Agathon Group

This open source webhost is dedicated to business excellence and moral excellence.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [October 10, 2008]

Every independent ISP serves a community. Most ISPs serve a community, but not all do. Some of the most successful serve intentional communities, communities that people have chosen to join.

Peter Green, currently CTO and co-owner of Grand Rapids, Mich.-based Agathon Group, started out as the system administrator of Gospel Communications International, an alliance of 200 to 300 ministries (the alliance is now dissolving and Green is busy finding many of these ministries a new home).

He became a partner at Agathon in 2000.

Green knows what his core competencies are. "We are more specialized than many other webhosts," he says. "We provide no end user access: no bandwidth and no dialup accounts. We don't do a lot of design; we farm that out. We do hosting and grid computing. We work in PHP and Ruby. We don't support Windows in any aspect whatsoever; we cut our teeth on open source."

Is Agathon Group guided by religion or religious tenets? "We've distilled things down to two words: do right," Green says.

In practice, it's up to the individual to interpret the Bible where the Bible is silent. Green says Agathon Group has passed up some clients who wanted to build New Age style websites.

In other cases, Agathon Group has forgiven debt or allowed late payment of fees. "As a parent, you can tell when your kids are trying to get something out of you and when they are really struggling and need help," he says. "When a client is truly struggling, the right thing to do is to help."

The deceptively simple portfolio that Agathon Group has posted on its website reflects these choices: a family-friendly MySpace, a website that delivers ticketing for Christian concerts, a website to help non-profits raise money and keep track of donations, and Xee.info, which helps train Gen X and Y Evangelical leaders.

Does Green have any advice for a local ISP that has sold service to the church their owner attends? "We have a saying within the Church," he says, "that the Church is about the people, not the program."

If you want to create an alliance of ministries or sell to a group of churches, you need to do more than make a sales pitch; you need to be ready to join a community. "Do it if you're passionate about it," he says. "If you're not passionate about it, you won't be happy doing it."

Automation
ISP-Planet was introduced to Agathon Group by application grid provider 3Tera. The company makes a fascinating software system that provides a drag and drop interface for application development. If you haven't seen AppLogic, check out the demo on the 3Tera website—it takes time to load, and a few minutes to watch, but it's impressive because AppLogic lets you build apps the way you map them out on your white board.

Green says he chose AppLogic to automate the webhost's operations because AppLogic allowed him to retain and use the open source skills his team already had. "Amazon and Google lock you in. A lot of other solutions don't play as nice with the skill set you already have," he says. "We have seven people, and we probably have eight decades' worth of hand on experience with Linux and related tools. That's a lot to give up for a new system."

AppLogic, he says, allows the company to code faster, and to make better utilization of hardware.

For example?

"For a couple of clients, we have hardware clusters. We might have three web servers for the website, a database server, a file server, and two load balancers (one primary and one failover). That's seven distinct physical servers to run a website, while at any one time, some of those servers (especially the load balancers) may not be doing anything."

AppLogic allows Agathon Group to devote fractions of a CPU to less intensive tasks (such as load balancing and firewall) and compress those seven severs into two physical servers.

If you retain your skill set, troubleshooting is easier too. "In debugging, writing solid code (every language has its idiosyncrasies), time to live, and any number of things, we are more productive because we get to focus on our strengths," Green says.

—End