Web Hosting News

One thing that has come out of this conference is that Google is being treated with a lot of credibility as a threat to Web hosts. Now that we all agree (interesting in and of itself, I suppose) that Web hosts are clearly in the business of offering hosted applications, and Google has been extremely consistent in executing on its strategy of delivering hosted software.

And it is, of course, important to note that Google is not in the business of partnering with ISPs or hosting providers. Google is going it alone, and is succeeding at securing the market - hosted email, definitely, and to a fairly menacing extent other small business apps.

One of the remarkable things about that, and one of the things noted Serguei Beloussov, CEO of Parallels, in his Tuesday keynote presentation, is that from the Web host’s perspective, that makes Google the new “evil empire.”

The company doesn’t want to partner with distributors. It wants to control everything from user activity to user data to payment. And it doesn’t appear to have any intention of leaving any business out there for anyone else (meaning Web hosting providers).

Once considered the “evil empire,” Microsoft is now the nice guy in the SaaS market. Microsoft has always been friendly to the partner model, from OEMs to VARs and now more attentively to hosting partners. Now, the company is almost by default carrying the banner for smaller service providers into the battle for the business of small business.

It’s a battle between giants - big as they come - and if you’re a smaller hosting provider, you’re either in the ring with Microsoft, or you’re on the sidelines, probably cheering for Microsoft.

That metaphor maybe got a little confused. Basically, you don’t have to be a Microsoft partner to want “partner-hosted solutions” to beat “one company operates the whole Internet” as far as SaaS models go.

From Serguei’s perspective, the answer to the challenge is something akin to “use Parallels products,” generally. More specifically he says you should be paranoid about efficiency, and about providing an automated and self-managed solution. And that mans an automated and virtualized architecture.

And make sure you own your customers. Hosts are in the enviable position right now of having the customer relationships that every builder of business applications covets. When adding those applications to your own offering, hang on to those customer relationships. Only resell solutions in a white-label model, he says, where you continue to own the customer.

Ultimately, Microsoft and Google are going to offer everything that hosting providers used to offer - domains, a Web presence, email, and everything else. For more complex business solutions, there’s still room for hosting providers to make those customer relationships evolve.

Approximately an hour and a half after being driven to my inspired “just let them pitch it” conclusion, which I described in a blog entry yesterday, I saw a presentation that went against my feeling that presenters in general are unwilling to make (or are discouraged, directly or indirectly, from making) a sales pitch, and confirmed my feeling that an outright sales pitch would serve the presentation better.

At yesterday’s 4:45 session “Server 2008 and IIS7 - New Hosting Opportunities with Microsoft Hosting,” Microsoft Deutschland’s Web platform architect evangelist Bernhard Frank took the opportunity to deliver a pretty unfettered sales pitch.

Granted, he had the built-in advantage of being scheduled to deliver a session on the features of a piece of software that is generally of interest to Web hosting providers, which sort of fundamentally made the “infomercial” feel more like information and less like a commercial. But an even more fundamental fact of the situation was the simple fact that it was a good presentation.

That is, it was interesting and engaging throughout. And I believe that a lot of that had to do with Mr. Frank apparently not feeling like he was under any pressure to carefully soften the message with a lot of possibly-irrelevant contextualizing. What we got instead was an unapologetically straightforward look at the features and functions of Microsoft’s new products. No harm done.

There was a bit of PowerPoint, which I suppose is pretty inescapable as far as seminars go, but he cut that off at one point to project his laptop on to the big screen as he logged into a remote server and updated a website to include a FastCGI module by changing config files, and apply an application to a live site.

And the presentation concluded with a video showing how Mambo could be set up on a remote Windows server in about seven minutes, using the advanced Windows hosting package, in a process that did away with a lot of time-consuming troubleshooting and many pages of documentation-reading.

Maybe this is no real revelation, but I couldn’t help but feel impressed with the degree to which we’d actually been provided practical information. Then again, maybe that’s an indictment of typical boring tradeshow fare. I think I’ll hold off on making a sweeping generalization either way this time.

And yes, I realize that the intricate workings of the newest Microsoft applications is not interesting information to everybody. But as I mentioned in the other post, the name ought to be enough to steer the profoundly uninterested in the direction of a different session.

As Liam noted in his blog, I’m at Webhostingday.  This is my first hosting event outside the U.S.  As the title above suggests  - the question I’m getting the most is “why are you here?” or with a bit more meat:  “what use are you to hosts and other internet infrastructure providers who are outside of the U.S.?”

Sidestepping the jurisdictional issues (I’m a member of the bars of the District of Columbia and State of New Mexico), this question goes to the fundamental issue facing all hosts, and the Internet in general:  who’s law applies?

Let me answer that in a typical lawyer fashion:  it depends.  Let’s say I’m representing a company in Ohio.  They have a disgruntled customer in Maine.  I’m going to argue that Ohio law applies, since that’s where my client is based.  Let’s say there’s the same set of facts, however the customer in Maine has money in a bank we’re trying to get.  I’m going to argue that Maine law applies.  U.S. law supports both arguments, particularly in the business to consumer context.

In the international context, the arguments are relatively similar, except it’s much more difficult to get courts of one nation to apply the laws of another.  This is VERY true of U.S. courts, who will almost never apply the laws of a foreign jurisdiction, or, for that matter, even cede that a foreign court may have come to a more reasonable decision.

However the Internet is global, and my clients, and the attendees at Webhostingday, have clients all over the world.  So, to make the example above more complicated, how does a datacenter in Cologne leasing space to my client in Ohio, deal with my client’s problem customer in Maine?

The answer that applies 75% of the time is by using a common contract.  In the hosting industry, along with many other Internet industries, a consensus has developed about what is, and what isn’t, acceptable in contracts.  Except in their extreme forms, most hosting contracts (at least those that I’ve written) can be distilled down to very basic principles.  These principles have wide application in almost every country that has accepted the principle of doing business by contract.  By creating contracts that hew to these principles, it is much more likely that they will be enforced by courts from the U.S. to Uruguay.

So what about the other 25%.  The other 25% tends to involve issues, such as privacy, reseller and redistribution rights, and price floors, on which many countries disagree.  As companies move up the value chain, and create more varied products and services, their ability to sell over the internet with a standard contract that applies to all customers regardless of country, decreases.  In that case, typically my clients will engage me to prepare a standard contract, and we’ll work with attorneys in targeted countries, or geographic areas, to create a specific contract.

So that, I think, is the general answer to “what can you do for non-U.S.” hosts.  As to other reasons why I’m here:  I’ve done several transactions in the past year where, thanks to the weak dollar, my clients were either acquiring a company in the U.S., or being acquired by a company in the E.U.;  I have clients in the E.U. who have encouraged me to come; and finally, to Liam’s point in a recent blog entry, I’ve always wanted to ride roller coasters as much as I desired without waiting in line.  Just don’t tell my daughter.

I’m sure I have commented in the past (and most people would probably agree intuitively) that there’s something disappointing about attending a hosting conference session that turns out to be a thinly veiled sales pitch. Maybe it just seems a little dishonest, even a bit condescending.

But sitting through my fifth not-quite-a-sales-pitch of the day, (this one delivered by AXIGEN, and preceded by similar performances from VisionApp, Q-Layer, Microsoft and Parallels), I came to a bit of a realization.

It’s really a difficult position a presenter is in. On the one hand their expertise, and presumably their best material, has to do with their product. But they’re prevented by whatever rules of decorum from pursuing that angle outright.

Let’s take for granted that people go into a session called “virtualized hosted solutions for business messaging - the AXIGEN alternative” accepting that they’re going to be hit with a sales pitch. The fact that they’re there at all (and in this case there are probably something like 150 people in the room) is pretty convincing evidence that they’re interested in the product they’re going to be pitched (in this case, AXIGEN, a Linux mail server).

The sort of “brief history of SaaS services” approach many of these presenters take to putting their products in context, and the “brief company history” approach to introducing those products seem to me to be a missed opportunity. Or at least, a rather gentle treatment of an opportunity. I can’t help but think that 20 minutes ago I left the exhibit hall, where right now, I could probably walk up to the AXIGEN booth and have a hands-on experience with the product right there. Why not bring that into the presentation? Here, I’m left wondering about simple things like what the user interface looks like.

I’m sitting next to Steve Higashi through this session. He works with Web hosting provider Vistapages, and he’s watching the presentation with interest, but frustrated interest. “A case study would go a long way toward making this work,” he says. In this case, pretending it’s not a pitch is actually hurting the presentation. There are obvious questions here that aren’t being addressed. How does it compare to exchange, or one of the other Linux mail servers.

He ends the presentation with the suggestion that we start “playing” with AXIGEN, and provides a link to a live online demo of the product. I don’t think this weakens my point. In fact, I think it’s a nod to the need for a better understanding of the product than can be communicated in the not-a-sales-pitch mode of presenting.

I’m not indignant, mind you. I can accept that event sponsors, when given a soapbox, are going to use that opportunity to pitch their product. It’s all-but-inevitable, and I’d say just about everybody expects it from this sort of event. And I can accept that this sort of presentation is going to fall short on the “issues and trends” kind of information.

The problem, as I see it, is whatever sense of integrity or propriety that keeps these presenters from making an honest sales pitch, using whatever tools they have. I think in trying to give a presentation that won’t sound like a sales pitch, presenters tend to ruin the sales pitch. Which tends to ruin the presentation, since the pitch is what everyone is waiting for.

Is it a problem that can’t be solved? Of course I understand that Webhosting Day would be a tough sell at $385 Euros a head to listen to marketing material for two days. But if conference organizers can’t or won’t develop session content themselves, then let’s loosen the reins on the sales pitch. The same old thing tends to get dull after a while.

By the way, this isn’t a shot at AXIGEN. The presentation was not necessarily better or worse than any other. It was just a good example of a pretty pervasive problem at the perfect time.

I’ve personally attended each of the three Webhosting Day events, now. And things have changed mightily since the original in 2006. What hasn’t changed, of course, is the event’s oddball setting.

I’m trying, I assure you, to keep from writing too much this year about how “weird” my surroundings are. It’s a given at this point that Webhosting Day is held at an amusement park. That it is an always odd, occasionally bizarre setting for a Web hosting conference should just be part of the scenery.

In defense of my own over-attentiveness, I really would challenge anyone to put themselves in these circumstances - sit down to cover the event and expect the incongruous images (a Windows Server 2008 banner hanging next to a stack of pirate treasure chests, for example), and the general weirdness, to just drop from their mind.

But I digress.

Right now I’m sitting six feet away from a human-sized birdcage with a disco-ball bottom, all of which is hidden behind a sparkling gold curtain with a fringe. Things like this are just all over this place.

Okay, now I’ll stop. Really.

What’s most notable about this Webhosting Day is the event’s ongoing progression in the direction of credibility. That’s not to say that it hasn’t arrived at credibility, but that it’s a growing concern. For an event that really seems to be learning as it grows, Webhosting Day is showing a lot of progress.

Some of that is apparent just in the layout of the thing. Last year’s (perfectly sufficient) registration area is now a (perfectly sufficient) coat check. This year, registration took place at the amusement park’s own entrance. That is, things are happening on a bigger scale here now.

According to the opening address, the event is dealing with close to 1,000 attendees, several hundred more than organizers were expecting even a week or two ago. That was apparent at registration, and beyond. There was a bit of a bottleneck signing in, as organizers handled the extra people, and the sessions saw the same roughly 30-minute delay as registration.

The attendance has led to Internet connection problems, too. Webhosting Day has had connection problems in the past. At last year’s event, a connection was hard to come by - particularly because the venue doesn’t have much an Internet connection to speak of. This year, Intergenia brought in a satellite link (it did last year, but that link caused some serious problems), and is working to provide a working, if over-taxed link.

(Keeping that link alive means blocking out certain bandwidth-intensive sites, such as YouTube and, unfortunately, Flickr, which has put a hold on me posting event pictures online. I will have use of an unfettered connection at some point, so keep checking back.)

The other big change is in the exhibit hall. Like the registration area, it has moved on to bigger and better things, located now in the “Wuze Town” area. While the exhibit hall at last year’s event seemed more like an afterthought, this year’s area is the real thing, dominated by elaborate displays from primary sponsors Microsoft and Parallels.

Finally, the sessions have been divided up differently. This year there are no “main” sessions overlapping with the workshops, forcing attendees to choose between workshops and main sessions. This year the main schedule takes place in the morning, with workshops in the afternoon. Attendees still have to choose between overlapping workshops (four are scheduled for any given time slot), but it’s certainly more possible to feel like you’ve attended the whole event.

Whether you are a website developer, small business with an ecommerce website, or are running a web hosting company - there always exists the possibility that your good website will go bad. And sometimes they go very bad.

The specific issue that I am addressing is the unfortunate reality that there are malicious and exploitive hackers out in the world who amuse themselves by taking control of your precious website.

Case in point: I run a small forum website - mostly I run it to understand the underlying content management system - vBulletin. So one day I type in the URL of the site, expecting to see how many visitors are on the site and which forums have newly updated posts. Instead, to my disbelief, I see various crazy colored text that looks to me like maybe Arabic lettering. After trying the URL several more times to convince myself that I am, in fact, at the correct web address I come to the inevitable conclusion: my site has been hacked.

HACKED!!! Me - I mean, MY WEBSITE. CRAP! Now what?!?!

After I calmed down, I presented a trouble ticket to my webhost. They took a look at the log entries and determined when the changes had been made. Then they simply rolled back to a previous version of the site from their backups. The entire fix took about 5 minutes after they processed the trouble ticket.

Here are the things that I recommend you think about as a web hosting customer with regard to malicious activity:

1. Make sure you have local backups. Locally backup your data to a disk and keep it up to date. When you make any significant changes to your website, update the backup file.

2. Make sure your web host has backups. Check the plan that you are on and determine how often your site gets backed up. It's not unusual for a quality business hosting plan to offer daily backups.

3. Keep up to date with software versions and patches. This was my problem with vBulletin. A totally simple flaw was identified and circulated around the Internet during that time. vBulletin offered a simple patch for the problem, or I could have easily updated my version to a more robust state. Don't make this mistake, take a few minutes to read, understand and act on any security information sent out by your software companies.

4. Use robust usernames and passwords. Examine your logins and make certain that they contain non-standard characters - like these: $, @, ! and that you have enough characters to make them hard to break. Guess what the most popular password is? PASSWORD. Duh. Don't do that.

5. Select a web hosting company that has proven security in place. This means both physcial security and virtual security. Look for a good description of the security procedures on the hosting company website. A truly aware web hosting company can often prevent malicious activity before it happens - saving you valuable time and money.

There are many more safeguards that one can undertake. The more, the better. However, these steps are a great start to get your awareness up. The best defense against an easy and obvious exploit is simply to arm yourself with awareness and knowledge. Keep your website safe. We don't want it turning bad.

This content provided by HostMySite.com Website Hosting.

Normally I’d post something about this a little further in advance, but things have been rather busy around the WHIR office the last couple of weeks, as we’ve been working hard to assemble the March 2008 issue of the WHIR magazine (it should start arriving in mailboxes this week - which will warrant a blog post of its own in the next day or two).

Advance warning aside, however, I’m happy to report that the WHIR team is headed for Germany again (technically, I’m writing this as we head for Germany. When this post makes its way to the website, we’ll be there). We’ll be making our third consecutive appearance at (the third annual) Webhosting Day, the hosting trade show event held by Web hosting provider Intergenia.

I and WHIRtv host and producer Anastasia Tubanos will be on hand at the event, and that means two things, fundamentally. First, we’ll be doing everything we can to provide thorough and up-to-the-minute coverage of the goings on at the event. And second, if you happen to be at Webhosting Day, please have a look around for us and say hello.

A few notes about the event (which begins Wednesday, March 12):

As with the past two years, Webhosting Day 2008 will be held at the always-bizarre Phantasialand, an amusement park near Cologne, oddly designed to resemble medieval China.

According to Intergenia CEO and event organizer Thomas Strohe, they’re expecting 800 attendees at this year’s conference, which is a definite increase over last year’s approximately 500.

It appears as though the major sponsors of the event will be Microsoft and Parallels, both of which are currently working with significant new releases. So if the sponsorships translate into session content, which I suspect quite strongly they will, at the very least it promises to be relevant and current content.

Also interesting: we happened to be on the same New-Jersey-to-Cologne flight as Internet lawyer and frequent WHIR contributor David Snead. From this encounter, I determined that he, too, will be attending Webhosting Day. Reliable and insightful WHIR blogger that he is, I wouldn’t be surprised if he offered some thoughts from the event as well.

One last thing - you can head over to our Flickr page to check out a set of photographs from last year’s event. And we’ll be adding pictures from this year’s event as it unfolds. Of course, I’ll post something about them just as soon as they’re up.