Please take a moment and introduce yourself and your company. Michael McGoogan: Sure. I'm the founder and CEO of AussieHQ. We are presently Australia's third largest Web hoster, by market share. We focus on the SME market, in the delivery of a full range of Web services, from domain name registration and basic Web site hosting to complex hosting for corporate, government, and enterprise customers.
So we have solutions that range from a $100-a-year budget solution for mom and dad that want to put up a photo album, through solutions that run services for the federal government and ASX 50 companies.
What are the platforms that you offer hosting on? Michael: AussieHQ offers a range of hosting solutions. We have dedicated Linux and Windows hosting environments that offer shared, virtual, virtual dedicated, and dedicated type service offerings.
We're currently in the process of developing a hybrid offering, which will deliver cloud hosting services using both Linux and Windows operating systems. It will give SMEs access to enterprise-grade ASP technology as well as supporting Linux applications.
What's the motivation for that blended solution? Michael: Traditionally, Web hosters would run dual server fleets: a server farm of Linux, which would run an SOE with a standard Apache, MySQL, PHP type stack, and they would concurrently maintain a server fleet running a Windows SOE, offering IIS and SQL Server.
Customers are starting to develop cross-platform applications, essentially taking applications that have been developed on Windows and mixing them with their Linux Web sites. And to bring those two things together, they have a concurrent Windows and Linux hosting requirement.
So is the hybrid environment basically Windows and Linux virtual servers running on a single physical server? Michael: Essentially, the architecture involves developing a cloud-based infrastructure that uses virtualized Linux and Windows platforms to access common storage with a load balanced front end.
So a customer's file store, which is common to all of our clients, can be simultaneously accessed by both Windows and Linux front ends. And based on URL calls, load balancers will send that call to either the Linux or the Windows environment that calls the file from the common file share.
Do you use Windows Server 2008 for that? Michael: Absolutely. AussieHQ was an early adopter of Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008, through the Go Live program. We were the first Australian host to adopt those technologies in a public offering to clients.
We're very enthusiastic about Microsoft's move towards PHP natively within the Windows environment, and that's certainly made Windows a serious contender as the platform of choice for Web applications.
In the past, people felt that their PHP applications would obviously run on Linux. Are you seeing a change in people's perceptions, where they see Windows as a credible platform for running PHP? Michael: I think it's early yet, but certainly, with the push toward hosted services and SaaS, ISVs and businesses are developing applications that require both technologies simultaneously. This drive is essentially based on customer requirements, and I think what we'll be seeing over the next few years is a strong push toward a single platform.
The Windows Server 2008 platform is the best thing that Microsoft has done in a long time, from the hosting perspective. Support for open source type applications on Windows is a very important trend with Microsoft.
Did you start out with Windows or Linux hosting, or were you doing both from the beginning? Michael: AussieHQ started life as a Linux Web hoster, and over time, we saw demand from developers so we started offering Windows technology. Now the spread is still predominantly Linux, but we're seeing more and more users adopting Windows.
As they become more and more aware of the features that are available within the Microsoft platform, they progressively redevelop their sites and move to the full spectrum of technology.
What I think we'll see over the next couple of years is .NET technology moving to the forefront among the more dynamic Web sites—the SMEs that are employing content-rich, media streaming and podcasting type technologies and people who are integrating traditional office apps with their Web sites.
From a technical perspective, have you seen Microsoft engineering Windows Server 2008 to be a better platform for you to manage as a hoster? Michael: The advantage of the Windows Server 2008 platform for medium and large hosters is standardization. We're able to see cost and revenue separation faster on Windows server deployments.
There is linear escalation of costs and revenue with Linux deployments. Linear scaling isn't suitable for our business, and I would assume the same is true for all medium to large size Web hosters. Human resources get progressively more expensive, technology should be getting cheaper, and so the argument needs to be how can we achieve that efficiency?
It comes back to standardizing on a single platform and reducing the management overhead of large server farms.
You mentioned that you were an early adopter of Windows Server 2008. Was that something you did on your own, or did Microsoft engage with you and partner with you to do that? Do you find that Microsoft is invested as a partner in your success? Michael: The support that we've seen from Microsoft across the last 18 to 36 months has been absolutely fantastic. We are very, very appreciative of that support, and we look forward to strengthening our relationship.
In terms of your engagement with Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, or the MySQL team, do they reach out and partner with hosters, and really work for your success, or are you kind of on your own with open source technologies? Michael: Well, I think it comes down to the fact that open source is free. [laughs] When a technology is free, you don't have the same relationship. Open source vendors do not engage with Web hosters, and they're not expected or encouraged to.
I don't think that Web hosters extract the full value of open source technology, because there is no relationship with open source vendors.
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