What are your roles at PoundHost? Steve Belton: I'm the software and systems architect for BlueSquare Data Group, which includes PoundHost.
Matthew Munson: I'm the technical director for BlueSquare Data Group.
What's PoundHost's business mix between Linux and Windows? Matthew: While historically, the majority of our customers were Linux-based, we've been seeing a significant shift over to Windows. We offer a wide range of operating systems, including various flavors of Linux, as well as a whole suite of Microsoft operating systems.
PoundHost is primarily a dedicated server provider, which is 70% of our business, but we also do co-location. Customers can choose from various types of dedicated servers in terms of hardware capabilities, redundancy levels, memory, and storage. Then they can choose the operating system they want to go with.
What's the cost difference between using a Windows-based virtual server solution or a Linux-based solution, from the customer's perspective? Steve: There is no price difference at all.
Matthew: With the release of Windows Server 2008, we've been able to bring the cost of a Windows-based solution to the level of a Linux-based one.
How have you been leveraging virtualization as part of your hosting solutions to date? Matthew: We've certainly got a lot more pressing issues this year, in terms of green issues, carbon reduction, and a possible upcoming tax on electricity use in the UK. That makes us very keen to adopt virtualization. We are seeing a lot of customers shift over to Hyper-V, purely because the cost of the Windows license is negligible compared to the cost of other virtualized solutions.
We also plan to use Hyper-V as the underlying virtualization platform for all of the operating systems that we offer—including various flavors of both Windows and Linux.
What has been your experience in keeping Windows machines updated and patched in a hosting environment? Matthew: Patching was traditionally the customer's responsibility, because we were driving down the unmanaged route as a hosting business, but the combination of Hyper-V and System Center provides us many benefits.
The first benefit is that we can offer centralized patching and server management to our customers because of the suite of customer-centric tools that System Center provides.
The second benefit is that systems management with System Center is an additional revenue stream for us that we wouldn't have had before in an unmanaged-only dedicated server market. We would have had to log in to each server manually and then build up our workforce to accommodate that style of customer engagement.
Because our systems management services are built on top of Hyper-V and System Center, most of our work on a customer's server can be automated and therefore be done by a very small group set of employees.
Within some IT organizations, there is an ongoing perception that Linux is inherently more stable than Windows Server. What are your thoughts on that point of view? Matthew: Some of that was true six or seven years ago. But certainly with the releases of Windows Server 2003 and 2008, that is a myth. A Windows Server machine, if set up correctly, will stay up as long as a Linux server.
Steve: We have Windows Server 2003 servers that have been up for four years with no problems in general and no security problems more specifically. We've also had SQL Server instances up and running without problems for the same length of time.
If you see trouble with a server, it is typically the application that is creating the problems. A poorly written application can obviously take down any kind of server. It doesn't matter if it is a Linux or a Windows machine.
Do you see a lot of customer interest in adopting your PHP offering on Windows Server? Matthew: I think we are at the start of a wave of PHP deployments on Windows. If you ask me the same question in six or twelve months, I think we will have seen a significant period of growth in this area.
You now have equal performance between PHP applications on Linux and PHP applications on Windows Server 2008, and with Windows Server 2008, you have the option to build applications with ASP.NET as well. From a Web application-programming-framework standpoint, there is less lock-in with Windows Server 2008 than with Linux.
What kind of relationship do you have with Microsoft at a business partnership level? Matthew: Microsoft's UK office has given us a lot of support, not just on the technical side but also in helping us come up with compelling business offers, assisting our marketing efforts, and giving us general advice on marketing our services.
Microsoft's relationship with us goes beyond the solution level. They help us with resources and technical guides and help us with any implementation questions that we have. They are also there to help look over what we've implemented and confirm that we've implemented it properly, if we need that.
Steve: It helps that Microsoft has a great deal of marketing material around their web solutions out there. We only have to maintain a small amount of information on our site about Microsoft-specific solutions, and we can send our customers to Microsoft-owned sites for the broader picture about Microsoft solutions such as Windows Server or System Center in a hosted environment.
That lets us point customers to the exact information that they require, and that helps us provide highly effective information very efficiently.
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