Is Bytemark the right hosting server for you, GNU/Linux lover?

We interviewed Matthew Bloch, one of the founders of British hosting company, Bytemark. He talks about his company, and their commitment to free software. You be the judge!

RC: When did Bytemark start? Who started it?

Bytemark Hosting was started by me (Matthew Bloch) and my friend Peter Taphouse in late 2002. We had limited success doing software consulting since leaving college the year before, but had recently signed up one of our customers for some specialised Java hosting, and we saw the light.

Pete had been experimenting with User-Mode Linux (UML) towards the end of the year, and by chance, some new development on the project had come to fruition which put it into the category of "first Free, hosting-grade Linux virtualiser". At a time when we had two servers co-located at great expense, one of them started to fail. Rather than waste money time to fix it, we decided to try to "save" it by turning it into a virtual machine using UML.

We saw potential for a hosting product. We knocked up some bad adverts, borrowed £15000, mostly from Pete's family, and on January 31st 2003, it appeared and we signed our first customer a day or two later (who we're grateful is still with us).

RC: Was GNU/Linux and free software used right when you started?

The business wouldn't have happened without the User-Mode Linux project being where it was, when it was. Our expertise with compiling, testing and taming bleeding-edge software (or should that be "former belligerence against paying for any software") was a great advantage early on. We were doing things that more established hosting companies were clearly nervous about doing, or were only able to do with expensive alternatives like Virtuozzo or VMWare.

RC: Do you contribute back to the free software community by sending bug reports and/or patches upstream when you notice that there is a problem with a piece of software?

Not in major ways because our schedules and needs don't really correspond with those of the people developing the software. We're careful for our business not to depend on a particular piece of software being fixed by a volunteer, or indeed to be able to control the future direction of anything we're using, however crucial it might be.

One of our staff is a Debian developer and I think I got a small patch into the Xen project a few years back, which was a learning experience, but for the most part our interactions with the developers are in pretty minor ways.

Generally, where we have problems, we develop our own in-house software which is under our control. We have released a few of these back again although we've not been able to put as much effort into making them into successful free software products (gaining developer interest etc.). This kind of contribution as a useful form of publicity among people who may one day become our customers. I am trying to do more of it.

RC: How many GNU/Linux engineers work for you?

Currently 7 out of 8 staff are Linux experts; so they're all system administrators and almost all are software developers too.

RC: Do you offer GNU/Linux systems only?

Debian is the main GNU/Linux distribution we support, followed closely by Ubuntu and CentOS in about equal measure.

We also offer FreeBSD and Windows for customers who want them, though we find them trickier to install on a large-scale basis. We work on these other OS options as customers ask for new installations, and will be promoting them a bit more in the near future.

It was a surprise to us that Microsoft have been much more accommodating than Redhat when it comes to selling a commercial hosting platform. They were very keen to visit and give us the technical contacts to help make Windows a viable installation option on our network (cough, and an XBox for office down time). They are obviously very keen to push Windows as a commercial hosting platform, and to us it's just another minority option that we try to cater for.

Unfortunately we've found Redhat more difficult because our hardware requirements never quite seem to match up to what Redhat supports, and hardware vendors don't see the need to make "Redhat compatible" drivers an easy option. In a way Redhat are up against tougher competition, that is to say, any Linux sysadmin who already prefers a different distribution is going to have a tougher sell on Redhat because they will always be able to persuade their customers who ask for Redhat to use Debian or CentOS. So maybe Redhat would be wasting their efforts trying to "sell" to those people.

Both of course fall far behind community-supported distributions in terms of flexibility of installation!

RC: As a major player in web hosting, what do you consider to be the best side of GNU/Linux?

GNU, Linux and the various BSD projects have been the only platform for large-scale commercial hosting for the last 10 to 15 years, depending on who you ask. It's zero-cost, largely working software which easily supports minor modifications, and major ones if you're smart enough to keep up with the system's various components. Given that the business was formed around selling Linux systems, which was all the computing environment I knew at the time, it is hard to think of "advantage" because I still don't really see any alternative.

RC: What about the worst side?

I've not seen a bad side that I didn't anticipate. I imagine the usual answer is "nobody else is to blame when it fails" - but I see that as a good thing! Do MDs and CEOs of this world really want to have to assure their customers that they depend on other companies maintaning software for their business to function, or that they depend only on software that they can always get a price for fixing in-house? If there's another company maintaining a critical part of your business, expect them to take that value from you! I'm not saying we could function economically without the ongoing, free maintenance of many different free software projects, but we are confident to say that we can fill in the gaps in the software that matter to us.

RC: To finish, please tell our readers why they should pick your hosting service rather than one of your competitors!

Well our main selling point is that, despite having thousands of customers, we manage on a staff of eight, almost all of whom are Linux experts. Those are the ones who will support your hosting and are able to get things fixed. Our product range gives you root access from £15 per month, and when you need it, you can upgrade to a dedicated server because we have real infrastructure and we control our own IP network. So when you want to upgrade to a dedicated host, you keep your system image, your IP address, you don't have to reconfigure anything. Because of this flexibility and close control over our network, we also find large-scale site hosting easy to implement, and cheaper by a factor of 2-4 than the "big name" competition. We're also debt-free and stable, since we're privately owned by director/shareholders who still improve the infrastructure for our own and customers' benefit.

Oh, and we give at least 10% discount to customers who use their VMs to publish free software projects on their VM (and of course it's usually 100% if we actually rely on your free software to run our business in any way).

Special offer - up to 10% off!

• Bytemark are offering Free Software Magazine readers an offer of 10% discount on Virtual Machines or 5% off dedicated hosts for anyone placing an order within one month of this interview being published (18th of November 2008). Simply mention "Free Software Magazine" in the notes field of the order form.