READ MORE: Google Domains Service Moves to .Google

“The Indian Prime Minister’s visit to Facebook and Google to promote a digital India did work wonders,” Ved wrote in a LinkedIn post shortly after the incident. “The very next day of his visit, it ended up convincing Google to sell what is perhaps their most prized possession to a person hailing from the small city of Mandvi in the Kutch region of the Indian Prime Minister’s home state…albeit just for a minute or so [sic].”

The company may have decided that its Alphabetization rendered its legacy domain obsolete, but if so, saner heads quickly prevailed.

Earlier this year the amount awarded to Ved was disclosed as part of Google’s annual review of its security rewards program. Ved originally received $6,006.13, a numerical rendition of the company name. The company doubled the amount after Ved announced he would donate the award to charity.

While the tool is really meant for registrants investing in domains, its launch provides a timely reminder for businesses in all industries that if your domain name is valuable, it should be carefully protected.

Source: TheWHIR

So, what’s not to like?

Who Are You Writing For?

Unless you control the platform, you’re working for someone else. It’s a great pitch: we’ll give you an awesome publishing platform and all you have to do is to fill it with content; we won’t charge you a dime.

Except, if you’re a professional creative, the content you create is your living. If you write for a free platform, you’re no longer writing for yourself: you’re working to build an audience for the platform’s owners.

It’s No Longer Your Audience

If you self-host a site, you have access to a huge amount of information about your audience. That information is valuable. Even if you don’t intend to monetize your blog with advertising, knowing where your audience comes from, what they are reading, what they love, what they hate, and what they think are all valuable for a creative looking to carve out a niche and establish themselves as a professional.

With a self-hosted site, you own the platform. The audience and the community you build is the pay-off for the work that you put in.

Limited Monetization Potential

“Free” platforms will have to make money somehow. In the short-term they can coast on VC cash and good will, but platforms are incredibly expensive to build. Eventually most platforms are going to start monetizing their users — the ones that your content is helping to attract. That puts the interests of the platforms and its content creators at odds. If there’s value in a platform, it’s going to be extracted by the owners of the platform, which leaves content creators with an audience but not much else.

Your Brand Is Not Under Your Control

Personal branding is an infelicitous term, but the truth that lies behind it is that to be heard, creatives have to craft a voice that speaks to an audience. There are a huge number of factors that can contribute to shaping that voice, including design, dialogue, promotional opportunities, partnerships with community members, and analytics data.

With a self-hosted site, a writer, photographer, or designer has complete control over their personal brand. A self-hosted site acts as a central hub — a personal platform — that is closely identified with the personal brand of its owner.

If you just want to throw up the occasional article or you want to gain exposure, free publishing platforms are a great way to scratch the creative itch or drive traffic to a self-hosted site, but, relying on those platforms exclusively prevents content creators from building the dedicated audiences they need to make the most of their work.

About the Author

Graeme Caldwell works as an inbound marketer for Nexcess, a leading provider of Magento and WordPress hosting. Follow Nexcess on Twitter at @nexcess, Like them on Facebook and check out their tech/hosting blog, https://blog.nexcess.net/.

Source: TheWHIR

“The main use case for 5G through 2021 will be enhanced mobile broadband services, although fixed broadband services will also be supported, especially in the US,” said Mike Roberts, Ovum Practice Leader covering carrier strategy and technology. “Over time 5G will support a host of use cases including Internet of Things and mission-critical communications, but Ovum does not believe those use cases will be supported by standardized 5G services through 2021.”

The forecast suggests that 5G will be available in 20 national markets by the end of 2021, across each of the four major regions the company divides the world into. While North America and Asia will each have nearly 10 million 5G subscribers at that point, Europe and the Middle East and Africa will account for 10 percent each with close to 2.5 million. Major operators in the US, South Korea, China, and Japan have made known plans to move aggressively with 5G launches, which significantly influences the forecast.

China’s Huawei, for instance, began announcing major 5G plans in April 2015.

Ovum defines a 5G subscription as applying to both the connection and the device, and 5G as a system based on 3GPP 5G standards. These will only begin to come available with 3GPP Release 15, slated to be finalized in 2018.

The company considers all of its subscription figures conservative, though it notes that uncertainty goes along with predicting technology several years away.

“5G is at an early stage and there is a high degree of uncertainty around 5G deployment and adoption, including significant upside and downside risks,” Roberts added.

Ericsson called for “global spectrum harmonization to secure early 5G deployments” in a recent report.

Source: TheWHIR

From that I departed and came here to DreamHost. The guy who led the acquisition of my company became CEO here at DreamHost, Simon Anderson, and so I joined to run DreamHost’s product and development team. I built out a product management discipline that didn’t exist and started bringing some discipline, organization and efficiencies to the development team. That was a great experience, and I took over the cloud business unit in late 2014. That basically was our first experiment with branching off part of the company to be more of a vertically integrated business unit – putting together everything from the very base layer of operations and engineering up through the software development, product management, sales, marketing and finance. That has also been a great experience and now we have finished going through a reorganization of DreamHost where we’ve done that with the entire business. We have three discrete business units now and I run the cloud one.

WHIR: Sounds like you’ve been busy. In your day-to-day role what does your job look like? What’s kind of a typical day in your life?

LaCour: Yes, I have been very busy [laughs]. DreamHost has been around for 17-18 years now, and our primary business has always been web hosting, and VPS, shared, and dedicated, kind of the standard set of services that people in hosting have come to know and love. My part of the business, you can kind of think of it as the emerging technologies or the new platforms and new business. Cloud services are really focused on people who are interested in deploying applications to infrastructure. It’s more in line with the Amazon Web Services of the world, although we don’t view them as a competitor. We’ve got two products; we’ve got DreamObjects and DreamCompute, and those are basically cloud storage and cloud computing, respectively. Basically it gives people like developers the ability to create virtual servers, virtual networks, store lots and lots of data in our cloud storage platform, and so it really targets developers, more technical folks, people who maybe have an existing application running on premise or in another cloud and are looking to learn about cloud or wanting to save money.

READ MORE: DreamHost’s Open Source Public Cloud DreamCompute Comes Out of Beta

My day-to-day really is all about continuing to iterate on those products, make them better, and get them out to a broader audience and grow the base. Right now I represent a very small chunk of the total user base because my products have not been in market for very long. Any given week I spend a significant amount of time doing strategy, figuring out what we’re going to work on next, and then a lot of blocking and tackling in terms of execution. Whatever we’re currently working on, making sure we’re tracking and making sure we’re executing against our plan. I’m pretty hands on when it comes to that, especially on the technical side of things: understanding where the software development is at, and understanding how the deployment is going. There’s also a lot of finance work: time spent assessing the margin on the product, price points, packaging, ensuring that we are only building out just ahead of capacity so we maximize the profit we can get from our services.

I spend a significant amount of my time surveying the landscape and the marketplace and understanding what the industry looks like right now when it comes to cloud services. In the web hosting industry a lot of the other players are starting to dip their toe in the water. We also have a lot of emergent players who have burst on the scene in the last couple of years that are selling just unmanaged virtual servers have done really well. So I spend a lot of time looking at the marketplace and feeding that information back into the product.

WHIR: Speaking about the marketplace, maybe you can give me an overview of where you see the hosting industry at this point and then looking forward 12-18 months from now?

LaCour: We’ve just gone through a huge exercise doing this exact thing; really digging in and seeing where the industry is and where we want to go. What we’ve concluded is the industry itself, if you look at the standard, shared, managed, VPS hosting products that we have all seen for the past decade, that provided all the growth up until this point, the growth has been slowing for basically everyone, industry-wide. Why is that? Well, there are a number of reasons but I think the primary reason is that hosting is a platform play. You aren’t signing up for a solution to your problem, you’re signing up for something that can be a building block to a solution to your problem. If you sign up for managed hosting and you want a website, which is your problem, ‘I have a website I want’, and you have to find a content management system. So you may one-click install WordPress; our platforms are great for that – we provide people with lots of choice and lots of capabilities and for a very low cost they have something they can put lots and lots of domains on and solve lots and lots of problems but the actual solving of that problem is very much in their hands. What we’re finding now is that middle of the road option for people who want a lot of control but need some help. People are moving up the stack to more application, kind of software-as-a-service type things. You know, site-builder type services, like the Squarespaces, Weeblys, Wix of the world. Someone says ‘I want a website’ instead of ‘I want shared hosting’ and so they get the ability to create a website easily. They’re not looking for the platform; they’re looking for the actual solution to their problem.

That’s one way the industry is shifting. For the people who want more control, they actually want more and more control, and more capabilities and power, and so they’re shifting to the cloud. Instead of signing up for something that’s middle of the road, and getting limited technical capability, they want to pick which version of Linux is running on their server, and they want to have their own server, or ten servers, and they want to be able to spin them up and down at will, and really kind of embrace the technology. And they don’t want anyone messing with their stuff; they don’t want to be on a platform that’s intermingled with a bunch of other people.

Cloud is becoming bigger and bigger so that’s why you’re seeing companies emerge like DigitalOcean and Linode – these companies that provide more technical platforms aimed at IT managers, developers, the highly-technical who want to have all that control and don’t want the platform. So the core product the hosting industry has had for years is being siphoned away simultaneously be things that are more technical and less technical. People are either wanting to build it all themselves without your help or their wanting to have it all built for them and get on with their lives.

In 12-18 months I see a continued flattening of growth in the traditional managed hosting and I see continued uptick and rise in software-as-a-service platforms and in cloud.

WHIR: How do you see DreamHost’s position in the market? You didn’t always go after developers, and it sounds like you’re starting to go after more of those technical users. How much of a challenge was it to focus on that group [developers]?

LaCour: In terms of being focused on that group it wasn’t too difficult for us to make the leap because we’re a bunch of technical users ourselves so in many ways it’s serving our own needs and I think the big difference between us and a DigitalOcean-type is that in many ways it appears that we’re doing the same sort of thing it is not just a product that we’re developing to sell to our customer, it’s a product that we’re developing to sell to ourselves. We have tons of expertise selling open source apps to people, notably WordPress. We are great WordPress hosts, probably the best in the market. We have this infrastructure that we’ve been building that underpins our software as a service and our other products.

We actually develop our cloud to go after developers but also to provide an infrastructure for our own use. That’s a wonderful thing because we have a customer in the building that we can talk to at all times and ask if we’re serving them well. While we’ve been in market as a purely ‘sell our infrastructure to developers’ for a bit now we are just starting to use it extensively ourselves internally. So the shift wasn’t really all that difficult in terms of mental shift, but the technology was big, heavy lifting to get good enough for us to use to run our own services.

In terms of the people we’re going after I’ll say that while developers are certainly part of the target I’ll also note that we’ve been attracting customers such as little startups that have been running their software on dedicated racks or colo or something of that nature and they’re looking for someone like them who can understand them and who embraces open source platforms – they want more of what cloud can give them.

WHIR: When you set out to create this cloud business unit and brought forward some of the experience you had on the product management side of things, what were some of the challenges that you faced?

LaCour: Back in 2014, the reason for doing that was frankly it was very heavy lifting building out these technology platforms. We chose to build out our cloud storage and cloud computing platforms on top of open source software, including Ceph, which is a project we created here at DreamHost, and OpenStack which is a huge, successful open source project. That said, both of those projects are very difficult to deploy and manage and maintain and run. It was a huge ordeal to go through the process of building out these new platforms. In 2014 the effort to do that was really to free me up to focus fully on getting those products finished and out the door. That was job number one.

It took the better part of a year, from 2014 to 2015 to really get that done. We got into beta, and that’s when started learning a bit about the people who were using the software and that’s when you start to think, ‘OK, what do people want out of this service? Who is the persona, the customer-type that is going to be using this?’ We started to do some assessments, demographics, everything from what browser people were using to age groups and screen resolution. We started to understand our customer a lot better. What we did was we took that data and built out real personas with real names, and now everything we do is really based on satisfying those customers. It’s these external customers and our internal customer at DreamHost who are building out these new services that we are going to serve. So the biggest challenge was that learning experience. Getting things deployed and into the hands of customers and then rapidly figuring out who that customer is and what they’re trying to accomplish. And that’s guiding everything we do from this point forward.

WHIR: You spoke a little bit about building the cloud storage platform and basing a lot of that on Ceph and OpenStack. The conversation in hosting for a long time has always been the build versus buy dilemma. What’s your take on that and how do you think cloud has changed that conversation?

LaCour: DreamHost is kind of a unique bird in this particular question. This has been a longstanding thing at DreamHost – before I even came here DreamHost has always had a strong open source bent and preference, and we also fancied ourselves engineers.

Over time we’ve developed a lot of software. We have our own control panel, which many people out there buy things like cPanel or Plesk, we never have. We wrote our own control panel; we own our own user experience. We developed our own configuration management – all these technical things on the backend, cobbling together mostly open source tools and so on. I think it’s been both a blessing and a curse for DreamHost to build everything. Sometimes we make the decision that we should when we should have just bought something, but we’ve got a lot better at that over the last four or five years especially. As we’ve brought in some new blood, including myself, we’ve done a much better job at looking at things and saying, ‘OK, do we really need to have our own bug tracker that we wrote? Probably not.’ Let’s focus on the things that our customers want and are going to make us money. We’ve definitely shifted in that regard but I think that DreamHost very much is and always will be a place that is built on open source software; we take open source software and we make it accessible and great.

WHIR: One thing that has stood out to me about DreamHost is its diversity, and I think that culture is a huge part of your DNA as well. Obviously there are skill shortages in specific areas of development and engineering; can you talk a bit about that and your approach to hiring?

LaCour: It all starts from culture. If I had to say the one thing that I was most proud of about being part of DreamHost, it would be our culture. That culture has existed since before I got here but since I joined 4.5 years ago DreamHost’s leadership team actually sat down and decided that we wanted to really articulate our values and put them down on paper. We had a focus group if you will – a group of people that came from all parts of the company – representing our very diverse employee-base and they solidified it and came up with something called the DreamHost Way. We have 8 values and then one kind of core statement that talks about who we are as a company and includes things like empower people, give everyone a voice, speak hacker, embrace open source, practice shameless honesty, practice flexibility, be irreverent and fun, and provide superhero service. We actually have those values painted on the wall of all of our offices. We frequently take big decisions to the group, to the company itself, we’ll vote on things from time to time. We try to really involve everyone in the process. That’s all permeated now in the handbook and through the hiring process. When people read about DreamHost and encounter us, we want them to know who we are. [The values] very quickly attract a top quality person [in the hiring process] – someone who wants to be a part of something like this where it’s built on a mutual respect and being genuine in who we are.

Being present in open source communities has been a huge thing as well. I’ve hired many people for our cloud team over these three or four years that came out of these open source communities – places where we were already participating and contributing. That resonates strongly with people. Being a part of those things in an honest way is a great way to attract people to join you on working on those things as well.

WHIR: Can you share anything about what DreamHost is working on next as you look at the upcoming trends?

LaCour: I think what you’re going to see out of DreamHost in the next 12-18 months is a real embracing of who we are at our core. That’ll show up in terms of embracing open source and empowering people. Following on what we talked about earlier in terms of those market patterns, seeing people move up into software as a service and down into infrastructure, you’ll see us really trying to provide value to our customers along those lines. We’re going to continue to be the best WordPress host out there and I think our customers are going to be really excited to see what we have in the works there. Now that we have this mature and powerful cloud platform some of the things we’re going to be able to do and enable WordPress users to do on top of the DreamHost platform are going to be pretty amazing.

Source: TheWHIR

“Demand for all our services is growing across all Europe. For us it’s business as usual,” Stephen Orban, head of enterprise strategy at Amazon Web Services, said in an interview at a customer conference Thursday in Frankfurt.

TRENDING: AWS Expansion Just Getting Started, CEO Andy Jassy Says

Britain’s vote last week to break away from the EU has raised concerns about how data-storage regulations in Europe and the U.K. will evolve. Orban confirmed Amazon’s planned U.K. data center would open despite the uncertainty, opening later this year or early next as planned.

“We’re watching the situation but I can’t speculate how everything is going to unfold,” Orban said. AWS is discussing the matter with the EU’s Article 29 working group on data protection, he said.

READ MORE: Brexit and Europe: Business as Usual

Britain’s decision to leave the EU could make using the planned London center more complicated for customers if the U.K. adheres to different rules than the rest of Europe about storing and safeguarding data. The Brexit process raises concerns that Europe’s new General Data Protection Regulation, approved in April and set to take effect in 2018, will no longer apply in the U.K. once it leaves the EU. If the U.K. needs to create its own set of protection rules it could complicate business in Europe for cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft Corp.’s Azure service, and data businesses.

Customer Considerations

“We were considering using the U.K. one, mostly for U.K. customers,” said Charles Phillips, Chief Executive of Infor, a New York-based business software company that’s one of AWS’s biggest customers. “It’s less likely given what’s going on. I don’t want to rush in there and then have customers tell us to do something different.”

Phillips, a former high-ranking executive at Oracle Corp., said Infor plans to keep hosting British customers’ data from Amazon’s Dublin center, though he had hoped Amazon’s U.K. center would offer faster Web response times.

“Most of our customers we know are OK with Ireland,” he said. “We don’t know if they’re OK with the U.K.”

Orban said European customers that don’t want to tap computing capacity from the upcoming U.K. cluster of data centers could still host their applications in Amazon’s Frankfurt and Dublin locations.

Amazon’s cloud division, which the company says is on track for $10 billion in revenue this year, rents computing capacity and software that businesses can tap online instead of installing and maintaining their own servers. Amazon serves customers from 13 data-center clusters worldwide and plans to open four additional locations in the coming year.

“Everything new we’re building on AWS,” said Eric Bowman, vice-president of engineering at Zalando SE, the fast-growing Berlin-based Web apparel retailer. Each of its 110 developer teams has its own AWS account, which lets the company build new capabilities quickly without getting tangled in one another’s code or waiting weeks for new servers to arrive.

The U.K. cluster would offer EU customers “strong data sovereignty,” Amazon’s chief technology officer, Werner Vogels, said in a blog post last year. That’s an important issue in Europe, where regulations require data resides on computers in the EU, and many businesses, especially in Germany, insist it say in their own country.

Source: TheWHIR