Media Temple, the GoDaddy-owned hosting provider, today announced the launch of its managed cloud hosting solution for AWS. The company will handle the roles of AWS cloud architects and sysadmins for the businesses that want to use this new service.
At first glance, that seems like a weird service for a hosting company to offer. Media Temple, after all, offers its own hosting solutions which compete with some of AWS’ offerings. So why would it now start offering a managed service based on AWS? Media Temple VP of Product Brian Kuhn and Brendan Fortune, the company’s product director, told us that the company doesn’t quite see it that way. “This is about meeting our customers’ needs at the high end of the spectrum and making sure that we meet their needs,” Kuhn said.
“The way we are looking at this has a lot to do with Media Temple’s history,” Fortune added. “We have our own hosting products, but we have also been putting complex hosting solutions together for our customers.”
Media Temple will work with potential customers who want to create new AWS-based projects, move their existing projects to the cloud, or simply have somebody else manage, monitor, back up and analyze their cloud infrastructure for them.
The company believes that some of its existing customers who are starting to outgrown Media Temple’s own solution will want to make use of the company’s new managed cloud hosting services, but Kuhn and Fortune also believes that this will attract new customers, too.
These new customers will likely include e-commerce sites that need more complex cloud architectures to run smoothly, creative agencies, popular content developers and creators who don’t want to have to manage their infrastructure, and startups who may have already starting building on AWS but now want somebody to handle that work for them.
The company tells me it has run a number of pilot projects with its beta customers over the course of the last few months to work out the details of how it handles these projects.
Pricing for creating and moving projects will largely depend on the individual project, but the most basic management service will cost $199/month, though if you want a dedicated account manager and a response-time SLA, you will have to pay $399/month. Prices top out at $1,499/month, which includes a 15-minute phone SLA.
Media Temple is obviously not the only hosting company that is going this way to offer its clients a managed cloud hosting solution. Rackspace launched a very similar service earlier this year, after all. In many ways, this is a natural move for these companies, given that they won’t be able to compete with incumbents like AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Azure and similar platforms. Many of their customers, however, are interested in moving to these platform as they outgrow their existing VPS-based setups and need a service like to handle their sysadmin needs for them. They can then leverage their existing relationship with these customers to get them onto these complex cloud platforms without losing them to other manage cloud service providers.