AppliedI’s outlook on 2011 and where we’re heading
With 2010 behind us and 2011 well on the way, I thought it would be good to share Applied Innovations plans for 2011.
I know that the economy is recovering at a very very very slow rate and that the mantra businesses adopted 2 years ago of “do more, with less” continues to be the mantra for small business in 2011. Businesses are spending today but it’s still “do more, with less” and it will continue that way for the foreseeable future.
#1 Helping businesses do more, for less with Cloud Servers.
As the e-business partner for thousands of companies worldwide it’s our job to help these businesses meet their objectives and help them “do more, for less”. This is why we rolled out our Hyper-V Cloud deployment two years ago and today we continue to operate one of the largest deployments of Hyper-V online today!
In the past as a website grew it would eventually outgrow shared hosting and have to look to managed dedicated hosting. This meant going from $25-$50 a month in hosting to paying $250-$1000 a month in hosting. For an ecommerce site this is generally not a problem, after all you’ll have more server dedicated to your site and your pages will load faster and you’re likely to see increased conversions as a result (fast website = more sales). But moving hosting is a distraction, costs you time and resources, and is something most businesses don’t want to do too frequently. As a result businesses tend to purchase a larger dedicated server than they need today because they’ll ‘grow into it over time’. This is completely against today’s business mantra of “do more, with less” and this is where our Hyper-V Cloud comes into play.
Two years ago we worked closely with Microsoft to deploy one of the first Hyper-V powered Cloud server platforms and today it powers nearly 2000 virtual dedicated servers (also known as: VPS, virtual private servers or cloud servers). The beauty of this platform is that you can scale (nearly instantly) from 1 CPU to 4 CPU, from 1GB of memory to 32GB of memory, from 30GB of diskspace to terabytes! So long gone are the days of having to ‘grow into it’ because you purchase only the resources you need. You add on top of that our server concierge managed services and not only do you have a managed dedicated server at a fraction of the cost but it’s fully monitored, maintained, updated, backed up and our team is available to assist you 24x7x365 whenever you need us! So task #1 for Applied Innovations will be to continue to leverage our Hyper-V Cloud platform and continue to work closely with Microsoft to make it even better!
#2 Helping businesses concentrate on business through better automation, WebsitePanel.
The other place we’re looking to in 2011 is the reason our customers select our shared hosting platform to power their web applications today. Generally the response is “I just want to give this to you and let you handle it, so I can focus on my business and building value.”.
So we’re evaluating our shared hosting platform and looking at how we can help bring more value to you. One way we’re doing that is improving our control panel. It’s no secret our HELM control panel is aging and needs to be replaced. Over the past six months we’ve been evaluating WebsitePanel in a live hosting environment as part of the AppliedI Labs and customer response has been quite good. It still lacks some of the functionality our customers request but we’ll be working on that. Plus we have a strong relationship with the team spearheading this at Microsoft and the direction it’s going will be a fantastic addition for you. We also have developers looking at an IN PLACE migration from Helm to WebsitePanel so your services would not be impacted in this migration. We’ve rolled this out today for our VPS customers and WebMatrix customers and the response has been fantastic.
#3 Evolve web application hosting, Cloud Sites!
The other place we’re looking is to the future! Applied Innovations is not a mass market discount web hosting provider! We do not provide $2.75/month shared hosting for the family pictures and junior high chess club website. Applied Innovations offers web hosting for advanced web applications that require more than your basic static website. Our hosting offerings are custom tailored around applications like WordPress, DotNetNuke, bvcommerce, aspdotnetstorefront, nopcommerce, sitefinity, kentico and the like. The future of this class of hosting is evolving. Here’s a peek into what our evolution of hosting will bring you:
But wait, There’s MORE!
Yes there always is more. We never stop looking at how we can bring more value, more ease and more performance to you and your business. These are really just the top three locations we’re looking today and throughout the year we’ll be working on some other projects, for example, we hope to launch a community forum this quarter, we plan to roll out a beta of our new web hosting wiki, we’re always evaluating our hosting plans and we’re constantly looking at what new technologies are out there so we can be sure to bring them to you first.
Oh and BTW, next month we’ll celebrate offering award winning Windows Web Hosting for 12 years!
I’d love your feedback so please feel free to comment below and let me know what you think.
