Montreal Tech Watch

First a disclaimer: I’ve been involved with iWeb in the early stage of this project, in product design. I believe though that the following is a impartial review!

For those who are unaware of it, iWeb is a web hosting provider, based in Montréal. They own and run their own data centers, setting them apart from the majority of hosting providers who either rent their servers or colocate them in a third-party data center.

In the past years, iWeb has been growing tremendously, with double-digit growth numbers, now more than 20,000 customers, funding from Goldman Sachs, and an excellent track record in data center maintenance. They were also listed in top 10 hosting provider compagnies worldwide, in DCK, an industry reference.

Hosting is a highly competitive market. Unlike most Internet markets, it’s one of the rare services where customers are willing to pay and have a shopping behaviour similar to offline products. The result is lots of price wars, innovative marketing packaging (like mediatemple), and of course continuous research & development. Cloud hosting and virtualization for instance changed significantly the product, with now customers looking for a product that would scale up & down, following their needs, and also very quick (if not instantaneous) delivery times. Gone are also the days where a company would only deliver a physical server with a dry message with your ssh credentials, nowdays it’s all about APIs, friendly user interfaces, and all sorts of pluggable third-party services, so that a web programmer would only “drag & drop” his code and activate services with just one click.

In response to those market shifts, iWeb has released last week a new product called “SmartServers“. It’s still a dedicated server, which means you don’t share its resources or time with another customer, but it also uses virtualization technology to offer rapid deployment. iWeb promises a 2 hour delivery time, from the instant you finish ordering a server on their website. Like other cloud offers, SmartServers can also be scaled up & down to a different server easily. The new offerings come also with a new modern user interface.

Cost-wise, SmartServers are much more affordable than what’s available in the cloud hosting market, promising savings for startups and web developers.

Here is a video of the iWeb-NE, iWeb’s new data center built to host the SmartServers

Lancement des SmartServers – Visite Centre de Données iWeb from Heri R. on Vimeo.

Featured in the video is Eric Chouinard, iWeb’s CEO

The SmartServers’s new features bring iWeb’s offering to the market’s level. It’s great to see a local technology company competing worldwide, in now a multi-billion dollar market. And as stated by iWeb, this is only the beginning since most of the R&D time was spent in building a software base, allowing for future pluggable services. I only wish they came up with this new offer sooner. Other providers like Amazon or Rackspace have already built market credibility with their cloud offerings for a couple of years. That’s why I think there are still challenges ahead for iWeb: it’ll need creative, quick and hard work to get the same market credibility and trendiness for SmartServers. Certainly a tech company to watch in the near future