SWsoft Brings Order To Hosting Providers

"We were unable to continue our growth," said Jordan Lowe, CEO of Server Central, a solution provider in Chicago. "We were growing at too fast a rate, and our current systems couldn't handle it."

The company was flooded with as many as 100 new customers a day after running a series of promotions. The start-up today has nearly 5,000 customers and is still picking up new clients.

Server Central solved the problem by reaching out to service provider SWsoft, which is finding many other hosting providers swamped by the details of running a service.

Over the past 18 months, SWsoft has developed a hosting solution designed to take the management strain off hosting providers.

While beta-testing the solution with 100 hosting service providers, SWsoft found that the primary problem was lack of automation. The hosting service providers were growing, but they did not have the staff or the technology to handle provisioning and ongoing support.

"They need to scale in order to reach profitability but don't have the resources to scale," said Craig Oda, vice president of business development at SWsoft. "So we set out to develop a solution that manages and automates all aspects of a hosting service provider's operations."

For $5,000, SWsoft's HSP Complete solution gives hosting providers the ability to manage thousands of customer accounts from one central console.

The technology behind HSP Complete is dubbed Virtuozzo, which SWsoft developed itself. "It automates everything we have to do by hand," Lowe said. "It takes the order, checks the credit cards, sets up the account and registers the domain name."

HSP Complete includes an administrative control panel for the hosting service provider, a reseller control panel for hosting service provider partners, and customer control panels that allow the customer to perform simple tasks such as Web site updates or make changes to components within the environment.

The control panel for the hosting provider features directories that give solution providers access to critical elements of the environment. Among these directories are an operations director for managing the hosting infrastructure, a business director for managing individual accounts, an e-commerce director for setting up storefronts, a systems director for overseeing the hosting staff, and an application director for managing applications and templates.

The system also allows hosting service providers to service reseller partners, complete with service plans and with the service appearing as the reseller's brand.

"Companies that want to resell our service and have their own store is the biggest market for us right now," Server Central's Lowe said.

Todd Robinson, CEO of Linux shop Penguix, Tampa, Fla., earlier this year started providing hosting services to customers.

"I'm just now finding out how much work it is," Robinson said. "With Virtuozzo, I can run multiple environments on one box, and now the customers can add a user themselves, set up e-mail and not call me to do it for them."

Another benefit is the ability to view the resources each customer is using and control or switch a customer to a different environment if necessary, he said.

"If one customer starts to do a lot more and taxes the system, that customer's environment can be reallocated very easily to another server," Robinson said. "It's a blink of an eye to switch over an environment using Virtuozzo."

The technology is proprietary but works with several outside services such as domain registrars, payment authorization vendors and security vendors as well as products by Red Hat, Miva and Macromedia.