New HostingBusiness Suite from Sphera

Sphera's latest additions to its popular HostingDirector lineup resolves thorny access issues between clients, webhosts, partners, and resellers. Consider it technological marriage counseling for complex business relationships.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [October 17, 2002]

Networking issues should be technical, not personal. The webhosting business should be about provisioning domain name services and delivering web content, not about resolving spats for access to servers. The problem is, different entities have different needs. A webhost that partners with a reseller to deliver low-end business services has different needs than a webhost that provides dedicated server access to technically adept clients.

The issue of where the client's access ends and the host's access control begins can often be source of friction between service providers, clients, webhosts, and resellers. Sphera seeks to resolve these types of prickly business relationships with its latest software solution, dubbed the HostingBusiness Suite.

Sphera recently released two new modules extending the service set of its popular HostingDirector software. The two new modules, ResellerDirector and ServerManagement Director, create technical rules to simplify business interaction between all parties concerned.

Tamar Naor, Sphera chief executive officer, said that the modules were developed in response to interviews with Sphera's webhosting customers.

"We found that everybody's looking to retain customers and to give them more but to also sustain a profitable business model. The reseller channel allows you to expand your market reach," Naor said. "We also found that webhosts whose dedicated server clients are running rich websites with e-commerce and streaming functionality want to give full provisioning capabilities to those clients who are willing to pay for the privilege."

As a result, Sphera's new ServerManagement Director features a central pool of patches and upgrades that can be distributed to the site managers who need them, and an element of self-service on the server side that grants clients significant control over the hosting environment, while still protecting server integrity for the webhost.

Avishay Abrahami, Sphera cofounder and vice president of product development, said the idea is to make the technology as transparent as possible.

"The customer experience is paramount," Abrahami said. "But Webhosts never want a customer to do provisioning, because they might, for example, deploy a database without monitoring and data recovery safeguards. If they did this and it failed, the customer would blame the host company."

In order to accomplish this balancing act, Abrahami explained that for ServerManagement Director, Sphera needed to create of a new kind of Linux user.

"Usually, Linux allows you to have a root user or a regular user. Our module allows you to grant additional privileges to the user (your customer), but to protect the machine," Abrahami explained. "It's like 'limited root' access and it allows you to protect your SLA."

Sphera's ResellerDirector solution features:

• Fully customizable branding for each reseller.
• Integration with billing packages, allowing each reseller to offer different pricing schemes.
• Account management, allowing resellers to manage their own accounts with out taxing the host's tech team.
• Automated reporting, allowing resellers to view up-to-date statistics on their own accounts (but not anyone else's).

Naor said that adding billing packages allowed Sphera to provide an out-of-the-box solution that can be quickly implemented throughout the webhost's architecture.

"By integrating billing functionality from Rodopi and Inovaware through Sphera's open API, we built a solution that accelerates profitability by satisfying hosting provider and reseller needs and reducing administrative and operational costs," Naor said.

Abrahami added that both solutions provide new measures of control for hosts and resellers alike.

"If you're a host, you want the reseller to be able to do everything non-technical, such as define service packages and brand the control panel, but you want to charge the reseller more for those functions or ask them to buy more accounts," Abrahami said. "You don't want the reseller to decide technical things like IP addresses, DNS, or the location of a database."

Partnerships for profit
Sphera's sensibilities to resellers and hosts was recently recognized by two blue-chip technology partners. IBM adopted Sphera as a core element of its IBM e-Server xSeries Hosting Appliance, a device designed to compete with Sun Microsystems' Cobalt line up.

Sphera's other technology partner is Microsoft. Until recently, the Sphera hosting solution ran on Linux and Solaris only. But with Microsoft as a partner, the company has developed a Windows 2000 version of HostingDirector.

Naor said the deal with Microsoft is a long-term technology relationship.

"We use standard Microsoft technology, including Active Directory, IIS 5.0, COM+, and MS DNS," Naor said. "Other companies tend to use a mixture of Linux and Windows. We're fully compatible with the Microsoft product road map."

Pricing and availability
The two modules are available immediately from Sphera, and are priced according to the volume of servers managed and the features used.

ServerManager Director is priced at $600 per server. ResellerDirector starts at $5,000 and can be up to $50,000, depending on the features used. Both are one-time license fees.

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