Sean Michael Kerner| Eweek
Dreamhost has emerged in recent years to become one of the world’s most popular shared hosting providers. The company is now expanding its lineup with new cloud compute and storage services, leveraging the open-source OpenStack platform serving as the foundation.
Helping to fuel Dreamhost’s expansion is a new $30 million round of financing. In a video interview with eWEEK, Dreamhost CEO Simon Anderson discussed his company’s OpenStack efforts and where the cloud is head in the next year. Dreamhost’s DreamObjects service is an OpenStack Swift Storage compatible cloud object storage service that launched in 2012 and is continuing to grow in 2013.
The DreamObjects platform leverages the Ceph open-source storage file system at its base. Dreamhost’s other big cloud effort is the DreamCompute cloud platform, which is currently in beta, and is rapidly nearing wider availability. DreamCompute is Dreamhost’s cloud computing platform and is based on OpenStack, as well.
Though Dreamhost is moving toward general availability of an OpenStack cloud computing platform service, the OpenStack infrastructure won’t have an impact on Dreamhost’s shared hosting services any time soon. Anderson said it’s at least 18 months away, until shared hosting is able to benefit from the OpenStack infrastructure.
“The DreamCompute platform will primarily be used by developers initially,” Anderson said. While many cloud vendors like to talk about the potential for hybrid cloud computing, Dreamhost is not likely to enter into that business. “We don’t pursue a hybrid cloud story because we want to focus on the needs of developers,” said Anderson.
“We quite deliberately are not going after enterprise customers; it’s not part of our DNA; we don’t have the support systems set up. But we’re very good at supporting hundreds of thousands of individual developers around the world.” As Dreamhost ramps up its cloud efforts, a key challenge for Anderson is to further simplify the experience of developers and users to get up and running in the cloud.
