The Zen of Hosting: Part 1 - Who, What, Where, Why, and How
So I haven’t posted for way too long due to a massive new initiative which I have been involved in, namely setting up a hosting solution provider called VirtualBox. This has been a very enlightening experience in terms of many new skills I have learned and a much deeper understanding of the products I worked with. So as a personal outcome from that investment, I have written a series on what I have learned. This series is kinda different from my normal blog posts, for a number of reasons.
Firstly, this is one of the few times I have written the posts out long before posting them (normally I post as I think). This has given me the chance to re-read them and change them so hopefully the quality is higher (as a side note, I used Microsoft OneNote to write this). The length of each post in this series is also much longer than my normal average (450 words per post), and lastly, this is one of the few times I actually blog about what I’m doing at work and mention some of the exact products, customers, and technologies I am involved with. The reason for this is not because I am normally not proud of what I do or who I do it with, but because I like to keep things separate. But this time, I am so excited (kid on Christmas Eve type) that I really can’t not share what has been accomplished by the small team I feel privileged to work with.
Firstly, what is a hosting solution provider? Well, traditionally, when you have wanted an application like Microsoft Exchange, you would go out, buy a server, buy the licenses, get an IT pro in to do the install and configuration. Well, a hosting solution provider (HSP) changes the entire game by removing the buying from the traditional way. So you want Microsoft Exchange, and you have it—instantly!
Why would anyone go this route? Well, there are a couple of benefits. For anyone, the turnaround time is minutes from needing it to having it ready. You get proven systems in place from day one, or having a guide on how your environment is set up—which means as you bring on staff, you just give them the guide, and in a few days of reading and asking questions (and lots of Googling), they have a wealth of understanding of the environment from the package. Better yet, if you can afford a few lab machines and run Hyper-V or Virtual Server, they could even do the deployment of the environment to really understand it.
But if you are a point-haired boss type, there is one very important business factor: money. For the SME market, the significant cost benefits come from paying for only what you consume. Licensing for Exchange, for instance, lets you purchase mailboxes with no support for calendars or tasks (i.e., just mail) if that’s all you need—for just a few dollars per month. The HSP also invests far more in hardware and staff, thus providing faster, bigger, and better (insert your favorite positive adjective here) than what the SME company could get themselves.
For the enterprise customer, an HSP can be a very different route in that it allows an IT department to move away from the traditional model and set itself up as an HSP for the rest of the business. This means they can lower the cost of licensing, properly manage budgets between them and other departments, react quicker to business needs, and lastly—once they have moved through the lifecycle of setting this up—could actually allow them to start offering the services outside the business, allowing them to stop being a cost center and start to become a revenue center.
That’s enough from me sounding like a business expert. So what can you expect in the series coming up? Well, we will next tackle the overviews of the system and then start to dive into some of the cooler technologies.