Open source at the business end

• Tags:
• Nt,
• Hosting,
• Open Source Software,
• Expertise

Andrew Donoghue ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 12 Mar 2009 16:01 GMT

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...in Perl and do nascent MySQL scripting — going into my Easynet job, I used to read the MySQL manual on the Tube. So we said if people want a stock-control application that runs on the web, we'll do it.

Were you ahead of the game when it came to internet applications?
We thought there was something in it. We decided to host a machine at Clara.net and sub-divide it into 10 or 15 accounts to pay for it. We used the rest of the machine to do our scripting and as a platform for our web applications.

But what happened was that we were so early in the game — doing things like PHP and MySQL, and shell accounts, and having access to your own Kron Tab and that kind of thing. In 1998, most people didn't do that. We suddenly started getting flooded with orders for hosting. So we decided we weren't primarily a scripting company, but rather a hosting company.

And how did you combine your interest in open source with the hosting business?
We knew Linux and free software very well and, at that time, the term 'open source' was starting to be introduced. So we decided we could do one of two things: become a jack of all trades or a master of one. I had been burnt by running a Windows NT network and had seen too many blue screens, so it wasn't out of any puritanical ideology — I had been at the coal-face and didn't like the dust that came off it.

We decided that if people wanted proprietary hosting, for our own sanity we would send them elsewhere. We decided to focus on Linux and open source and become the best at it in the country — that was our hubristic code at the time.

Have you fulfilled some part of that ambition?
We established quite a nice community of Debian and Red Hat certified staff as well as attracting people such as GNU Project founder Richard Stallman, who hosts his site with us.

We have given talks at Debian conferences, we run a Debian mirror, and have helped run the hardware when they are doing testing. It all started working well and we started doing increasing managed servers, failover clusters and that kind of thing — it wasn't just the shared hosting anymore.

Because we got so much experience with the free-software stack, we were able to put things together like full failovers with NAS [network-attached storage], with firewalls — all running on free software and therefore being a lot more flexible but less expensive than the proprietary stack.

But were customers specifically attracted by your open-source infrastructure?
They liked the idea of a system that would stay up. They would say, 'Our host has to reboot every six days — do you think you can do better than that?'. We would get calls like that all the time.

Open source might be a bit rough around the edges, but over the long term it is a more sustainable ecosystem because the proprietary ecosystems, while they have islands of excellence, are a bit like game reserves with lots of fences to stop animals roaming. Open source has almost infinite room to grow without artificial constraints.

What are the downsides of hosting based on open source, compared with proprietary formats?
The biggest problems are the Microsoft technologies in .NET. But Novell has a project called Mono that allows you to run .NET software, and we have one or two companies that are using it quite happily. But as you know with Microsoft, there will be some little proprietary DLL that isn't part of the standard, which people get used to using. So as long as our customers stick to the .NET standard as published they are fine.

If they have already chosen us for hosting, they know the score and what technologies to use. The free software ecosystem is very rich. Look at Facebook, look at Google, Amazon. Those sites are based on free software technology. So if you can build a Facebook or a YouTube using primarily free software, then it is hard to argue that your little e-commerce shop is too powerful to use those things.

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