Dan, thank you for taking some time out and answering my questions as I know you are a traveling man.

1. Can you first tell us what your role is at Tier1, what you do and what your company does?

Tier 1 Research is an industry research and analysis firm, covering the Internet Infrastructure space. We concentrate on hosting, colocation, data center real estate, peering, content delivery networks, and data telecom issues. We provide daily, quarterly, and annual written research to our customer base, which include most major providers of Internet infrastructure services, as well as a large number of financial clients, many of whom own large stakes in those providers.

2. It seems that the big talk in the hosting industry is about Rackspace going public. Do you think their stock will pop or flop? Additionally, now that Rackspace will be a public company and have to answer to shareholders do you think they will be able to justify what are likely high staff costs that provide the “Fanatical Support” for which they are known?

Rackspace is an outstanding firm with very good numbers - they will, without doubt, have a successful IPO. The “pop” we normally see may not occur due to the Dutch Auction format of the IPO - the opening price should be the market price. This will maximize the IPO for Rackspace’s owners and investors. Rackspace was careful to talk about fanatical support as the differentiator when they filed their S1. While some shortsighted Wall Street analysts may have a problem with it, I don’t see Rackspace’s leadership moving on the issue - nor should they.

3. Now that Rackspace is going to be a public company do you see it as a possible acquisition target, specifically by a company like Akamai who shares so many customers with them?

An IPO is also a prospectus for acquisition. Akamai is an extremely unlikely M&A partner for Rackspace - a private equity firm would be the best candidate. That being said, I think they will end up going public rather than being acquired.

4. When we talked a while back you thought for sure that Microsoft would acquire Yahoo. How surprised are you that Microsoft walked away and why do you think they didn’t go hostile?

I think Yahoo has made a terrible mistake. Their executives put their own self-interest ahead of their investors. Microsoft offered a fair price and was rebuffed, in a move that hurts Yahoo’s stockholders. Expect numerous stockholder lawsuits now. Hostile takeovers are very difficult these days due to the numerous “defenses” available. Thats why they are so rare. They are also costly.

5. We are seeing a lot of products flow into the market place that offer utility computing or cloud hosting (I’m not really sure on the difference between the two). We now have Amazon (EC2), Servepath (Gogrid), XCalibre (Flexiscale), Sun (Network) and IBM’s announced Blue Cloud. Do you see this trend continuing and do you think this Utility computing/cloud hosting will eventually replace dedicated servers?

Tier 1’s forthcoming report on Cloud Computing will help explain that difference, Ross. I think there is a real possibility that cloud computing will replace dedicated servers at some point in the future. We certainly are not there yet - its at least 3 years out. Cloud storage is far hotter, at least right now. I think we’ll see more cloud storage offerings like Amazon’s S3, Nirvanix SDN, and Rackspace CloudFS in the next few months. One of the key reasons that the server side is not quite ready to go is that licensing has not quite caught up yet, especially on the Windows side. I think that is going to change in the next 6 months.

6. Do you think enterprise customers will be open to using these new hosting solutions or new storage solutions like Amazon S3/Nirvanix? We know Mozy saw some success with their GE deal and VMWare has been gaining a lot of ground in the enterprise market both of which have traditionally untouched by major players.

Mozy is really EMC, so enterprise success should not be a surprise. Nirvanix just won a Fortune 10 deal. I think we’ll see more enterprises embracing storage-as-a-service, because storage demands are increasing so rapidly. Software developers are rapidly adopting these services as well, which will help them grow very rapidly.

7. On the topic of Nirvanix and Amazon S3 do you still think Nirvanix continues to offer a better solution to companies that need a storage service? Is there anything Amazon can do to show that they are a better company for the job in your mind?

Amazon needs to hire a general manager for AWS from the hosting industry. Nirvanix is full of people who understand that a solution like S3 is not just “cool technology”, but its also something that must be operated reliably and supported. I don’t think Amazon totally gets the importance of support and reliability yet - they charge 20% extra for support of uncertain quality. They just introduced a dashboard to allow folks to see the status of the service, which is great, but shouldn’t that have been available on day 1? Amazon has made a lot of technology and positioning promises that have been misleading or simply hype, coasting on their name.

8. Layeretech recently announced they are buying Fastservers. These two companies serve two entirely different markets with Layeredtech offering cheap unmanaged solutions and Fastservers going after more of the small managed hosting customers. Do you think this is a good buy for Layeretech and what do you think they need to do to make sure it is successful?

Consolidation is a fact of life in this industry. LT wants to do managed hosting and Fastserver’s founders wanted an exit and monetization - the deal works for everyone. Most mergers and acquisitions are not successful, and the hosting industry has had their share of disasters. Slow but steady integration by a team of experienced managers is usually the key. I have great faith that the team at LT can make this one work.

9. The CDN wars continue to rage on with rumors of Level 3 going as low as $.08/GB, do you think they can beat the competition on pricing alone? Who do you think is best positioned in this space? Can you share your thoughts on the Limelight and Akamai patent dispute which Akamai recently won?

The LLNW/AKAM patent dispute is far from over and will keep going in the appeals courts, possibly for years. As far as Level3 - I don’t think they can win on price alone. Features and reliability are hugely important in the CDN market. One thing to keep in mind is that, while 8 cents is low, its not like the bottom dropped out. Two years ago, you could get 11 cents on the largest deals. Now, the deals are larger and the standard 10% decay in telecom pricing has led us to 8 cent deals. Thats not disruptive pricing so much as the continuation of a trend. There is not CDN price war - there is a very competitive market that existed long before Level3 purchased any CDN assets.

10. With the current market downturn I can see two things happening. Either companies reduce their IT spending which could hurt a lot of managed hosting companies or companies will turn to managed hosting companies to outsource their infrastructure. Which do you think will happen and why?

The evidence so far is the latter. We don’t see any shortage of managed hosting deals - most folks are doing just fine. IT spend and managed hosting do not seem to be tightly correlated. Colocation, on the other hand, seems to be benefiting from the bad economic times, with enterprises canceling builds in favor of doing business with third-party datacenter firms offering colo and datacenter real estate.

11. If the latter happens what hosting company do you think is best positioned to gain customers who want to outsource their IT infrastructure and why?

Too early to say. Its really a factor of whomever has the marketing agility to recast their message on the fly, while continuing to offer the same services mix.

12. What company in the hosting space do you think is most exciting right now?

Thats a tough one - there are so many great companies in the hosting space that are executing very well in a tough business climate. When you have multiple firms delivering 30%+ year/year revenue increases while doing M&A and introducing new products, its tough to pick a single winner.

13. Where do you see the hosting industry 5 years from now? Who will be the dominant players in dedicated servers, CDN and managed hosting? Who do you see buying whom?

We’ll certainly see more consolidation and a much larger (in terms of revenue) industry. The credit crunch will have eased, so we’ll have more datacenter builds, which will increase competitiveness in colocation.

14. When you aren’t busy being the god of research for the web hosting industry what do you like to do? Any major hobbies? What are your favorite blogs to read?

I like to spend time with my family, attend technical conferences to stay informed, read, play video games (I need to buy GTA4), and read various political blogs, not to mention DIGG. In other words, I’m a geek.

15. When you go into your meetings with Microsoft do you take your Macbook and iPhone or do you leave those at home?

Always! I have never gotten a really negative comment, just some good natured kidding - the hosting team at Microsoft is incredibly laid back and very cool. The fact that I have a licensed copy of Windows and Office installed doesn’t hurt. Most folks don’t realize that Microsoft’s revenue from selling software to Apple users is considerably higher than that of most stand-alone software firms. Its not like sending a FedEx shipment to UPS. On the other hand, walking in to the Zune development building with an iPod or the Xbox product area with a PSP might be hazardous to your health.

16. Random thoughts or comments?

Keep up the great work.

Thanks Hiten for spending some time with us and answering our questions.

CrazyEgg is owned by Advantage Consulting Services which is online marketing company, which I believe is your primary focus? How does CrazyEgg tie into your existing product portfolio and how does it help your customers?

Consulting regarding Internet marketing is our primary focus. Crazy Egg ties into our existing products because it was created out of a personal need of ours to represent analytical related information that we understood to our clients, in a visual manner. Crazy Egg has since evolved into a tool that can help any website owner improve the effectiveness of their webpages.

What does CrazyEgg have that Google Analytics or Mint can’t provide to someone that needs to know the most about their website?

Crazy Egg focuses on tracking every click on a page. This focus is narrowed down even more by the fact that Crazy Egg allows you to test one page at a time. Through the use of data and visualizations, Crazy Egg is designed to help people continually test and improve their websites.

Webvertising surpassed 9.6 billion dollars last year, do you see this trend continuing or are we in a bubble right now? Do you think most advertisers are seeing good returns from their webvertising dollars or are they just blowing them on ill-placed adsense ads?

I believe this trend will continue, primarily because of the increase in websites offering free and / or freemium services to their users. Monetization will always be an issue when it comes to building things on the web, especially with the cost of launching a web based service being so low and Google, Yahoo and Microsoft willing to offer excellent web based services for free (as long as you are willing to deal with advertisements).

Mark Cuban said anyone who advertised on YouTube was a moron basically because it was a waste of money if your ad pops up when grandma was just there to watch little Suzie jump rope on video, do you agree and how can a business successfully leverage the larger sites without just blowing cash? What are your thoughts on advertising on large sites like YouTube/MySpace/etc.

I think advertising on social networking / community websites is more about sponsoring the community and finding ways to engage them with your advertising. This form of advertising is just beginning to creep up, but will continue to grow; we are already seeing “special” YouTube channels for companies like Coca Cola and Chevrolet. Also, branded MySpace profiles are something that companies such as AquaFina and Chilis have already started to do in conjunction with their traditional advertising campaigns.

Whats the most important thing a business should remember when they begin webvertising?

Know the audience you want to reach and make sure that the website(s) and social mediums you choose to advertise on are the places where your audience hangs out.

Web 2.0 is the term being flung around right now and if you don’t own a Web 2.0 site you just aren’t cool (don’t worry Hiten, you are cool). We see at least 10 new Web 2.0 sites pop every day. I can list 10 Web 2.0 sites that deal with personal finances alone. Is the it becoming saturation 2.0 where companies just keep breaking off small chunks of the user base? Is Web 2.0 going to be another bust? Doesn’t this make it harder on advertisers as now they have to advertise on 10 sites to reach the user base they want?

Web 2.0 as a buzzword is definitely wearing on all the early adopters. I think of the current state we are in as an evolutionary period and something that is the result of some of the things I mentioned in question #3. Ultimately, if it makes sense for your business to advertise on 10 sites, you will do it. But I think there is definitely room for consolidation in some segments of the market.

CrazyEgg is funded by your consulting company and has no outside VC funding right now, one of the very few web 2.0 companies that can actually say that. Is this a strength because you actually own it or a weakness because you don’t have the capital that other companies have?

I think when it comes to funding, it is all based on timing and the resources you have available at your disposal. If you do not have the resources available to do what needs to be done for your company to succeed, it does make sense to seek funding early on, but funding can come in many different forms, not just VC funding. In our case, we are fortunate enough to have income coming in from our consulting company which is helping us keep Crazy Egg alive in the short run.

I’ve read many reviews on your product and everyone who uses it and falls in love with it. With a product that is getting such great reviews I’m surprised executives from other companies aren’t throwing hookers through your window to get you to sell? Have any of the big boys come around trying to sweet talk you?

No comment.

TV executives and newspapers hate people like you with a passion as your are taking away some precious advertising dollars from them. Do you see advertising dollars continue to be pushed away from traditional advertising and pushed more towards webvertising?

Yes, I do see advertising dollar continue to be pushed towards webvertising. But that does not mean that traditional advertising venues are useless, in my opinion, it just means that the “gatekeepers” of traditional advertising need to wake up and smell the $$$.

To expand on the question above, is webvertising always a better choice? I mean you can focus your advertising dollars on certain groups so why use the traditional method at all?

There have been several recent studies that show that traditional advertising does have its own “branding” benefits. One thing to remember with this argument is that without getting creative you can run out of webvertising options very quickly, thus many companies start falling back on traditional advertising.

Something like %98 of Google’s revenue is advertising; shouldn’t that scare a company that large? If the advertising market ever takes a hit how can companies based solely off of advertising survive? When do the webvertising dollars get to thin?

As long as webvertising campaigns continue to generate traffic and revenues for companies, I do not see the market declining; I only see it increasing as new opportunities arise, such as social media, to connect companies with their potential customers.

Many of the new web 2.0 companies are being driven just off of VC funding right now, do you think they will actually succeed when they have to turn a profit on their own or will they fall flat on their face?

I think this question has to be answered on a case by case basis. VC investing has always been crazy, but I think that some VCs have been funding a lot more wisely then “last time”. What I have noticed is a rise in investment rounds from angel investors. It seems that the smarter, more agile angel investors are able to get to entrepreneurs before VCs do these days.

Google and Yahoo have been swallowing up companies left and right (flickr, dodgeball, orkut, etc.) but these companies don’t seem to be leveraging these new properties will in terms of advertising. Aren’t these companies just wasting money with these acquisitions if they can’t effectively bring them into the fold of their advertising model? What would you do to turn this around if you were in the CEO position at either?

This is a tough question, since I am sure there is more then meets the eye going on at the two companies you mention. Without knowing what’s really going on inside these companies, from what I have noticed, I think they are purchasing companies and “talent” to build up their war chest for the long run. There are a lot of opportunities that exist if you start looking into the future; my feeling is that these companies are making acquisitions and talent-buys in an effort to stay competitive for the long run.

Hiten, the most important question; which are cooler pirates or ninjas?

Ninjas.

Random thoughts, ideas or just general outbursts?

Thanks for interviewing me, I appreciate your consideration and patience, I have enjoyed all your previous interviews and I hope that people like mine

Readers I’d like to see your answer to these questions, please feel to leave them in the comment box.

Hello Derek and thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule to do an interview with me.

Hey Ross, no problem thanks for having me. After all we do know each other pretty well after that run at the stri……wait is this being recorded?

Gigenet has been around since 1998 doing filtering for IRC clients. With your new site launch you guys have offered a new service called ProxyShield which is more of an enterprise grade product. What is ProxyShield? How does your regular filtering and Proxy Shield differ?

Actually, the Proxyshield service has been around for about 2 years now, marketed on some of our sister sites like DDoSProtection.com and GigeServers.com. Although it has been designed to be highly-scalable in order to mitigate the large attacks that big organizations encounter, we’ve found that the majority of our clients are small to medium sized businesses. Being that it is service-based, rather than a hardware device, it is much more affordable and easier to implement, which is appealing to companies on a lower budget. The Proxyshield Lite service is a server-based solution, which provides DDoS mitigation only for bandwidth-intensive attacks, attacks that attempt to saturate your network connectivity.

The Premium solution is a more advanced offering that is resilient to complex service-based attacks such as HTTP GET attacks that fool the web server into thinking it’s being overloaded with legitimate traffic to the victim’s website. Our Premium service is able to distinguish between real visitors and harmful bots. In addition, Proxyshield Premium does not require the end user to host with us. They simply point their DNS to one of our proxy servers so that it appears as if they are hosting with us so all traffic to their website first goes through our scrubbers before being passed on to their real web server. Illegitimate traffic is dropped at our network so that real users can still access the website and not experience any interruptions.

Traditionally companies that need DDoS protection are e-tailers or online gambling sites. Do you see this trend changing anytime soon? Will the market open up more as cyber extortion becomes more prevalent?

Many people have the idea that only high-risk or high-profile websites are susceptible to DDoS. In reality, we have people coming to us with websites all over the spectrum. E-tailers, financial sites, news and informational resources, even blogs! DDoS is already very prevalent, however the media has skewed the public’s idea of who is at risk because they tend to only want to report on the more high-profile victims of DDoS. Everyone is a potential victim, because DDoS attacks are instigated by not only money, but by hate, retaliation, contest, or even out of plain boredom.

In November the U.S. government sent out a warning to banks and financial institutions that Al Qeada was planning cyber attacks. Do you see the war on terrorism expanding to cyber space? Are these kind of alerts a wake up call to companies to protect their cyber infrastructure and do you see it dramatically increasing sales of managed security services?

At this point in time I do not believe that terrorism is a driving force behind cyber attacks. However, I have seen controversial websites that focus on reporting or debating terrorism to have fallen victim of DDoS. It is unclear as to who initiated the attacks or why they were attacked.

With many dedicated server providers such as EV1/ServerMatrix, SoftLayer, etc. including DDoS protection why do companies need ProxyShield? What does your service offer that their protection doesn’t?

A few large dedicated server providers are known for offering DDoS protection as an add-on to their main service. To what extent they will protect you is something they usually do not clarify. Based on my own experience, these companies usually implement some type of intrusion detection device like the Cisco Guard XT. While these devices do offer some basic protection, they are limited in how effective they are and the scale of attacks that they can mitigate. I’ve heard quite a few times that if an attack is too large or too complex (which most are), that the basic DDoS protection provided by these companies will not suffice, and many times their solution is to null the victim’s IP, which in effect made the attack successful (the website is no longer accessible).

There are a couple of providers in the enterprise filtering category one of the leaders being Prolexic. With Prolexic’s CTO Barret Lyon leaving who was pretty much the driving force behind the company do you see this as your chance to grab some of their market share? Why do you think you can offer a better service experience than Prolexic or others?

Doing a Google search, I only found Prolexic and Proxyshield as service-based DDoS mitigation solutions. Everyone else is trying to sell some form of hardware device, which as I mentioned before have strict limits on their ability to adapt to new attacks and handle attacks of large scale or complexity. Not only do I believe that we offer a better service in terms of success rate than any other providers, our service is very affordable to almost all web businesses. Most businesses cannot afford to pay 5-10 thousand dollars per month and be locked into a contract for DDoS protection, and that is why ProxyShield is so successful. The service starts at just $1000/mo and our customers can cancel once the attacks stop. In fact, I’m so confident that our service is superior to anyone else’s, that we will guarantee that the attack is stopped, or our customers do not pay.

What is the biggest attack that you guys have successfully filtered out? How long did it last? What is the most typical type of attack you see? Typically in a given day how many attacks do you guys filter out for your clients? Any other useful information you can provide?

We have successfully filtered out attacks that are over 10 gigabits in size. While most attacks last only a few days, we have some attacks that have not let up for months. Most service based (HTTP) attacks are generally under 20Mb/s in size, however bandwidth based attacks can exceed 5 to 10 Gb/s in size.

One of the big topics of the year has been recursive dns and dns amplification attacks. How prevelant are these attacks, are they becoming more common and how destructive are they really?

Joker.com, one of the largest European domain registrars, fell victim to a large-scale DNS recursion/amplification attack a few months ago. Thousands of their customers went offline as a result of Joker’s DNS servers being inaccessible. We arranged to filter these attacks in order to help get Joker’s customers back online. DNS attacks are starting to get very common, and their wide reach has an ability to affect tens of thousands of people by attacking a single source. This is one type of DDoS that the internet community as a whole should pay more attention to.

With the security of Microsoft Windows increasing do you see botnets becoming smaller or the amount of packet kiddies decreasing? Will they have to become more sophisticated and include linux botnets into their network to successfully take out their targets? How are these guys going to succeed if the hosts they use to attack targets become more secure?

Hahaha! (Derek lets out a deep belly laugh) I’m sorry but I had to laugh at that. According to internetworldstats.com only 16.6% of the entire world population has access to the internet. As more and more people get connected, it will only provide hackers with more resources to carry out their attacks with. Since DDoS drones are essentially Trojan-infected computers, the increase in new and inexperienced PC owners will proportionately result in the increased number of infected machines, or drones that are part of a DDoS botnet. I honestly do not believe that we will see a decrease in DDoS any time soon.

How can we as an industry work to improve the security of the internet to make it harder for these packet kiddies and cyber extortion groups?

That’s an excellent question, and unfortunately I don’t know the answer to that. I think that in order to find an effective solution to DDoS we will need proper education, and cooperation amongst not only end users (who get infected), but ISP’s and government agencies as well. If more internet service providers better understood the implications of DDoS, they might be more inclined to invest their time and money in ensuring that DDoS attacks are not launched from their networks.

Which are cooler pirates or ninjas?

I had to get additional input on this question, and the majority of the guys here at Gigenet agree that ninjas are much cooler than pirates. Pirates do have hooks and singing parrots, but ninjas will launch a throwing star into the back of your head before you even know they were in the room.

Do you have anything else to say to the readers of The Host Guru?

There is no final solution to DDoS, no end-all cure. But, there are some great solutions that are available to help protect people from DDoS. You don’t have to be a Fortune 500 to be able to afford such protection either. Whether you go with a hardware mitigation device, a dedicated server provider that offers a basic protection plan, or a service that specializes in DDoS mitigation (like ProxyShield), make sure that you do proper research and choose a solution that will be a good fit for you and your business. DDoS can be very expensive, so I try to encourage all business owners to take out a cheap insurance policy on their website by investing in a DDoS mitigation solution as part of their IT infrastructure. You wouldn’t drive a car without proper coverage, and you shouldn’t run a business without it either. By proactively protecting your website from DDoS, you will save an exponential amount of time and money due to lost revenue, upset customers, and a tarnished reputation later on when your site is under attack.

Gigenet

Tim, I first just wanted to thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule to do an interview with us today.

Excellent. The $20 I paid you for this interview is already….Hey, you are editing this, right?

My first question is how did you enter into the web hosting business?

Entirely by accident. I used to be a web hosting customer a long while ago, but wanted more control and VPS’s hadn’t really gained much traction at that point. So, I teamed up with some people on splitting a dedicated server. That server eventually split into two and I was getting lots of compliments on the quality of service I was providing, even though I wasn’t guaranteeing anything. I had also been working on some (now defunct) software projects and wanted to roll that into a company, so A Small Orange Software was born.

Your company is rather new to the industry, lets face it you are no Pair (pun intended). How has your company grown so fast in such a short period of time? What is the special sauce?

Well, first off, we’re not growing *that* fast. I’ve actually taken this company very slowly compared to how most people would take it. But I’m not a big risk taker and would rather have a solid business going for me.

But the source for our success is our extreme customer focus. It drives everything we do. For example, we do no advertising. I’d rather spend money on supporting our existing customers than on trying to get new ones. We also don’t play gimmicks with people, like overselling our services or artificially limiting things like MySQL databases or email accounts. It’s all about working for the customer, rather than against them.

Lets talk about the web hosting market. There are tens of thousands of hosting companies with new ones opening daily which are run by kids who live in their mothers basement. These companies are saturating the market and generally offer a very poor experience to customers which might drive them away from hosting. At what point does the market become too saturated? What are your feelings on the industry? How is the lowering of hosting prices affecting you, etc.

I think it’s already too saturated, but we’ve gotten to the point where it’s just normal to be at these levels. More hosts aren’t going to change the dynamics of the market that much. And conversely, it would take the closure of a vast majority of hosts to change it to a smaller market.

It’s tough to gauge if this is really hurting the consumer. More choices are usually better, but it also allows bad hosts to slip between the cracks. But with companies like Mosso offering billing, support, and reliable service, it doesn’t really seem like a disadvantage to have a middleman. You’ll end up dealing with the same companies, just with different logos.

The saturation also makes it more difficult to gain marketshare in the beginning, because you have no discernible advantages over any other host. You’ve basically got to spend a lot in advertising costs to make a splash.

Overselling…there I said it, do i need to go wash now? This is kind of a dirty word in the shared hosting industry. What are your thoughts on the practice and what do you have to say about companies like DreamHost who take it to the max but deliver what they promise?

Well, I think in the case of Site5 and DreamHost, they’re taking it too far. Overselling can be good. It’s a very pro-consumer practice, in theory. But when you over-promise and under-deliver, it does more harm than good. I think ASO will start overselling a bit at some point, since we are customer focused. But it would be on a much smaller scale and something that can be reasonably supported.

Do you think these companies that oversell will eventually collapse? I mean why buy a server from ASO when I can buy a DreamHost account with the same specs for $7.95/month.

I’d rather be sold on the quality of service than on some gimmick. Basically, the massive overselling is more of a gimmick than a legitimate marketing practice. As a result, I think it will hurt them in the long run. They’ve got to match it up with proper support and service. As DreamHost’s nearly constant problems with their power and network show, it’s something they’ve got to focus on.

I’ve talked to many of friends looking for hosting and they seem to only care about price/resources. It seems like this fits the average consumer in general which is why overselling has become so prevalent. How should the smaller guys like yourself combat this type of mentality?

At risk of sounding like a jerk, it’s pretty simple: I don’t want those customers. I want people who have chosen us because they like how we do things. We have a great community of customers, which is exactly the kind of environment I was trying to foster when starting things out, so I’m really most proud of that. A lot of people choose us simply based on the forums alone. Check our our forums and DreamHost’s. They’ve got about 20 times the number of customers, but we’ve got a significantly more active forum. I love how excited people get about my simple little company.

Overselling has worked for dedicated server companies for a while, why can they get away with it but shared hosts can’t?

Dedicated servers have significantly less support overhead than shared hosting. So, once the cost of the box is recouped, you have a lot of income from each machine. So, technically, they’re not really overselling as bad as what’s going on in the shared environment. They’re actually playing it safe, which is great for everyone. Support quality is what can kill an overseller.

ASO use cpanel for its hosting operations. Recently there was a major exploit in cpanel which caused many hosts to get compromised. What were your initial thoughts when you first heard about the flaw? How did the flaw impact your relationship with cpanel? Finally, how did this exploit affect your customer’s trust in your business?

It wasn’t really as big as everyone makes it out to be. They were on it like white on rice, so the turnaround was extremely quick. Especially considering it was a weekend. I don’t think it’s had any impact on our relationship with them or with our customers. We didn’t have any machines hacked because of it.

GRID, GRID, GRID, GRID, GRID, GRID that has been the talk of the entire shared hosting industry lately. Media Temple launched a new “grid server” offering recently in which their motto was “the last hosting plan you’ll ever need”. Soon afterwards their “grid” melted down leaving many hosts chuckling to themselves but it seems they have it running now with only a few bumps and bruises suffered. What do you think about Media Temple’s offering? Do you consider it a true “grid”?

I hate marketing terms with the burning passion of a thousand suns.

Let me make this very clear: MT’s “Grid Server” is not a grid. It’s never been a grid. It never will be. It’s a cluster. It’s very simple to differentiate between the two types. In a grid, your processing task is parallelized between all the nodes in the grid. In a cluster, the processing task is done on one machine at a time, with the ability to failover to another machine, if needed. It’s horizontal versus vertical, basically. Grid computing is used all the time in scientific tasks and things like 3d rendering. Clusters are used when you cannot take a task and split it up into chunks to be processed on multiple nodes. When you request a page on MT’s “grid”, it’s just pulling from storage, through the webserver, out to the load balancer, and then is on it’s way to your computer. You cannot make this a parallel task, so it’s not a grid. There’s no way, nor any reason, to split out the serving of a single webserver request among multiple machines.

I can assure you our version of this isn’t going to have grid anywhere on the site…

Your hosting has been labeled DIGG proof by some as when a site on your server gets dugg it stays up where other hosts usually melt down. How do you guys ensure that customer sites stay up during large traffic sites and how does the label “DIGG proof” make you feel?

Well, we’re not always Digg-proof. It depends on the site. Someone running a Joomla installation with tons of plugins probably isn’t going to fair as well as a simple static HTMl page. But we do attempt to mitigate the load without just suspending the site that’s being dugg. There are a variety of techniques and tricks to do this, and if other hosts aren’t able to keep up, then they probably just haven’t learned them all.

There is talk that you are developing your own control panel, do you have any juicy gossip for us on it?

Nope, just that the Georgia Tech guys are still working on it. It works, but it’s still all very basic at this point. We’re still working on most of the internal plumbing and such right now.

Which are cooler Tim, pirates or ninjas?

I think the ultra-rare pirinja beats them both.