There is no doubt that managed hosting has been undergoing an on-demand transformation thanks to advances in virtualization and grid technologies, but although the underlying technologies might be similar, the available services are increasingly unique — targeted at doing a few things and doing them well. This is especially true for two relatively recent entrants into the virtualized hosting fray.

Bringing Virtualization to Canada’s SMBs

Radiant Communications, a Vancouver, British Columbia-based provider of commercial broadband solutions, publicly entered the virtual space in October 2007 with its AlwaysThere hosted Exchange offering. Leveraging Radiant’s Grid Computing Utility (GCU), a collection of virtual machines combined with a flexible storage area network (SAN), the hosted Exchange offering gives users a dedicated instance of Microsoft Exchange with, according to Radiant’s director of advanced hosting, Jason Leeson, all the security and flexibility of an on-premise offering, as well as the economies of scale that come along with a shared environment. Thus far, the company has been focusing its marketing efforts around the Exchange service (specifically within the Canadian SMB market), and has been gaining a lot of traction as a result, but Leeson says that this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Radiant also is offering virtual servers (running Windows Server 2003, Red Hat Linux or any VMware-compatible OS) to customers who want the ability to scale their resources as needed, on demand, without having to invest in purchasing and managing physical machines. Leeson said the concept of renting virtual servers on a pay-per-use basis is currently showing the most opportunity for uses such as disaster recovery (i.e., backup) and business continuity (i.e., automatic failover), but some customers are actually hosting their own applications on the grid. Radiant’s grid computing environment is connected directly to its existing MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) core network, which Leeson says allows Radiant to host and deliver grid-based virtual servers and applications for each customer in a completely secure and private manner.

Concerning the latter, Leeson acknowledges that Radiant’s virtual server model is still in its infancy, but points to significant advancements on the horizon. Currently, users wishing to cluster several VMs must wire the servers together themselves, as Radiant has not yet incorporated that level of automation. Additionally, customers must add servers directly through Radiant, with servers usually provisioned and ready to go in a few hours. However, Leeson explained, Radiant is only in the first stage of a three-phase rollout: (1) standardize the grid infrastructure; (2) build the internal management tools for automation and provisioning; and (3) delegate administration, control and management to users. Once the final phase is complete — or at least underway — Leeson says customers will have the full virtual private datacenter (VPDC) experience of being able to turn up or turn down servers on demand, track server utilization, etc. He thinks these customer-side management tools and consoles will be big differentiators as Radiant continues to grow its service.

Right now, the main target for virtual servers and VPDCs is the independent IT consultant market. “We talk to a lot of IT consultants, for example, who don’t have their own datacenters [but] have niche vertical apps that they offer to their customer base,” said Leeson. “This is an opportunity for them to tap into the Radiant datacenter, and we set them up with the virtual servers and they can run what they want.” Professional service organizations, such as law firms, have been the main customers for the AlwaysThere hosted Exchange offering, added Leeson.

Hosting in the Cloud

Attacking the management problem from a different angle is Mosso, a Rackspace company that started in 2006 when co-founders Jonathan Bryce and Todd Morey had the idea to offer Rackspace’s enterprise-level technology to smaller users in a multi-tenant environment. In February of this year, Mosso introduced a revamped service — the Hosting Cloud — in an attempt to make the Web hosting experience as simple as possible without sacrificing reliability.

Leveraging a cloud of computers and VMs to offer customers as-needed scalability, Bryce describes the Hosting Cloud as “a place where developers can basically upload their code and we take care of the rest.” With this in mind, the infrastructure uses standard Web technologies like PHP, Ruby, Perl, .NET, and ASP, and users don’t do any server provisioning, as Mosso’s internally developed software manages provisioning, scaling and other aspects of the environment automatically. Once the application has been uploaded via the Web interface, $100 per month gives customers access to 500GB of bandwidth, 50GB of high-performance storage and 3 million Web requests. Scaling is done automatically as applications experience greater traffic or require more resources, and the extra resources and/or Web requests cost only “pennies”: $.50 per gigabyte of disk space; $.25 per gigabyte of bandwidth; and $.03 per 1,000 Web requests. “A lot of those other systems,” said Bryce “… make it easy to provision additional resources quickly, but they don’t necessarily do it automatically.”

As good as this all sounds, though, even Bryce acknowledges that the platform has limitations — some of which, like not allowing users administrative access, are by design. “It’s a plus because it means they don’t have responsibility for that, but it’s a minus because it means there are limitations that we put in place — you couldn’t run SAP or something on our cluster,” explained Bryce. “It’s meant to do a few things really well. It’s meant to serve Web applications and their … databases.” Essentially, if users have needs that are out of the norm for Web applications (e.g., connecting to a legacy system with custom C code), Mosso will not currently handle them within its system, as such custom installations might affect downtime or otherwise throw a wrench in the system.

The reality, says Bryce, is that there always are trade-offs when dealing with a fully managed platform. “One of the questions we get is why would someone go with Rackspace over Mosso, and that’s generally what it is,” he elaborated. “Rackspace’s customers have more complex and more customization needed to work with their overall architecture, and we generally do really well for the set of standard technologies that we support.”

Among the technologies that Mosso does not support is Java, although Bryce hopes that will change by the end of the year. Java support will come hand in hand with a “sandbox” environment Mosso is currently working on, which would allow customers administrative access of individual virtual instances without Mosso having to install any unique software across its entire pool of resources. Customers also will have more in-depth insight into how their applications are running, thanks to an improved control panel that will, among other things, allow users to access storage snapshots. In addition to these upgrades, Mosso also plans to expand into an additional Rackspace datacenter and to introduce larger base packages for customers who know they will regularly go beyond the current base quantities.

Mosso is an optimistic company, though, and Bryce firmly believes that Mosso’s pros outweigh its seemingly minimal cons. And one big thing the company has going for it is its level of service, which Bryce describes as deeper and more proactive than those of many other managed service providers. Support is available 24 hours a day via phone, e-mail or chat, says Bryce, and because everyone is in-house, customer services representatives have easy access to the technology team should they need it. “Even though everything we’re doing is high technology, we still keep a people element in it,” says Bryce. “That’s been one of the keys to Rackspace’s success over the years, and we definitely stick with that legacy.”

One example of this personal service to which Bryce points involves a recent appearance by a Mosso customer on a national network morning talk show. The customer gave Mosso a heads-up as to when it would be on, and Mosso scaled up its infrastructure in advance to avoid any potential traffic-related downtime. Generally, however, customers don’t know when the need for increased scale will arise, but that doesn’t mean there is any less service involved. According to Bryce, Mosso looks at every deviation from users’ averages and acts accordingly. If it’s just more Web traffic, then the answer if more resources. If, however, it’s a funky SQL query, the Mosso reps will play the role of database administrators and help get everything running smoothly.

Clearly, customers aren’t shying away from Mosso, as the company currently boasts more than 2,000 customers, with the majority having joined in the past year. Bryce says Mosso adds 900 applications per week to its cloud, and is hosting more than 76,000 mailboxes.

One of these customers is David Ponce, owner and managing editor of consumer technology blog Oh Gizmo, who has been with Mosso for almost a year. He was turned on to Mosso after seeking input via a post on his site, as increasing traffic and “terrible” experiences with other providers left him needing to make a change.

At one point, Ponce downgraded from one provider’s “limited” virtual private server offering to the regular grid-based offering, and while it handled his needs just fine, customer service was another story altogether. Corroborating Bryce’s account of Mosso’s level of customer service, Ponce says he has “never seen anything like it.” “I can get in touch with a human within two minutes,” he added, “and, to me, that is worth every penny.”

As far as the product’s offerings, Ponce points to some early issues with downtime following appearances on the front pages of Digg or Slashdot, but says everything has been running pretty much “perfectly” — nearly 99 percent uptime — after a couple months of tweaking the settings. “Whatever they’re doing, their clusters are working, because whenever there’s a spike, it grows and handles it just fine,” said Ponce.

Ponce also has some concerns with the pricing around Web requests, as he has been exceeding the limits lately and expects to do so occasionally in the months to come. He welcomes the opportunity to upgrade to a package offering more base requests, but notes that for the most part, Mosso Hosting Cloud is perfect for his needs, which generally involve 600,000 to 700,000 page views per month.

One Step at a Time

Regardless how many customers managed hosting providers draw or how grand their master plans, both Radiant and Mosso understand that success in the utility hosting space requires a measured approach. According to Mosso’s Bryce, truly pervasive cloud computing will only occur if today’s providers keep their foci narrow and focus on doing one thing well — managing that service “all the way up and down the stack.” Like Amazon’s S3 for storage and Mosso’s Hosting Cloud for Web applications, Bryce foresees a day when “[t]here’ll be enough of these services and enough of these technology-specific utilities that are high-quality and high-performance that most things will be running on them.”

Radiant’s Leeson sees the market unfolding in much the same way, noting that Radiant saw e-mail as a great opportunity to introduce customers to its grid-based service because e-mail is a mission-critical application that doesn’t provide any real strategic advantage to organizations. Disaster recovery and business continuity are other areas where customers, particularly SMBs, can move some tasks into the cloud without over-committing. “When we talk about SaaS or cloud computing, it’s not all or nothing,” he explained. “It’s not companies that are suddenly going to move everything into the cloud and get rid of all their on-premise stuff. It’s going to be slow, and it’s going to be gradual, and they’re going to start with certain things.”