24
Feb

18

Is cloud hosting green?

By Rudhir Sharan | Filed in cloud hosting | 18 comments

A few weeks back, I was fortunate enough to speak in front of a group of very smart technology and non technology entrepreneurs.

One of my slides mentioned that cloud hosting is green. Someone pointed out from within the group that there is no study to prove that cloud hosting is green. A very excited conversation followed which completely digressed from the issue raised in the first place.

So, here are my two cents on the topic.

Is cloud hosting green?

Let us take the case of a data center, using traditional hosting technology, which houses the online applications of, say 5000 customers at an average of 2 servers per customer. So the total servers running in the data center is 10,000.

Let us take the carbon emissions from 1 server be equal to x

Then the carbon emissions from 10,000 servers equals 10,000 x

Therefore the per customer carbon foot print for the data center is 10,000 x / 5000 or equal to 2 x

Now, let us switch to cloud hosting.

Since cloud hosting works on virtualization and the on-demand computing model, the server utilization in a cloud hosting enabled data center will be better than in the former’s case. Let us consider that the inventory optimization factor for these 5000 customers is 5:3.5. This means that the same 5000 customers will only need a total of 7000 servers in a cloud computing / cloud hosting environment rather than 10,000.

So, the total carbon footprint will be 7000 x

As a consequence, the per customer carbon foot print becomes 7000 x / 5000 or equal to 1.4 x

This means a reduction in carbon foot print of 35%!

The numbers could be different for different users/customers/applications – more for some and less for some. But the result would be the same: A reduction in carbon foot print happens when you use cloud hosting.

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13
Dec

883

What is cloud computing? Hype, precise, semantics or old wine in a new bottle

By Rudhir Sharan | Filed in cloud hosting | 883 comments

What is cloud computing?

This has probably become one of the most intriguing and controversial questions of late.  Most businesses and IT people, across geographies and industries, are asking this question and debating it quite vigorously.

It is broadly understood to be an amorphous computing body (a cloud) which delivers computing resources on demand and without the need for the user to understand what is and how to operate the ‘pistons and shafts’ of the computing infrastructure/system or software behind it. It is instantly provisioned & readily scalable and has a Pay As You Go model.

The definition and paradigm has come to fore within the last three odd years. Some would argue that it became prominent after Google’s August 2006 announcement of the cloud computing paradigm. While for some Google is the God of internet and this should have percolated down to all of as “Then there shall be cloud!”, Oracle has been less than amused, at least initially. Oracle’s Chief Executive Larry Ellison referred to cloud computing as “gibberish”.  A few weeks later Oracle announced that its software would be  “cloud-computing ready”. Ouch!

A few days back I tweeted (or twittered) mentioning the phrase “cloud hosting”. It drew mixed and strong responses from a variety of users.  A few argued  that it is the same as VPS or Virtual Private Server hosting.  Students and techies – whenever they hear the word, ‘cloud’  – take pleasure in taking it apart.

So, what is cloud computing? It is increasingly appearing to be like the elephant to the blind men – we all seem to be associating different meanings to it, treating it as a “game changer” or dismissing it, outright.

What is Cloud computing – like blinded men with an elephant.
What is Cloud computing - like blinded men with an elephantWhat is Cloud computing - like blinded men with an elephant

Some argue that since all systems which drive applications for users on the internet are transparent to the users, the cloud or the internet has always been there (at least for a decade and a half). That being the case, what is new with the “cloud paradigm”, they ask. It is a valid argument with certain limitations in specific domains. Cloud hosting, for example , has emerged as a different service with significant improvements in terms of user interface, control and commercial factors than its elder dedicated/traditional/VPS hosting cousin.

The technology forecasting Gods have endorsed it and have predicted multi-billion cloud computing markets. IDC, Gartner and Merrill Lynch have forecasted $42 billion in 2012, $56.3 billion in 2009 and $160 billion in 2011, respectively, for cloud computing. Is it still just semantics? Old wine in new bottles to sell virtualization and jack up stock prices? Depends on point of view.

If we take the broad definition as above, cloud computing can possibly be categorized into Application Cloud, Platform Cloud and Infrastructure Cloud. Salesforce.com is (re)branding itself as a cloud service – an Application Cloud – while scores of web hosting companies are spending millions of dollars in building their Infrastructure Cloud service or Cloud Hosting. Ahaa! Let us dwell on this for a while.

So, what is cloud hosting and how is it different from traditional hosting, specifically VPS hosting or dedicated hosting?

Broadly, it is cloud hosting if it can be/has:

1.Instantly provisioned – not wait for dedicated server hardware to be provisioned and new software to be installed.

2. Instantly scalable or re-sizable – if you can go from 1 GB of RAM with 20 GB disk space to 8 GB of RAM and 200 GB disk space in 5 minutes and without the need to migrate data.

3. Your cloud server can be re-built from a custom or canned image within minutes.

4. Payment flexibility – Cloud hosting does away with the ‘pay for at least a month’ restriction. It is Pay As You Go. If you use a cloud server for 3 days, you pay only for 3 days.

It is easy to take either side. One can say we have a high availability hosting service with instant provisioning, quick re-imaging, image storage & build from images facility, Pay As You Go pricing, instant scalability or one can say we have Cloud Hosting. Whichever way, one cannot deny that this is changing the spectrum – hosting will never be the same again as users taste the flexibility of the cloud.

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22
Oct

0

Getting personal with GeoCities

By Rudhir Sharan | Filed in Web Hosting History | No comments yet.

It was the Year 1999. Half the population of the world was high on the net. The other half was aspiring to. While the global internet user population had surpassed tens of millions, India lagged behind – but only in numbers.

When I look back and see most of my first generation entrepreneur peers at that time – we were all very excited, very young and very brave (or fool hardy). ‘Building castles in the ether’, as a confused would-be-investor had told a friend. Chasing eye-balls was more en vogue than chasing skirts (sorry girls) and the ultimate macho thing was to refuse bids to buy. A college senior, confessed, years later, how many hundreds of millions he refused as a buy out bid for his company(ouch!).

Dot com was the pastry business as a big 4 M&A consultant told me in a clouded bar in suburban Gurgaon in 1999. Amidst this din and pervasion of our minds by infinite possibilities, I ran a free hosting service called advantage2you.com. With more than 20,000 SMBs, all over the world, using the service, we were among the top twenty free hosting providers in the world – for whatever it was worth. Among the stalwarts in this Top20 list was a giant called GeoCities – a company that Yahoo! acquired for $2.9 billion.

Now, years later, when the news of GeoCities shutting down becomes public, for some strange reason, I feel very odd. It is obviously the end of an era.

PC World describes GeoCities as “GeoCities was born as “Beverly Hills Internet” in the winter of 1995. Its parents, David Bohnett and John Rezner, wanted to create a virtual community that mimicked the real world, with pages hosted in “cyber cities” and other similarly nauseating concepts.”

Is free hosting dead, now? Possibly with low cost hosting services, delivered out of hybrid locations and with low cost inputs, free hosting in 2009 makes little sense…or has for years. Well, Yahoo! has formally accepted that.

As one reflects back, it is inevitable that one were to ask -  how many of the acquisitions worth millions and billions were capitalized upon by the acquirers? What was Yahoo!’s return on investment on the $2.9 billion? It also makes you realize how expensive it is to acquire customers (or eye balls, as a throw back to the 90s), even if they are the non-paying variety. Is the same true today, too?

Well, before I get any more heavy and controversial, let me exit by saying, one last time – ‘Bye Bye GeoCities’. This was personal :|

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12
Oct

3

Web Hosting Control Panels

By Rudhir Sharan | Filed in Web Hosting Control Panels | 3 comments

The Graphical User Interface standards for managing servers and web hosting accounts, including email, ftp / passwords, DNS/MX records and other server administrative jobs have come a long way since the nineties.

Some of today’s web hosting control panels started with pretty rudimentary functions like adding a domain name/email, changing passwords, etc. Plesk, for example, in its 2.x avatar was very very elementary. Plesk 9.x is in another league, today, more than 7 years later.

It is interesting to look at the web hosting control panel options, today. There are dozens of them, albeit a few alone are prominent and popular.

Some of the popular ones, today, are Plesk, cPanel, Helm, Ensim, H-sphere… Some like the DSM and Webmin used to be popular a few years back. But there are others too. Freeware/opensource options like RaveCore and DTC, lesser known hosting control panels like DirectAdmin, Interworx, HMSPanel, DotNetPanel and scores of others… VishwaKarma, VirtualMin, HostingAccelerator, GNUPanel, LayeredPanel, Zomos, HostFlow… the list is  long.

While seasoned hosting users are mostly familiar with the top control panels, new users are sometimes left wondering which ones to choose. Most of the hosting control panels – even the free or open source ones – today, have most of the features that a new or old hosting user will need, anyway. I mean, do you really think of setting up your cron jobs through the control panel? If you have a cron job to set up, you probably do not need a control panel to do it for you. If you don’t, it does not matter to you if your hosting control panel  supports it :| . So, what is the best way to choose a control panel?

If you are a new web server owner / administrator then you may want to look at factors such as availability of support, user base and feature rich/feature needs. If you are a single web site manager, I wonder if it matters. You could be as happy with a Helm as with an H-sphere or with a Plesk…for die hard cPanel users, I am including that too :) .

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29
Jun

266

Birth and growth of Web Hosting

By Rudhir Sharan | Filed in Web Hosting History | 266 comments

When you look at Web Hosting as a service & business paradigm in 2009, have you ever wondered how it all started and the journey it took to arrive here? Here is a brief profile of its growth from the seventies into the end of the first decade of the 21st Century.

Birth of Web Hosting: Parents first! – Internet & WWW!

Web Hosting’s parent, the internet, took its birth and form in the early 60s. Between the birth of the Galactic Network concept in 1962 and the first form of the internet as ARPANET in 1966, the internet took its early shape. By 1969, the internet spanned across four ‘hops’ - UCLA, The Stanford Research Institute, The University of California Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah!

Birth of Web Hosting: Conception and birth: Email and domain names

I think it will be fair to assume that when in 1971, the first email program was written, web hosting was born - since email is a unique hosting service in 2009, today. However one could also argue that 1984, when the Domain Name System was created, should be referred to as the ‘birth year’ of web hosting. It was only by 15th March 1985, however, that the first domain name was registered: symbolics.com. Today, we have over 110 million active registered domains. The total number of domain names registered far exceeds that, when you add more than 420 million expired and deleted domain names. So, over the last 24 years, we have seen more than half a billion domain names registered, a bulk of which have been registered over the last 15 years.

Teenage of Web Hosting: Puberty & early promise: Dot com era hosting environment

It was only by 1991, however, when commercial restrictions were lifted, that web hosting as an industry came to form, close to how it is known today. Around the same time, the advent of the www and  the HTML brought hosting into the commercial spectrum.

From the early nineties and all the way to the “dot com” boom and bust through 2001, an industry around web hosting matured and became multi-billion dollar strong. It started with (what now appears as) miniscule disk space options of 10 MB / 20 MB and “tiny” servers with 64 MB / 128 MB RAM catering to a testing and tentative business and online community. This soon matured into a complex array of services & mission critical applications resting upon large servers and demanding equally large disk space/storage requirements.

Free wheeling days of web hosting: Free love: Internet and its free paradigm

The internet is characterized by free, readily available and non physical delivery services. It is obvious, therefore, that the free component would be a factor worth mentioning in the hosting context as well. The nineties saw hundreds of free hosting providers line the internet. Notable among them were the likes of Tripod & Geocities, which got aquired by Lycos and Yahoo, respectively.  These free models could not find business sustainability, however. Most of these free hosting companies served as eye ball attractors and were acquired by businesses which needed eyeballs – search engines and large multi-function online portals. Some graduated to offering paid hosting and / or other paid online services.

Web hosting matures and grows: : Post puberty & teenage into adulthood: method to growth into focus and strength - multi-billion dollar industry with clear business paradigms

The period between the early nineties till 2005 was marked by growth in three dimensions in the industry:

 1. Market size

2. User experience and control via software / panels

3. Service expectation standards.

1. Market size

During the second half and through to the end of the last decade of the 20th century, the industry grew to a size of $5.7 Billion by 2001. Today, in 2009, the hosting market is many times bigger.

 2. User experience and control via software / panels

In the early and mid nineties web hosting rapidly grew into one of the biggest businesses on the web. Hosting was but a system administrator’s job, still. It required logging on to the server, changing apache(or IIS) entries, modifying zone files, installing applications and components and creating users and then mapping these together to make a web site or an application working. The second half of the decade, however, began to saw the advent of the paradigm called  hosting control panel in a more developed form.

The graphic user interface hosting control panel made a significant change to the hosting industry and was one of the major factors that led to the commoditization of hosting as a service. The panel took the gizmo work out of the shadows and enabled a normal or a non-technical user to use hosting as a business service rather than as a technical maze.

This period  was marked by continuous enhancements in hosting control and user interface tools. From the mid nineties, when hosting control interfaces were limited in use, the next five years saw hectic activity in the increase in sophistication of user interface. Hosting enabling software or control panels became one of the key differentiators. One saw the advent and rise of control panel softwares like DSM, Ensim, Plesk/Parallels, Helm, H-sphere and cPanel, during this period.

Around the mid and late nineties, a number of hosting companies innovated with control panels. Webmin, DSM, cPanel and others appeared. Gradually the industry segregated and consolidated itself. Hosting control panels became indepdendent businesses in themselves, necessiating focused road maps and providing stand alone business. By the turn of the century the leaders were born. Plesk came with what was a rudimentary version of a control panel – the Plesk 2.x in 2002 was a very basic control panel – which developed into an industry leader in less than five or six years. It also went through a series of M&As – Parallels, the leader was born and collected in one bouquet, conrol panels like Plesk, H-sphere & Helm. 

While the GUI control panel was taking root into the growth of the industry, another paradigm invented itself, only to play a promising but secondary role. By 1998-1999, automation in another field fired the imagination of the industry – automation of content development. While desktop based web site or content makers existed already, the introduction of the online web site maker created a buzz and accelerated the growth of the industry as well. A number of free and paid hosting services began to offer online web site making tools. Today, leaders such as Sitebuilder garner a significant user share in this segment.

3. Service expectation standards.

The inevitable, as in every growing and maturing sector, of service and user experience taking the predominance in user choice, manifested more deeply around the time the “dot com” buzz died down. The focus turned from the colocation fixation to that around managed services and hosting. The fall of colocation giants like Exodus and the rise of managed services centric companies like Rackspace, were probable evidence of that trend.

Hosting comes of age: Productive adult re-inventing itself: Cloud computing

Through the first five years of the new century, the web hosting industry contined to grow steadily, though interspersed by troughs as a result of over zealous capacity builds of the “dot com” era. Though the term had been around for a while, Web 2.0 as a new era in the internet economy gathered credence around 2005. It was accompanied with user generated content, interactive & social media based online businesses and a new wave of capital infusion into the industry. The hosting industry also re-invented itself around this time by starting to adopt the dynamically scalable model of cloud hosting. It is a wonderful concept that works quite like an elecricity grid supplies electricty to homes. Users and businesses can increase / decrease capacity on demand and pay only for what they use. For Web 2.0 start-ups this is a heaven sent model. Demand for computing or bandwidth is very unpredictable for a start up like a social networking site. When a cloud hosting provider offers a Pay-As-You-Go model for their hosting needs, it sounds wonderful. Even though providers like Amazon/EC2, GoGrid and Mosso  – and many more aspirants – are investing millions of dollars into developing cloud hosting models, the service offering, technology, user interface and business models for cloud hosting are undeveloped at this stage. Which indicates towards upcoming hectic activity and a competitive cloud hosting era in the next two years or so. In this still-to-mature segment, growth areas around OS and application deployment flexibility, user/control panel interface and scalability / price issues will drive the future.

Today & the future: years to come: The cloud will change hosting?

The journey of web hosting continues. It has traversed a path from the experimentation & promise of the nineties to the maturity of the 2000s and the re-invention of the last three years. From a content based service of web 1.0 to the highly interactive & complex application hosting of the 2000s. As Web hosting today seeks to be an on-demand service, we can look forward to much more excitement and flux in the next 2-3 years, which will change web hosting as we see it, today.

 

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