Meerkatalyst

Meerkatalyst email newsletter 1

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 15:47:31 +0100

Startups are hard work... Free ticket to Software Craftsmanship

Mon, 16 May 2011 09:39:00 +0100

Startups are extremely hard work and as such sometimes the company has to take priority over having fun.

Last year, I (Ben) attended Software Craftsmanship at Bletchley Park. The event was amazing. Great experience, lots of interesting people and generally a fun day. I was planning to attend this year, however my focus is currently on Meerkatalyst.

As such, we have a ticket for both the day and night available. The event is on May 26th at Bletchley Park.

Given the fact that the ticket is a donation to Bletchley Park, we aren’t asking anything for it. Bletchley Park is an amazing location, full of history and something which every computer geek should visit. They are dependent on donations, so every little helps - if you do attend, I’m sure they would welcome any donations.

Details on the event:

http://www.codemanship.co.uk/softwarecraftsmanship/

Details on Bletchley Park donations:

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/contact/donation.rhtm

If your interested, please let us know ASAP.

It appears that @DevOps_Borat has a very optimistic view of...

Thu, 05 May 2011 23:17:58 +0100

It appears that @DevOps_Borat has a very optimistic view of Windows based deployments. Sadly, in the real world it’s not that simple - yet.

However, if Windows based deployments could be simple then what would it look like? How would it behave? Could it be like how Borat describes?

At @Meerkatalyst we would love to hear your ideas on this, is Borat correct and a .bat file is all you need or do you need more control and configuration? Please drop us a tweet or an email and let us know your thoughts.

If you have additional thoughts to share, then it would be great if you could fill out our questionnaire.

The new office may not be near the Silicon Roundabout (Old...

Tue, 03 May 2011 15:22:49 +0100

The new office may not be near the Silicon Roundabout (Old Street, London) but the view is amazing.

Has Heroku killed the shared hosting company?

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 01:05:57 +0000

Today I was left wondering - with the rise companies such as Heroku and EC2 offering their platform-of-a-service, what’s going to happen to the traditional hosting companies we all used to know and love - what is the future for the shared hosting account?

Before “the cloud” I worked at an internet solutions company providing hosting services ranging from hosting small websites for local businesses up to multi-server complex online gaming networks. The company grew rapidly but times have changed. We were early adopters in providing linux virtual servers as a middle ground between shared and dedicated servers, but now customers can match exact requirements with price from a number of successful companies such as AWS EC2, Linode, Slicehost and brightbox to name but a few. The market has changed, offerings has changed, the price has changed but the key customer requirements and problems they want solving still remain.

When it comes to shared hosting packages, has Heroku and associated companies killed the market? Shared hosting used to allow customers to use a reliable server for a faction of the cost. However, Heroku has flipped the market by offering a reliable, ready to go service with the great price of free. To make matters worse, in many ways Heroku is a shared hosting provider, just very strong opinions - as mentioned by co-founder Adam Wiggins. With this being the case, what’s left for the market?

The companies I used to consider shared hosting providers have shifted to focusing on VPS and cloud based services, which are the same service that they used to offer but under a different name. Other companies hasn’t changed since I used them five years ago. If managed\shared hosting companies want to survive and grow then they quickly need to think outside of the box otherwise platform-as-a-service companies will control the sector.

There are signs of hope with companies such as Orcsweb. They are building upon the huge amount of experience and most importantly trust by offering services such as PCI DSS to companies who are more than happy to pay. They have recently announced a new service called Cytanium providing low cost Microsoft WebMatrix hosting. They appear to be taking the opinionated approach together with the experience of building a hosting platform.

Traditional shared hosting companies have had competition before and survived, but this is it’s toughest battle yet. Cytanium is an interesting approach to try and combat the competition but it still feels like it’s missing something.

Is this the end of the traditional shared hosting package? Or has it been dead for years with companies just unwilling to let go?