SaaS/Hosting Questions

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Permalink Reply by Daniel Leuck on January 14, 2009 at 3:47pm

Hey Patrick. Congrats on completing your move and welcome to the Hawaii business community! We hope you start a trend :-)

The three main considerations we hear are reliability, service and price. A lot of local businesses actually host on the mainland using GoDaddy or Slicehost as a simple low cost option and Rackspace on the high end. We also see some of the local web application companies moving to Amazon's cloud platform (EC2 and S3 for storage) and using RightScale to help manage their systems.

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Permalink Reply by Truman Leung on January 14, 2009 at 8:31pm

Welcome to Hawaii, Patrick!

I run a SaaS with half of my customers here in Hawaii. But I have a VPS hosted on the east coast with ServInt. I plan to supplement that with Amazon S3 for storage and perhaps try out their CDN service.

Of course uptime is very important, but that goes without saying for any hosting service.

Price is somewhat of a non-issue for me because hosting costs amount to low overhead when compared to the monthly subscription income I receive per customer.

What I value most in my host is that they provide a managed hosting service. I can submit requests to have the NOC install software or troubleshoot a problem. I'm primarily a web developer (PHP, Javascript, MySQL) and have no time to learn much about Linux admin. So I rely on my host to help me with server management. They also provide a telephone number answered by server techs in the NOC (not some call center manned by people who follow a script) so I can call them in an emergency 24/7 at no extra charge.

The benefit of having a local host would be that having a server locally might provide faster load times for my Hawaii-based customers.

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Permalink Reply by Laurence A. Lee on January 15, 2009 at 1:01pm

Funny, I'm on the completely opposite end of the spectrum when it comes to SaaS Hosting. I'm wearing the "SaaS Hosting Provider" hat more than the "SaaS Hosting Customer" hat.

Bandwidth, Reliability, Price, and Upscaling Capacity are the key metrics most important to me.

I'm a BOFH, and prefer a "bare bones" platform that I can set things up exactly how I like. I handle all administration, maintenance, upgrade, and upscaling services for my customers, and I'm the 24/7 Technical Support contact for them.

I'd only be contacting an upstream provider if a machine is totally unresponsive.

With this arrangement, I have no worries about an Upstream provider breaking things via "unannounced" software upgrades (a common problem amongst Shared-Hosting Providers), I can self-install everything I need to run the customer's software, and I earn an income as a Value Added Provider.

My SysAdmin services are on par (more or less) with RightScale and Mosso -- which are nicely packaged upscaling management solutions. I just provide a Local Presence as their "Go-To" Technical Support person.

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Permalink Reply by Curtis J. Kropar on February 7, 2009 at 1:11pm

Laurence A. Lee said:

I'd only be contacting an upstream provider if a machine is totally unresponsive.

With this arrangement, I have no worries about an Upstream provider breaking things via "unannounced" software upgrades (a common problem amongst Shared-Hosting Providers), I can self-install everything I need to run the customer's software......

Same, we run a SaaS. Ours is mainly used for homeless shelters, homeless service providers and non profit orgs. We design software that is used to manage all of their day to day operations and conform to reporting requirements for the state and federal gov. As i didnt want to take the chance on being at the mercy of someoen else when it came to managing the infrastructure... we became the hosting provider. As a non profit, we own and operate a web hosting company. Our servers are in Texas but we are in the process of setting up failover and redundancy to here in hawaii in our new facility.

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