Hosting

AppLogic Gird OS Improves Hosting Margins

Despite rapid growth in the hosting business, success is a constant challenge. Fierce competition, customer churn, and lack of differentiation leave many providers with growth capped by their ability to finance server purchases.

To break this cycle, hosting providers need to to attract new customers by offering differentiated services at low entry prices and sell additional resources and services to existing customers when their needs grow. Large numbers of entry-level accounts mean providers have to manage tens of thousands of customers cost-efficiently. At the same time, they need to support their best customers with large numbers of servers and tools that make managing their systems easier. All while controlling labor costs.

Infrastructure hasn't been designed for hosting

Maintaining margins while offering low entry prices means customers need to self-serve. Users pick a configuration on the web, select customization options, enter a credit card and have a system ready in minutes. When the user needs more memory, CPU, disk space or bandwidth, they should simply add them online without operator intervention, service disruption or re-installing software. Backup and restore, reboots, monitoring and software upgrades should also be self-serve.

Creating self-serve systems for users isn't simply a matter of writing scripts, because this becomes just another requirement for constant maintenance. Rather, the number of systems a provider actively maintains must be reduced. Ideally, all services, including shared hosting, virtual private servers,  value-added applications, and even large distributed applications should be delivered from a single scalable platform. In this way all servers, storage and users could be managed from a single point.

Some aggressive hosting providers have tried to achieve this by investing in enterprise technologies like blade servers, SAN, and server virtualization. They've tied it all together with thousands of lines of scripts. Unfortunately, enterprise systems can't deliver what hosting providers need because they were designed with different usage in mind. As a result, despite significant investment in equipment, software and labor using these kinds of systems may actually increase the cost of integration, management and maintenance.

AppLogic delivers grid computing infrastructure

AppLogic converts a grid commodity servers into a scalable shared resource for running web applications. On the grid, a control panel, a virtual private server, a clustered database, or even a social networking system are all just applications. This enables providers to deliver shared hosting, VPS, complex hosting environments and advanced applications from the same grid. All without new equipment or people.

Grid computing enables hosting providers to easily automate the deployment of customizable services. Hardware resources usage is flexible and each user can be scaled with a single command, without affecting other customers. AppLogic applications aren't limited to a single server so a single user can scale to multiple servers, making it easy manage multi-server configurations.

Grid computing greatly simplifies managing resources and users. Because applications run on the grid rather than individual specific servers, resources can be added or subtracted without affecting users. Even server failures are handled automatically by AppLogic without data loss.

Opportunity to improve margins and differentiate

Shifting from managing individual servers and software images to operating a shared scalable grid allows hosting providers to efficiently scale existing lines of business and branch into new high margin services like offering utility computing. All while providing customers low prices and scalability, which reduces churn.