Number 3 Web Hoster Has Rocking 2013

OVH.com moved from the fourth largest hoster to the third and wants to crow about this and other 2013 accomplishments. In fact the company wants the kind of name recognition of Amazon, Rackspace, Verizon (News - Alert) Terremark and other known Internet vendors.

OVH doesn’t have the strong brand of its rivals in large part because it is so new, having been launched in North America only last year. That’s an infant in the world of Web hosting, and now North America is where it really wants to make its bones. Meanwhile the company has been in business in Europe for 15 years.

“Since its initial launch last year, OVH has attracted a large number of customers looking for effective and innovative solutions. In order to meet the needs of increasing demand for its services, OVH.com is planning another year of significant investments, as well as the launch of major new products and services,” the company said.

As part of the new push, OVH plans on offering an array of new services such as public cloud, VPS, clusters for big data, dedicated cloud for Microsoft (News - Alert) Hyper-V and a new server family and domain names.

These new services are on top of what the company has already done. “OVH has significantly expanded its product range in the last few months: adding anti-DDoS protection to their dedicated server line, launching the Dedicated Cloud solutions (a complete virtual datacenter) and hybrid infrastructures (with vRack 1.5),” OVH said.

Major Buildout

OVH has been building out in North America like crazy, constructing two hosting towers each of which can contain 10,000 servers. And in Canada, OVH has 15,000 servers in production with the ability to grow to 360,000 servers.

Speed is of the Essence

One achievement OVH can’t lay claim to is being the fastest managed hoster on earth. A company appropriately named HOSTING has already staked out this territory.

A recent Cloud Spectator benchmark test found HOSTING to be the fastest – at least when it comes to managed hosting. Now HOSTING wants to share this goodness with more partners under its new Cloud Crew program.

The hoster already has partners, it just wants more and it wants to give its existing friends more options, support, services and revenue.

The new program is tailored to 3 kinds of partners, referral, wholesale and associate.

One partner uses HOSTING to offload its basic infrastructure. “HOSTING is our partner in infrastructure,” said Jeremy Pease, EVP of Infrastructure at Indisoft. “We're a software development firm. HOSTING allows us to do what we do best, and not have to worry about infrastructure.”

We mentioned that Cloud Spectator said HOSTING has the most when it came to managed hosting speed. Their report, Cloud Analysis: Performance Benchmarks of Linux & Windows Environments, found that “HOSTING performs 67 percent greater than Rackspace (News - Alert), and 167 percent greater than Amazon in overall system performance (using Windows).”

Threehosts.com has Different Take

When it comes to Web hosting, Threehosts.com thinks it knows a thing or three. And sticking with that theme, the organization looked at Heroku, Linode and Rackspace and found three very different approaches. OVH was likely too new to be part of the Threehosts’ analysis.

The main criteria were security, pricing, customer service and speed and performance.

Starting alphabetically, Heroku is really aimed at application developers, so it serves as a PaaS. One drawback is that programmers give up some control, but ultimately can get programs written faster. And the PaaS is more easily scaled than on-premises gear.

Next is Linode, which offers raw capacity and virtually no real management. This means customers have to not just do their own software updates, but handle configuration chores as well. These include “things like DNS configuration, control panel setup, SSL certificates creation, scripts and software installation, troubleshooting configuration issues, setting up iptables firewall rules, upgrades, backups, etc.,” Threehosts.com said. If something goes awry, the customer has to fix it.

The benefit of this approach? It can be way cheaper.

Finally Threehosts.com tackled Rackspace, one of the biggest hosting companies, and examined Rackspace Cloud, which like Linode, can be delivered as an unmanaged service. “Rackspace Cloud does not offer a popular control panel like Plesk or cPanel. This company provides a web-based management interface that users accustomed to cPanel and Plesk may feel a bit awkward when using it,” Threehosts.com said. 

While one version of Rackspace Cloud is unmanaged, that does not mean it is unsupported. To the contrary. There are two levels of support. Core service doesn’t include troubleshooting of the software but really focuses on support the raw infrastructure.

Managed Service, which costs an extra $100 a month, includes OS and application support and monitoring. The knock against Rackspace? The services just cost too much money.