Altruism and Web Hosting

One of the more memorable quotes from HostingCon last week was: “We are more altruistic when we’re making money.” Steve Lesem, CEO from Mezeo made the statement in one of the several sessions dedicated to Cloud Hosting.

As you may know, altruism (from Wikipedia) is the deliberate pursuit of the interests or welfare of others or the public interest. Now I’ve been duped, pitched and played but I sensed genuine altruism in many of the discussions I had during the three days we spent in Washington D.C.

Take for example my meeting with Fasthosts' Chief Marketing Officer, Steve Holford. One of Steve's primary reasons for attending was to find ways to accentuate a virtualization strategy that Fasthosts is currently implementing. Fasthosts will be identifying then introducing new services that their reseller partners and their customers want most and need.

"By introducing dedicated solutions recently, we're providing the flexibility and the opportunity for our resellers to sell what they want to sell. There are virtualization products here and (for that matter) value-added services provided by the smaller firms that are a great fit for our resellers and their customers," Holford reiterated. "We're want to proactively get the solutions to the resellers so they (in turn) can satisfy their customers early in the game."

Similarly, Jon McCarrick and the Parallels team want to help hosting companies compete with the likes of Amazon in the Cloud hosting space and also find ways to enable these hosting companies to better satisfy their customer base. Parallels just introduced (in beta) the revolutionary Parallels Panel 10 SMB Edition, which allows hosters to offer a myriad of on demand services that SMBs want most, while simplifying the end user experience.

"With a single click, you can install a shopping cart. The API brings you back to the panel and there's no license installation. The customer can install applications with no real knowledge of how a server works. Spam protection, email management, backup, light CRM, whatever the SMB needs (to conduct business) has been formatted and made available through the control panel...everyone participates in the revenue streams and the end customer wins the biggest," described McCarrick.

The ParaScale software platform is set up to help the hosting companies win as well. Cameron Bahar, the company's founder has been engulfed in the cloud story since its infancy as far back as 20 years ago. Today, he identifies it as a key market for Web hosts and indeed for years to come.

To tackle the cloud storage market Web hosts have to dismiss the notion that they can build or replicate what the giants like Amazon or Google have already done because to do so is "a race to zero," Bahar notes. "They must differentiate to make money in the storage as a service market. Figure out your segment, understand the customer requirements and build on that. Storage is sticky. By partnering, hosting companies can get to market quickly, provide value added services like content management, document management, backup, archiving... and protect their existing client base."

So while we may have stretched the concept of altruism a bit, it's very encouraging to see that there still exists a spirit of cooperation and willingness to help the other guy, and in the process help ourselves.