Next "must have" web hosting app
May 17, 2005 8:05 AM   Subscribe

Be my focus group! Due to very limited resources the company that I work for can only commit development resources for one emerging technology to be integrated. Understandably I want the biggest bang for the buck. What do you consider to be an up and coming technology/app for web hosting?

Ideally we're talking open source and something customer facing. What are you excited about that isn't already mainstream? Is there something that doesn't yet exist that would make your hosting experience better/easier/more compelling?
posted by FlamingBore to Computers & Internet (36 answers total)
 
Maybe I don't understand the question, but isn't the whole point of a corporate website to deliver the corporate message over the intarnets? You decide what message you want to send, how you want it to look, and that tells you (in a general sense) what technology is required.

Choosing a whizz-bang technology just for the heck of it, and then afterwards deciding what you want to do with it, probably isn't going to make your site the 'best of the web'.
posted by veedubya at 8:19 AM on May 17, 2005


Or do you mean that your company is a hosting company, and is looking to add a new technology to its stable of offerings? If this is the case, then my answer is Ruby on Rails. If not, then I second veedub.
posted by misterbrandt at 8:28 AM on May 17, 2005


Response by poster: veedubya... we're a web hosting company. I'm looking to the MeFi constituency because I know we've got a lot of folks here who utilize the web regularly and are abreast of the latest technologies.

Sorry if the question wasn't clear. I'm looking for suggestions/ideas for a web hosting company to integrate and offer to customers.

On preview: misterbrandt nails it.
posted by FlamingBore at 8:31 AM on May 17, 2005


Also, isn't this sort of strategic thinking something that your CEO and / or senior management team should be doing?

If your core hosting capabilities aren't solid and self sustaining then no amount of whizzy tech is going to enable your company to grow.
posted by bshort at 8:33 AM on May 17, 2005


Response by poster: Please assume that the core capabilities are solid. I'm simply looking for brainstorming ideas from some of the smartest people I don't know. We'll get together as a team and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each option.
posted by FlamingBore at 8:37 AM on May 17, 2005


I don't know anything about your company or its offerings, but it seems to me that if you just offered reliable uptime, high storage space, high bandwidth, attentive customer service and low prices, you'd have your killer app right there.
posted by Faint of Butt at 8:40 AM on May 17, 2005


You know what I'd love to see? Lisp-friendly web hosting.

Also: python and ruby.
posted by bshort at 8:43 AM on May 17, 2005


Ach, now all is clear! My apologies.

For web development, best for me is a choice of languages (PHP, Java, Perl), and a choice of databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL). Given that, and FTP and a choice of shell, I'm happy.

I don't think it exists yet, but what I'd like above all else is the ability to single-step through server-side code. As in, having two browser windows open, one showing the code as it is on the server (not as in IE's 'view source' but, for example, the PHP that's generating that HTML source). The other browser showing the page as it renders. The code window would allow setting breakpoints, single-stepping, step-in, step-out, that sort of thing. Oh, and showing the value of variables. Perhaps allowing those variables to be modified. Please.
posted by veedubya at 8:44 AM on May 17, 2005


so, for example, you're looking for what cms people might want? i quite like zope, which is perhaps not fully mainstream yet.

if you're looking for something so cutting edge it doesn't yet exist, a bunch of people are intermittently interested in doing something with haskell. halipeto, which i wrote, could be used for the page generation (it works similar to zope, but allows haskell functions to generate page content, rather than pythin objects), but it woul dneed integrating with a server front end, better database, and clearer site structuring...
posted by andrew cooke at 8:47 AM on May 17, 2005


Despite FOB and bshort having already declared your question invalid, I'll ask for some additional clarification - do you have a target market, like resellers, hardcore developers or tech-ignorant retail people?

Speaking as someone closer to the third than the second, I'll say I've always found the fantastico installers, with a nice selection of available scripts, to be VERY helpful.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 8:47 AM on May 17, 2005


The competition for Ruby on Rails hosting seems too small at the moment, it's a case of either TextDrive or get a root account and roll your own.

More and more drop in applications for Rails seem to spring up every day and the LightHTTPD / FastCGI production requirements seem to flummox a number of people.
posted by gi_wrighty at 9:03 AM on May 17, 2005


Just add turnkey blog cms installs. Have a customer click a button in a panel and boom! they have MT/WordPress/Blogger, etc powering their site.
posted by mathowie at 9:10 AM on May 17, 2005


Response by poster: I appreciate any and all answers, but stupidsexyflanders is more on target for what I'm looking for.

Without getting into too much detail, I represent a company that has several brands of hosting, therefore several target markets. Retail is the place where I personally see the greatest growth opportunity for web hosting.

Thanks all and keep them coming.

On preview: mathowie... isn't that fairly mainstream at this point or do you still think there is a need?
posted by FlamingBore at 9:11 AM on May 17, 2005


This is probably too obscure to be very commercially viable, but I'd think highly of a host which provided a native XML database (such as eXist) as well as the usual SQL variants. I'm currently developing a web app that uses an NXD as the backend and I'm assuming that I'm going to have to go colo or with a virtual host when it goes live; it would be nice if that were not the case.
posted by IshmaelGraves at 9:30 AM on May 17, 2005


mathowie... isn't that fairly mainstream at this point or do you still think there is a need?

This is why the question is a little tough to answer. for the tech people, blogs are several years old, but my sister got her first blog last month, and most end users I know in Vermont have just barely heard of them. So, if you're AOL or Earthlink, turnkey blogs would be a good thing to add, as would stats packages and all sorts of other smallish cutie add-ons that a lot of people who are more tech-savvy expect with our hosting.

On the higher end, if you want to integrate it, it will have to be something that is already not doing well-enough as a stand-alone app. So, we've seen all sort of studies that show that Instant Messaging is hitting a tipping point among end users, but is there a reason to reinvent that wheel to sell it to your customers? I think of AOL and the hell they wreaked with their stand-alone browser [and other co-branded browsers that hosting companies tried to foist on their users] and I wince.

I think people will be willing to pay for VOIP which, again, is getting standard in businesses but still fancy moon-tech for end-users out here.

Having ways to integrate office tools like word and excel into spitting out compliant code straight to a website would be awesome. Small businesses would love to be able to keep some of their data online instead of in a damned spreadsheet that they emailed around. They could then have a bunch of easy-to-create web forms and functions that manipulated some standard back-end database. Think PHPMyAdmin but so easy that my Mom could use it [and find it!]
posted by jessamyn at 10:09 AM on May 17, 2005


You want to do something that no other person seems to be able to do properly? webDAV access. This is currently a bit of a gripe of mine, but I think the hosting company that can offer something that works as well as iDisk, has domain hosting and basic rights management (e.g. "Hulk Like Friends can add Photo Folder") and is accessable from winXP & macOSX without downloading s/w, reading huge chunks of documentation or phoning tech-support, will do well.

Plus add some sort of technology where photographs dragged into one folder are automatically reduced in size and synched with a blog or a photo gallery.
posted by seanyboy at 10:10 AM on May 17, 2005


Offer mod_perl. Hardly anyone seems to offer that these days without a dedicated server.
posted by Captain_Tenille at 10:11 AM on May 17, 2005


re: turnkey blog cms installs.
If you do offer this, make it right and at least give users the ability to install them into the main Web Directory.

My web Hoster offers turnkey solutions, and they all have to be installed into subdirectories. I can't use the Turnkey WordPress as the main entry point of my site.
Also, a load of the installs ask really stupid questions. Frinstance, What the hell does "Database Name" mean to someone non-technical. Finally, these turnkey solutions tend to fall over as often as they stay up.

So - If you want to do this, do it right!
posted by seanyboy at 10:18 AM on May 17, 2005


Dude, you wouldn't get this kind of expertise from a focus group.

Who are you catering to now? Novice users? Hardcore users? Where is your company trying to head towards? (Retail is vast. What niche in retail?) Where is the opportunity in the market against your largest competitors? How can you provide features/technology that not only is cool, but also has a buzz or referral factor that draws new customers in? Do you have a core brand message? Because I would argue that your filter/criteria should also include whatever supports your brand personality as well (power/useability/speed/convenience/whatever).

You don't want something cool. You need something cool and relevant to your target in an exciting, compelling way that promotes your overall brand.

But this is from a marketing droid that always has to sell/write around/focus group test this kinda stuff all the time and gets frustrated watching potential customers say over and over again, "Yeah, but why should I care?"
posted by Gucky at 10:39 AM on May 17, 2005


What Faint of Butt and Gucky said. You know what I really want? Free reliable access to broadband wherever I go. If my ISP offered a plan where they teamed with T-Mobile (for example) so I could have 10 hours a month of free and hassle-free broadband access in any Starbucks/Borders/insert-ubiquitous-hotspot-here I would be all over it. No bells and whistles, I don't want them, I won't use them. Just give me service.
posted by cali at 11:03 AM on May 17, 2005


Odd: asking non-customers about an exciting technical innovation that can be integrated (spend money) and then offered (spend marketing efforts/dollars) to existing customers.

As opposed to, say:

* Calling your existing customers to ask what they want now, what they find difficult or impossible to do, and what features they think they will need in the future.

* Asking your help desk and technical support staff about changes in the software that would reduce their work (as in, customer needs), eliminate customer questions about features ("why can't I do X; why is Y so difficult to do?"), and generally make customers happy.

* Creating and using a customer advisory (user) group as a sounding board (or even unofficial voting platform) for recommending and prioritizing new features.

* Talking to the sales folks about the potential customers they have lost because of missing features, and the features they think would help them get customers in the future.

* Reviewing what direct competitors offer, to see if they have features that your software is missing.
posted by WestCoaster at 11:33 AM on May 17, 2005


How about JSP, J2EE hosting. No one seems to offer it, other then at ludicris prices. Tomcat is open source.
posted by delmoi at 11:37 AM on May 17, 2005


Something like Alertra, that monitors uptime and page content via checksums every X minutes and notifies you if something's up.

Given that you're the provider, and have competency in maintaining uptime, a simple "content change" notification would still be really helpful. Protect against hacks, unwanted changes, etc.

If you want to get really fancy, some sort of easy to use CVS-like system that would let you roll your site back to X date, etc, and let you easily test site revisions before making them live.
posted by trevyn at 11:46 AM on May 17, 2005


Response by poster: Good lord. Can we stop assuming that I'm here asking for suggestions INSTEAD of all the customary things. With the exception of a "customer advisory" group we do all of that.

I've said it before: I'm simply asking for suggestions from the smartest people I don't know.

So, delmoi - Odd: coming into a AskMefi thread not to answer the question but to piss on it.
posted by FlamingBore at 11:51 AM on May 17, 2005


woah - what did delmoi do dude?
I know some people have this thing against java, but...
You need to apologise.
posted by seanyboy at 11:56 AM on May 17, 2005


Response by poster: crap, sorry - in all my righteous indignation I managed to get the wrong username. Sorry delmoi.

WestCoaster: Odd: coming into a AskMefi thread not to answer the question but to piss on it.
posted by FlamingBore at 11:57 AM on May 17, 2005


Good lord. Can we stop assuming that I'm here asking for suggestions INSTEAD of all the customary things. With the exception of a "customer advisory" group we do all of that.

WestCoaster: Odd: coming into a AskMefi thread not to answer the question but to piss on it.

Dude, you're asking us to do your job for you. Why don't you take the free advice and exhibit a bit of gratitude? If you're not able to come up with a list of exciting new technologies that your hosting company should investigate that's as long as your arm, then you're in the wrong business.
posted by bshort at 12:29 PM on May 17, 2005


Response by poster: bshort: No, I'm exploiting a great resource of really smart people. If you don't want to contribute, that's okay. Don't assume I'm not culling through reams of information that we gather every day. One of you might trigger something that we hadn't thought of or that our users haven't asked for or that our support agents haven't documented.

And frankly, the problem is that we DO have a list about as long as my arm of things we want to do, but we've tied up resources with other things.

I've expressed my gratitude to those that have contributed their thoughts/suggestions upthread, but I don't have to be thankful for you or WetCoaster busting my chops for this. The golden rule of AskMe: AskMe is as useful as you make it.
posted by FlamingBore at 12:38 PM on May 17, 2005


FlamingBore - You'd be better off ignoring answers that you don't like rather than mocking the contributors.

AskMe is as useful as you make it.

No shit, sherlock, but we're not here to do your job for you.
posted by bshort at 12:45 PM on May 17, 2005


Response by poster: bshort... seriously... wtf? Would you like to step into MeTa? Did I do something that was profoundly offensive to you? What is your axe to grind here?
posted by FlamingBore at 12:50 PM on May 17, 2005


ASP.NET support is nice. If you can't go the MS route, put some effort into Mono & its Apache extensions. Other than that, Ruby on Rails and Zope is nice.
posted by devilsbrigade at 2:00 PM on May 17, 2005


I'd like to second the request for Java hosting. Due to some stupidness in basic Java classloaders, it's not too easy to do, and Sun is just getting around to fixing it.

However, a couple of companies seem to have managed it. I would say you don't even need to offer a full J2EE stack.

A way of deploying java servlets (Tomcat, Jetty, etc) would be awesome.

There are so many of us whose primary language is Java @ work and would love to work with it doing hobby stuff also.
posted by PissOnYourParade at 4:06 PM on May 17, 2005


Dude, you can stop reading this thread now. If you haven't already realized you need to implement Ruby on Rails then you're about to miss the boat.
posted by pwb503 at 5:26 PM on May 17, 2005


Along the lines of a one-click solution for installing blog software, I'd love a one-click solution for installing mediawiki.
posted by gwint at 8:05 AM on May 18, 2005


Just as an FYI... For all those people looking for a one click installer for MT or a one click installer for Moodle, check out TeacherHosting.com. You don't have to be a teacher, it's just designed for teachers in mind.
posted by pwb503 at 11:47 AM on May 18, 2005


So, delmoi - Odd: coming into a AskMefi thread not to answer the question but to piss on it.

WTF?! I've never seen cheap JSP hosting, even though it's not much harder to setup tomcat then PHP...

Bite me.
posted by delmoi at 11:56 AM on May 20, 2005


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