Innovation, Target and Focus
“Cook pointed to three things that prompted the decision – he said he recognized the brilliance of Jobs’ vision for the iMac as being different from “following the herd.” He was also impressed by Apple’s strategy to target the consumer market, which contrasted with competitors’ plans to move toward the enterprise. Finally, Jobs struck Cook as someone who was unaffected by money, a trait that he strongly admired.” – [ source ]
Acquia.comGetPantheon.comOmega8.cc
AAcquia.com started its hosting in September 2009 as a purely enterprise-oriented solution. It is what Managed Cloud is still about. Then, in March 2011 they added a Dev Cloud, as a response to other offers, already available on the market. They added Memcached support in October 2010, but they still use the standard LAMP stack. Before adding hosting, Acquia.com services consisted of a bundle included in the Acquia Network subscription, which is now an impressive collection of various valuable add-ons to any Drupal site which can benefit from this service. As a result, Acquia.com is a big player in the Drupal-sphere, offering wide range of services, now including also three kinds of hosting (remember about DrupalGardens). However, it means more conservatism than innovation in the technology stack, various targets and thus no focus possible, while still gravitating toward enterprise market.
PGetPantheon.com started its publicly available hosting after a very long invite-only beta, in March 2012. Their v1 offer, available only during the beta period, was a more traditional, LAMP+Varnish stack based, similar to that one still used by Acquia.com. But their v2 offer, introduced in October 2011, is a completely different beast. They use modern LEMP stack, with Redis added in February 2012. As we have mentioned in one of previous articles, it is a highly sophisticated, innovative way to host Drupal. It is a true bleeding edge technology. They do hosting only, so good focus is possible, which accelerates the innovation, and vice-versa. However, it looks like they attempt to target all market levels – by offering two entry level, limited and not scalable options (Developer and Basic), one of them (Developer) completely free, through business entry level option (Pro), up to custom built (Enterprise and Zeus) high-end options. The result is that there is no main target defined, which adds some blur to the focus density.
8Omega8.cc started its Aegir Drupal hosting in July 2009, leveraging its experience in the hosting industry since 1997. It is based on a modern LEMP stack from the day one. Omega8.cc pioneered LEMP stack use in the Drupal community. Both Memcached and Redis were included since July 2009. After Memcached has been removed from the BOA stack in May 2012, it is now a pure Nginx, PHP-FPM, MariaDB and Redis based stack only. Omega8.cc does Drupal hosting only, with clearly defined target – a consumer market. As written on the About page: “We love making things simple, elegant and easy to use. We believe that powerful web hosting tools, even if complex behind the scenes, should expose only simplicity, beauty and power.” Omega8.cc doesn’t offer free, nor any enterprise level option – the main and only target is the consumer market – Drupal sites owners, small design studios, small developer shops, who need either fully managed, high performance Drupal hosting at affordable price, or just an assistance for their own small hosting business, based on the open source BOA stack.
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