Complete, Cost-effective, Scalable
Webhosting Suite

Ensim's Webhosting suite reconfigures physical servers into "private servers" to support small businesses. ISPs can profit from the economies of scale.

by Wayne Kawamoto

Ensim Corporation has announced a complete Webhosting suite that runs on Ensim's ServerXchange platform. The suite comes with tools that make it easy for ISPs to offer Web services to small and medium-size companies in a secure, scalable, manageable way.

In the past, when ISPs wanted to provide services to multiple companies, they had to locate their Web sites on a single server, which degraded overall performance and forced all the customers to share the same configuration parameters. The other option was to provide a dedicated server for each customer, which was expensive.

Presto change-o
Ensim's ServerXchange transforms a single physical server into multiple "private servers," each of which supports an independent set of applications and appears indistinguishable from a dedicated physical server to the ISP's customers. Each private server has its own resources in terms of memory, disk space, CPU, and network bandwidth, independent of the other private servers that run on the same machine.

The Web hosting suite includes the OpCenter, for administering and managing the private servers so managers can configure servers, customers, and services. The ControlCenter acts as the common repository for ServerXchange's customer database. And the ControlCenter monitors events and usage, generates fault alarms, and restores failed servers.

Economies of scale
"The only way for ISPs to survive in a $19.95-per-month world is to lower their costs and generate new revenue streams simultaneously," said Rosen Sharma, Ensim's CEO. "ServerXchange uniquely addresses both critical areas by reducing the large overhead and personnel costs associated with multiple dedicated servers and providing a platform that scales to meet increasing customer demand and new applications."

"We have a tremendous opportunity to capture more small and medium-sized business customers today if we can find a cost-effective and time-saving way of providing Web hosting and other value-added applications securely and reliably, with a guaranteed quality of service," said Haralds Jass, president and CEO of Superb Internet Corp., a Washington, D.C. and Vancouver, B.C.-based Web hosting and Internet presence provider. "Ensim's ServerXchange Web hosting application is the only solution I have seen that allows us to enhance our current investment in hardware and provides us with a platform for easily and seamlessly growing our service offerings in the future."

Ensim has 15 ISPs in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and France participating in the company's Early Adopter Program. Each "private server" deployed by an ISP costs $30 per month—in turn, the ISP can charge end user customers upwards of $150 per month.

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