A New Breed of (dv) Servers?

Since our launch late last year of version three of our (dv) Dedicated-Virtual server line, we have been selling these servers like hotcakes. Quite literally, we now sell as many daily as we used to sell in a month when the product line was first announced. Customer demand and satisfaction have been very high on both counts, and we are happy to be able to provide a product of this quality in the marketplace.

From a technical standpoint these servers are in part based on Operating System Templates. When a new (dv) server is provisioned, an OS Template is mapped into that customer’s service which allows us to provide each server with a bit-by-bit copy of a known and reliable environment. Practically speaking, an OS Template corresponds to a specific Linux distribution. Currently, the distribution that we deploy is CentOS 4.4, which is a free, binary compatible clone of Red Hat Enterprise 4. There are other distribution templates available, but we chose CentOS for a few specific reasons. The first reason is that this is known to be an extremely stable and well tested Linux environment. The second is that many of our customers install binary third party software applications on their (dv) servers. Since Red Hat is the big fish in the Linux pond, all Linux ISVs certify their software against it. So, by using a compatible Red Hat clone such as this, we allow these customers the greatest flexibility in terms of their ability to get third party applications up and running.

Now, keep in mind that the basic goal of Red Hat Enterprise distributions is to provide stable, secure, well tested software. There are other distributions whose primary goal is to provide very up-to-date, bleeding edge versions of various software packages. Based on recent customer inquiries, we are internally discussing a new flavor of (dv) server based on one of these “bleeding-edge” template schemes. The advantage to a customer using this kind of (dv) is that they would have very new versions of things such as apache, subversion, PHP, Python, Perl, and so on. The downside is that these distributions get less testing than CentOS before new packages are made available, so third party applications may not be certified against them and they may be somewhat less stable.

Of course, as a company, our job is to weigh the increased engineering and support costs of having a new product on our roster against the customer demand for such a product. And so, we would really like to hear your thoughts on this matter. Would a (dv) server based on one of the bleeding edge Linux distributions be of interest? If so, can you let us know why? Is there a particular application that you’d like to run but you need the newest versions of everything in order to make it work? Please leave your comments here for us, we’re all ears!