The vast majority of web hosting customers are small businesses such as cake shops, accounting firms, etc. These are customers who are very savvy in their trade, and usually look for an easy way to establish an online presence.

Small time business owners primarily want two things:

• An interface to add content to their website.
• An interface to send/receive mails.

But to get that, small business owners often need to learn complex concepts like MX records, SSL renewal, Cron jobs, and more. For a non-tech person, it could be very confusing.

Control panels such as cPanel and Plesk have tried to make web hosting simpler for small business owners, but learning the ropes is still an uphill task for many. That’s where application hosting makes a difference.

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The shift away from traditional web hosting

In the past few years, there has been an increasing interest in specialized application hosting such as WordPress hosting.

WordPress hosting trend in Google Trends

The rise in demand for specialized hosting is driven by the need for simplicity.

For eg. when a business owner signs up for WordPress hosting, they only need to learn about adding content via the WordPress interface – not the whole curriculum of server management fundamentals. Everything else, like SSL, DNS, etc. are taken care of by the web host.

Such an approach has given rise to large providers like WPEngine. So, the writing on the wall is clear. The future of web hosting is managed application hosting, and it is time to think beyond traditional web hosting solutions.

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Why and how to get into application hosting

Here are the top 4 advantages of moving into managed application hosting:

1. Achieve early mover advantage

Every web host competes in their niche market such as “Business web host in Bay Area, SF”. It’s a limited market, and when small business owners within that niche starts hearing about application hosting, it’d be great if your name features as the first one.

Early movers often get the most publicity, and set the market trend. Others are just going to play catch-up.

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Bobcares helps web hosts maintain their server infrastructure, and expand to new markets. When transitioning to a new technology, our advice to customers is to start small, but to keep the systems ready to scale up fast.

For eg., when setting up a specialized WordPress hosting system, we usually recommend setting up a VPS to run WordPress containers using Docker or LXC. This provides a low barrier entry point, that minimizes investment, but, if setup right, provides a base for seamless expansion when the orders start coming in.

To compete with the big cloud based managed service providers, you need a system that’s equally capable. We’ve found that open source technologies such as oVirt, LXC and Docker can be used to build better platforms than paid virtualization solutions, while being cost efficient.

2. Prevent client base erosion to large managed services

Sooner or later, your customers are going to hear about managed application services that’s simple to manage, is reliable, and easy to scale up.

The first choice of your customers is always going to be to stay with your service, because they want to avoid the hassle of setting up service elsewhere. If you have a compatible service, you’ll retain your clients, and even attract new ones with client referrals.

Tip : Build an industry leading service feature list

Aside from simplicity of management, customers look for easy scaling up, SEO support, SSL, etc. So, when setting up a system it is important to make it compatible to add all key features your customers would need.

In the application hosting systems we maintain for our customers, we’ve included capabilities such as hot migration, auto-SSL solutions (from Let’s Encrypt), latest service software (such as PHP7), etc. so that no other company gets an edge over the services offered by our customers.

3. Improve server stability

One benefit of using containers such as Docker is its ability to limit resource usage per account. It’s almost like a VPS, but not as heavy.

We help web hosts to setup resource limits on application containers such that a single user cannot take more than the resources allocated to them, and bring down the whole server.

It results in a very stable server, and a happy customer base.

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4. Deliver highly secure hosting

A common thing many web hosts struggle with is protecting IP reputation. When one account is hacked, outgoing spam results in mail services of all users from being blacklisted.

By using a microservice based architecture, one account is completely isolated from another. In the servers that we maintain, we make it a point to setup strict SELinux based isolation, so that even if there’s a bug in the system, an attacker cannot access the other accounts.

Conclusion

Traditional web hosting requires the customer to know a lot about server management concepts. There’s a new wave of demand where small business owners look for specialized hosting solutions such as WordPress hosting, Magento hosting, etc.

Today we’ve seen how you can build an application hosting solution that stands up to new age challenges. To know how these systems can be best adapted for your business, Click here..