StrataScale – Hosting for the Edge Cases

There’s quite a divide between traditional hosting in physical servers and the somewhat ethereal (actually completely ethereal) concept of cloud hosting. Into this breech walks StrataScale. StrataScale call themselves the first fully managed server hosting solution – that’s physical servers, not virtual ones. In an answer to many peoples concerns around virtualization and cloud storage, StrataScale brings some of the benefits that cloud hosting brings (scalability, rapid deployment etc) with the rock-solid approach that a physical presence brings.

The unique point of distance is the ability they give to bring cloud like feature sets for dedicated hardware – web portals, provisioning servers and storage on the fly, configuring of IP addresses in real-time – all within a dedicated physical hosting environment.

StrataScale pitches the benefits of their service as;

• Immediate infrastructure
• Direct server control
• Web browser accessibility
• Immediate change management
• Instantaneous scalability
• Physical infrastructure, cloud efficiencies
• Predictable, monthly costs
• World-class Data Center

Their servers give flexibility in terms of operating system, firewall, RAM and storage etc and also allow for full control via a web interface. Scaling up isn’t quite as quick as spinning up another EC2 instance, but StrataScale advise me that it’s close to that fast, with the added robustness that comes from a physical presence.

I understand the point StrataScale is making, and understand that they’re solving a pain point for some users. I can’t help but wonder however how long that pain point will exist. The divide between physical small scale hosting, and cloud based hosting is rapidly narrowing. Add to that the fact that most large businesses won’t be happy with offsite hosting, be it physical or otherwise, and it would seem that StrataScale niche is small and not getting any bigger – I’m more than happy to be proven wrong on this contention though!

It seems someone at least is excited by what StrataScale is doing, they’ve just been invited to join Microsoft’s Software + Services incubation centre suggesting that there’s at least an outside possibility of an acquisition at sometime in the near future.