Cloud.bg - A History In Brief

In 2008 me and my friend and partner Stoyan found ourselves in a situation where we needed invest in a new hardware and to build a new infrastructure for our local Bulgarian web hosting company. This made us to ask ourselves some questions. One of them was "How to optimize the server infrastructure?". I might not praise our own web hosting provider, but the fact is that FColor.bg is the Bulgaria's leading VPS Hosting provider, which delivers high-class stable hosting services on the local market. Anyway, this is another story.

Virtualization and the hosting industy

At the end of 2007 virtualization technologies had already become an important part of the enterprise hosting infrastructures. The number of website owners who decided to move from Shared Hosting to VPS had grown a lot. Companies like Citrix, Parallels, etc, had already been "fighting" to increase their share and influence on the VPS Hosting market. So we decided that we should create something like in-house web hosting laboratory, which would do research and testing of different approaches to virtualization and to decide which one would work best for our company.

The first we did was to find, test and buy hardware platform which would increase our productivity and to cut our operational costs on data center space, power and cooling. We went to meet our banker and within 2 weeks we already had a bunch of Supermicro blade servers. We have decided to choose Supermicro Superblade, because we have been using their hardware for years and we are quite satisfied of their products.

The first we did was to find, test and buy hardware platform which would increase our productivity and to cut our costs on data center space, power and cooling. As we went to the bank and after 2 weeks we had already had a bunch blade servers of Supermicro. We  decided to choose Supermicro Superblade, because we had been using their hardware for years and we are quite satisfied of their products.

Once we finished with the server installation we began making various tests and experiments. One of them was to use OS virtualization (OpenVZ and Prallels Virtuozzo Containers) to create scalable virtual environments, and to allow users to get instant resource upgrade when they need it, without service outage. At the time we have already used Virtuozzo to create and provide VPS Hosting services.

VPS Hosting in Bulgaria?

An year and a half ago (in 2007) most Bulgarian website owners were interested in purchasing cheap Shared Hosting services. However the things rapidly changed in 2008. There was already a growing demand of VPS Hosting services, even if most of the VPS customers demanded low-cost entry level virtual servers and expected to get a fully manages service for around 20 euros per month. The lack of knowledge on virtual server management was (and still is) the major obstacle for the most of the site owners to move from Shared Hosting to a VPS. This is an issue on every national web hosting market. The high costs of server managements that VPS owners face discourage most of them and keep them to continue working in Shared environment.

From Clusters To The Cloud

The American financial crisis has accelerated the Cloud computing trend and increased expectations that the new way of producing and delivering computer services would save money both to businesses and consumers. "Cloud" has become a buzz word in the North American web hosting market in 2008 and 2009. We have been influenced by this major change in computing and have decided that we shall play a part in the emerging computer industry. So we begun studying and researching different cloud computing technologies.

At the end of 1st quarter of 2009 we have been ready with our own project to create a cloud computing class enterprise hosting infrastructure. We have based our development work on the best practices and standards in Linux enterprise computing (Linux clusters) and began drawing our cloud computing platform. My partner Stoyan has started testing Red Hat Cluster Suite on our infrastructure. We have abandoned some of the ideas we had bit by bit. One of them was to use OS virtualization on the cloud and choose different approach to virtualization (Full Virtualization).

At the beginning we were quite ambitious and thought that it was a good idea to develop and release our own fully automated cloud automation software platform, including an end user control panel. However we have soon changed the concept and decided to use different approach and to find and deploy an enterprise automation platform which brings the best web hosting standards on the cloud. This decision was the right one and we decided to deploy Fuscan Linux Cloud, an unique cloud hosting automation, the first one on the market fully integrated with the most popular control panel cPanel/WHM.

Instead of spending ten thousands dollars and more than an year in developing our own hosting control panel, we would name "Cloud", we have decided to use cPanel/WHM and made Cloud.bg the first web hosting service which brought the best web hosting technologies and standards on the cloud.

This is the story of Cloud.bg in brief. It is not a charming one. However it has turned into a real thing after 18 months of hard work and thousands of miles flown over the Atlantic and Europe.