It has been a while since we have released a news item, but we wanted to update our existing customers and let them know we are still moving forward with some new hosting products. It has been an interesting year with the new developments in cloud hosting versus traditional hosting models.
To this point, Windows products and (IIS) Internet Information Services have both generally been a bit late to the game to truely support hosted cloud services. I think there is a good reason however, and I believe the reason is for the same reason that we have also pushed our own cloud hosting offers to the back burners. The point of cloud hosting services is to provide a superior architecture which is easily scaleable and ultimately reliable. So far this has not occurred in the cloud hosting market, what we have seen instead is a series of technical issues and providers marketing the technology so heavily before it is ready for a release.
As an example, we have seen much better uptime with traditional virtualized servers and dedicateds as compared to any shared cloud hosting platform. We have been closely watching uptime and reports from the major cloud providers, and thus far we are not convinced the issues are fully worked out for Microsoft products to run on the cloud. It is not to say that cloud hosting is useless or that it is not ultimately the way hosting will become, but we still believe the technology to be slightly pre-mature.
We have personally tested more than 3 different cloud products and each one has had some issues with Windows and HyperV environments, and therefore we have avoided doing full shared clouds to date. However, our infrastructure is already 80% cloud-like and we did take the best parts of the cloud and integrate them into our current hosting offers.
Due to the issues we have had with the cloud products, we have pushed back our site updates and rollover to September 1st, 2011. We hope this will be the final date and that all of our new products readied by that time.
Thank you for your patience and understanding.
Thursday, July 28, 2011 3:41 AM