Stacy and Jim, can you tell us a bit about your backgrounds and about HostMySite? Jim: I am the Director of Infrastructure for HostMySite. I am primarily responsible for our data center operations.
Stacy: I’ve been with HostMySite for 18 months. Previously, I was an IT executive with a number of IT consulting firms. At HostMySite, I am focused on leading our sales strategy. We have been growing organically at well over 50% a year for the last six years, and not a lot of companies can say that. We commit to our customers that when they call, we will answer the phone in three rings or less, which we do more than 90% of the time. We also commit that the person who answers the call will be the person that will resolve your ticket, and to date we’re running at a 94% resolution rate for the first person you talk to.
We also have a wonderful relationship with Microsoft, and we are predominately a Microsoft-based hoster. Microsoft gives us a nice package of software to build products around. What’s led to your preference for Microsoft-based solutions? Stacy: The thing we really like about Microsoft is that their suite of products was designed by one company to work together.
All the pieces of the LAMP stack grew independently, and they were built by different groups who had different end goals in mind for their piece of the stack. With Microsoft, you know they started off with a strategy to develop an enterprise suite of products that you could run a business on. With LAMP, we just get a set of products that happen to work together; it’s not by design.
What is the benefit from your perspective of having products that are more tightly integrated? Jim: It is predominately speed and ease of use. We can rapidly deploy a Microsoft-based solution. What we get from Microsoft is extraordinary plug-and-play software.
With the LAMP stack, we have to knit things together to meet our customers' needs. The LAMP stack is essentially missing some “glue” at times between parts of the stack. With the LAMP stack, if you do not have a tech who is able to solve the very complex problems that can arise, it can be difficult to stitch a solution together. It is much easier to deploy a site based on SQL Server and IIS than a LAMP-based site. For example, setting up a clustered environment is dramatically more difficult with Linux than with Windows. Stacy: When you talk about ease of use, what strikes me is that in the Microsoft world, you don’t really need a separate control panel. In fact, there aren’t any major control panels that target the Microsoft world, and that’s because IIS is the control panel. In the Linux world, if you want to do some major things on the server, you are going to have to go off and buy a control panel. With Microsoft, on the other hand, they have already thought that out for you and given you a solid integrated control panel.
What has been your experience when it comes to patching LAMP-based stacks versus Windows-based stacks? Jim: If you were to ask me a few years ago who had the biggest challenges when it came to patching, I would have said Microsoft. Since then, Microsoft has really made a transformation in the way they deal with security and patch management. I have found since that transition that patches have been very reliable. Very rarely do we find that a patch is giving us issues in a customer’s environment. Patch management with Microsoft has been very clean, and that’s been great. I can’t tell you the last time we had a Windows-based vulnerability, because it’s been so long since we had one. So there has been great improvement in that area as well.
Now if you look over at the LAMP stack, things can be different. With MySQL, Apache, and all the elements of the LAMP stack, the question is “Are these things all integrated correctly with the kernel?” If they are not and you roll out a patch, you are going to have an issue.
I think security concerns have swung in the opposite direction, compared to years past. I am actually a bit more concerned about Linux-based Web app security now than Microsoft, which speaks volumes about how far Microsoft has come. For example, Fedora’s update servers were recently breached, and given that Fedora is the proving ground Red Hat uses for future development of RHEL, that gives you cause for concern.
How has your partner relationship with Microsoft and Red Hat evolved over time? Stacy: The primary thing we get out of our Red Hat relationship is that we get to put their logo on our Web site. I cannot even tell you who our Red Hat representative is.
Jim: We do use the Red Hat community to solve certain technical issues, and we use their update servers for patches.
By contrast, Microsoft has engaged us at a very high level as well as at a very technical level, so I feel our organization has a good relationship with Microsoft. But from the Red Hat perspective, if they went away tomorrow, it wouldn't be a big deal. We’re invested in the relationship with them because some of our customers want RHEL, but from a partnership or company perspective, we’re not. Stacy: Microsoft has always reached out and is looking to see how we are leveraging their products. I like to know that they are engaged. We sometimes have differences of opinion on how certain technologies are driven to market, or how things are developing around a given technology, but I would rather be engaged at that level with the Microsoft team than try to have the same conversation with Red Hat.
What kind of uptake have you seen for PHP applications running on Windows? Stacy: I think support for PHP is big. We are seeing a lot more of it with Windows than with Linux. The ability to run developer frameworks like Python and Rails on Windows is a big development as well.
Why do you think people are attracted to running PHP applications on Windows?
Stacy: I think most of the reason is IIS 7.0. With IIS 7.0, you have an incredibly powerful tool that is frankly far better than what you get from Apache. You can run thousands of sites on a single server with IIS 7.0. You just do not have the same ease of use with Apache that IIS 7.0 gives you.
Jim: They key thing for me with PHP support on IIS wasn’t that PHP on IIS would perform better than PHP on Apache but that it would perform as well as Apache. When I was looking at the early betas of IIS 7.0, I was looking for IIS to provide a comparable level of stability and throughput to what I had previously seen with Apache. And we did see that.
Secondly, I think it comes down to the configuration tools and GUIs that IIS 7.0 provides, particularly the Web admin tool. The ability to delegate management to customers via IIS 7.0 is a big benefit of Windows and IIS. Stacy and Jim, do either of you have any closing thoughts? Jim: The only thing I would add goes back to a point we made earlier about Microsoft having a leg up when it comes to overall user experience. When you look at the various applications they provide, when you look at the way they are installed, and to the various UIs available, I think the whole experience Microsoft provides is very impressive.
For example, I look at Red Hat clustering right now, and it is a pain in the neck for even the brightest technicians we have to set up. Microsoft’s Clustering Services is a very easy, pain-free environment to set up. I think the setup and configuration of high-availability scenarios is one of the key differences between Linux and Windows. Stacy: I agree with that. I think Microsoft has packaged up a clustering solution that is easy to implement. And when you look at the comparison to Red Hat and Linux, Microsoft has redefined the market in that area.
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