The theme of HostingCon 2009 is billed as: compete and thrive in a changing environment. We’ve discussed before the necessity of cloud computing in our hosting and day to day lives. With that in mind and Web hosters wanting a piece, NaviSite’s William Toll and Suneet Sabharwal provided the tips, tools and ideas to launch a product - part of the competing and thriving elements to be sure.
Failures in product launches in hosting abound. Get out early if it doesn’t work is sound advice in many cases. Just quit as opposed to launching, re-launching, and finally throwing in the towel on the third try. That was Toll’s assessment of Blue Halo, the Interland platform that seemed workable to some but didn’t work at all.
Success in hosting, obviously, also abounds. Just examine Rackspace’s numbers that recently came out. Managed hosting revenue increased to $138.9 million for the second quarter of 2009, up from $134.2 million in the first quarter of 2009. Cloud revenue increased to $13.1 million in the quarter, up from $10.9 million in the first quarter of 2009. Total customer count increased to 70,803, up from 62,078 customers in the first quarter of 2009.
These would fit well under the measures of success in a product launch, cloud hosting as the product. In its Private Cloud Launch In July 2009, Rackspace announced its new offering, which allows customers to run the centrally managed VMware virtualization platform on private dedicated hardware environments.
Watch what these guys are doing and measure their success. Following what works is another sound survival strategy. But realize that in today’s competitive hosting market, it's not good enough to merely survive; you must be able to thrive.
HostingCon in DC, a quick snapshot
Email
Print
Comments
There are currently no comments posted for this article.