Please take a moment to introduce yourselves and talk about the services that CrystalTech offers. Bob Cichon: I am the President of CrystalTech Web Hosting. I get spread across the entire business—I oversee the technical side, which rolls up under Derek, the customer-facing portions of the business, and the front office.
Derek: And I’m the VP of Technical Operations. I essentially oversee several core departments, including Server Operations, Network Operations, Internal Development and Technical Support.
Bob: CrystalTech was founded over ten years ago, by Tim Uzzanti and Mike Baker. In the beginning, the company focused on providing tools and tool sets for Microsoft developers to easily develop and host Web applications for customers. Our primary customers over the last five or six years have been designers of Web sites who need a hosting solution for their customers.
Four years ago the company was acquired by Newtek Business Services. They saw that CrystalTech would align with their business services, which include merchant processing, SBA secured loans, and insurance, since those match a lot of what our customers use on a day-to-day basis.
I was initially brought in as Vice President of Technical Operations, and I took over as President when Tim left the company. We still focus primarily on Web development companies, but we have a number of customers who have built their own sites and host with us directly.
Why did the company choose Windows as its primary hosting platform? Bob: There are a couple of reasons. First, we have a very intelligent WebControlCenter™ that runs the entire company and gives our customers the ability to do an unbelievable amount of configuration and management to their sites, without having to deal with any humans.
Our WebControlCenter is built for Windows, and it would be very expensive to try to provide the same functionality for Linux. The decisions between Linux and Windows aren’t theoretical for us; they’re very practical. The second reason is that, when I took over the company a year and a half ago, one of my first calls out was to Microsoft to say, "I want to partner with you. I’m working to grow our hosting business, which uses and promotes your products, and I want the same kind of partnership back from you." Truthfully, Microsoft turned around and did that for me. They have given us a great partnership, and I don’t know that a Linux vendor could do as much for us. Derek: Bob hit on a couple things that I think are really important. Number one is the toolsets. Microsoft is making a great effort to reach out to people in the development community, providing them with toolsets that are free and easy to use like Visual Studio Express and SQL Express. These provide a free development environment and a free database. We can also combine that with a lot of what people think of as Linux technologies, things like PHP, that actually works well on Windows. The problem is I think there are a lot of people who just aren’t aware that this runs well on Windows.
Specifically, how has Microsoft been a good partner for your business? Bob: Microsoft has provided a number of opportunities for us. They invited us to the MIX 2008 conference, and promoted us for hosting the conference “Sandbox in the Sky.” That gave us a lot of exposure. The conversation we’re having right now, this discussion…this interview, is an example of Microsoft reaching out to us. We don’t spend heavily on marketing; we use our reputation and word of mouth. Microsoft has done a great job in getting the word out about us.
There are other things that they do for hosters, like the Service Provider License Agreement (SPLA), which provides very low cost licensing for their products in a hosted environment. That’s great for us. As Microsoft has driven opportunities our way, and helped our business, it’s naturally made us more excited about Microsoft, and encouraged us to take a closer look at their new technologies, like SilverLight and Hyper-V. Now obviously, they’re not going to send every opportunity to just us. Instead, they seem to do a really good job understanding the specifics of a partner's business, and they’re good at knowing which partner best aligns with a given opportunity. When something’s a good match for us, they call us. Even though we use CentOS, and Red Hat, we don’t get Sun or Red Hat calling us with opportunities like Microsoft does.
We're just a very technical group of people who pride ourselves on doing a good job. That’s exactly how they’ve positioned us and promoted us, and that is worth the world to me. Not only have they always helped us out every time I have a question or talk to them about an issue, but they also go the extra step to help us look for marketing opportunities, craft press releases, and do other things to promote ourselves.
You offer technologies like PHP on Windows? Bob: There are a lot of technologies available, and we have to carefully select what we’re going to offer. The LAMP stack is an excellent example, because the LAMP stack isn’t just one thing. It’s Linux, Apache, and PHP. Those have to be evaluated individually, and we have to look at not just today’s market share, but where the trends are going. We feel the adoption of PHP is strong and growing, but we’re not convinced that Linux is on the same trajectory. It makes sense to offer PHP, and we think Windows is a good platform to host it on.
It does seem to be true that not a lot of people know how well you can run these technologies on Windows. Has that always been the case? Derek: Maybe five or six years ago several of the management team at CrystalTech had a meeting with some people from Microsoft, and we talked about this very thing. Our message to Microsoft was pretty simple: You need to embrace these technologies. At the time, Microsoft seemed to have the view that everyone should run Windows, and Visual Studio, and SQL Server, and ASP.NET, and everything Microsoft.
But they’ve realized that PHP is out there, and there are a lot of people with experience and even preference for those technologies. So we’re very happy to see Microsoft focusing on interoperability, and focusing on making Windows a good platform for PHP applications, because that’s exactly what we need. Just look at the work that Microsoft is doing with Zend for FastCGI, and all the interoperability work they put into Windows Server 2008. I think some people are shocked to see that Microsoft and the open source community are working so closely together. Microsoft is really putting forth the effort to embrace these popular open source technologies, while they continue to develop their own popular technologies. I think that's absolutely the best strategy. How do you ensure that systems are kept secure? Derek: Personally, I think security boils down to your knowledge and expertise. We are known for providing a secure, reliable, and stable environment. We have not been affected by a lot of issues that have affected other companies. Even in the early days, vulnerabilities like CodeRed didn’t have a big impact on us. Today, Microsoft releases patches on a predictable schedule, and that helps a lot, because patching is inevitable for any platform. The predictable schedule and Windows Update features make it easier for us to build patching into our regular processes.
Have you used Microsoft’s support? If so, what is that experience like? Derek: We've had a lot of great success getting support from Microsoft. We are by no means their largest partner, so I can’t imagine they’re doing anything different for us than they do for anyone else. I can be on the phone with someone from Microsoft like my licensing specialist, and I can say, “Hey, I have this technical question, and I’m not finding an answer anywhere.” He passes it on, and an hour or two later I’m getting a call from someone on the Windows Server 2008 product team, and he's walking us through the process, finding out what our problem is, and getting it resolved.
Now that’s an informal way of getting support, and we do go through the regular support channels as well, but it just amazes me when I’m on the phone with someone who’s building the product, and they’re taking the time to understand and resolve an issue that I’m running into. With Linux, you post a question to a forum. The community is really great about replying with suggestions, but when I have a really important problem, I don’t necessarily want ten different people sending me ten different ideas. I don’t want to try five things and think, “Well it seems to be working.” I want to know for certain that I’ve fixed the problem the right way, and not wonder if I’ve fixed one thing and broken something else. The community isn’t always good at giving you a definitive, “This is exactly the problem, and this is exactly how to fix it” kind of answer Bob: Because of that, we have to have a couple of people in-house that are PHP and Linux experts. If we have a PHP problem, whether it’s on Windows or Linux, we tap them to help solve it.
Even though our Linux business is much smaller than our Windows business, it’s important that we stand behind all of our products. We've had to hire people who were experienced in that environment. You don't offer up a product unless you can back it up by having the support mechanisms behind it. I have experience as a Linux, UNIX, and Windows developer, and I’ve personally had experience trying to figure out the inconsistencies between the different Linux and UNIX flavors, so I know what it means for us to support Linux for our customers. We use a lot of CentOS, and that puts us in a position of having to rely on ourselves for support, because CentOS isn’t backed by a company that you can pay for support. We’re also looking at Red Hat, where we’d have a company to call for support, but in that model you’re paying for that support agreement. So really nothing’s free. You can either hire more senior people and pay that way, or subscribe to Linux and pay that way, but there really is no “free” support if you factor everything in. Is it difficult to find people with Linux and Windows experience? Bob: It’s very difficult to have a single support person know Linux, Windows, the .NET Framework, PHP, and all the other technologies. We bring people on board who have knowledge of some technologies, and then train them on other technologies to round out their skills.
It's true that Linux developers and admins are more expensive and more difficult to find than their Windows counterparts. That's an expense we have to think about when we decide what we’re going to offer and support. A lot of people think that Linux is free because it’s open source, but there's a lot of expense behind the scenes that isn’t obvious. If someone is thinking about hosting LAMP or Windows, what advice would you give them? Bob: If you’re a hoster, you’re going to have people come to you with solutions built on top of Windows, and solutions built on top of Linux. It’s possible to build just about anything you want on either of those platforms, and when you talk about something like PHP, they could even build it on one platform, but host it on another, so there’s going to be demand for both.
But in the business of hosting, it really comes down to knowing what it takes to support the different platforms. You have to keep the platform up and running for extended periods of time. I've supported both platforms in a Web environment. I’ve supported very large-scale production environments, and I can say that when a Linux system goes down, it is a lot harder to figure out what happened than when a Windows system goes down. Windows just has the tools to help us understand what happened, and it’s less complex than a Linux environment. With Linux, you can have system administrators that really know what they're doing, and it can still be very hard to figure out what the problem is. I personally feel good about the fact that I know I can find talented people at a reasonable cost for the Windows platform. From the perspective of a hoster, it’s about the cost of keeping systems up and running and meeting our guarantees. I don’t think it’s any secret that Linux administrators are more expensive and harder to find. | 
