Part 1: No-brainers and managed hosting issues

Can you tell us briefly about Inflow and its role in managed hosting?
We're a managed hosting provider and essentially we have 18 data centers, 17 in the US and one in Dublin, Ireland. And what we do is host companies mission critical web applications.

What's happened over the last few years, which is fortunate for us, is that it's kind of become almost a no-brainer type of decision to use a hosting facility to grow your web applications. It's been proven, time and time again, that it's a lot more cost effective than building your own data center.

If you think about it, building your own data center in a small space - maybe like 500 or 1000 square feet - is extremely expensive. It's much better to go into a large facility, where you're sharing the costs.

In fact, that's the whole nature of our business. You have the ability to share the data center and the communications infrastructure, and most importantly the people. In addition to space and network access, the real value to what we bring are the people who are experts in storage and application management. And that's really where the necessity is, especially for companies growing quickly, who can't find enough human talent fast enough.

And the level of knowledge that a hosting company can provide to a smaller company or start-up is invaluable?
Yes, the great thing about going to a hosting company is you can essentially learn what big companies do. If you're a start-up company you're just trying to stay afloat. You're trying to hire people as fast as you can, and you don't really know how everything should evolve. I always liken it to having a big brother that tells you what to expect next.

If you go to Inflow and you talk to a staff person about your company, we will say, "Well, you need to consider a firewall, you need to consider load balancing, you need to consider these things as you grow, because they become bigger and bigger threats." And the reason we know it is because we've dealt with larger companies, who have gone through that evolution.

We don't necessarily tell people they need all these things right away. Like a firewall, we watch their growth, or for instance with load balancing, it's another very useful way to measure some of the hosting issues for a company.

How does load balancing work?
Well, what happens is essentially this type of application that intelligently routes a request to multiple servers. So you start out as a web company with one server. Let's say, you're selling a product online and you get so many incoming requests that the server can't handle it. There is a tool called a load balancer that basically balances a whole bunch of requests against multiple computers.

That's a great example of something you don't need until you get to the right growth point.

And do you tell people when they come into Inflow, "You don't really need us."
Yes, that happens at times. We work with folks like MapQuest and MessageMedia, or Rand McNally, or the news shows on the Web which have enormous needs for bandwidth etc. But there are tons of companies out there that can fit the needs of smaller companies.

One of the things we do best is exploring the options for each company, helping them troubleshoot what their current needs are and what they might be in the future. For smaller companies, that might be to simply get them to the right hosting company - or it might be to help them address how their level of growth is going to be managed appropriately in the future.

Continued...