Tell us about your role with MaximumASP. Dominic: I was the first engineer that MaximumASP hired, and I focus on the development of new technologies and products. When I started, we had one rack of servers and hosted a few hundred domains. Now we host more than 48,000 domains.
What makes MaximumASP different in terms of offerings as a hoster? Dominic: We offer a core set of products so that we can focus on delivering those products in the best possible way. As you can see on our Web site, we are different from many of our Web hosting competitors because we do not have 32 different offerings. We focus on offering what we do best.
Give us a bit of the history of MaximumASP. Dominic: The three founders of MaximumASP and I came from a mixed Microsoft and Linux-based Web hosting company. Unfortunately, that company was trying to do everything for everyone. They were hosting Linux and they were hosting Windows, but they were doing both in a very generic form. When MaximumASP was formed back in 2000, we saw some glimmers of hope in IIS 5.0. We saw that you could take applications and isolate them if you were smart and knew how to handle it. We did not see any other hosters doing that with IIS 5.0 at the time. We also saw where Microsoft was moving to with IIS 6.0; it was going to allow application pooling that would give you the opportunity to lock the environment down even more securely than was possible with IIS 5.0.
We understood that if we went with IIS and Microsoft, we could make a solid product on Windows. And we knew we’d have a hit because no one at that time was doing high-end shared hosting on the Windows platform.
What are the benefits of having a single vendor provide your entire stack? Dominic: Operations Manager is a great example. One of the advantages of having a management product is that it can alert you as to why a specific error is occurring. For example, if error 1000 gets thrown, Operations Manager will automatically recognize the error as associated with a specific product and provide a typical resolution. It will ask if you would like to implement the resolution or fire off an alert.
That type of integration is huge for us. Because as good as another management vendor may be, they do not have Microsoft’s level of knowledge about their products. Products like cPanel, Helm or Plesk essentially sit on top; they lack that type of comprehensive integration. Microsoft’s management tools are much more tight-knit.
What would you say about security concerns people have about running a Web hosting business on top of Windows? Dominic: Some of the concerns were valid in the past, as was proven with the outbreak of worms like Nimda. In the past, Microsoft put security on the back burner. If you had a security breach, Microsoft’s response was that you, as the hoster, should have locked it down more securely.
But those are issues that no longer exist. I can’t cite a single security-related instance in recent memory that has caused us a problem. I think that many of those misconceptions are carried over from past experiences.
Microsoft has taken the initiative and said, “Every month we are going to address it at the first of the month. If any patches are necessary, we are going to push them out then.” They have made great strides in security. If someone finds an issue, they report it and Microsoft fixes it. In the past, they might have blown off such reports, believing that the incidents weren’t really affecting anyone. That isn’t the case today; they take a keen interest in any bugs or security issues submitted. What about concerns with reliability? There are more than a few folks who say that Linux is more reliable than Windows. They say you have to reboot Windows all the time, etc. Dominic: I don't believe there's a basis for those beliefs any more. If those claims were true, then they don’t have many Windows servers or the servers are not correctly configured. I have 1,500 servers in our data center and reliability is not a problem. They are constantly up and running.
Why do you think people have held onto negative impressions of reliability?
Dominic: I think it is similar to the so-called problem with security. People have preconceived notions, and they carry them for a time. People say, “That is how it has always been, so it’s like that now,” even though it’s nearly a decade later. I think that’s all there is to it. Personally, I don’t see it. Our engineers here are not seeing blue screens. It did happen in the past, with older operating systems such as NT 4, and even occasionally the Windows Server 2000, but not anymore.
What has your experience been like in dealing with Microsoft support? Dominic: I have opened up my fair share of tickets with them. I think, in general, they are a great group of people who honestly want to help you work through your issues. You can hear in their voices that they really do want to help you solve your issue. They are on the difficult problems like pit bulls, and they work hard to help you to fix the problem. They will not blow you off, and they will continue to work with you on the issue until it is fixed. I really appreciate that about them.
What do you like about the management tools that Microsoft provides Web hosters? Dominic: If you’ve used Microsoft Outlook, you’ll feel strangely at home opening up System Center Operations Manager. That’s because the Outlook and System Center teams worked together to provide a common feel. This helps a lot because you can hop in and intuitively know what you are supposed to be doing.
How much visibility do you have into the Microsoft roadmap for future releases, compared to what you can see with Linux? Dominic: We do not really have the option to see the future roadmap for LAMP. We know where Microsoft is going and where they want to be next year, in the next two years, or over the next three years. We see where the community wants to go in the LAMP environment, but there is no single driving force telling us, “Hey, this is what we are going to do.”
Tell us a bit about why you decided to start offering PHP on top of IIS 7.0. Dominic: Let’s say you want to start a Web site for yourself. You decide, “I want to start a mom and pop shop that sells jam.” You’re going to start surfing the Web, looking for components to stick together to make your Web site. You might look for a free shopping cart that gets you quickly up on the Web and quickly selling product. Frankly, if any of the widgets you grab are free, then they are usually going to be open source. They’re usually going to be written in PHP or Perl. So we started offering more and more of those kinds of custom components. We decided we could give customers a shopping cart that runs great on IIS, and is using PHP.
As PHP matured, we saw that security was being tightened. In the past, you had to constantly patch PHP, because there were exploits in it. That security issue is why, for the longest time, we did not support it. But there are more users out there now, and PHP has gotten more secure, and we’ve adapted our business to meet that need—and that is a good thing. From our perspective, if we can get some people who were once in a die-hard LAMP camp converted over to Windows, our situation gets even better. How responsive do you feel the Microsoft product groups are to your needs? Dominic: Microsoft is always rock-solid, and we have an open line of communication with them. We talk with them on a regular basis.
What do you like about what you see in Windows Server 2008 as a Web hoster? Dominic: With Windows Server 2008 I get good capabilities. I can have a bare-bone, command-line operating system with Windows Server Core, or I can install a full-blown Windows GUI OS.
The roadmap also shows a variety of technologies that we will leverage at MaximumASP. We are prepared to move to Hyper-V and to leverage more of Powershell. Since it is going to be remotable in the next version, we are going to be writing many of our internal components in Powershell. We are also going to be utilizing a number of the System Center products that are on the roadmap. What do you like about IIS 7.0 as part of Windows Server 2008? Dominic: They have opened up the product quite a bit. The attitude surrounding it in the past was “This is our product and you have to figure out a way to work with it the way it is.” Now they have opened up the toolbox on IIS 7.0. If there is something you do not like, you can open it up and change it. It is similar to an open-source attitude: “If there is something I do not like, I can change it.” I think that is a great improvement.
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