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Help Loic Le Meur (Seesmic) and John Furrier (Silicon Angle) find new hosting
March 29th, 2009 Uncategorized none Comments

Help Loic Le Meur (Seesmic) and John Furrier (Silicon Angle) find new hosting

Loic Le Meur complained about his hosting last night. The other day John Furrier, my former boss, complained his host was down too and he told me that he’s looking for new hosting. Loic runs Seesmic, which includes the popular Twitter client Twhirl and John is starting a new blogging company that covers the tech industry.

I’m not going to pitch them on Rackspace (my new employer). Instead, I’m going to ask you to help them out. After all, maybe Joyent or GoGrid or Amazon’s Web services or Google’s App Engine or Microsoft’s Azure or something else is better for them to consider.

Some things to consider:

1. Uptime vs. service vs. cost. Which one is best? My cell phone number is +1-425-205-1921, how many hosting company employees make themselves available like that? How many have hundreds of people standing by on the phone to help you 24/7?
2. Hybrid approaches, important? Some companies want to have a stack of their own servers as well as keep some things in the cloud. As their file sizes get bigger and bigger having them on the same high performance network might be important, especially as they use new cloudbursting techniques (moving files from their own datacenter to the cloud when they get popular or their own servers start to get too busy).
3. Agnostic from religion? GoGrid, for instance, lets you spin up Windows or Linux instances. If you’ve already built your infrastructure on Windows, that might be important. For guys like Loic and John, though, it’s less important because they are already on LAMP stacks. But still, they might need WordPress loaded. That’ll be tough to get at some hosting companies.
4. Other things? Does your business need hosted email, for instance? Some hosters do that, others don’t.
5. Best-of-breed APIs? Here Amazon and Google are leading the way, but their approaches are very different. Which one might be appropriate to Seesmic or John’s new blogging company? (Rackspace is making sizeable investments here, too).

But if you were in their shoes, which hosting company would you go with? What other things should they consider? Who is doing the best for super small startups like John’s company, or already-established companies with tons of storage needs like Seesmic?

Posted in technology Tagged: datacenter, hosting, storage

Help Loic Le Meur (Seesmic) and John Furrier (Silicon Angle) find new hosting
March 28th, 2009 Uncategorized none Comments

Help Loic Le Meur (Seesmic) and John Furrier (Silicon Angle) find new hosting

Loic Le Meur complained about his hosting last night. The other day John Furrier, my former boss, complained his host was down too and he told me that he’s looking for new hosting. Loic runs Seesmic, which includes the popular Twitter client Twhirl and John is starting a new blogging company that covers the tech industry.

I’m not going to pitch them on Rackspace (my new employer). Instead, I’m going to ask you to help them out. After all, maybe Joyent or GoGrid or Amazon’s Web services or Google’s App Engine or Microsoft’s Azure or something else is better for them to consider.

Some things to consider:

1. Uptime vs. service vs. cost. Which one is best? My cell phone number is +1-425-205-1921, how many hosting company employees make themselves available like that? How many have hundreds of people standing by on the phone to help you 24/7?
2. Hybrid approaches, important? Some companies want to have a stack of their own servers as well as keep some things in the cloud. As their file sizes get bigger and bigger having them on the same high performance network might be important, especially as they use new cloudbursting techniques (moving files from their own datacenter to the cloud when they get popular or their own servers start to get too busy).
3. Agnostic from religion? GoGrid, for instance, lets you spin up Windows or Linux instances. If you’ve already built your infrastructure on Windows, that might be important. For guys like Loic and John, though, it’s less important because they are already on LAMP stacks. But still, they might need WordPress loaded. That’ll be tough to get at some hosting companies.
4. Other things? Does your business need hosted email, for instance? Some hosters do that, others don’t.
5. Best-of-breed APIs? Here Amazon and Google are leading the way, but their approaches are very different. Which one might be appropriate to Seesmic or John’s new blogging company? (Rackspace is making sizeable investments here, too).

But if you were in their shoes, which hosting company would you go with? What other things should they consider? Who is doing the best for super small startups like John’s company, or already-established companies with tons of storage needs like Seesmic?

Posted in technology Tagged: datacenter, hosting, storage

Out of Order 2.0
March 27th, 2009 Uncategorized none Comments

Out of Order 2.0
Microsoft’s Steven Martin has ironically blown the whistle on an attempt at an “open” coalition that freezes out certain companies. Ironic in that Microsoft and IBM played this game years ago with the WS-I, an industry standards group that pointedly stonewalled Sun Microsystems’ involvement before caving under media pressure. In a Google Groups post Introducing the Open Cloud Manifesto, Rueven Cohen describes an effort involving “several of the largest technology companies and organizations” to “draw a line in the sand.”

We are still working on the first version of the manifesto which will be published Monday, March 30th with a goal of being ratified by the greater cloud community. Given the nature of this document we have attempted to be as inclusive as possible inviting most of the major names in technology to participate in the initial draft. The intention of this first draft is to act as a line in the sand, a starting point for others to get involved. That being said this manifesto is not specifically targeting any one company or industry but instead is intended to engage a dialogue on the opportunities and benefits of fostering an open cloud ideology for everyone.

As inclusive as possible? Not targeted at any one company? Engage in a dialogue? What a load of crap that is. It’s the same back room cigar-smoke-filled scam of the good old days when Web Services first began its inexorable move to reshape computing.

Out of Order 2.0
March 26th, 2009 Uncategorized none Comments

Out of Order 2.0
Microsoft’s Steven Martin has ironically blown the whistle on an attempt at an “open” coalition that freezes out certain companies. Ironic in that Microsoft and IBM played this game years ago with the WS-I, an industry standards group that pointedly stonewalled Sun Microsystems’ involvement before caving under media pressure. In a Google Groups post Introducing the Open Cloud Manifesto, Rueven Cohen describes an effort involving “several of the largest technology companies and organizations” to “draw a line in the sand.”

We are still working on the first version of the manifesto which will be published Monday, March 30th with a goal of being ratified by the greater cloud community. Given the nature of this document we have attempted to be as inclusive as possible inviting most of the major names in technology to participate in the initial draft. The intention of this first draft is to act as a line in the sand, a starting point for others to get involved. That being said this manifesto is not specifically targeting any one company or industry but instead is intended to engage a dialogue on the opportunities and benefits of fostering an open cloud ideology for everyone.

As inclusive as possible? Not targeted at any one company? Engage in a dialogue? What a load of crap that is. It’s the same back room cigar-smoke-filled scam of the good old days when Web Services first began its inexorable move to reshape computing.

Atlanta Gets Its Own Y Combinator In Shotput Ventures
March 25th, 2009 Uncategorized none Comments

Atlanta Gets Its Own Y Combinator In Shotput Ventures

Silicon Valley has Y Combinator. Boulder, Colorado (and now Boston) has TechStars. Boston also as of today has Start@Spark. Washington, D.C. has LaunchBox Digital. Philadelphia has DreamIT Ventures. And now Atlanta is joining the seed incubator movement with Shotput Ventures.

Started by a group of Atlanta tech entrepreneurs who want to attract and keep startup talent in the Southeast, Shotput Ventures is accepting applications from young, first-time founders for its summer program. The deadline is April 10.

Mitch Free, the founder of industrial marketplace MFG.com, is one of the backers. He explains in an email:

We are looking for “capital light” web startups. We think there is so much open source software, web services and cheap cloud computing capacity (like Amazon S3) that web business can be prototyped and launched very inexpensively.

Ideally we are looking for a small team of co-founders, most likely still in college. We will pick 8 to 10 teams and give them $25k each so they don’t have to get summer jobs and can work on the product full time. We (all seasoned entrepreneurs) will mentor them through the summer. We will take a 5% to 10% equity stake. At the end of the summer we will pick some to further fund and/or help raise capital and some we will probably kill.

There has been nothing like this in the Southeast. We have lots of great breeding grounds such as Georgia Tech but the people with the next big idea have had to reach out to the Northeast or West Coast to find seed capital and support. Our goal is to create an eco-system in the Southeast to encourage and support web startups. And once they are up and running we don’t want them having to relocate to Boston or San Jose

The first summer round is funded with $300,000. Who needs a summer job, when you can create a startup instead?

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