Will Amazon Become The King of Web Hosting Too?
Amazon’s web services (AWS) are on track to being a half-a-billion dollar business. They’re home to some of the hottest startups on the planet. Even older startups use their infrastructure. And despite all the false rumors, pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly is a customer. Ironically, the company which put the “cloud” in cloud computing has found a fast growth opportunity in a decidedly old fashioned business — web hosting.
While the company’s web services continue to gain traction with folks looking for on-demand compute resources, AWS has seen an uptick in folks using it for steady-state applications (a euphemism for web hosting), according to Adam Selipsky, Amazon Web Services’ vice president of product management and developer relations, who stopped by at our offices to discuss various Amazon Web Services initiatives.
Newsweek and the PBS network are using AWS for hosting their web sites. In addition, large e-consulting firms such as Digitaria and Razorfish are adding a few thousand sites a year to Amazon, Selipsky said. From movie sites to hosting apps for large brands, Amazon suddenly (and perhaps unintentionally) finds itself competing with thousands of web hosts. As more and more media companies integrate Internet and mobile applications into their overall product mix, they’re likely to spend more on their infrastructure needs.
Just as Dell and their ilk benefitted from close ties with old-fashioned consultancies and sold a lot of hardware to their clients, Amazon can now find itself benefiting from the growth in demand for the services of these new e-consultants. These e-consulting firms are pretty influential, especially when it comes to attracting corporate clients. For instance, Digitaria client Hasbro is hosting the website of its Monopoly game on AWS. It cost the company nearly half of what it would have cost on a traditional hosting set-up. (More details here.)
The looming presence of AWS in this market should worry current players such as RackSpace and The Planet (which is said to be in the process of merging with SoftLayer, another hosting company).
Related Research from GigaOM Pro (subscription required): The Evolution of the Private Cloud
Om, they’re missing a key feature for web hosting — index files.
Suppose I put a website on S3 and map a domain to it:
http://hello.newsriver.org/
Try going there, you’ll get an XML error return.
But… it does have an index file.
http://hello.newsriver.org/index.html
All Amazon has to do is make the first URL work, which is how web servers work by default, and boom they’re in the web hosting business.
Without it, all we can use it for is to store images, MP3s, JavaScript snippets, archives.
I’d love to see them do it, then I could move my archived static sites up to S3 and forget about them.
This exact functionality that Dave is describing appears to have been announced yesterday on Amazon Cloudfront if I am reading the announcement correctly
http://bit.ly/ajnzH0
I think it is — but if I’m not mistaken, CloudFront is not S3.
I’ve written a post about it on scripting.com so I expect we’ll get clarification pretty soon.
Guy Rosen tracks the number of web sites hosted at Amazon, and provides monthly updates on its progress versus Rackspace and other cloud providers at http://www.jackofallclouds.com.
Interestingly, it looks like Amazon actually slipped a bit last month.
The battle for developer friendly tools continues to accelerate. Apple and iOS set a new standard, one that everyone is frantically rushing to follow. The ultimate king of we hosting, be it AMZN or RAX will be dependent upon who provides the developers with the richest toolsets to quickly design, develop, deploy and manage applications.
Presently, from everything I’ve been able to uncover, AMZN has a slight lead here.
This being the case, I would not be surprised to see a series of announcements from RAX through the remainder of this year and well into 2011 as they look to stake this claim.