This story appeared in "Ten Turning Points," featured in the September 2004 issue of Web Host Industry Review magazine. Click here to subscribe for free.
September 20, 2004 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Once upon a time there was only shared and dedicated hosting, and a massive gap in between.
The two Web hosting formulas were so distinctly different that early service providers often associated dedicated hosting with their colocation businesses, and shared hosting with their consumer divisions. The difference lay in underlying technology, quality of service and, of course, resulting price tag. Dedicated hosting came in the form of a hulking $10,000 server, a dedicated T1 line, and a price tag that would cover these two bills, plus the host's overhead and margin. Dedicated hosting was an expensive proposition, and many mid-sized businesses looking to test the waters of Web hosting went with the only other alternative.
Shared hosting was just that: customers sharing a single server, along with other resources. This was an economical way to support a hosting service. But Web hosts, at the time, were faced with questions that had yet to be answered. They needed to know how to keep their accounts private and prevent individual customers from accessing the traffic information and customer databases of "server neighbors." They needed to make sure that all customers had access to the same performance and resources. And they needed to know how to manage each account separately, changing individual customer configurations without taking everybody offline.
Hosts around the world sought and found answers to these questions, which led to the development of technologies for server virtualization and automation. Hosts like Concentric (now part of XO Communications), Verio (now part of NTT Communications) and Alabanza (still independent) developed in-house technologies that would alter server software and network architecture to address some of these customer concerns.
Virtualization platforms, the very first to appear, were designed to break a shared server into separate areas that each operated like a dedicated server to an end user. Levels of virtualization varied by company and by vendor - some found ways to make the root of the server individually accessible, while others felt root access should remain shared - but all of these technologies shared the goal of separating user environments on shared Web hosting servers.
The earliest goals of automation software were to create a simpler, more efficient means of managing server environments that were growing more complex and difficult to handle. While big Web hosting firms developed their tools for handling server management in house, a handful of companies, like Plesk, Sphera and Ensim, appeared, offering commercial automation software designed to appeal to smaller Web hosts and resellers.
These companies offered solutions that automated mundane server maintenance tasks as well as time-consuming repetitive tasks like account provisioning and server setup. The solutions allowed smaller Web hosts to manage environments previously beyond their means. Automation software so simplified the complex technical aspects of Web hosting that it has, in just a few years, become an essential hosting tool on a level close to that of hardware, or bandwidth.
Automation software also led to control panel technology, which allowed Web hosting customers to manage the basic elements of their accounts through Web-based interfaces, enabling them to handle simple account management tasks and alleviating a massive management and technical support burden from Web hosts.
These days, says Babar Zaman, Business Development Manager at Advanced Communications, makers of the Hosting Controller (hostingcontroller.com) automation software, competition in the hosting automation space is focused mainly on identifying and addressing unmet needs by incorporating new features into automation software. Hosting Controller, he says, is one of the few automation products that offers broad multilingual support - a feature that has helped to define and differentiate his company's software. The company's software also includes a complex proprietary system for automated billing and invoicing, he says.
Part of the challenge of creating an automation software platform for the masses, rather than for a single hosting provider, says Zaman, is being careful to assure that new features address universal, rather than specific needs.
"In order to compete in the market, we have to provide the features that Web hosting companies are looking for," he says, "But we have to make sure those features are really in demand."
Automation's impact on the hosting business really can't be overstated. It allowed smaller Web hosts to compete with larger firms by enabling them to easily manage complex server environments without the need to hire large IT staffs or develop management software in-house. It contributed to Web hosting's shift from a technology business to a service business, and pushed along the growth of the reseller model. Automation has become a standard element of any hosting environment. Its impact on the way hosting operations are run has been so universal that it's difficult to imagine how a Web host might operate without it.
