Ever looking for insightful views on the topics of internet technology and business, HostReview conducted an exclusive head-to-head interview with executives from two major web hosting companies. Our topic was web hosting trends 2009: what does the year hold for the web hosting industry and its clients? We talk to John Lee, Senior Vice President of Small Business Hosting, with Hostway, and Urvish Vashi, General Manager, Dedicated Hosting, with The Planet. Both companies have strong, and well deserved, presence in our Annual Web Hosting Awards listings.

John Lee is a co-founder of Hostway, together with CEO Lucas Roh and two other University of Chicago alumni. His role at Hostway is to ensure that the company communicates its products and services to customers, in order to enhance their web hosting experience.

 

Urvish Vashi serves as The Planet’s general manager for dedicated server hosting. In this role, he oversees the development of the product and marketing strategies for the company’s self-managed dedicated servers. He previously served as director of product management with The Planet.

In your opinion, what were the defining characteristics of 2008 in terms of business and technology trends? What was different from previous years?

John Lee: Mobile web, mobile email, and mobile everything. iPhone definitely accelerated the trend towards more computing power being delivered through the mobile network and mobile devices.
SaaS is picking up steam. This time around (first round was ASP), we have the right model.
Cloud computing is picking up steam. Amazon is the most innovative here.
Google has come to dominate the search space in all of North America and Europe. Yet China marches to its own drumbeat.
Everything became expensive; now it’s not.
The US dollar was weak; now it’s not.
Mega datacenter projects [are] under way.

Urvish Vashi: Economic realities have created an almost “bi-polar” response over the last year, and 2008 can be divided into two distinct halves. During the first six months, companies focused on building smart, actionable plans to grow their businesses online. In the second half, we’ve seen companies look for hosting as a way to operate more cost effectively, without all of the capital and operational risk that comes with IT expansion plans.

While we heard a lot of technology around virtualization, cloud and utility infrastructure, we saw that businesses increasingly turned to trusted IT partners who could help them navigate their hosting options with these infrastructure add-ons. Customers aren’t always sure which options address the specific problem or use case they are looking to solve, whether it be long-term data archiving, on-demand scaling, data center optimization or myriad others.

As companies grow and make their bets on where to invest, we see an increasing number of SMBs wanting not just to pick and chose the infrastructure from simple to complex, but also increasingly wanting to take an a’ la carte view of services.

Which technologies will be "hot" in 2009?

John Lee: Mobile computing, Cloud computing and Virtualization, Unified Communication.

Urvish Vashi: It’s hard to talk about “hot” without mentioning cloud and virtualization. Both will continue as big topics in the New Year. These enabling technologies can provide real benefits to SMBs looking to outsource IT. The opportunity for hosters is to take these emerging technologies and couple them with infrastructure management services to address specific customer needs. Hosters stand to gain significant benefits from these technologies because they provide a path to better efficiency in labor, server and storage resources, and data center utilization. While this is great news for hosters, the primary benefit for customers will come from improved performance and better prices.

How will growth in demand for virtualization and cloud computing solutions compare to traditional hosting offerings like dedicated servers and shared hosting? Do cloud platforms by Microsoft, Amazon and Google threaten traditional hosting providers?

John Lee: [There will be] no end-user impact on the shared hosting. However, from hosting company perspective, we can lower our cost of operation by adopting the cloud computing technology to better utilize resources. As you know, there are a lot of idle servers in any big server farm.
Positive impact on dedicated servers: It may come to pass that cloud computing may replace dedicated server model, but that is still some years off. For now, cloud computing will help to drive more dedicated server sales as the expertise around cloud computing will develop faster in hosting companies than in internal IT departments. While large clouds will continue to gather momentum, mini- private clouds hosted and managed by hosting companies will gain momentum as well. And the cloud computing model is very conducive to outsourcing. As more businesses consider cloud computing, they will be more open to outsourcing model. That will help with the dedicate server sales. Remember, our biggest competition is still the in-house hosting centers.

Urvish Vashi: The cloud platforms offered by Microsoft, Amazon and Google play an important role in driving broad market adoption. These players don’t, however, have a heritage of service and support, which is what most customers require to make the best use out of these technologies. That’s where we come in. The “special sauce” as you might say, is technology in conjunction with service and support. The threat of these solutions will be felt first by the thousands of hosting resellers. We’ve already seen many of our resellers begin to develop platforms that provide similar functionality based on some of the same platforms. However, those that thrive will recognize that the technical platform alone is not sufficient to address the needs of most customers.