My idea was a really basic system, at a basic price. The system would initially only allow PHP and mysql sites.

Over the past year I have been buying massive amounts of hardware and with my most recent purchase (a massive SAN) I think that we finally have enough hardware to start the system development work.

The kit I have set asside for the initial launch is:

1. Two Cisco Netscaler load balancers in HA mode
2. Three beefy mysql servers for a cluster
3. Three beefy web app servers (I can add to this as necessary)
4. My new SAN
5. My new Foundry switch

The plan is to put all this equipment into one of our datacenter cabinets and then back it up onto the local SAN every hour.

I was thinking of a fixed monthly fee of around £250 which would give:

1. Unlimited number of domain names and web sites
2. 1Tb of disk space
3. Basic apache and PHP config tweeks
4. As many mysql databases as you want (perhaps give command line access as well as PHPMyAdmin)
5. Bandwidth is charged at £0.15 per Gb in and £0.10 out.
6. Outbound email relay
7. Two full days development time to help move to the new system
8. Access to a fully secure memcached daemon
9. As many IP’s as you need
10. SSL certificates (at a nominal extra fee)

The system would not do the following:

1. Anything other than PHP and mysql (initially). I am looking at either perl or Windows hosting next.
2. Log files (you would need to use something like the Google Analytics service)
3. Domain registration

In return, we would guarantee uptime, throughput and system stability….basically…you upload your websites and we will guarantee that the site stays up even if the traffic peeks significantly. I am going to try to launch this in BETA before the end of July…anybody interested in trying it out?

Today we would like to announce a new partnership between Rozmic (the developers of emailcloud) and Identity Automation (a Texas based technology services company).

• You can find more information on Identity Automation here:
  http://www.identityautomation.com/
• You can read about the Identity Automation Email Scan service here:
  http://www.identityautomation.com/solutions/email-scan
• You can see the custom branded interface to emailcloud here:
  https://secure.identityautomationmailscan.com/

The service will be sold at £8.50 per user per month and includes:

• Exchange 2007 Mailbox
• 2GB Total Diskspace per user (optional upgrade to 4Gb)
• 1 x Public Folder per user
• Full Outlook functionality
• Full support for iPhone
• Windows Mobile support
• Unlimited Contacts
• Shared Contacts, Calendars and Tasks
• Outlook Web Access
• IMAP/POP3, Outlook Anywhere and ActiveSync
• 1 x copy of Outlook 2007 or Entourage 2008 per user
• Continuous Backups

The Rozmic Hosted Exchange service is a hosted enterprise messaging solution based on Microsoft

Exchange Server 2007. Hosted Exchange helps give your business the email security it demands, your employees the email access they want, and your IT staff the operational efficiency it needs. The service uses our knowledge of Microsoft products, best practices developed with Microsoft’s customers and partners, and our infrastructure to deliver a world-class, mission-critical service.

You can find out more about this service here:
http://www.emailcloud.com/hosted_exchange.html

Redundant Servers

I have just spent the weekend helping a friend to build servers and setting up a hosting facility. It was a weekend of cables, kernels and RAID driver patches!

A few months ago we sat down and started a planning session to evaluate the needs of his company and we decided that the current hosting setup was not good enough. The days of using a collection cheap dedicated servers at a US hosting facility were long gone because their customers demanded a more reliable service. After evaluating some of their needs we quickly decided that Cloud Computing is not an option. We had to build our own system on our own servers.

We had many variables to consider including:

1. dedicated resources
2. physical access to the servers
3. load balanced HTTP service across several servers
4. Cloudbursting facility for web and application servers

In the past if you came up with the next ‘killer app’ you would be faced with a serious decision…do you try to build your business on a shoe string and risk the chance of being a victim of the Slash Dot effect  or do you try to navigate the slippery road of equity investment funding. Entrepreneurs have travelled both paths, neither are fun and both are fraught with danger.

The business economics of the Slash Dot Effect are not new and certainly not confined to the internet. UK telephone company Talk Talk had serious problems last year when it announced it’s free broadband service…the company simply could not handle the number of queries. On the internet there have been many casualties but the general result is ridicule and perhaps business failure. The fate of a fully funded internet business is not guaranteed either. The internet is littered of stories describing how the entrepreneurial flair and energy was sucked straight out of the company by an evil equity investor.

The basic problem is that in order for your business to be successful you need to give your application an adequate provision of bandwidth, processor power and storage capacity…and properly defining adequate is the problem. If you try to save money you can end up with insufficient capacity. If you project to buy too much you might find it hard to raise equity funds.

The advent of IaaS has resolved this little issue. Now, instead of needing to estimate and purchase your capacity (bandwidth, processor and storage) in advance you can buy it as you use it, in a ‘pay as you go’ system. In our case we buy servers of several providers (AWS and Flexiscale) on a per server per hour basis. We fluctuate between having 20 and 150 servers (instances) running at any time. This business model allows us to compete with some of our VC backed rivals in our market as our capacity is not limited by our cash reserves!

Buying your capacity in this way not only gives you a cash-flow advantage it also gives you unlimited scalability. Online video website Animoto went from roughly 50 servers to needing more than 3,500 in three days. Imagine having to predict growth and get servers racked, stacked and online in time to meet the growth! While a hardware order like this would be a dream for DELL, I doubt they have that kind of stock readily available or indeed the logistics to ship and set it up in that time. The New York Times covered this in more detail.

Using IaaS you can scale in a very cheap way without serious capital investment. This now allows entrepreneurs to setup and start trading with very little funding…hopefully getting them into profit earlier and retaining more of the equity of their business. Indeed, this is now causing problems for VC’s as they traditionally justified their huge equity stakes (or excessive protection clauses in their subscription agreements) because of the high commercial risks. These risks can now be significantly lowered which can allow entrepreneurs drive a harder line.

Once the startup  is trading and actually making money the economics can change significantly. While having unlimited scalability in a cash flow friendly manner is advantages in the early days it can often be cheaper in the longer term to transition the infrastructure in-house (or to a co-location facility). While this calculation is dependent upon how you application uses hardware (is it CPU intensive Vs RAM intensive) it is generally true.  So, start-ups need to look at buying their own infrastructure after a period and start transitioning their applications. The ultimate goal is to move the bulk of the application to your own infrastructure and still use IaaS for any additional or burst capacity.

In my day job I am involved in transitioning some of our capacity from our IaaS suppliers to our own hardware. So, at the moment I am planning to setup several racks of servers in several data centres and installing commodity servers in clusters. Then using fancy traffic routing I plan to point our traffic at these banks for processing and then using IaaS to give us burstable capacity. We have effectively used IaaS to bootstrap our business into existence…something that would have been impossible in the past.

So where previously the startup had the ‘shoe string’ or ‘VC’ route they now have an additional option…the ‘bootstrap and transition’ route. The interesting point is that rather than being a disrupter for the traditional co-location market, I have found that IaaS is actually building demand for co-lo providers as it lowers the cost for start-ups and will eventually increase the numbers of them…thus building the co-lo market!

Tony told us the story behind Flexiscale and how he decided back in 2004 that what the world really needed was a proper utility computing infrastructure, so he and his team at xcalibre created FlexiScale. His story is very interesting as for many years he was developing a technology and business model that nobody understood!  All that changes with the introduction of the Amazon AWS services, something that opened the worlds eyes to cloud computing and utility computing.

Flexiscale is the only provider of utility computing in Europe and one of only a small few in the world. I know that many people who attended the presentation will try out the service, it wont be a long time before Flexiscale becomes a large cale player in the market. Good luck Tony.

Some large organisations are uncomfortable with critical data residing on a cloud outside of their four walls. This is true for many reasons, notably availability and security. So, despite the clear economics of cloud computing, the following objections will be hard to completely overcome:

• SLA & availability: large organisations will never trust anyone other than their own staff to maintain critical apps.
• Compliance: i.e. the need for complete auditability of data
• Privacy & legal requirements: most of the commercial cloud computing service providers use hardware which resides in the US. These servers to the Patriot Act – something which may not appeal to firms based outside the US.
• Liability: Who bares the financial burden due to a delay or loss of data?

Of course, these opjections mean that larger organisations will be relucatant to use a commercial cloud comuting provider (such as AWS) but there is another option — creating a “cloud-style” utility computing environment within the enterprise.

Blacknight Internet

“If you are looking for a hosting provider or a Co-Location partner, let me save you some valuable research time. Blacknight is the gold standard by which all others should be judged.”

If you are looking for a hosting provider or a Co-Location partner, let me save you some valuable research time. Blacknight is the gold standard by which all others should be judged. At every turn Michele and Paul have provided support and expertise that exceeded my expectations and enabled my company to realistically compete in our market space. Small businesses like ours have absolutely no margin for error when selecting a Co-Location provider and I have never second guessed my decision to partner with Blacknight. I had a tight budget and an even tighter schedule, yet Michele and Paul worked with me relentlessly to bring my vision to fruition. Simply stated, go with Blacknight – you’ll be glad you did or wish you had!

Rated 5/5 on Feb 21 2008

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Review Tags: blacknight, co-location, hosting, isp