GoGrid, and parent company ServePath, are excited to announce participation in Microsoft’s new WebsiteSpark Program, specifically targeted towards Web Professionals. Using WebsiteSpark, Web Pros can drive new business opportunities through connections with partners and customers around the world.

Before jumping into the details and Q&A, if you already know that you want to participate in this program with either GoGrid or ServePath as your Hosting partner, please visit our signup pages on the GoGrid site or ServePath site.

But what does all of this mean? Trust me, I have read through all of the 19 pages of Frequently Asked Questions and Program documentation and it is a bit overwhelming. So, this blog post is really an effort to try to cull out the critical points of importance for you. However, if there are any questions that you do have after reading this, I encourage you to talk to some WebsiteSpark folks or sales reps at GoGrid or ServePath. At a high-level, this is an incredibly helpful program targeted towards Web Professionals.

Probably the best way to approach this is through a series of questions and answers.

What is WebsiteSpark?

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It’s with great pleasure that we announce the guest speaker for the StartUp SF (version 2.1) event coming on June 4th, 2009. (StartUp SF is a San Francisco Technology Meetup co-hosted by GoGrid/ServePath and Microsoft BizSpark.)

Loic Le Meur, Founder and CEO of Seesmic, has graciously agreed to do a presentation titled “How to Launch a Product with your Community.” Learn first hand how to use various community building techniques to build your product, service or brand from the ground up.

You may have seen Loic and Seesmic Desktop mentioned in the New York Times site.

Seesmic is Loic’s 5th business so he definitely has lots of experience under his belt. Some more information about Loic:

Loic is the Seesmic CEO. He founded the company in 2007 with the goal of turning online video into a powerful medium for threaded, interactive video conversations.

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The following press release came out today about GoGrid’s parent company, ServePath, and discusses how Gartner has included ServePath as a “Cool Vendor” for development done under the GoGrid brand as related to Cloud Computing.

ServePath Named “Cool Vendor” by Leading Analyst Firm

Vendors selected for the “Cool Vendor report” are innovative, impactful and intriguing

San Francisco, CA April 27, 2009 — ServePath, LLC has been included in the list of “Cool Vendors” in the April 2009 “Cool Vendors in Cloud Computing Systems and Application Infrastructure, 2009” report by Gartner, Inc.

The “Cool Vendor” report by Gartner, Inc. showcases key findings and recommendations to consider when evaluating Cloud server infrastructure services and companies. As defined by Gartner, Cloud services are divided into two general categories: infrastructure and applications. ServePath’s Cloud Computing division, GoGrid, represents excellence within both cloud categories as is evidenced through the Gartner “Cool Vendor” selection of ServePath. The report is available on the Gartner website for a limited time.

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Last week I had the pleasure of joining Peter Silva (Technical Marketing Manager at f5) and Telemachus Luu (Director of Business Strategy at GoGrid/ServePath) in a podcast hosted by f5 on their DevCentral community site. The topic of the podcast was “Cloud Computing” (of course) but specifically how using f5 technology, ServePath and GoGrid were able to create a full spectrum of hosting solutions ranging from Dedicated and Managed Hosting (ServePath) and Colocation hosting(ColoServe), up and into the Clouds with GoGrid.

The podcast titled “Hosting in the Cloud with ServePath and F5” covers a variety of topics including:

• ServePath’s product extension from managed hosting to cloud hosting with GoGrid
• The “Cloud Pyramid” and distinctions within the various Cloud layers
• Understanding the nuances within the Cloud Infrastructure layer: “Infrastructure Web Services” & “Cloudcenters”
• How f5 was paramount in creating a Cloud Computing Infrastructure offering

I encourage you to listen to this 30 minute podcast (forgive the audio quality, we were in an empty conference room) which is available at the following locations:

• On f5′s DevCentral site
• As a downloadable MP3 file
• Play from this site (click on the graphic below)

  Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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Well, I thought that I could get away with no more articles in 2008. I guess that I was mistaken. I just read a good article by Chuck Goolsbee on SearchDataCenter.com titled: “Don’t buy cloud computing hype: Business model will evaporate” and I figured that I would put in my 2 cents on some of the items mentioned within.

Goolsbee takes a very pragmatic approach to “slicing through” traditional datacenter hosting (using Occam’s razor to boot), so that he could evaluate each and every aspect of what is contained in a physical environment. To summarize (and I’m paraphrasing, hopefully accurately), he mentions:

1. Payment Card/eCommerce systems – hard to audit the purchased virtualized hardware within the Cloud
2. Security – this works with auditing, but is the environment physically secure? Is there “data mingling?”
3. “Fully acronym-compliant” – is the Cloud HiPAA, SOX, SAS70, GLBA, etc compliant?
4. Data retention – for legal purposes, how can you ensure data retention?
5. Cloud Computing Success Stories – pure cloud solution successes are marketing driven
6. Margins for Cloud Providers – how can a cloud provider keep a good profit margin?
7. Data Center On-Demand – that is what Cloud Computing is
8. AWS is only real “successful” cloud provider – they are selling unused capacity
9. “Buzzword overlap” – SaaS is NOT a cloud

Those are just a few points that I wanted to call out and respond to from my own perspective. First of all, I don’t disagree (completely) with the items that are listed above. Any company looking at the Cloud as the end-all solution for their IT needs may be disappointed unless they fully think it all out. To address the points above:

1. I somewhat agree with this assessment. It is impossible to fully audit what I call “disposable IT.” However, the shift from CapEx to OpEx means that auditing methods need to be re-evaluated. In the past (and currently), if you wanted to requisition hardware, there was a process for doing so. It took time and had rigorous approval processes built in. Now, with the Cloud, you can do this “on the fly” and servers in the Cloud can be created and disposed of extremely quickly. With data in general, you can never fully have “absolute certainty” with an audit. Compliance requires a “reasonable certainty”, especially since data isn’t persistent in or outside of the Cloud. So, saying that the Cloud model will fail because it isn’t compliant or can’t be audited is erroneous.
2. Physical security is left to the hosting provider or even to an outsourced 3rd party whose specific job is ensuring security and complaince therein. This is true with traditional datacenters, “cloudcenters” (a term that we at GoGrid are using to describe our Cloud Infrastructure), and even shared hosting. Just as Credit Card fraud initially got a lot of hype due to the launch of eCommerce, security in the Cloud will undergo a similar scrutiny. There is (unconfirmed) more Credit Card fraud that happens over the phone or physically at merchants than with eCommerce. When you choose a hosting provider, cloud or traditional, you need to think about data mingling anyway. Just ask your provider those questions. As standards arise and Government and Enterprise adopt Public and Private Clouds, security, as I have said previously, will be as robust if not more so than traditional centers. As in the Credit Card example, it’s probably safer to use a credit card online now than over the phone, but that depends on the site.
3. Yes, the ever-persistent acronyms are important. GoGrid and parent company, ServePath, are SAS70 Type II certified, for example. But, these regulatory organizations will ALSO have to adopt to this new business and technology model. This could prevent some traction of the Cloud for a few corporations but I don’t think it will slow down others that much. And audits like we have, like SAS70, are widely-accepted industry standards for showing reasonable assurance and allowing auditability.
4. I agree with the assessment that the Cloud will make it difficult for Law Enforcement to ensure data retention. Cloud Storage and/or backups can be used to allow for data retention to take place. However, if data retention is a requirement due to compliance or legal issues, processes can be built in to any IT infrastructure, cloudy or not. The other thing to consider here would be “hybrid solutions.” Since GoGrid is run by a traditional managed hosting provider, ServePath, we understand that there are certain items that are better fit for physically residing somewhere. To that end, we developed Cloud Connect. Corporations or businesses that are concerned about data persistence and the physicality of that data could opt for a solution like Cloud Connect to meet this need.
5. Success Stories generated by providers are great. But what is better is blog posts or end-user reviews of the service. There aren’t too many reviews on successful implementations with datacenter deployments, mainly because it takes a very long time to roll out fully within a data center. And, it’s not “sexy.” Deploying a full IT infrastructure in the cloud in a matter of hours (vs. days or weeks in a datacenter) IS sexy, and people are talking about that. Time is money. If you can reduce your time to market by using the Cloud, then you will be many steps closer to monetizing than if you took a traditional method. Again, this could be where hybrid clouds (e.g., Cloud Connect) might come into play. I don’t agree with Goolsbee’s statement that “the cloud cannot contain anything critical”. Just look at SalesForce or EC2 or GoGrid. Plenty of critical data is contained within those Clouds. I do agree that Cloud Computing IS great for start-ups, but if you stop there, you are missing many larger opportunities.
6. Margins for traditional data centers is a topic unto itself. I will only scrape the surface here. GoGrid, for example, was born from traditional managed, dedicated hosting provider experience. In order to roll out and deploy servers, there is a large capital and operating expense. When new clients come on board, servers have to be configured to their needs, hard drives formatted, memory installed, cables connected, etc. The man-hours spent to roll out a single customer is quite large. We saw these inefficiencies as well as the fact that once deployed, servers sat idle and under-utilized. GoGrid was developed to combat these internal and external cost and labor inefficiencies. Not only could more “servers” be “contained” within fewer larger physical servers (reducing datacenter footprints, power, cooling, etc. metrics), but also, automated deployment reduced the human capital needs. Coupled with the fact that the control was now in the hands of the end user (in terms of scalability and configuration, for example), time to deploy was reduced (equating to less grumbling on all sides). If you read between the lines here, there are better margins for a hosting provider to convert some internal infrastructure over to providing Cloud “services” than not. Once the technology is created, rolling out Cloud infrastructures within a hosting provider for end users to later use is better than rolling out a handful of customized dedicated servers.
7. Some Cloud Computing providers are data-centers on demand, but very few. As I mentioned, we now refer to GoGrid as a CloudCenter, the equivalent of a DataCenter but in the Cloud and using the requirements of Cloud Computing: dynamically and rapidly scalable, paying for what you use and using only what you need, programmatically controlled through an API (or web interface), and somewhat “virtualized”. To be a true “datacenter in the cloud” you must have all of the components of a datacenter (servers, switches, firewalls, load balancers, storage, multiple network pipes, internal and external networks, etc.). Only those Cloud Providers that give out Infrastructure solutions (e.g., GoGrid and potentially EC2) can be considered “data-centers on demand” and even then, EC2 doesn’t quite fit.
8. AWS had a few things going for it to get it on its way to being considered a “successful provider”: its name,  its size and the fact that it was first to market (or appeared to be). Don’t get me wrong, their entire suite is very impressive and they have a lot of extremely happy customers. Also, they have truly cut the ice for other Cloud providers to come along (to which we are thankful). I’m not sure about the accuracy of what Goolsbee says (that they are “selling unused capacity”). This may have been true initially, but I believe they are their own business unit by now and their data centers have nothing to do with their “book selling.” Also, the mention of uptime and security guarantees being lacking will change (they recently released an SLA for EC2…it’s not as robust as GoGrid, for what it’s worth). The general pessimism about AWS not being good for mission-critical IT functions is not really warranted, I don’t feel. Datacenters fail, as do servers. This is not specific to the Cloud. If you are worried about your data, back it up! That is the best practice and not something that you should only do if you are using the Cloud.
9. I agree that Cloud Computing as a general buzzword is over-used and vague, but it is here to stay until something better comes along. We are already seeing segmentation within it. It is a general encapsulation of many different things. I do think that SaaS belongs as one of the Cloud layers (Cloud Applications) provided it meets the Cloud checklist. Google IS a cloud provider (Google App Engine as a Cloud Platform; Gmail as a Cloud Application). Buying application time (specifically “hosting” your Python application within their datacenters) IS using the Cloud, but not Cloud Infrastructure but rather Cloud Platforms. In fact, you will be able to buy additional capacity on App Engine soon.

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Laura Sydell, of NPR’s All Things Considered, yesterday covered Cloud Computing in her piece “Computing in The Clouds: Who Owns Your Files?“. It’s good to see NPR making an attempt to cover critical technologies. I have found, however, than much of the time, NPR does stories that are more science related (e.g., thermo-power, developments in genetics, etc.) and less so on technology that affect computing. I guess, for one, they have a much different demographic than the one I am used to. But of course, working in San Francisco, we exist in a technology bubble. Travel slightly outside of that bubble and people don’t know what the “cutting edge” of technology is (with some geographic exceptions, of course).

So, when NPR starts to mention “the Cloud,” I get intrigued. They briefly covered it in this interesting piece on cloud computing as a “pay-as-you-go” enterprise. I understand that it will take time for others to hear about Cloud technology and even longer to understand and adopt it. But the interesting thing is, many people have been using it for some time, albeit named differently. For several years, the term “ASP” (Application Service Provider) was kicked around and equated to providing an application over the Internet. This recently evolved into Software as a Service (SaaS) which has strong adoption within the tech arena with providers of SaaS products growing daily. Now, the Cloud rolls in and we see companies working to position themselves within it.

Sydell’s story focuses on data ownership and User Agreements as they relate to Cloud Applications. What is a Cloud Application? Well, if you have read through some of my previous posts, I introduced my concept of the “Cloud Pyramid” which segments different Cloud offerings into various categories: Applications, Platforms and Infrastructure. Recently, I expanded that image to include Cloud Aggregators and Cloud Extenders (details here).

But getting back to the NPR piece, I think what is important here is that they are showing their readers/listeners that they are already using the Cloud in one form or another, through Gmail or Flickr for example. What is unfortunate is that they stop there and almost introduce a paranoia into the mix. However, the points that are made are good ones to think about, that of data ownership, security and SLAs (Service Level Agreements).

I would like to step through a few points that Sydell makes as well as some made by Harry Lewis (who contributed to the article). Specifically: (more…)

Today the Internet was abuzz with the latest Steve Jobs’ Keynote address at the Apple World Wide Developers Conference, so much so that Twitter was brought to its knees and other blogging sites were overwhelmed with repeated traffic requests. I watch the action on a variety of sources (pictures and text from Engadget and Audio being streamed through uStream). It was a bit painful having to manual refresh or have audio drop during the keynote speech, but the announcements were eventually heard world-wide.

This post is not about the iPhone though but rather about a new GoGrid customer who was recently written up on TechCrunch, ScribbleLive. ScribbleLive is an Ajax-based, Live Blogging platform that enables authors to cover live events in a real-time manner. Billed as a “media rich conference call” ScribbleLive provides audiences an immersive experience on browsers and mobile devices alike, pushing text, links, pictures and videos instantly without the need to constantly reload the browser page.

What makes this story noteworthy is that ScribbleLive is a true, bootstrapped startup. The company, founded by Jonathan Keebler and Michael De Monte, was put together for about $1500. They are only 2 employees but have set up an infrastructure of a well-established company, with GoGrid powering their Application and Database servers and Akamai providing the CDN (content delivery network).

During the WWDC event, they ran their own “System Status” LiveBlog to keep users up to date on the systems powering other users live-blogging. Some highlights:

• The day before the event they were getting 181,000+ page views
• Throughput before, during and after the event ranged between 1.3 to 4.6 Mbits/sec
• Front-end servers maintained 2% CPU utilization
• Database server peaked at 7% CPU utilization
• 1.5 hours before the event, 1+ unique visitors/sec were accessing the site

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NetworkWorld today ran a review of GoGrid in their Web Applications Alert newsletter. Mark Gibbs, consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger, provides a candid analysis of GoGrid’s current offering in the review titled “Cloud Computing for the Middle Market.” However, it’s his sub-title provides the best summary: “With GoGrid you can provision a server in less than five minutes,” a fact that he experienced first hand.

For several months now, I have been touting the strengths of GoGrid through articles, blog responses, social networks and other media channels. Gibbs echoes many of GoGrid’s strengths (and a few weaknesses even) in his careful analysis. Some highlights:

“A new entrant in this market is GoGrid, currently in its Public Beta phase. I’ve tested the service and what GoGrid claims is true – you can provision a server in less than five minutes. A few minutes more and you can have more servers as well as load balancers and databases.”

Later Gibbs continues:

“GoGrid is very easy to expand and contract as needed and there’s a choice of operating systems to use (Windows as well as several Linux distros with different services configurations). Add to that 24/7 support and GoGrid is a very interesting platform for a variety of markets.”

It is Gibbs’ conclusion that contains the most resounding comment: (more…)

Tomorrow is SF New Tech and GoGrid will be there handing out “free servers!” The theme of tomorrow night’s event is “Wine, Women and a Whole Lot More!” Companies doing the 5 Minute Demos are: Nirvino, Zivity, Razz, MyMeemz/Skollar and Ribbit.

The event is at Mighty (119 Utah Street @ 15th) from 6:30pm to 11:00 pm PT. Tickets are $15 in advance or $20 at the door. The schedule of events is as follows:

6:30 pm – Doors open
6:30 -7:30 pm – Schmooze
7:30 – 9:00 pm – Demos
9:00 – 11:00 pm Schmooze

GoGrid will have a table at this event so be sure to come by and ask us questions about GoGrid. You will walk away pleasantly surprised!

Attendees of the inaugural meeting of StartUp SF, a new meetup for technologists, developers, entrepreneurs and startups in the San Francisco Bay Area, were given a great GoGrid gift, $100 off their first GoGrid account. But the value went further than just that including a valuable CD-ROM from Orrick containing helpful document templates useful in launching your own startup. Attendees also learned some important tips on how move their company “from concept to company” as delivered in a presentation by Jonathan Cobb, CTO and Founder of Kiptronic.

StartUp SF is an event that is co-hosted by Orrick and ServePath designed to help “kick-start your startup” by providing a venue, topics and experts, as well as food and drink to facilitate the process.

More details on yesterday’s event can be found here and here. We were even lucky enough to get Pete Cashmore (of Mashable) to pose with Paul Lancaster (of ServePath) in one of our stylish GoGrid hats.

More photos can be found on our Flickr photostream and the StartUp SF Facebook group. Don’t forget that GoGrid now really helps you get your Facebook app up and running FAST with the Facebook QuickStart Server Images for Windows and Linux!