eApps

Founded by three ex-'Big 4' consultants in 1986, eApps has continually reinvented its services to respond to the demands of the market - from IT services and consultancy in the 80s, through Lotus application hosting in the 90s, to today's range of cloud hosting, Java application hosting, enterprise collaboration, email and security services.

At this year's WHD.global event, eApps' President, Richard Lingsch, was kind enough to spend some time with the OnApp team (and a camera crew) to explain why they chose OnApp software, and how they are using their cloud to grow their business.

“Since we launched the OnApp cloud service we’ve been experiencing a steady growth, and not only are we attracting new customers, but the customers on our previous VPS service are migrating to the new cloud service,” he says.

"The people at OnApp know the hosting industry... they know what we need to compete."

CDN: the cure for latency

OnApp Cloud also gives eApps the opportunity to expand into new service areas, such as CDN - expanding the services available to customers, solving the inevitable latency issues you get working with a global customer base, and bringing new revenue streams into the company.

“We have customers in over 125 countries. Latency is a big issue, and CDN is the solution to the latency problem. And the fact that the CDN capability is built right into the OnApp system, is very important to us,” Richard says. “We love the pay as you grow model. It matches our expenses to our revenues and allows us to put sophisticated services out there easily and quickly, without making a huge financial commitment.”

Our thanks again to Richard. Check out the eApps site to learn more about their range of services. 

Next time...

We'll publish more of these customer videos each week. We hope you enjoy them. You can also find more customer stories and comments (including more about eApps) on our customers page. Next up, the cloud comes to Morocco!

If you're a customer and would like to get involved in future case studies, drop us a line. 

The issue in brief

A security firm, Context IS, examined a number of different cloud providers. They identified an issue where fragments of VM data could be accessed by another VM, after the first one had been deleted, because disk space wasn’t wiped before it was allocated to another user. Among the firms they tested were Rackspace and VPS.NET. Both providers have confirmed that they have updated their clouds to address the issue.

How to update your cloud

We've had an update available for some time now - the ‘LV Wipe’ add-on for OnApp Cloud, which is available on our downloads page. The add-on ensures that VM disks are zeroed out after a VM is deleted, or when a virtual disk is removed from a VM.

Important notes

Please be aware that this add-on could have an impact on SAN performance and needs to be installed correctly to maintain proper operation of your cloud. Customers with a full/paid license should contact support for help, if required. 

While we're on the subject of security, it's probably a good time to remind OnApp customers about our Cloud Lockdown and Access Guide, which explains the recommended procedures for securing your OnApp Cloud. For the latest version, contact support, your integrations specialist or your account manager. Thanks!

OnApp Cloud v.2.3.2 integrates our fully redundant DNS network into the OnApp Control Panel, so you can manage DNS for your own domains, and your customers' domains. Our Anycast DNS service is hosted at 14 datacenters around the world, and it's free of charge for customers running the full version of OnApp Cloud v2.3.2, with CDN enabled. Get fast, fully redundant DNS for free!

More 2.3.2 features

OnApp Cloud v2.3.2 includes hundreds of new features, improvements and fixes. In this short video, Carlos Rego, OnApp CVO, showcases seven top features in the new version. 

OnApp Cloud v2.3.2 also includes...

• New backup server options that improve stability and performance - add multiple dedicated backup servers and shift the load from your hypervisors
• New license options for Windows VMs: KMS, MAK, or 'bring your own' for users
• Multiple ports for load balancers
• Enhanced billing for network & datastore zones - easier monthly and hourly billing
• New search tools that simplify cloud administration and localization
• New custom user fields you can add to user profiles, which are available to the OnApp API

For more information, check out the OnApp Cloud 2.3.2 release notes or book a demo.

How to upgrade

If you have the full version of OnApp Cloud, you can either:

• Upgrade your own cloud: see the OnApp Cloud 2.3.2 release notes page for more information.
• Or, you can raise a ticket with support, and we'll take care of the upgrade for you.

If you'd like us to handle your upgrade, please be aware that there might be a queue :]

Free version users

If you use the free version of OnApp Cloud, you can find upgrade instructions at our community forum. 

“Mind-blowing support”…. “lightning-fast service”… “awesome support team”

Over the last couple of months we’ve been running some banner ads with fantastic testimonials from our customers, raving about the quality of OnApp support (those quotes are from Atlas Networks, Dediserve and Swiss Cloud VPS, respectively.)

We love our customers, and we’re happy they love us. But it’s a cynical world, and you might be thinking (quite reasonably) that such glowing praise involved endless cajoling from our Marketing department. Plenty of meetings and conference calls, possibly with fancy biscuits. Rounds and rounds of approval for customer quotes, and maybe even some bribery…

Nope. Not a bit of it.

For one thing, our customers tend to be above such low-brow tactics. If you're a cloud service provider, you know exactly what constitutes “mind-blowing” support, because that’s just the kind of support your customers demand from you.  If we provided anything less than stellar support, we’d get it in the ear.

For another thing, it just wasn’t necessary. We simply asked our customers what they thought. And, in more than one case, we found glowing testimonials already present on public forums, un-prompted and un-asked for. Check out WHT, for example.

When you’re successful, we’re successful

Support is critical to our customers, and from the get-go we’ve built awesome 24x7 support into our software. We’re passionate about making our customers successful. When you’re successful, we’re successful. When you're happy, we are happy.

That’s why all customers with a full license get 24x7x365 support, included in the price. Telephone and email support, included as standard. A 15 minute SLA for critical tickets, included as standard. Direct access to our highly talented L3 techs, if you need it, included as standard.

It’s a radical approach compared with open source cloud frameworks and other “enterprise” cloud platforms. So radical, in fact, that we spend quite a lot of time explaining to potential customers that yes, it’s included with a full license, and no, you don’t actually need to pay another 20% of the software cost, just to make sure there’s someone on the end of the 'phone.

Cloud is about uptime, and uptime is about support. That’s all there is to it, and that’s why you get mind-blowing support, fully inclusive.

February support stats

We're proud of our support team's performance, and want to start sharing some stats on how they're doing. In February they looked like this...

• On average, 4 out of 5 tickets are resolved by our first line support team
• On average, calls to our support team are answered within 5.5 seconds
• In February 2012, our support team didn’t miss a single call
• The average initial response time this year, on a weekly basis, has never been above 5 minutes
• Our longest call in February was 1 hour, 49 minutes and 55 seconds…
•  … we stay on the line with our customers, as long as they need us to

To make sure we keep up this performance we've doubled the size of the support team this year, and moved them into some swanky new offices.

Keep telling us what you think!

If you’re a customer, we’d love to hear about your OnApp support experiences.  Drop a line to marketing@onapp.com and we’ll share your feedback with the support team. Maybe we can work together on our next round of ads, a case study or video (we have plenty of great customer videos coming really soon). 

There won’t be any bribery, but there won’t be endless conference calls, either – we know you’re too busy making money from the cloud. If you’re in London, though, and you fancy popping into OnApp HQ for a chat, we can pretty much guarantee biscuits!

Best of all, we previewed a new free version of OnApp Cloud, which is something I'm really excited about. OnApp has always been about reducing entry barriers to cloud, and more recently CDN.

Our new free version is going to make it even easier for people to try the OnApp Cloud platform, and see just how powerful and simple cloud can be. Not just hosters and other service providers, but companies of all shapes and sizes. We'll be announcing general availability real soon, so watch this space!

OnApp CDN was another big focus for us at Cloud Connect. We started rolling out to customers at the end of last year, and even in that timeframe the network's grown to 40 PoPs. That puts OnApp CDN in the top 5, straight off the bat, and I think you're going to see a lot more competition and innovation in the CDN market as our CDN federation members start launching their own services.

The federated model is really becoming key in this market, and it's so cool to see our clients take the vision and make it real. We'll have more news about OnApp CDN in just a few week's time. 

There's a lot happening in this market, and there's even more happening at OnApp - stay tuned!

To win an iPad we asked our customers to tell us which OnApp feature Santa would appreciate most. We had a great range of entries, so let's look at few of the honourable mentions before we announce the winners...

Close, but no cigar

There were some popular themes in your answers. A lot of you thought today's Santa simply couldn't live without OnApp's autoscaling and load balancing, including Jeff at Uncorrupted.net: “so he can deliver presents to as many houses at once without getting tired and overworked!” Load balancing would also make life easier for Santa’s reindeer, especially if you add automatic reindeer failover, as Chris at Lightning Base suggested.

“Amazing support,” said Edward at CloudNext – “we have OnApp, Santa has his elves!” David at Royalty Networks suggested hot migration for Christmas gifts, “so Santa stays home and eats cookies instead.” Meanwhile, Richard at Dediserve suggested “Multi-Site Failover”, adding “It's awesome, innit?” It certainly is :]

Self-provisioning was another popular theme, saving poor Santa the bother of all that travel. You’d definitely need the OnApp permissions and limits system as well, though, if kids really could help themselves.

CDN was another popular response. “Christmas would not be complete without a CDN (Christmas Delivery Network)”, said Sean at DedicatedServers, along with a few others. Richard at eApps sent a more musical entry: “Dashing thru the Cloud / On an OnApp open sleigh / Selling CDN / Laughing all the way!”

Some of you came up with feature requests. These are always nice to read, especially when they’re already on the roadmap. Finally, some of your ideas were clearly inspired by a little too much Christmas spirit. At least one involved a sexy santa outfit – thanks Stéphan. We won’t share your suggestion here :]

And the winners are…

But who gets an iPad for their ideas? Our lucky winners are:

• Shannon at JoltDigital for suggesting ”easy backups –  do you have any idea of the hourly rate of an elf sysadmin?” Those pesky elves…
   
• Michael at Basedrive, who said: “Santa would love the analytics - to see who has been naughty and who has been nice. If little Billy uses too much and doesn't share he will get an overage for Christmas.” Poor Billy!
   
• Vince at Site5, for suggesting autoscaling – “for the rush on santa.com the week before Christmas”. One of many similar entries, but you were first!

Congratulations to our iPad winners, but don’t despair if you didn’t win… you should be getting an ultra-cool OnApp polo shirt in the mail very soon.

Our thanks go to everyone who entered our Christmas competition, and to all of our customers for your support in 2011. Here’s to a great 2012!

It’s an exciting week at OnApp, as we finally move into our new offices - complete with original street art by Nathan Bowen! Check out the video to see Nathan working, talking about how he got started and describing his art movement, Afterlives.

Our new office is still in the Old Truman Brewery complex on Brick Lane, but now we occupy a large chunk of what used to be the cooperage.

It’s a kind of neo-industrial space, with ancient wooden flooring and bare brick walls, and some fairly substantial pieces of ironwork dotted around.  Power and network tendrils hang from shiny metal gantries, and it’s all topped off by a very retro-looking aircon system.

It feels a bit like somebody crashed a B-movie spaceship into the roof of a Victorian factory.

We love it, but the top floor of the office had some very plain-looking white walls that were crying out for something a bit special, just to finish it off.

That’s why @Ditlev decided to get in touch with Nathan Bowen.

Nathan Bowen - Afterlives and crazy builders

Nathan is a street artist whose work can be seen around Brick Lane and other parts of London. We tracked him down and asked if he would transform our plain white walls.

As you can see below, he certainly did. Now we just have to sort out the boring stuff like seats and screens...

Art complete (everything else, still in progress!)

We grabbed a few minutes with Nathan to ask about his influences, his style and the Afterlives movement. 

"Afterlives is giving walls an artistic reincarnation," he says. "So I go to street locations, and find run-down walls... walls that have been completely vandalized... and I reincarnate that wall in an artistic way." 

Nathan draws quickly, confidently and with flair. Within minutes our walls are coming to life with the characters that feature prominently in his work at the moment - a motley crew of builders, part human, part troglodyte, part clown. 

They can often be seen on boardings at construction sites around London.

“A lot of building sites are quite run down, anyway, so they could do with a bit of Afterlives... a bit of reincarnation," Nathan explains.

Nathan has a soft spot for his strange construction workers.

"These builders are clumsy, they're immature...but I kinda feel for them, y'know? I feel what they're going  through. They're just fun-loving characters."

Nathan’s art is moving beyond London – he travels to Paris this week (“taking it global,” he chuckles). 

Nathan is a really nice guy, and we had a lot of fun watching him work.

Now his builders keep a watchful eye on the OnApp team at our new office...

More of Nathan's art

There's much more of Nathan's art at http://www.artofnathanbowen.com

You can also buy limited edition prints of his work here. 

Your fresh guesses

Before we announce the winners, let’s take a look at some of the suggestions you made.

Some of you took it seriously…

Quite a few of you thought the prizes on offer must mean our fresh announcement was an OnApp iPad app (try saying that after a night at HostingCon). Sadly, that wasn’t the case. Far too obvious!

You’ll be pleased to know, however, that an iPad client for OnApp is in the works, and will join the iPhone app we have already released.  We had a few guesses for an Android app, too – likewise, no, but one is in the pipeline.

We had plenty of cloudy guesses, which ranged from “didn’t read the website” (quite a few people thought we were launching cloud hosting software – we’re pretty sure we do that already) to more practical suggestions already on our to-do list (VMware and Hyper-V support) and a few unusual submissions (all VPSs should generate Bitcoins!)

Some of you didn’t...

There were many silly guesses too. We can only assume “ferret-powered hosting” had something to do with hamster balls and the CDN logo. One entrant guessed that we were cloning Ditlev, our CEO, and in a similar vein a “virtual Caroline Paine” was suggested as well. Sadly for all of us, Ditlev and Caroline are unique, one of a kind!

Quite a few of you seem to have customers with, shall we say, dubious taste. You thought the best thing OnApp could launch right now is a device to automatically remove references to certain celebs from the websites you host.

Our official position, of course, is that OnApp software is celebrity-agnostic, and from that perspective we couldn’t possibly comment. However, more than a few of us have worked in or run hosting companies, and were secretly impressed.

Some of you were spot on!

Finally, we said we’d award a prize to the most accurate guess – and a fair number of guesses were right on the money. Since it’s a many-way tie for the “most accurate” iPad prize, it seemed only fair to pick one of those guesses at random.

And the winners are…

We promised an iPad 2 to the people who made the most accurate, the most entertaining and the freshest guesses in our competition. And so, in reverse order…

Best Fresh Guess:

This was actually the hardest to judge, but eventually we decided to award the prize to RSKeens for his “recursive cloud” idea. Having a cloud host more clouds (and so on, ad infinitum) suggests to us that someone has spent a bit too much time thinking about, if not actually going down the rabbit hole. Anyway, we congratulate you - an iPad 2 is yours!

Most Entertaining Guess:

It was close, but in the end our ex-hoster judges decided that OnApp’s celeb-neutral policy should be ignored for the purposes of the competition. An anti-celebrity-reference device was deemed to be the most entertaining guess of all. Of the handful of you who suggested something similar, just one caught our eye for its snappy name – the Bieber Firewall. Our congratulations go to Matt, from HostMist, for his good taste and fine suggestion.

Most Accurate Guess:

Finally, we threw all of the CDN guesses into a hat, blindfolded a passing looter and had him take one at random. So, with commiserations to those of you who guessed right but didn’t win, our “most accurate” winner is Curtis, from Surmounted.net, for guessing we were launching a CDN platform. Good job!  (No looters were harmed in the drawing process.)

Congratulations to our winners. We’ll be in touch soon to sort out your prizes. And, a big “thank you” to everyone else who took part and made us smile.

Now go check out OnApp CDN!

We have three iPad 2s to give away for the freshest, the most accurate and the most entertaining suggestions we get. We were going to award a few Amazon vouchers, but - because we love you so much - we've decided to up the stakes and award shiny new iPad 2s instead!

A few of your guesses so far...

We've had some clever, funny and just plain weird suggestions...

• Ferret-powered hosting?
  Er, probably not. Although ferrets are certainly flexible and quick to deploy.


• Cloud software for hosts?
  That's kind of what we do already :]


• A new type of chocolate bar?
  No, but it is pretty tasty...


• A device for triple-billing hosting clients if they mention certain celebs on their websites?
  Now we're talking!

Can you do better?

Guess what's fresh and win a shiny iPad 2!

Hosting providers have a real market opportunity to sell more flexible, profitable cloud services to traditional dedicated and shared hosting customers – who in turn want the increased reliability, convenience and pay-per-use pricing of the cloud. In the enterprise, IT infrastructure is in transition from silos of compute and storage to private clouds capable of flexible resource allocation, greater scalability, increased utilisation and better cost efficiency.

Whether you’re building a private cloud for internal users, or a public cloud for paying customers, the first challenge is finding the best way to “cloud-enable” that IT infrastructure. Some companies build their own clouds from scratch, but for most the quickest path to the cloud is to invest in a third party cloud deployment and management tool. There are many available. This is a vendor-neutral guide to ten areas a company should focus on when choosing a product and vendor.

1. Fundamentals

Top of the list of concerns for most cloud deployment projects: how much it will cost, how long it will take, and how can we ensure return on investment? A good cloud software provider will understand how these metrics relate to your company and industry. Look for clear pricing and implementation timelines, and focus on the value your cloud will deliver to the business – do they understand it the same way you do?

The product roadmap is also important. Your provider should already be working on what your users will need in future, and what development you will require as your cloud and the market matures. Find out what features are planned, including specific integrations, hypervisor support, available virtual machine templates, or support for a range of hardware or billing models. Identify those which will add commercial value to your business, and challenge your provider to do the same.

Key takeaway:

As with any critical business application, make sure you choose a provider with real understanding and experience of what your kind of business needs to successfully deploy a public or private cloud.

2. True cloud, not just virtualisation

There are lots of products that claim to “cloud enable” your infrastructure. Not all clouds are created equal, however. One example of this is automatic failover: if you don’t have it, you don’t really have a cloud – it’s a fundamental characteristic. The type of cloud support and the depth of cloud management capability also vary greatly between software platforms. Check whether a product supports public, private, hybrid or VPS cloud, or all of them. Other key focus areas are set-up time, load balancing, autoscaling, automated billing, secure multi-tenancy, firewalling, hypervisor support, and speed of provisioning for virtual machines.

Look for as much automated capability as possible, for the kind of cloud hosting you plan to deliver, to minimize the effort of provisioning and managing your cloud hosting service.

Key takeaway:

Not all cloud products are created equal. Insist on functionality that gives you maximum automation and efficiency. Above all, find a product that gives you the flexibility to adapt to the market as it evolves.

3. Time to “cloud-readiness”

Rapid deployment of public cloud services is not just a “nice to have”. A land grab is underway in public cloud hosting, fuelled by customer demand. Cloud hosting margins are as high as 50%, with low customer acquisition costs. Even six months from now the market landscape will be dramatically more competitive. Demand for private cloud infrastructure in the enterprise is also accelerating, and rapid deployment can naturally help to keep costs down.

Guaranteed speed of deployment to cloud-readiness from your chosen cloud software provider is essential. They need to show evidence of a bug-free platform, proven deployment and examples of the software in action. This is where expertise in real-world cloud deployment; your industry; and in user and billing management, server, network and SAN set-up, security, and integration really shows its worth.

Cloud software providers with a tailored product should have built their understanding into it. Aim for a complete implementation within a couple of weeks; in six months you could be too late.

Key takeaway:

A lengthy cloud deployment increases the risk of late entry into the public cloud hosting market where early adopters have become established leaders. For enterprises, slow cloud transition risks the need for fresh capital expenditure on new hardware, and operational inefficiency of existing infrastructure. Measure your deployment in days, not months.

4. Cost

Every move to the cloud should have its costs carefully scrutinised. For hosts, launching a public cloud business has to be profitable; building a private cloud in the enterprise demands clear cost structures to accurately budget for the lifetime of the project. In each situation, you need complete transparency from a cloud software provider.

Get the basics right by understanding what investment is required from you up front, the ongoing pricing model and contractual terms. Look out for any hidden costs in set-up, deployment and integration. SAN set-up can often be an additional hidden cost, and support also appears as an extra with some providers.

The ideal scenario is probably to run a proof of concept with the cloud software provider before committing. There may be a small investment required to build a working cloud and test the software, but you should not need to invest huge sums up front: best-in-class functionality can be had without much investment, or on a free trial basis.

Key takeaway:

The cloud management software market is increasingly competitive, and best-in-class functionality can be yours for little or no investment up front. You need to have a very good reason to insist on software with monolithic licensing and prices for integration, implementation and support.

5. Billing

Billing flexibility is critical. In public clouds, billing flexibility drives profitability for the host, and at the same time gives cloud customers more choice. The more things a host can measure and charge for – CPU, RAM, storage space and so on – the better they can design cloud services with the features and pricing different kinds of customer need, at a price point that makes sense. In private clouds, billing flexibility is more about efficient use of resources, by enabling accurate measurement of resource usage, and financial transparency for reporting, cross-charging or cost allocation purposes.

In each scenario, your cloud software’s billing functionality is critical. The minimum standard should include options to bill for CPU cores and share; disk space, both primary and backup; RAM; IPs and bandwidth; and IOPS. Also advantageous is the ability to bill for multiple tiers of resource, and to charge for idle or reserved resources. Finally, check the terms of utility billing. Not every customer wants to pay as they go, so look for a cloud management product that offers daily, weekly and monthly models, or a mixture.

Integration is also important here. Whatever type of cloud is being deployed, it’s important to understand the cloud software’s compatibility with existing billing engines or internal charging systems. Check which standard integrations have already been built, and who will pay for any integration work required.

Key takeaway:

Don’t assume that moving to the cloud means you have to adopt new billing platforms and utility billing models and a small set of billing options. Billing flexibility will be critical to the success of your cloud project.

6. Hardware compatibility

Whether a cloud is built on high-end racks or much less impressive hardware, the resources provisioned to customers and users are the same: a CPU resource is just a CPU resource. In spite of this, however, it is important to consider what hardware a cloud management product enables you to build your cloud on.

Different approaches to cloud deployment and virtualisation have different kinds of hardware requirements: some insist on homogenous hypervisor servers, for example, while other products can create clouds from a mix of hardware. Enterprise data centres tend to house a set of best-of-breed vendors, and are more likely to offer a standard hardware platform for cloud creation. Some hosting providers will have comparable hardware: others will be looking for ways to utilise older servers.

Both public and private cloud operators, however, will benefit from cloud enabling products that support the broadest possible mix of hardware for hypervisor servers and SANs. Not only does this provide more flexibility in the way a cloud is architected, it provides the potential for more efficient use of hardware in the future. Hardware that is due for a refresh may find a new lease of life provisioning CPU and RAM resources in the cloud.

Key takeaway:

Compatibility in server and storage hardware is a critical success factor for cloud projects. Focus on platforms that support the widest range of hardware types and performance levels; that enable you to re-use your existing servers and SANs; and providers that can help with any hardware investment you need to make.

7. IOPS monitoring

IOPS monitoring (disk Inputs/Outputs Per Second) is central to cloud efficiency and performance. Most cloud providers, public or private, have the ability to allocate chunks of CPU, disk and RAM to a user, and of course measure and (if required) bill for those resources. Being able to do the same for IOPS, however, is much rarer.

IOPS monitoring is important because of the dependence cloud hosting has on storage performance: a single virtual machine may consume minimal CPU and RAM, but generate intensive disk access and reduce disk performance for other users. In public clouds this is easy to mitigate by charging more for heavy IOPS users. In private clouds, there may be interdepartmental charges involved, and there will certainly be value in understanding how IOPS performance impacts overall cloud performance.

Tiered storage in the cloud is another consideration for distributing IOPS and maintaining performance levels. Multiple tiers of storage from multiple sources, and multiple disks per virtual machine, can go a long way to alleviating potential IOPS bottlenecks – and therefore, performance problems for customers. This is also a key feature to look for in cloud management software.

Key takeaway:

Unless you have good reason, avoid cloud management systems that cannot monitor IOPS or that don’t offer flexible tiered storage and swap disks.

8. User permissions

Another area to focus on is how well a cloud management product handles user permissions and limits. Granularity is the secret here. The more control a cloud platform provides over what users are allowed to do, the better it will be at delivering services tailored to the precise needs of those users.

As a minimum, a host needs a simple way of controlling permissions and limits to create all of the typical user types – standard users, VIP or power users, resellers, and its own L1/L2/L3 support teams. Beyond this, look for cloud management software that will enable you to offer premium and add-on services by enabling you to set up different user types with access to specific management features – higher-performing storage, remote access to virtual machines, advanced backup options, and so on.

In the enterprise, IT departments need to balance performance to the user with resource efficiency. The ability to categorise users, and control their profiles and permissions, allows private cloud operators to optimise sharing and allocation of resources to users across the business.

Key takeaway:

Look for cloud software that gives you granular control of user limits and permissions, so you can create the cloud service your users need.

9. Usability

Self-service is a fundamental characteristic of the cloud. The cloud’s back-end may be complex, but the user interface should be simple enough for anyone to use.

In public clouds the front-end has a direct impact on the quality of the customer experience, with a corresponding impact on sales. It also affects productivity for system administrators, support and billing teams.

In private clouds the same is true: user experience and productivity depend on the quality of the interface, and just like in a hosting business, the UI should meet the needs of a broad range of users with different experience levels.

As a result, you should spend time testing the UI from the point of view of different users, and investigate the extent of customisation, localisation and branding that the software provider can enable. Integration is another important consideration, particularly the ability to deploy an alternative customer portal if needed. Rather than the provider’s UI, you may prefer to use an existing control panel or develop your own front end to the service.

Key takeaway:

Focus on the UI from an internal as well as a customers’ viewpoint, and favour cloud platforms that enable you to customise the user experience easily – either directly, or through the API.

10. Support

The promise of the cloud is that it is “just there” – an always-on, instant access compute and storage resource. In the enterprise, cloud users expect their IT “to just work”, and in the public cloud, customers are also buying into the cloud’s uptime benefits.

With automatic failover, cloud users ought not to experience any service disruption. If things do go wrong, however, you will need rapid, high quality support from your cloud software provider.

The key questions to ask your provider are whether support is free or an additional cost; how skilled the support team is, and what hours they keep; and whether 24x7 support includes telephone, live and email support channels; and what response time you can expect. If things do go wrong you will need SLAs with response times measured in minutes, not hours.

Key takeaway:

Since this is the platform on which you’re running your cloud business, insist on free, high quality, 24x7 support from your cloud software provider.

I'm presenting at the show today, at 12:15pm in the Virtualisation and Cloud Theatre, and talking about my favorite two topics: the cloud hosting market, and, of course, OnApp.

Today we have also announced DedicatedNOW as a certified OnApp Cloud Service Provider. Using OnApp software they've put together a great D-I-Y cloud offer - cloud infrastructure as a service for web hosting providers, powered by OnApp.

Hope we see you at the show - and please do catch up with me or the rest of the OnApp team if you want to talk more cloud. We're at Stand A50.

Today should be even better - not least because I'm giving a keynote speech in an hour or so, along with VPS.NET. I'm really looking forward to it.

As a lot of you will know, VPS.NET is a huge hosting industry success story and the first true cloud host for the mass market. Powered, of course, by OnApp :]

Together with VPS.NET's Judah Johns, I'll be talking about the technical and business issues we overcame to enable VPS.NET to become the incredible success it is today. Cloud hosting in the real world!

Don't miss it - today at 10:30am, in the Security and Storage Track theatre, at Cloud Expo Europe. Hope you can make it - and if you want to chat after, just grab me or find us at the OnApp stand, #22.

OnApp has been in development for over two years now, pushing the boundaries of cloud provisioning and management. It's a journey we love being on, and one we're happy to share with our customers.

When we set out to build OnApp we set sail on uncharted territory. With version 1 we learned valuable lessons on what works and what doesn’t in the cloud. With version 2 we delivered a clean and streamlined version of the software that could do more with less overhead. Today we have more than 70 hosts using OnApp to power more than 40,000 virtual servers.

OnApp 2.0 may have gone gold, but the journey continues. We're already hard at work on OnApp 2.1, which will - of course - add more great features and innovations to our cloud engine. The ETA is late December - watch this space.

In the meantime, you can see the latest version of OnApp 2.0 at our "under the hood" webinar on 1st December. Register today!

Everything has been moving so fast since OnApp went live and I really haven't had a moment to step a bit back and reflect over the last few months' development. OnApp was open for business the first of July 2010 - so almost five months ago now, the first few weeks Carlos and I were busy doing demos. We did five or so per day, and landed a lot of important clients during that time.  This was how my calendar looked the first week after launch. Crazy days. 

Now we've got Caroline and Steve doing most of the demos - Carlos and I still join one or two of them per month, we love talking about this stuff - but Caroline and Steve are doing a great job working with clients to find the best configs and solutions for them.

In the few months we've been online we've managed to get a fantastic team of 47 cloud-rockstars - including more than 25 developers, a 24/7 phone support team in the US, and my management group in the UK.

We've got more than 70 hosting provider customers with 40,000 virtual servers in Europe and the US that have created cloud services using our software. That's about  $1 million worth of annualized revenue in licenses alone - not bad for a 5 month old company. 

Customers range from small $1m+ revenue shops to very large $100m+ businesses – though most are in the $5-15m range. UK2 Group's VPS.net is our biggest customer. On a good day they can spin up 500 VMs.

Our clients are typically setting up new cloud brands providing cloud services 'powered by OnApp', or simply using OnApp to underpin existing services. 451Group estimate that are around 450 public clouds in existence so far - in that case OnApp would be powering close to 20% of those.

451Group produced an 'Impact Report' outlining the progress of OnApp. It was sent out in both the T1R and 451 newsletter and it's an amazing feeling seeing it in black and white.

Thanks for your support!
Ditlev

For the full list of changes, see our new changelog page.

Drop by the OnApp stand - we'd love to chat. Shouldn't be too hard to spot us, but just in case, here's a clue...

One thing we always end up spending a long time discussing is hardware, so I thought I'd present you with a shopping list of a decent-sized OnApp cloud setup. Now, we almost have as many configurations as clients, but it might interest you to see an actual real-world list, down to the last detail.

Before we get into the list, a couple of notes/thoughts. This client has gone with Super Micro boxes - the 2U ones with 4 HVs in each. They are pretty sexy - I'm impressed - but personally I'd rather stick to 2 HVs in each box, as it lowers the initial requirements for idle failover hardware. Other clients deploy on DELLs or HPs etc, and obviously OnApp works with any type of server - so the list below is just a suggestion and example of what can be used.

Also, their SANs are built using 7,200 RPM drives - some of you might want to go higher than that depending on your client profile and usage patterns.

Excluding networking, here is the basic shopping list:

1x CP - for OnApp administration setup.
8x HVs - for the VMs and failover of VMs.
2x SANs - for storage running SAN software like Open-E or Starwind for a HA setup.
1x Backup SAN - for backup and creation of custom templates.

1x CP Server

• 1U Rackmount Server Chassis
• 2x Intel Xeon Quad Core E5520 2.26GHz
• 2x Onboard Intel Gigabit NIC
• Integrated IPMI 2.0 with KVM and Dedicated LAN
• 1x 520W Power Supply
• 4x 4GB DDR3-1066 PC3-8500 CL7 ECC Registered RAM
• 2x Seagate Cheetah 15K 146GB SAS Hard Drive
• Adaptec RAID 5405 1 4I SAS/SATA 256MB PCI Express Controller
• Adaptec Battery Module ABM 800 for 3405/3805/31205/31605

2x Hypervisor Servers (2U Twin w/4 nodes)

• 2U Rackmount Server Chassis
• 8x Intel Xeon Quad Core E5620 2.40GHz
• 8x Onboard Intel Gigabit NIC
• Integrated IPMI 2.0 with KVM and Dedicated LAN
• 1x Redundant 780W Power Supply
• 24x 4GB DDR3-1066 PC3-8500 CL7 ECC Registered RAM
• 4x 250GB Seagate Barracuda SATA
• 4x 1x Intel Pro/1000 PT Gigabit Copper Server Adapter, PCI Express

2x SAN w/MaxIQ

• 3U Rackmount Server Chassis SC836E1-R800B
• 2x Intel Xeon Quad Core E5620 2.40GHz
• 2x Onboard Intel Gigabit NIC
• Integrated IPMI 2.0 with KVM and Dedicated LAN
• 800W Redundant Power Supply
• 6x 2GB DDR2-667 PC2-5300 Fully Buffered RAM
• 2x Seagate Barracuda ES.2 500GB 16MB Cache 7200RPM SAS Hard Drive
• 14x Seagate Barracuda ES.2 1TB 16MB Cache 7200RPM SAS Hard Drive
• Adaptec 5805ZQ 16 Port SAS/SATAII PCI-E Controller w/MaxIQ and BBU

1x Backup SAN

• 3U Rackmount Server Chassis
• 2x Intel Xeon Quad Core E5620 2.40GHz
• 2x Onboard Intel Gigabit NIC
• Integrated IPMI 2.0 with KVM and Dedicated LAN
• 1200W high-efficiency (1+1) Redundant Power Supply
• 6x 2GB DDR2-667 PC2-5300 Fully Buffered RAM
• 2x Seagate Barracuda ES.2 500GB 16MB Cache 7200RPM SAS Hard Drive
• 14x Seagate Barracuda ES.2 1TB 16MB Cache 7200RPM SAS Hard Drive
• Adaptec RAID 51645 16I/4E SAS/SATA 512MB PCI Express Controller
• Adaptec Battery Module ABM 800T for Series 3 and 5

Questions? Feel free to contact me directly: ditlev@onapp.com - we'd love to discuss your setup as well.

The survey also touched upon usage patterns, and they listed three examples:

Application testing clouds: Test labs handle low-risk workloads with variable usage patterns, but are capital-intensive to build. Many SMBs simply can't afford test labs and, hence, rely on vendor partners for testing. This is low-hanging fruit for cloud service providers, and most service providers have answered with testing clouds.

Cloudbursting: This enables enterprises to smooth out variability. While seasonality and one-off marketing events require added capacity, it only requires this capacity for short durations of time.

Backup and disaster recovery: Cloud-based recovery services back up or replicate physical or virtual servers to the service provider's multi-tenant environment, which consists of virtual servers and shared storage. In the case of a disaster declaration, the service provider recovers servers as virtual servers hosted in its environment. With these services, systems can be recovered in hours – with just a few minutes to a few hours of data loss, but without the cost of dedicated IT infrastructure; storage-based replication; and high-bandwidth, low-latency network connectivity between a datacenter and the service provider. This is a net new capability for many SMBs, but for larger enterprises, this represents a low-hanging-fruit opportunity to cut costs.

Tier1's take on this puts the pressure on IT department managers. End users are looking for speed and flexibility, but at a lower cost. The new breed of service providers, who are leveraging virtualization and automation technologies - like OnApp clients - can compete directly with the internal IT shops by lowering the entry barriers, increasing the level of automation and providing more cost effective solutions.

This is not news to OnApp - we've seen this trend within our major clients for a long time, and the applications in use in OnApp powered clouds are wide-ranging. We are pleased to see that the T1 survey validates the market, and we hope that service providers realise that this is the time to move. Clients are requesting IaaS, ideally based on cloud infrastructure, but the number of service providers who actually have cloud services in their product portfolio is still limited.

Improvements

• Added copying the MBR file when converting Windows backups to templates

Fixes

• Fixed the potential for a user to edit/remove schedules of other users without permission
• Fixed an issue with the 'creation of a new schedule' permission
• Fixed a rollback issue with 'build_disk' transactions
• Fixed an issue with IP range generation during network configuration

OnApp clients have now deployed more than 50 clouds and 35,000 virtual servers on the platform.

The OnApp cloud platform provides an easy way for a web host to set up, configure and manage a cloud hosting operation using off-the-shelf server and storage hardware. Once the cloud is deployed, OnApp provides simple web-based control of clouds, virtual machines, storage and compute resources, users, billing and more.

“There’s a lot of fluff talked about clouds, but for web hosts it’s a very tangible business issue,” said Carlos Rego, MD of OnApp. “Hosting customers want more control over the services they buy. They want to be able to self-provision and scale those services, quickly and easily. They also need more flexibility in the way they pay for services. Cloud hosting meets this market need, but it presents a technical and a business challenge for the host.”

“That’s where OnApp has a unique proposition. We advise on cloud hosting business models, and provide a turnkey cloud platform designed specifically for hosts: affordable, easy to use, easy to manage and quick to deploy,” he said.

Dediserve (http://dediserve.com) is one of the recent converts to OnApp. Dediserve offers a wide range of virtual and dedicated hosting services from its HQ in Dublin’s Digital Hub.

Aidan Mc Carron, Dediserve’s Managing Director, said: “Having reviewed a wide range of cloud management solutions, including investing 6 months in our own solution, we were delighted to deploy OnApp. It answered every requirement we identified, and the credentials of the team involved are second to none, globally.”

In a typical host’s hardware environment, OnApp can set up a cloud in about one day. Once a cloud is deployed, it can take as little as 60 seconds for the host to set up a virtual machine and provision a cloud-based service to a customer. OnApp gives hosts a free license for 100 CPU cores for one year, after which licensing takes the form of a simple monthly fee per core and per cloud. As a result, OnApp makes it easy and affordable for a provider to start offering cloud hosting services to its customers, without massive up-front licensing costs.

The gold rush we are seeing now in Cloud Hosting attracts a lot of web hosts, both seasoned and start-up, and while most of them have their business plans in place and their budgets worked out, some make the move assuming that the cloud is "business as usual".

There are three factors that will dramatically change the game, though:

1. Entry barriers - both technical and financial
2. ARPUs - they are lower
3. Overselling - well, underselling in this case

The point about entry barriers is pretty straightforward. I would say most - if not all - hosts are realizing that the cloud as a concept is here to stay, that clients are requesting the service and that hosts need to make the move pretty soon to remain competitive. However, they also see that it's not straightforward to get your cloud offering up and running.

Hosts are typically buying best-of-breed software and tying the nuts and bolts together using the APIs provided, like Ubersmith+cPanel, WHMCS+Parallels etc. And that is the approach hosts would prefer for the Cloud as well - it's obviously the approach we've taken here at OnApp, and we feel that's part of our early success. The technical entry barriers are significant, and that is surely the main reason there are 'only' 3-400 cloud hosts out there (out of around 33,000 hosting companies).

Also, from a CAPEX perspective the Cloud is something of a game-changer - simply put, your first dedicated server client would cost you whatever the dedicated server costs (like, $2,500 or so). However, your first cloud hosting client would cost you quite a bit more to get online, typically $10-20,000, as you would need your fully redundant infrastructure in place before getting started. Now, your cloud hosting business segment - when scaled - would be way more profitable than your dedicated server offering: but you need to accelerate your signups to get above water on your initial CAPEX setup.

And yes, your ARPU goes down compared to your dedicated server clients. When your clients sign up to a utility-based billing model, their actual usage will be the base of the recurring revenue and typically a dedicated server is utilized less than 30%, so you will see a lower ARPU from day one. However, you are able to work at a higher margin and you can offer a wider range of add-on products to enhance your profitability. This is a structure closer to shared hosting, and your ability to acquire customers at a low CPA will be key for your business.

Finally, if you are running a shared hosting business, overselling is probably a key part of your business model. In the cloud business model it's very hard to oversell as you need to leave room in your infrastructure for clients scaling up (when your clients end up on the front page of digg.com) and for hardware redundancy.

The image above was part of the slidedeck I used for my presentation at the conference, and it is meant to illustrate overselling using the analogy of your average airline company. We've probably all tried boarding an oversold airplane - or been offered compensation if we agree to give up our tickets because a flight was overbooked. Typically airlines are oversold between 5-10% - and that works out fine, because thats the percentage of passengers that tend to be "no-shows".

That is a model that shared hosting businesses have adopted very successfully. Typically a shared server is oversold more than 500% or more.

Dedicated server providers obviously can not oversell hardware to the same extent, as it is 1:1 - one server to one client. Overselling is still done at the network level, though.

However, with cloud hosting you are actually pushed into underselling, as you have to set up your full airplane infrastructure, but only fill up 80-90% of the seats because your passengers might multiply 'mid-air' (when getting on digg.com). That is a serious game-changer and something that has to be thought through before launching your cloud hosting business.

TheWhir.com has a writeup on my session: you can read about it here.

Feel free to send me any questions you have about everything above (ditlev@OnApp.com) - would love to discuss with you!

Best,
Ditlev

New features

• Added power cycle to VMs for the restore backup process
• Added power cycle to VMs for the rebuild process
• Added a permission to allow/disallow adding extra IPs for VMs
• Added formatting disk after building

Improvements

• Wide range of API improvements

Fixes

• Fixed issues with migration between hosts sharing common data stores
• Fixed reboot hypervisor issue
• Fixed login output for Windows VMs
• Fixed losing port speed limits after hot migration
• Fixed disabling backup schedule
• Fixed issue with removing disks action through stop/start VM
• Fixed failure on creating VMs with max RAM allocation when user limits are not divisible by 256

For a low monthly fee, hosting companies can deploy the entire JumpBox library of ‘ready to use’ web applications in the cloud, using OnApp’s unique elastic cloud engine, while benefiting from easy upgrades to those applications from JumpBox. The result is significantly reduced cost, complexity and time to deployment for the applications that hosting providers’ customers want to use. The monthly fee includes unlimited user access per cloud.

“The combination of OnApp’s highly configurable cloud hosting engine, and JumpBox’s ‘ready to use’ web applications, makes it simple for hosting providers to deploy and manage the applications their customers need,” said Carlos Rego, MD of OnApp. “With more than 50 JumpBox applications available today, a low monthly fee, and OnApp’s unique approach to cloud hosting, our clients can expand the services they offer in a very quick and cost-effective way.”

“With the combination of JumpBox and OnApp, hosting providers now have a ready library of application solutions for their customers,” said Kimbro Staken, CEO of JumpBox. “Adding these easy to deploy applications to a hosting service encourages increased usage by hosting customers and higher revenue for the hosting provider. Plus, since the library gains more applications over time, the provider’s revenue opportunity just continues to increase while the low monthly fee stays the same.”

OnApp’s elastic cloud engine enables hosting providers to set up and manage cloud and virtual servers on commodity hardware, extremely quickly, using virtual machine templates and a web-based user interface. JumpBox makes it simple to deploy and manage Open Source web applications by packaging each one as a ‘ready to use’ virtual machine.

With the library of JumpBox virtual machines available through OnApp, hosters and other service providers can quickly deploy, configure and manage cloud-based applications – from blogging and content management systems to wikis, bug trackers and e-commerce platforms – to meet the needs of their customers.

The OnApp cloud hosting engine is licensed to users on a cost per CPU core and cost per cloud basis, but is currently available with a full year’s free trial. See http://onapp.com/onapp-pricing/ for details.

About JumpBox
With customers in forty countries and over 350,000 JumpBoxes distributed to date, JumpBox is the recognized leader in providing hassle-free Open Source server software. JumpBox enables businesses to deploy a wide array of collaborative infrastructure in minutes across a variety of computing environments. Offering the convenience of a SaaS-based service and the control and flexibility of private, run-anywhere instances, the JumpBox service enables IT admins to concentrate on extracting value from their software rather than maintaining it. For more information, visit JumpBox on the web at http://www.jumpbox.com

About OnApp
OnApp is one of the fastest growing cloud platforms in the market, with over 30,000 virtual servers deployed in less than two years. Designed for the needs of the hosting market, OnApp enables hosting providers to set up public or private clouds based on commodity hardware, and deploy customizable virtual machines in just a few clicks. OnApp uses multi-hypervisor technology (such as Xen and KVM) to ensure complete security and isolation for virtual machines. It also offers unrivalled scalability, with virtualization management that enables service providers to optimize their use of server resources, creating the potential for significant hardware and energy cost savings.

Features

• Implemented user dashboard view: when users log in to the Control Panel, they see the resources used by each VM marked in different colors per VM
• Added possibility to suspend and delete users. When a user is suspended, all VMs are stopped and login disabled. When a user is deleted, all VMs and other resources are scheduled to be destroyed
• Added NTFS resizing and provisioning of hosts larger than template size. The system now also prevents provisioning of hosts smaller than template
• Introduced PHP API Wrapper
• Added permissions that allow restricting access to transactions/logs and their details
• Added time zone settings to user profiles
• Implemented running automatic backups

Improvements

• When adding an IP to a VM, users can choose between viewing unused or used IPs in the list
• The Reset button at the Users->Your_User->Edit menu now resets all the fields
• Improvements related to granting permissions to users. Fixed Usage Statistics, Hypervisor's VM list, See own backups, and See own disks permissions. Added permissions on Settings
• API-related improvements: added possibility to view status, usage, profile info, and the list of all permissions/IDs through the API
• Extended the contents of logs
• Added sliders showing new prices during the VM resize
• Improved hot migration of VMs between hosts sharing common datastores. Added rollback to hot migrations for safety
• Implemented slider that sets the port speed, as well as the Unlimited checkbox that nullifies the value set by the slider

Fixes

• Fixed wrong values shown after RAM allocation
• Fixed users not allocated max value for the Primary disk size field during VM creation
• Fixed cancellation of pending tasks for a VM
• Corrected disk usage calculation and display on the Dashboard
• Fixed the misbehaviour of creating the power off VM task two times
• Fixed creating a disk, adding a new one, or allocating a Swap disk with more resources than allowed by the limits
• Fixed the issues with the minimum and maximum disk sizes set during the VM creation
• Removed possibility to create or assign memory more than available on Hypervisor
• Fixed HV monitor timing out under heavy disk IO load
• Fixed VMs attempting to hot-resize when powered off

We would love to touch base with you - so if you are around Houston or Vegas, let me know (ditlev@onapp.com) and I'd be happy to meet up and talk cloud.

Best, Ditlev

Most of our clients are service providers (ISPs, Webhosts, DCs etc) and they are setting up OnApp in order to offer some flavour of cloud hosting to their clients. There is a huge difference in the offerings they have in mind, though.

We've got clients deploying high-end multi-10g HP/NetApp powered enterprise solutions, where everything is set up for High Availability (HA) on branded hardware in SAS70-II DCs. They love the failover features built into OnApp, and the fact that we allow several storage devices to be attached to the same VM/Cloud/HV/etc. They demand flexibility and reliability and they are very focused on the fact that we have VPS.NET with their large userbase (30k servers) as a proof of our scalability.

The enterprise clients are also those digging most into our security features like anti-sniffing, custom firewalls etc. Typically we have 2-3 demo sessions with these guys, followed by an OnApp install in their DC so they can try to break it on their home turf. Integration takes a few days because most of the enterprise clients run custom billing/CRM systems.

Then we've got a lot of clients asking for HA-on-a-budget. These companies take their business and clients serious, they want to provide the best possible service to them - but they are also sensitive to prices and they know their market segment very well. They are typically very hardware and network savvy and know exactly what sort of offering they want to deploy and at what cost.

They are deploying Open-E, Openfiler or Nexenta SANs on commodity SuperMicro boxes. These clients are typically very creative, and it's an interesting process putting the solution together. Integration is normally easy as they use standard billing systems such as Ubersmith, WHMCS or Hostbill - OnApp works really well with those.

We've also seen a few SaaS companies signing up. They typically set up smaller clouds, with 2-3 hypervisors only - and they actually do not give their clients access to the OnApp GUI. Generally they just set up a template with their SaaS application in OnApp and deploy an instance for every client. OnApp takes care the deployment, IP settings, password settings etc etc. These clients typically integrate fully using our RESTful API, and so far they seem to grow fairly fast.

The demos and client installs are great fun for us - there is nothing like seeing our software being put into good use.

Best,
Ditlev

Carlos, the MD and Chief Architect is @nullmind on Twitter, and here on LinkedIn. I am @ditlev and here on LinkedIn.

Also, I am speaking at Hostingcon in Austin again this year. OnApp has a booth there, and we'd love to touch base with you, so drop by if you're around.

Best, Ditlev

A quick post to thank you for the support during our launch. And, wow - what a launch we had. We've done more than 25 OnApp demos (check out my calendar) the last 2 weeks. It's been great fun, we've had so much fantastic input and ideas to make OnApp even better.

We use tungle.me as our demo booking system, and it has been a lifesaver: without their service we would never have been able to squeeze that many demos into such a short timeframe. Btw, book your demo here if you haven't already.

We've also signed our first 12 service providers (with more to come) and 5 of those are already live ... selling cloud hosting to their clients, powered by the OnApp platform. It's just the best feeling ever, seeing something that we've worked on for 2-3 years finally being put to good use, setting servers live, providing cool services and producing a good margin for our new clients. I couldn't be happier :)

The demo-process has been interesting in many ways - like, we thought we had to start by explaining "the cloud" as a concept ... that has not been the case at all. You all 100% get it, but you've been looking around for a long time for the right turnkey platform to get your cloud business unit started. That's actually quite a bit like when we started the development of OnApp.

A bit of background
As you may know, OnApp is funded by some of the investors behind UK2Group (where I was the CEO) and it actually began as a platform for the UK2Group cloud brand called VPS.NET that launched back in early 2009. VPS.NET was a fantastic success. We sold more than 10,000 servers in the first 6 months - and more than 25,000 servers so far. It is the fastest growing entity in the UK2group, and it is showing great promise for the future.

When UK2Group started the process of building VPS.NET I was looking around for a good turnkey cloud platform that I could use. I spoke with the all the other solutions on the market (really, all of them), they all had good set ups, but not flexible enough, too pricy, or no large installed base etc etc... and while I really did not enjoy the idea of us building our own platform, I saw no other option.

So I hired a team of developers headed up by Carlos Rego (who was a senior guy at Parallels at the time, and had experience from Cpanel, and Hsphere (MD)), and we got cracking. Some 6-8 months later we were ready with an initial beta platform, and after about a year of development in total we came out of beta. VPS.NET sold 10k servers in the first 6 months.

Around a year ago, VPS.NET started to see a lot of interest from other webhosts in the market. They wanted to provide a "VPS.NET-like" product to their clients. We built APIs, and set up an OEM version of VPS.NET, and that was fine for most webhosts - so VPS.NET managed to build a strong reseller client base, now representing around 30% of the revenue. Those clients were all running on the VPS.NET infrastructure, but with a white label setup, so there was no easy way for their clients to see that VPS.NET was the actual provider.

For some hosts it was not enough, though. The larger guys wanted the VPS.NET technology, but on their own hardware/datacenters/infrastructure. They did not like the idea of VPS.NET powering a core part of their business, since they felt out of control in case of hardware failures, and they wanted to run their own networks and so on.

However, we could not install VPS.NET technology in external datacenters, as the code was very customized, and there was no structured set up for support/service/pricing/etc outside of VPS.NET.

The demand was huge, though, and as a reaction to that we decided to set up OnApp - a software company focused on developing cloud hosting platforms for service providers. We made that decision about 6-8 months ago, and we hired 20+ developers for the project, worked on product development, business plans, pricing etc. OnApp is now an individual company, with its own management team and funding, now totally split out of UK2Group.

That was a bit of background - Next week we will announce a bunch of cool partnerships that will make it even better to be an OnApp client - and we have so much more on the way. I'll catch up with then and tell you more.

:)
Ditlev

PS. Btw, we will be at HostingCon in Austin, Texas next week - stop by our booth if you are there.

OnApp is an elastic cloud platform for service providers, tailored to the hosting market, with ease of use and maintenance at its core.

Over the coming weeks we will be adding more content to our site. In the near future you can expect information on additional resources such as Webinars, Conferences and much more.

Please make sure you schedule a demo to find out more... it only takes 90 minutes and it will amaze you what OnApp can do. Or contact us for more information.