It used to be the case that hosters and providers of online services provided their products in neatly defined buckets. They called them “Product options” but in reality it was simply a way of defining price points and keeping up with (or overtaking) the competition who were all doing the same thing.

With “Cloud” or online service consumption becoming more mainstream and business focused, this approach is now coming to be seen as a limitation to customer adoption. If someone needs a RAM heavy but CPU light environment, the chances are that the ‘bucket shops’ don’t offer such a beast, again in history this would have been a “bespoke build” and a premium charge would have been applied for the privilege.
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“Must have good long term prospects, be flexible and able to cope with reasonable demands. Ability to to grow to suit demand is a must, as is a stable and reliable environment for my application. A solid SLA is a must”

I’m not expecting to see ad’s in the dating pages just yet, but there is a significant growth in developers looking to put their applications ‘out there’ for consumption at scale and as a Service. Now that Microsoft’s Azure has formally been launched we’re going to start seeing some real shift in how both application developer and web-service solution providers are offering their products. Google’s I/O is also starting to hit a significant mark with dev’s looking at size the potential audience for their work with glee!

But oranges are not the only fruit and there are devs out there who will be looking for a provider who is able to work with them on a more personal level, one who will understand their specific requirements and who may have a slightly different, but more accessible way of providing the right service. Hosters should now, more than ever, be looking at the developer community and really asking what services can be provided and how. The paradigm is also shifting in terms of the relationship too, no longer are hosters simply selling space and power for devs, with SaaS offerings there is a n opportunity for true partnership and for applications and services to be offered out as revenue share, referral or reseller.

The days of the “Web Hoster” are almost done. Get flexible, get dynamic and get “Service” oriented, then you’ll get the business.