the long run weather you have 10 servers or 10k servers.

just my two cents :)

--Jessie

[mario]

Hello,

just to make sure you guys don't figure out who i am and think I'm trying to hide and insert spam... i'd like to say upfront, I am the Dir. of Operations & Customer Support for 3tera.

that being said..:)

--Jessie

Jessie welcome to the cloud talk community we welcome all feedback from all. We look forward to seeing more useful posts from you and your real-life experiences as in the end that is what will make this technology the best as you mentioned.

[hosting365]

I don't think it's reasonable to 'exclude' VMware as a cloud?

Even Amazon run on xen. Virtualisation is the very basis of any cloud platform.

[mark]

Absolutely correct, but it has to make financial sense, right?

[jsmart]

I think of vmware as a virtulization tool that could help build clouds the same way xen is a tool that allows you to build clouds.

neither is a cloud but with the right infrastructure, portal, gui, etc.. they help in the deployment of cloud services by making it easy to deploy virtual servers and infrastructure.

I see some real use cases where vmware makes sense, as today most other "cloud" tools do not fully support windows.

I think in the long run most clouds will support all of these tools, including services such as AWS, S3., dynavol, nirvanix,etc.... incorporating all of them into one system that has the functionality that you need to deploy all of your services from a single location regardless of the platform or vendor selling the resources.

[Eric]

I guess it's time I introduced myself. I'm COO of ENKI, a managed cloud computing services provider. We use AppLogic as our underlying technology, because we feel it's the best technology we can offer our customers, and because our founder and 3Tera's founder shared a vision of fast and reliable cloud computing made accessible to the average user.

We have a couple customers providing shared hosting from our cloud computing service. There are two main advantages that those customers see in coming to us instead of building their platform themselves out of colocated servers or other non-cloud approaches. The first advantage is that AppLogic provides near instant scalability and automatic self-healing features that allow the hosting companies to see improved reliability over hosting on physical hardware, as well as paying only for the resources they use. This is important for small but growing shared hosting companies, because their cloud computing costs are kept in proportion to their business. Because of AppLogic's paradigm of a physical datacenter implemented in the virtual domain, moving their shared hosting system (Cpanel, Plesk, etc.) to the cloud is very easy.

The second advantage is that we are essentially their IT department, managing AppLogic for them and handling all system administration. This frees them from having to have deep technological expertise in order to host their customers on a reliable platform. All they have to do is to use the control panel in their shared-hosting software to respond to their customer needs. But more importantly it allows them to be in the hosting business and make money on it while their focus is actually elsewhere (usually on building successful ecommerce sites for their customers.)

Clearly, these advantages aren't going to be viewed as critical to some existing hosting companies, especially ones with deep technology skills. But by lowering the barrier to being a shared hosting provider, AppLogic based cloud computing can help companies that are "accidental hosters" doing shared hosting as a side business become successful and serve their customers well.
________________
Eric Novikoff
ENKI
http://www.enkiconsulting.net
"Enterprise-class managed cloud computing"

[mario]

I guess it's time I introduced myself. I'm COO of ENKI, a managed cloud computing services provider. We use AppLogic as our underlying technology, because we feel it's the best technology we can offer our customers, and because our founder and 3Tera's founder shared a vision of fast and reliable cloud computing made accessible to the average user.

We have a couple customers providing shared hosting from our cloud computing service. There are two main advantages that those customers see in coming to us instead of building their platform themselves out of colocated servers or other non-cloud approaches. The first advantage is that AppLogic provides near instant scalability and automatic self-healing features that allow the hosting companies to see improved reliability over hosting on physical hardware, as well as paying only for the resources they use. This is important for small but growing shared hosting companies, because their cloud computing costs are kept in proportion to their business. Because of AppLogic's paradigm of a physical datacenter implemented in the virtual domain, moving their shared hosting system (Cpanel, Plesk, etc.) to the cloud is very easy.

The second advantage is that we are essentially their IT department, managing AppLogic for them and handling all system administration. This frees them from having to have deep technological expertise in order to host their customers on a reliable platform. All they have to do is to use the control panel in their shared-hosting software to respond to their customer needs. But more importantly it allows them to be in the hosting business and make money on it while their focus is actually elsewhere (usually on building successful ecommerce sites for their customers.)

Clearly, these advantages aren't going to be viewed as critical to some existing hosting companies, especially ones with deep technology skills. But by lowering the barrier to being a shared hosting provider, AppLogic based cloud computing can help companies that are "accidental hosters" doing shared hosting as a side business become successful and serve their customers well.

Welcome to TheCloudTalk Community Eric. Thanks for telling us about ENKI and the benefits of AppLogic. If your founder and Vlad shared a vision I am certain you guys are clearly in the know about what all this should be about and its importance to the future of IT.