As we settle into the first New Year for Level Traffic, I'd like to thank our technology partners, affiliate representatives and most of all our clients for their part in the development of our rock-solid platform and the phenomenal growth that is based on that foundation.
As our service delivery platform matures, our tech and marketing teams are turning their focus towards instantaneous and automatic service provisioning and on-line ordering. The basics are a no-brainer, and slated for Early Spring release are the following feature enhancements:
- Online Domain Registration Purchase and Instant provisioning of Control Panel Access.
- Online and Instant Provisioning of Enterprise Email Products.
- Online Ordering and Instant Provisioning of the Enterprise Hosting - Basic product
As we architect the GUI for online ordering and instant provisioning of the last item product family, Hosting, the entire affair gets a bit sticky. The success of Level Traffic is and has been based on the very characteristic that sets us apart from the Mega Hosts and the plethora of other hosting services on the market - Rock Solid Reliability, Blazing Fast Performance, all delivered to the Client painlessly and seamlessly. This is not accomplished by magic, rather it is accomplished by personal analysis of each of our clients business and technical requirements, and the implementation of specific platforms and technologies from our toolset to achieve the end goal. So the challenge we face now is where to draw the line between shielding and protecting our Clients from that technical complexity, and providing the type of instantaneous provisioning available to consumers of simpler Hosting Suite products.
In the hosting Family, the product areas providing the most significant challenge in the balance between instantaneous ordering and provisioning and servicing our clients from technical complexity and product selection or configuration mishaps are:
- Load Balanced Database backed applications requiring instantaneous DB synchronization
- Load Balanced Web applications requiring cross-postback Session State
- Auto-Scaling synchronized database applications.
Some applications involved in the above scenarios will always require a custom coding component, be it database triggers to simultaneously update mirrored databases, or special TCP/IP handling to insure a 2nd response returns to the same server instance as the original request to maintain session state. Some scenarios, take for example a CMS system that can function well using a master/feeder database setup that is synchronized daily, can be configured for automatic provisioning. There's a school of thought within the internal ranks that professes to place all the tools that we possibly can in the Client's hands and leave the responsibility with them. There's another school professing the prudence of shielding our clients from potential technology mishaps, and maintaining these services exclusively on a fully managed basis. It reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where Pappy and Kramer argue over wether to permit the customers to make a pizza with "any topping they want". I'll keep you posted.
~KMF