WCN 05-2014
Dear Readers,
With this joint issue of WorldCloudNews, we are
proud to welcome you to our dedicated local
Hosting Events in Singapore, São Paulo and the
European WHD.local Tour.
Although many miles apart from one another,
these events give proof of both the global
interaction and business network of our hosting
and cloud industry, as well as the important central
focus when it comes to support local SMBs with
our services.
Therefore, we are expecting intense discussions
and close networking among the several hundred
visitors and partners during each event. During
each day we want to especially focus on the
enormous changes within the IT channel and the
prospects and challenges VARs and Managed
Service Providers are facing due to that.
You as an attendee will profit from leading industry
experts sharing their knowledge, such as David
Ednie from SalesChannel Europe, or our partners
from Parallels and VeriSign. Furthermore, global
hosting and software companies like Softlayer
or Rushfiles have come to cooperate with local
businesses and to leverage the rising business
opportunities.
In order to capture the guiding topics and focus
of this event, as well as to keep you informed of
what’s going on in the industry after the events are
over, we created what you are currently reading –
WorldCloudNews. This way you can continue the
discussions with hosting experts around the world
online at worldcloudnews.com afterwards.
But for now, we wish you a great WHD event with
lots of business opportunities.
Thomas Strohe & Daniel Hagemeier,
Publishers WorldCloudNews
“I wanted People to use it,
so I made it Open-Source”
Igor Sysoev is a co-founder
of NGINX, Inc. – the company
behind the NGINX software. It
is based in San Francisco, CA
and Moscow, Russia. Igor is the
author of NGINX web server and
he’s been developing it since
2002. Prior to joining NGINX,
Inc. at the beginning of 2011, Igor
worked for Rambler – one of the
largest Internet portals in Russia.
Igor holds a diploma in Computer
Science from Bauman Moscow
State Technical University. Igor
Sysoev was interviewed by
WorldCloudNews reporter Rob
Clymo on the future of NGINX
development and the power of
open source.
Igor, can you begin by telling
us how your first user summit went in San
Francisco earlier this year?
It was extremely exciting for me to be there! Actually
I want to extend kudos here to Sarah Novotny, our
community manager – she’d joined us about a
month before the event, and what she did in terms of
organizing it was amazing. So I was pleased with both
what we can do as a company, and the event itself.
Everyone was receptive, open, and appreciative. The
overall atmosphere of the event was really “NGINX”
– lots of geek talks, lots of creative feedback – all
useful.
Did the event reveal any surprises in the way
NGINX is being used?
Yes and no, actually. There were some interesting
corner cases highlighted, and I was a bit surprised
to discover how popular some of the third party work
for NGINX is. I was also thrilled for yet another time
to see how creative the users are in their use cases
for NGINX.
How do you think NGINX has evolved in the near
ten years that it has been in existence?
That’s a great question. I started NGINX as an
experiment, and I never thought it was going to
become that successful. It is a bit hard for me to think
of its evolution in detail. However, I do think NGINX
has already changed the definition of a webserver,
and it has also become a dominant component of
changing modernized web architectures (vs. legacy
ones) - this is probably the most exciting news for
me. I started it as an experiment to boost the delivery
of static content (my reference examples of that time
were things like thttpd). But as soon as other people
tried it in production, they immediately requested the
proxy component, and the whole “web acceleration”
direction had started. In short, NGINX evolved from a
simple experiment with the idea of solving the C10k
problem, to a complete solution for proxying, load
balancing, SSL, static content acceleration, and a few
unique capabilities.
What makes it the dominant high-performance
web server it has become – what has been the
secret of its success?
I don’t 100% know the secret sauce, but from what I’ve
been told by the users, my perception is the following.
First of all, when I started NGINX, I focused on a very
specific problem – how to handle more customers
per a single server (existing server). It turned out to
be a universal problem. NGINX vastly helped fast
growing websites scale efficiently, without spending
a lot. What happened next were people asking for
additional functions in NGINX that would make it
similar to the then existing hardware web accelerators
– and I did that. However, as I’d never been a network
Highlights of WHD.asia 2014
Keynote:
9:30 am – David Ednie (SalesChannel Europe):
“Digital Disruption: 5 Steps to accelerating
Adoption of your Cloud Services”
Sessions:
11:40 am – Dr. Burt Kaliski (VeriSign):
“Innovating with the Domain Name System: From
Web to Cloud to the Internet of Things”
2:40 pm – Tatsunori Shibata (NEC Asia Pacific):
“NEC Platform Solutions for Hosting Providers”
2:55 pm – Janna Lam (IP Mirror):
“Best Practices in Online Brand Protection”
4:50 pm – Dreas van Donselaar (SpamExperts):
“Email Security 2.0 –integrated & automated”
Networking:
5:00 pm – Networking Drinks at hosting.FAIR
Highlights of WHD.brazil 2014
engineer, I was adding the web acceleration functions
in NGINX my own way, thinking from a standpoint of
a systems and application engineer. That must have
been a common problem too – how to blend web
acceleration into the applications infrastructure. It
wasn’t a one-off process, and I wasn’t thinking of it
exactly like this – it’s all been very gradual and subtle,
and NGINX just became what it is: an essential part
of changing architectures.
Keynote:
Sessions:
Networking:
What do you think have been the key developments
of NGINX in the last few years?
When we started the company 3 years ago, NGINX
was used by about 7.3% of all Internet websites, and
by 24 million sites overall. Three years later the Web
is 3 times bigger, and we have twice as much market
share, having grown 6 times in the absolute number
of domains that use NGINX! It reflects the level of
appreciation people have for NGINX. It didn’t happen
just “because.” As a company we fixed several
hundred bugs in NGINX, and added over 100 new
features to our open source product in the past 3
years, maintaining the same quick release cycle as
before. We also grew a team of core developers to
join myself, which was one of the key goals I had for
the company myself and has proven to help develop
the product. As a company we gained interesting
experience of helping some of the largest web and IT
companies in the world (e.g. Netflix), as well as many
smaller clients. Overall it has been a very exciting and
gratifying experience for me.
And what do you have planned for the future – do
you still have a strong belief in the power of open
source?
I do have a strong belief in the power of open source.
Initially NGINX was an R&D project, but as soon as I
realized it really helps to improve web performance,
I wanted people to use it, so I made it open-source.
I also wanted to avoid any limitations due to the
licensing so I deliberately made it permissive, BSDlicensed. I still have the same attitude towards
what we do with our open source project. I would
also like to improve the situation with the third party
enhancements for NGINX, and this is why we are
planning to extend our modular architecture and
developer APIs in the future.
Do you think there is an optimum performance
limit for a web application accelerator such as
NGINX or can it become even more powerful?
It can become more powerful. When I started
NGINX it took me a long time to study all the new
mechanisms that modern operating systems offered.
I tried to use those that made most sense back then,
and I spent many hours doing my research, trying
different approaches, and checking what works and
what doesn’t. You can still find the remnants of that
Imprint
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era in the existing NGINX code. Why I think we can
make it better? Because operating systems and
hardware will continue to evolve. NGINX has evolved
and adapted too. We’ve been optimizing it to the
state of things, and it is a continuous process. We are
currently working on a number of extensions to the
NGINX architecture that will allow it to be even faster,
more efficient, more gratifying.
How do you feel about the alternatives to NGINX
that are out there – do you have direct competitors
right now?
There’s of course Apache, and there are other
products specializing on just a subset of web
acceleration techniques like Varnish, HAProxy, and
Apache Traffic Server. However, NGINX is unique
in its ability to bring all the most needed and most
relevant web acceleration tools to the plate – at
once, in the form of a compact, and yet very powerful
software package. NGINX is versatile, you can use
just some of its function sets, or all 5 (or maybe 6!)
on the same instance.At the same time, what’s even
more exciting for me is that NGINX is part of a rich
ecosystem of web infrastructure products, and it’s
not like you should necessarily replace something
with NGINX. As an open-source product, we coexist happily with legacy setups, and heterogeneous
setups, most often making them more efficient. We
also offer an alternative, “reduced complexity” option
with our commercial offerings, but that’s another
story!
How much do you think the ‘community spirit’ of
NGINX has helped with its success?
Publishers: Thomas Strohe, Daniel Hagemeier • Advertisement: Christian Jaeger
Editors: Michael Frenzel, Sophie Große Ostendorf Rob Clymo • Layout: Verena Rolfes
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Market & Innovation
Page 2 • WCN 05-2014
Disrupt or be Disrupted
the short term but makes you
vulnerable in the long run to new
competition as it stifles innovation,
transformation and change over
By David R. Ednie,
President and CEO of
SalesChannel Europe,
and keynote speaker
WHD.australia
The enemy of transformation and change is the dayto-day. Maintaining the status quo, just doing what we
need to do each day holds us back from moving into
the future.
“Disrupt yourself, before someone else does. Disrupt
yourself – to dominate the next wave of business,
even if in the near-term it undercut your existing one.”
Clayton Christiansen
‘Protect the base’ thinking makes total sense in
the longer term. The dominant firms of yesterday
have at best a precarious hold on the success of
tomorrow.
Dell built a hugely successful multi-billion dollar
business on it’s ability to execute. Dell exemplified
execution. Execution in sourcing components,
execution in supply chain management, execution
in low cost/high quality Just-In-Time assembly
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and execution in driving the channel to take huge
shipments at the end of every quarter. So while
the market demanded ever increasing numbers
of PC, Dell dominated. Dell’s business model of
constantly driving additional economies of scale
through operational excellence kept Dell at the top
for over 25 years. But when the market shifted (as all
markets do) to Smart phones and Tablets, execution
didn’t cut it anymore. The market now wanted new
and different, radically different. The market wanted
innovation from PC vendors. Innovation was the new
business model, the business model that would take
Technology and PC vendors directly to the sweet spot
of the business opportunity created by market shift.
Innovation, not execution was the market maker.
well. Those who could see it coming had to first
imagine it, then create it, then get the market to
want it. And that is all about innovation. Innovation
at multiple levels; product innovation, marketing
innovation, sales innovation and ultimately
innovation of the underlying business model.
We all have 20/20 vision in hindsight.
Question: When was the last time you disrupted your
business? Think: Market -> Market shift.
Think: Product -> Product experience.
Think: Customer needs -> benefits the
customer might want tomorrow.
Looking back from where we are today this may
seem obvious, but at the time who could see it
coming and how? Certainly not those who had a
vested interest in the continuation of the current
business model, such as Dell management. After
all they had over 100 quarters of proof that their
business model worked and worked extraordinarily
Sieht so nicht schön aus...
Execution is a powerful competitive advantage when
markets are in high growth through to maturity.
Innovation is critical to bring new technologies,
products and services to market when shifts occur
and the status quo loses its appeal to buyers.
“The ultimate success is to define future markets,
and place yourself at the center of them.”
Aaron Levie, Founder & CEO, Box.net
Takeaway: Over the longer term Execution is tactical
and temporary, Innovation is strategic and
sustainable. The choice is yours: Disrupt
or be Disrupted.
Market & Innovation
WCN 05-2014 • Page 3
276 Million Domain Names registered –
remarkable growth for
ccTLDs of Tokelau, India & Colombia
A few days ago, VeriSign released the latest issue of
the Domain Name Industry Brief for the first quarter
of 2014. By this report VeriSign highlights important
trends in domain name registration, including key
performance indicators and growth opportunities.
The gTLD and ccTLD data cited in the report are
estimates as of the time the report was developed.
The DNIB showed that the Internet grew by five
million domain names to a total of 267 million
domains names across all top-level domains (TLDs)!
This is a 1.7 percent increase over the fourth quarter
of 2013. Registrations have grown by 19.3 million, or
7.5 percent, year over year.
.com and .net
New .com and .net registrations totaled 8.6 million,
bringing the combined number of .com and .net TLDs
to approximately 128.5 million domain names in the
adjusted zone by the end of the first quarter of 2014.
This represents a 4 percent increase year over year.
As of March 31, 2014, the base of registered names in
.com equaled 113.2 million names, while .net equaled
15.2 million names. In the first quarter of 2013, new
.com and .net registrations totaled 8.8 million.
gTLDs and new gTLDs
As of March 31, 2014, there were a total of 224
generic top-level domains(gTLDs) in the root with
approximately 149 million registrations. The top 10
largest gTLDs zone size were .com, .net, .org, .info,
.biz, .mobi, .asia, .cat, .tel and .name.
.org, .cn (China), .ru (Russian Federation), .info and
.nl (Netherlands). As of March 31, 2014, there were
283 global ccTLD extensions delegated in the root
(including Internationalized Domain Names), with the
top 10 ccTLDs comprising 65.8 percent of all ccTLD
registrations.
Among the 20 largest ccTLDs, four exceeded 4
percent overall quarter-over-quarter growth: Tokelau
(8.0 percent), Argentina (7.2 percent), India (15.2
percent) and Colombia (12.4 percent). This marks
four straight quarters where Tokelau has exceeded
4 percent growth.
DNS Query Load
The average daily Domain Name System (DNS)
query load during the first quarter of 2014 was 85
billion, with a peak of 120 billion, across all TLDs
operated by VeriSign . Compared to the previous
quarter, the daily average increased 3.4 percent and
the peak increased 20.6 percent. Year over year, the
daily average increased 14.8 percent and the peak
increased 6 percent.
Some interesting facts: 69 percent of all .com
websites are in English, more than 95 percent of
networks are compromised in some way and internet
users send 204 million emails per minute. For more
domain stats from the first quarter of 2014, check out
the latest issue of the Domain Name Industry Brief at
verisigninc.com/dnib.
Furthermore, there were 198 new generic TLDs
(gTLDs) delegated into the root; 125 of which were
delegated during the first quarter of 2014. New
gTLD registrations totaled 405,091, or 0.27 percent
of total gTLD registrations. The largest new gTLDs
by zone size were .guru, .berlin, .photography, .tips,
.today, .email, .technology, .company, .directory and
.clothing.
ccTLDs
Country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) reached
approximately 127.1 million domain names in the
first quarter of 2014, so ccTLDs were increasing
2.9 percent quarter over quarter. The addition of
3.6 million domains means a 2.9 percent increase
compared to the fourth quarter of 2013. This is an
increase of approximately 14.7 million domain
names, or 13.1 percent, from a year ago
The largest TLDs in order by zone size were .com, .tk
(Tokelau), .de (Germany), .net, .uk (United Kingdom),
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Market & Innovation
Getting the Most of a Services and
Solutions Partner Program
Page 4 • WCN 05-2014
Getting the Most of a Services and
Solutions Partner Program
space, but consider your key and potential market in
other countries.
By Janna Lam, CEO of
IP Mirror Group
Janna Lam has served as the Chief Executive
Officer of the IP Mirror Group since 2000. She
has been successfully leading IP Mirror as a wellestablished registrar that provides expertise in
domain name management and recovery, online
brand protection and security, especially in the
context of Asia.
The loss of revenue, diminished trust, and erosion of
customer confidence are prominent consequences
for the lack of online brand protection and security
for online brand assets. Here are three common
approaches that companies can adapt to strengthen
their online footholds.
1. Domain names form part of your online presence.
As hundreds of domain name extensions are
scheduled to be released, it is important for
companies to employ the most successful strategies
for domain names. A good domain name can go a
long way towards generating traffic to your website
and build your reputation. This, in turn, will result
in better revenue for you. Protect not only the .com
2. A few online security measures can help companies
prevent attacks and damages. Companies can keep
their domain name in public WHOIS confidential, lock
the domain name to prevent any fraudulent changes
and transfers by third parties, or auto-renew the
domain names. Many opt for Secure Socket Layer
(SSL), a service that encrypts sensitive information
sent across the internet. To avoid being spammed
or attacked by viruses, businesses often pay for
premium email services that deliver a high level of
protection. These security measures ensure that
companies’ websites are stable and accessible to
customers, and that transactions are secure.
3. Asia is a booming market that attracts business
development, market penetration, brand expansion
and inevitably also brand abuse. Managing
online brand protection and security requires the
understanding of various governing jurisdictions in
different countries. Singapore has a more structured
conflict resolution for domain name abuse compared
to the system in Vietnam, for example, meaning you
will need to put more efforts in handling the matter in
the latter country should issues arise. The more adept
your company is at understanding and adapting to
local regulations, the less vulnerable you become to
brand infringements.
The three approaches mentioned above can be
effectively employed. As technology changes and
innovation grows, the trend will continue to shift the
landscape of IT industry. Brands and businesses
should be always on the lookout for new strategies
that better protect themselves.
By Lemanto Siantar,
Channel Development
Manager, SoftLayer
Technologies
Lemanto Siantar works as Channel Development
Manager for SoftLayer Technologies. He works
with existing and prospective partners in promoting
and selling SoftLayer’s hosting solutions. Prior
to his role at SoftLayer, he was a Senior Sales
Manager at Webvisions Pte Ltd.
[email protected]
Businesses based across Asia are using
infrastructure on the Cloud to meet the demands
of their exponentially growing global client base.
Additionally, aggressive expansion plans across key
global markets require scalable, flexible and secure
infrastructure – bare metal, public or, private cloud.
Creating a hosting business requires a platform that
is fully automated and controlled via API and provides
total transparency and control.
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or, infrastructure
on the cloud brings together on-demand, dedicated
computer power – servers, storage and networking
– in a pay-as-you-go model. When you or, your
customers’ infrastructure requirement are volatile,
you don’t need to invest in your own hardware – in
house setup can, after all, never match the scalability
that your business requires. Whether a business is
a start-up or is testing new ideas, companies with
leading edge solutions need to remain competitive,
innovative and above all else, agile. IaaS, through
public, private clouds or dedicated bare metal
servers, is the perfect solution.
SoftLayer provides the unique opportunity to build
on and resell any or all SoftLayer services as though
they are your own. No two reseller hosting solutions
are the same. SoftLayer allows you to design (and
only pay for) the infrastructure your solution requires.
Some of the typical components that SoftLayer
provides to help materialize many reseller hosting
solutions include Control Panel & Billing, Virtual
Servers, storage solution with built-in search and
CDN integration, Virtualization, Private Clouds and
Content Delivery Network.
The SoftLayer Services & Solution Provider program
provides qualified, value-adding services providers
the ideal platform for building a dynamic business,
plus exclusive benefits and advantages including
preferred server delivery and generous volume
discounts on server and upgrade purchases, setup
fees, and more. With dedicated and virtual servers,
storage, networking, and more, we have the modular
infrastructure that your customers (or your unique
services) require.
Why Join SoftLayer Reseller Program
●● Preferential server, limited inventory,
and promotional product delivery
●● Preferential overstock inventory and
Windows Server® pricing
●● Preferential cancellation policy and
flexible payment options
●● Published Reseller information for all
IPs (RWhois/SWIP/Reverse DNS)
●● License Manager for Helm, Parallels®
Plesk, and cPanel®
●● Customized portal permissions for
customers
●● Competitive Setup and Monthly
Discounts