Web hosting providers wanting a stake in the lucrative Cloud services market have a new gateway.

Cloud hosting continues to be described as “a game-changing paradigm shift” by Rackspace Hosting’s Chief Executive, Lanham Napier and dozens more.

As discussed previously, the Cloud hosting business contributed 10 percent to Rackspace’s revenue in the third quarter of ‘09 and has been steadily growing in excess of 100 percent per year.

That’s wonderful news for the industry and Rackspace, but what about the the smaller Web hosts? How are they to compete with momentum-riding Rackspace, AT&T, Amazon and even the unstoppable Google?

First you have to get in the game cost-effectively. Luckily, there are “shrink-wrapped” solutions in the marketplace that are worthy of further investigation and don’t necessitate refinancing your business to make it work.

Cupertino, CA-based ParaScale introduced ParaScale Cloud Storage software (PCS) R2.0 on November 16th. In addition to enterprise storage administrators seeking to save money in an ongoing need to increase storage needs without sacrificing any performance, Web hosting and other service providers may share in the opportunity to bolster existing cloud offerings or even start out in this lucrative business sector.

“The power and scale of cloud compute and storage begins to make sense in an open and interoperable environment where resources can be provisioned as needed, any commodity hardware can be added to grow the cloud including repurposed servers, and new applications can be leveraged to create a virtualized data center, said Arun Taneja, principal, Taneja Group.

He adds: “ParaScale provides a unique open alternative to other cloud storage platforms and is developing an ecosystem of partners to integrate applications like back-up and disaster recovery, content management, and data migration on its storage servers.”

Sajai Krishnan, CEO of ParaScale, has been outspoken on mid-sized entrants who want to employ “a build and they will come” strategy seeing this eventually turn into a “build and you will get run-over” by the goliaths.

Web hosts wanting to capitalize on the cloud now, need a well-thought out strategy. With capital expenditure in check as use of commodity hardware is a reality and the ParaScale software on tap which enables automation and provides the flexibility on the amount of storage that can be administered, opportunities to provide value-added services can be created. Web hosting providers have proven to be adept at introducing these services and can test their skills once again on a new playing field.

Source: TopHosts.com Web Hosting Blog
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