DiscountASP.NET Hosting

Shared Hosting Is Dead! Really? Again?

Hosting Industry, Internet, Marketing

I was in the audience of the Tuesday, August 11th, Keynote Cloud Panel session entitled “Shaping the Cloud Opportunity: Vision and Growth for the Future” at HostingCon 2009 in Washington DC, when Emil Sayegh, GM Rackspace Cloud Division declared that shared hosting was dead and is well on its way to being decimated in the next few years. No one on the panel (representatives from Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Tier1 Research) outspokenly supported this prediction but no one refuted it either. All I was thinking was, “Shared Hosting is Dead Again?”

I don’t believe that shared hosting is dead or will be decimated. In my 12 years of hosting industry experience I’ve heard that shared hosting was to die many times before, and yet, shared hosting is still a thriving business today. I guess shared hosting is a cat with nine lives. Let’s look at some of the past death-threats.

Free Hosting Will Kill Shared Hosting
In the early days of hosting, a new ad-driven free model for hosting arose. Many were claiming that free hosts like GeoCities were going to kill subscription-based shared hosting. Well, fast forward to 2009 and Yahoo just pulled the plug on GeoCities. R.I.P. GeoCities – shared hosting is still alive.

ISDN/DSL Will Kill Shared Hosting
Back in the day when most users were using modems and when ISDN/DSL was starting to grow in adoption, there were claims that fast internet connectivity would kill subscription-based web site hosting. It was argued that if a user could get fast connectivity to the internet, why wouldn’t they run their own web server at home or their business office? Well, in the early wild wild west days of hosting, that’s exactly what the shared hosting entrepreneurs did. They ran their business and web servers out of their garage/apartment. Fast internet connectivity didn’t kill shared hosting – it fueled the business.

Domain Registrars Will Kill Shared Hosting
After ICANN opened the domain business up for competition, many new domain registrars came on the scene and started to diversify into offering hosting as a value-add. Because of the domain registrars huge market share in domains, there were many predicting that they would be the death of shared hosting. Sure, domain registrars may have many shared hosting customers, but that did not kill the shared hosting business. In fact, many hosts partnered with domain registrars, some also became domain registrars themselves, and still other shared hosts provided private label hosting for the very domain registrars that were going to do them in.

Functional Hosting Will Kill Shared Hosting
With the rise of Web 2.0 social media, we’ve seen the rise of many new “functional” online services like Hotmail,  MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, and YouTube that allow users to maintain email, personal portals, blogs, share pictures and videos – all for free. I heard proclamations that shared hosts were going to die because of these functional hosts. The way I see it, functional hosts pushed many new users who didn’t use shared hosting before into the world of having a web presence. No longer was the web the sole domain of web designers and developers who knew how to program or use WYSIWYG authoring applications. Now a complete newbie without any experience could start a blog and publish their own content live onto the web. Functional hosting fueled new entrants to get a web presence, which in turn fueled growth of the shared hosting business. The more sophisticated and experienced the user became with their free functional host, the more they wanted increased control and custom templates which is supported by more mature and easy-to-use CMS applications on shared hosting platforms.

Cheap Dedicated Hosting Will Kill Shared Hosting
Dedicated hosting used to be really expensive. But then the budget dedicated hosts came onto the scene with cheap dedicated boxes. With competition, prices dropped even further. Again, I heard calls for the death of shared hosting.  Why would anyone want to share when they can get a cheap box for themselves? What cheap dedicated hosting actually did was lower the barrier for shared hosting. You actually saw a rise in the number of shared hosts as the high price of hardware was not a barrier to entry anymore. In fact, coupled with the availability of canned hosting automation and control panel software, the number of shared hosting companies exploded.

SaaS Will Kill Shared Hosting
A few years ago, I sat in the audience at the Tier1 Research’s Hosting Transformation Summit where Dan Golding, Tier 1 Vice President and Research Director, declared the death of shared hosting by the movement toward software-as-a-service, managed hosting, virtualization and other pressures on the shared hosting business. Fast forward three years and shared hosting is still here. Even today, Tier1 projections still show growth in the shared hosting sector.  I see the SaaS growth as tapping into yet another new market just like functional hosting, which will probably help fuel the shared and other hosting industry segments.  Some shared hosts have become SaaS providers themselves or added SaaS options to their hosting offers.

Now: The Cloud is Going to Kill Shared Hosting
The new shared hosting killer is the Cloud. To me, this type of talk is just more hype. Yes, the Cloud is important and will be useful to many, but not everyone. Even Tier1 Research’s Phil Shih, Research Analyst for Mass-Market Hosting, during his presentation on “Following Web Hosting Trends” at HostingCon 2009 stated that their research shows that the Cloud’s potential revenue projection is actually a lot less than what is being stated by the rest of the Cloud industry at large.  You also have roll-up companies like Endurance International, still actively targeting and acquiring shared hosting companies. Clearly these investors do not believe that their business model is doomed.

In fact, as I stated before, I think the Cloud, with its promise of elasticity, resources on-demand and pay-as-you-go revenue model, will impact the dedicated hosting business. With a dedicated server, you have to be able to handle your web site’s peak activities, which means that most of the time you are paying for server resources that are not being used. With the Cloud, you would pay for what you use and nothing more. So in this sense, it would seem like the Cloud would have a disproportionate impact on the dedicated hosting business. So it does make perfect sense for RackSpace, a renowned dedicated hosting provider, to move into the Cloud computing space. To join the Cloud movement rather than try to fight it. And lately, RackSpace has been pushing the concept of “hybrid hosting” – customers using both dedicated and the Cloud.  RackSpace will need to demonstrate case studies and success stories of this hybrid model and hope that this is the way the Cloud is adopted.

So if none of these “shared hosting killers” have been the death knell of shared hosting, what effect do they have?

A Healthy Ecosystem of Hosts
With the rise of new business models and new hosting technology innovations the only thing that changes is the number of choices for the end user – which is a good thing. Increased choice affects all hosts and they need to adapt and they need to innovate to stay relevant. I believe that there will be a healthy ecosystem of hosting providers of all types (shared, VPS, dedicated, cloud) and that will each be optimized for different workload needs of the end user. No one hosting provider or hosting segment will meet all the needs of every end user.

Example: Different Workload Needs of the End User
This is a great example: Rackspace recently announced dropping support for Full Trust in their .NET Windows Hosting Cloud environment (This is listed as a caveat in Wikipedia with a schedule of Full Trust deprecation). There are many components and applications that will not work in Medium Trust. Here at DiscountASP.NET we do support Full Trust in our shared hosting platform. On our Windows 2008 Hosting platform, we have delegated the trust level control so that customers can control the trust level with their web.config file. So depending on the workload of the end user, a different hosting environment will be suitable.

When all is said and done, I think I’ll have to agree with what Nietzsche said about shared hosting; “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”

Takeshi Eto
VP Marketing and Business Development

Microsoft AJAX CDN: What is it and why you should know about it

Technical

Microsoft just announced the AJAX CDN (Content Delivery Network). The CDN was made available to aid in the serving of jQuery and ASP.NET AJAX script libraries to the end user. Traditionally, these files are served from the same server that is serving the web site content.

The CDN uses edge-caching to deliver this content instead. Microsoft’s edge-cache servers are strategically located all over the world. This has a couple of advantages. First, it’s faster because the data is coming from the server that is closest to the end users locale. Second, if the end user has already visited a site using the CDN, this information is probably already cached locally.

Also remember, without the CDN this information is downloaded every time a user visits a unique AJAX enabled site. Even if the applications are the same, the fact that they are located on different systems causes the information to be re-downloaded. But with the CDN, since it distributes files from one common location, it is very likely that some other end user has already downloaded the file in question while visiting a different site, so that should make things faster.

There are a couple of potential drawbacks however. First, if there was to be an issue with the CDN, resolving the issue is completely out of your hands and there is no one to contact and ask for assistance. The second potential issue could be privacy. The CDN is delivered via the microsoft.com domain. Their use of cookies could be used to track visiting habits.

Personally, I think the drawbacks are minimal, however I felt they were still worth including.

For additional information about the AJAX CDN and how to implement it, head over to the Scott Guthrie’s blog.

Michael Ossou

Add Michael Ossou to your Google+ circles.
Visit DiscountASP.NET to learn more about our ASP.NET hosting services.

A Walk Down Search Engine Memory Lane

Internet

Since we are on the topic of search engines, how many of you out there remember, HotBot, WebCrawler, DogPile, AllTheWeb, MetaCrawler, or InfoSeek (go.com)?  Better yet, how many of you remember what those search engines look liked back in the 90’s?

I found this pretty cool page that lists some of the most popular search engines in the 90’s (yes, more than just one) , and what their sites looked like throughout the years.  Oh don’t worry you Google fans, if you visit the web page you can see what Google looked like in 1998, when it was in BETA!

So if you’re an Internet old-timer, this link will make you appreciate the search engine evolution that we all had to endure, and for you Internet youngsters out there, well … you will appreciate the fact that you didn’t have to be blinded by the HotBot design.

Mark Medina
Director of Marketing

The Cloud is Really on the Ground

Hosting Industry

With all the talk about the “Cloud” and the very use of the word “Cloud”, one may get the notion that somehow your application and data are just floating around out there in some nebulous fluffy super-connected ether-world. But really, all applications and data will be housed on real physical servers housed in real physical data centers somewhere. The Cloud is tied to a real physical infrastructure.

Here is a photo montage of some of the data centers that are part or will be part of the Microsoft, Google and Amazon Cloud. It is in places like this where the apps and data of the cloud will reside.

But things could change in the near future…

– Your Cloud may be a lot closer to sea level and on water. Google was granted a patent for Water Based data centers that are floating sea-based platforms using the ocean for power and cooling.
– Your Cloud may also go spelunking – that is, go underground.

Takeshi Eto
VP Marketing and Business Development

The Now Web vs. The Then Web

Internet

There is increasing discussion about how real-time Web 2.0 services like Twitter and Facebook could actually threaten search giant Google. How can that be? Well, imagine Google is like a library with lots of archived deep content (the Then Web) but the real-time web (the Now Web) is more like hanging out at a café and discussing what’s going on today.

So if you are looking for a review of the movie that just came out, or what people are saying about the latest single from some band, or even what people are saying about a webhosting provider today – which search would you use? Many people are switching over to Twitter for real-time information. And recently, Twitter redesigned their home page with a search box front and center.

Personally, I don’t rely on Twitter for my search but I do supplement my search engine searches with Twitter search – and more people are starting to do this. Even Google co-founder, Larry Page, has admitted that Google is losing out in the battle to provide real-time information. We are even starting to get our news from the real-time web.

But doesn’t Google update their index all the time? Yes, but there is a time lag as highlighted recently by Bing.

There is a battle brewing for participating in and being relevant in the emerging real-time web and conversational search. Of course, the giant search engines have the resoruces and can get a piece of the action by acquisition, investment, indexing real-time posts, or launching their own real-time web service.

We’ll see how this all plays out.

Takeshi Eto
VP Marketing and Business Development
DiscountASP.NET

Silverlight up your life

Technical

Great news! Microsoft has officially released Silverlight 3. I just deployed a couple of sample applications up to the servers and everything worked great. We know many of you have not had a chance to dabble with Silverlight yet, so we thought we would take this opportunity to give you a little nudge. This isn’t just about sexy animations, folks. Silverlight’s presentation layer capabilities along with WCF and data-binding abilities make for serious business.

This is a major release with a ton of new features. You can find out all about it from Mr. Scott Guthrie himself. If you’re the impatient type and just want a quick once over of the major stuff, here is the tale of the tape:

  • Support for Higher Quality Video & Audio. With support for native H.264/Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) Audio, live and on-demand IIS7 Smooth Streaming, full HD (720p+) playback, and an extensible decoder pipeline, Silverlight 3 brings rich, full-screen, stutter-free media experiences to the desktop. New and enhanced media features in Silverlight 3 include:
    • Live and on-demand true HD (720p+) Smooth Streaming. IIS Media Services (formerly IIS Media Pack), an integrated HTTP media delivery platform, features Smooth Streaming which dynamically detects and seamlessly switches, in real time, the video quality of a media file delivered to Silverlight based on local bandwidth and CPU conditions.
    • More format choice. In addition to native support for VC-1/WMA, Silverlight 3 now offers users native support for MPEG-4-based H.264/AAC Audio, enabling content distributors to deliver high-quality content to a wide variety of computers and devices.
    • True HD playback in full-screen. Leveraging graphics processor unit (GPU) hardware acceleration, Silverlight experiences can now be delivered in true full-screen HD (720p+).
    • Extensible media format support. With the new Raw AV pipeline, Silverlight can easily support a wide variety of third-party codecs. Audio and video can be decoded outside the runtime and rendered in Silverlight, extending format support beyond the native codecs.
    • Industry leading content protection. Silverlight DRM, Powered by PlayReady Content Protection enables protected in-browser experiences using AES encryption or Windows Media DRM.
  • Empowering Richer Experiences. Silverlight 3 contains new 3D graphics, animation features, hardware accelerated effects and text improvements that enable designers and developers to create next generation Web visuals. Additional features include:
    • Perspective 3D Graphics. Silverlight 3 allows developers and designers to apply content to a 3D plane. Users can rotate or scale live content in space without writing any additional code. Other effects include creating a queue in 3D and transitions.
    • Pixel Shader effects. These software based effects include blur and drop shadow. In addition, you can also write your own effect. Effects can be applied to any graphical content. An example would be to make a button appear depressed on rollover you could use a drop shadow effect on the pressed visual state.
    • Bitmap Caching. Silverlight 3 dramatically improves the rendering performance of applications by allowing users to cache vector content, text and controls into bitmaps. This feature is useful for background content and for content which needs to scale without making changes to its internal appearance.
    • New Bitmap API. With Silverlight 3, developers can now write pixels to a bitmap. Thus, they can build a photo editor to do red eye correction, perform edits on scanned documents or create specials effects for cached bitmaps from elements on the screen.
    • Themed application support. Developers can now theme applications by applying styles to their Silverlight 3 applications and changing them at runtime. Additionally, developers can cascade styles by basing them on each other.
    • Animation Effects. Silverlight 3 provides new effects such as spring and bounce. These make animation more natural. Developers can also now develop their own mathematical functions to describe an animation.
    • Enhanced control skinning. Silverlight 3 provides easier skinning capabilities by keeping a common set of controls external from an application. This allows the sharing of styles and control skins between different applications.
    • Improved text rendering & font support. Silverlight 3 allows far more efficient rendering and rapid animation of text. Applications also load faster by enabling the use of local fonts.
  • Improving Rich Internet Application Productivity. New features include:
    • 60controls with source code : Silverlight 3 is packed with over 60 high-quality, fully skinnable and customizable out-of-the-box controls such as charting and media, new layout containers such as dock and viewbox, and controls such as autocomplete, treeview and datagrid. The controls come with nine professional designed themes and the source code can be modified/recompiled or utilized as-is. Other additions include multiple selection in listbox controls, file save dialog making it easier to write files, and support for multiple page applications with navigation.
    • Deep Linking. Silverlight 3 includes support for deep linking, which enables bookmarking a page within a RIA.
    • Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Silverlight 3 enables users to solve the SEO-related challenges posed by RIAs. By utilizing business objects on the server, together with ASP.NET controls and site maps, users can automatically mirror database-driven RIA content into HTML that is easily indexed by the leading search engines.
    • Enhanced Data Support Silverlight 3 delivers:
      • Element to Element binding : UI designers use binding between two UI properties to create compelling UI experiences. Silverlight now enables property binding to CLR objects and other UI components via XAML, for instance binding a slider value to the volume control of a media player.
      • Data Forms. The Data Form control provides support for layout of fields, validation, updating and paging through data.
      • New features for data validation which automatically catch incorrect input and warn the user with built-in validation controls.
      • Support for business objects on both client and server with n-Tier data support. Easily load, sort, filter and page data with added support for working with data. Includes a new built-in CollectionView to perform a set of complex operations against server side data. A new set of .NET RIA services supports these features on the server.
    • Improved performance, through:
      • Application library caching, which reduces the size of applications by caching framework on the client in order to improve rendering performance.
      • Enhanced Deep Zoom, allows users to fluidly navigate through larger image collections by zooming.
      • Binary XML allows communication with the server to be compressed, greatly increasing the speed at which data can be exchanged.
      • Local Connection This feature allows communication between two Silverlight applications on the client-side without incurring a server roundtrip: for instance a chart in one control can communicate with a datagrid in another.
    • Advanced Accessibility Features. Silverlight 3 is the first browser plug-in to provide access to all system colors, allowing partially-sighted people to make changes such as high contrast color schemes for ease of readability by using familiar operating system controls.
      • Out of Browser Capabilities. The new out of browser experience in Silverlight 3 enables users to place their favorite Silverlight applications directly onto their PC and Mac, with links on the desktop and start menu—all without the need to download an additional runtime or browser plug-in. Further, the new experience enables Silverlight applications to work whether the computer is connected to the Internet or not—a radical improvement to the traditional Web experience. Features include:
      • Life outside the browser. Silverlight applications can now be installed to and run from the desktop as lightweight web companions. Thus, users can take their favorite Web applications with them, regardless of whether they are connected to the Internet or not.
      • Desktop shortcuts and start menu support. Silverlight applications can be stored on any PC or Mac computer’s desktop with links in the start menu and applications folder, and so are available with one-click access.
      • Safe and secure. Leveraging the security features of the .NET Framework, Silverlight applications run inside a secure sandbox with persistent isolated storage. These applications have most of the same security restrictions as traditional web apps and so can be trusted without security warnings or prompts, minimizing user interruptions.
      • Smooth installation. Because Silverlight applications are stored in a local cache and do not require extra privileges to run, the installation process is quick and efficient.
      • Auto-update. Upon launch, Silverlight applications can check for new versions on the server, and automatically update if one is found.
      • Internet connectivity detection. Silverlight applications can now detect whether they have Internet connectivity and can react intelligently including caching a users’ data until their connection is restored.

    Source:  http://silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight3/default.aspx

    First things first, you have to get the software and runtime.

    Visual Studio and Visual Web Developer Users, you will first want to pick up the additional tooling for the IDE. This has the Silverlight/Visual Studio integration you need. Since this might take a while, head over to DASPTV while you wait.

    For our beret wearing, paintbrush holding friends, a bundle including Expression Web 3 RC and SketchFlow RC has also been released. As a side note, this also resolves the pipe command issue that affected Expression Web 2.

    Now that you are ready, and have finished watching all the videos at DASPTV, go straight over to the Silverlight.Net site. There are some fantastic video tutorials there. We also have a Silverlight area in our community forum.

    Michael Ossou

    Add Michael Ossou to your Google+ circles.
    Visit DiscountASP.NET to learn more about our ASP.NET hosting services.

DaspTV.com and the Increasing Importance of Videos

Hosting Industry, Inside DiscountASP.NET, Marketing

First, I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce a new site: DaspTV.com.

This site has been live for a little while and we’ve been driving a small amount of traffic to it. But its time to officially introduce this Video Resource site. We hope that this will be useful site to all, but especially for our customers. For this launch we feature videos created by one of our Technical Evangelists, Mark Wisecarver, as well as some videos from some of our Partners – DotNetInvoice and Sitefinity. We also include a video from Microsoft and a Marketing video from Google. This will be an evolving project so please send us your suggestions and let us know if this has been helpful (or not) and how we can improve upon this effort.

I also want to acknowledge that for dasptv.com, we are using Xigla’s Absolute Video Channel application. Xigla has been a great partner and they also use their Video Channel application for their own video resource site at xigla.tv, which is hosted at DiscountASP.NET.

So why are we launching this video site?

This project has three motivations. First and foremost, we want to provide useful video content to help make our customer’s web presence more successful in their site development and programming effort and also in their marketing effort.

Second, we want to help highlight our Business Partners and videos can help provide more insight into the value propositions of our Partner’s businesses, as well as provide instructional information on how to use a Partner’s service/product with our hosting service.

And finally, we wanted to start addressing the major impact that online video content is having in everyone’s lives today and how these trends are changing the way we must conduct our business to stay relevant in these new times. Let me elaborate a little more on this.

It is common knowledge that the Google search engine has the lion’s share of search activities on the internet and that Yahoo was considered in the second position for a long time. Last year in 2008, searches on YouTube surpassed Yahoo search, making YouTube search the second largest in search activity volume. Clearly, Internet users are very interested in video content.

Back in 2007, Google rolled out their Universal search and added even more navigational guides for increased vertical search capabilities. With Google’s Universal Search, they hit several vertical searches at once, and display those results blended with the natural horizontal search results.

Now, add to the mix the new Google SearchWiki feature introduced late 2008. A Google account holder can now search while being logged into Google and change the ranking order of search results and add notes to personalize their search results further. How this personalization data is being used and going to be used is up for debate but if there are changes that can be made to produce more relevant blended search results for all Google users, I’m sure Google will update their relevancy algorithms.

What does this all mean? Well, it means that it is increasingly important for businesses to take a more “global” approach to their marketing / branding. No longer is it just about focusing your resources on natural search engine optimization (SEO) as the blended Universal search is decreasing the effectiveness of SEO, and it is increasingly important to participate in other verticals to stay relevant today. So our DaspTV.com site is one effort of ours toward addressing this.

Takeshi Eto
VP Marketing and Business Development
DiscountASP.NET

   RSS Feed

   Blog Archive

   Community Forum