A small company called SWSoft has released HSP Complete 2.0, which promises to be a complete webhosting package. It resides on top of the company's innovative Linux-based Virtuozzo server virtualization software.

by ISP-Planet Staff [August 12, 2002]

You probably have not heard of SWSoft. Founded circa 1995 by Serguei Beloussov, the company has been building a new hosting solution that it calls HSP Complete. The company maintains offices in Moscow, San Francisco, and Singapore.

Designed with the help of chief software engineer Alexey Kuznetsov, who has a reputation in the Linux community, the company claims its HSP Complete 2.0, which was released on August 1, 2002, offers better virtual server operations than its competitors.

They key challenge, says Alex Plant, SWSoft's senior marketing manager, was to give many users root access to a single server, allowing a service provider to sell entry-level services that resembled owning a dedicated server. The key technology is a piece of server virtualization software that SWSoft calls "Virtuozzo." To provide root access to, say, 150 different users, the company had to figure out how to give each user a completely configurable operating system that was nevertheless as small as possible. It was like slicing an atom—breaking down something that many assumed could not be cut.

SWSoft calls each copy an "instance," and earlier this year announced that it had successfully placed 2000 instances of the Linux OS on a single server (Dell 8450 PowerEdge running RedHat Linux 7.2).

Most service providers, Plant thinks, will use lower-end off-the-shelf hardware and be able to place about 150 instances, at most, on a single server, because their customers will use a significant amount of disk space. Nevertheless, if all instances are sold out, the product should be profitable.

On top of the virtualization product sits HSP Complete, which manages all of the business and technical functions of the webhost: hardware, backups, IP pools, service levels, making and changing virtual environments, accounts, resellers, billing systems, e-commerce order taking, and more. It is all managed through a single Web-based GUI (above).

"We've got customers of all sizes," Plant says, "down to guys who were running the business out of their college dorm rooms and have now graduated. Our average customer at this time has 10 employees and over 10,000 accounts."

The company's biggest customer is 1Net-Singapore, a backbone provider and data center operator in one of the most wired cities in the world. Another noted customer is USonyx, which prices the Virtuozzo virtual servers starting at $49.99 per month.

We spoke to another customer, Penguix. The company's president and founder, Todd Robinson, told us why he'd chosen HSP Complete. He said, "I'm a consultant. I've build data centers and I've run call centers. Hosting was a secondary business but it was becoming a headache to run. What really caught my eye about HSP Complete was the virtual server environment. Sure, if you're a Linux guru you might be able to roll your own, but I liked the fact that, after I bought several servers, I'd be paying just about $3,000 per server. I find the GUI easy to use, and I feel I can make back the money I've spent on it."

The company competes with Plesk, Ensim, and Sphera on the hosting management side, and its Virtuozzo product competes with other storage virtualization vendors like vmware. Coincidentally, VMware and Sphera have been adopted by IBM for use on its hosting products, making IBM an intriguing competitor.

With the product just starting to roll off the shelves, the company is looking at new horizons. Says Plant, "we're looking at porting to Windows and possibly SUN Solaris. We're seeing interest from all over the world, including Europe, New Zealand, and Australia. We're considering putting our software in other languages, such as French, German, Dutch, and Spanish."

Pricing and availability
HSP Complete 2.0 is available now.

The product is priced at $250 per box, plus $50 per virtual server (so a box with 50 virtual servers would cost $250 + ($50 x 50) = $2,750. The price of hardware with the software pre-installed starts at around $10,000.

—End