Best OnApp Hosting: Which Host Is Right For Your Site?

What is OnApp?

OnApp provides a set of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) software and services to help hosting providers, telecoms, and managed service providers automate the management and provisioning of their cloud infrastructure from one user interface. Their core service offerings include cloud, content delivery, storage, disaster recovery and add-ons for a variety of virtual cloud softwares.

OnApp Overview and History

OnApp was founded in 2010 and is headquartered in London, but they employ hundreds of people around the world. Their IaaS software provides resellers of cloud-based technology the ability to deploy clouds, virtual and dedicated servers, content delivery, domains, storage and more from one user interface.

Companies looking to break into the cloud services market typically find OnApp to be an all-in-one solution for their needs – from deployment to post service customer support and monthly billing. These softwares also have built in services to improve company efficiency, including load balancing and automated scaling with built-in control panels and 24/7/365 support options.

Founded in 2010, OnApp took about two years to develop and was delivered to the market as one of the first turnkey cloud deployment softwares for the hosting industry. About a year later, the company added a 170 location content delivery network (CDN) onto its platform to improve video, application and site delivery functions. The following year, they added a storage area network (SAN) to the service to provide customers access to consolidated blocks of cloud storage.

After adding dedicated server capability to their platform in 2013, OnApp invested heavily in adding systems to improve virtual server management. In a simultaneous move, the company acquired SolusVM and launched a portal for VMware service providers designed to help them better manage vClouds. Disaster Recovery As A Service (DRaaS) is the most recently added feature to the service for replication and restore of clouds in real time.

As a company, OnApp also offers a pay as you go service for content delivery and a global compute cloud on its own infrastructure called the OnApp Federation.

Infrastructure As A Service Products Offered By OnApp

IaaS products and services offered by OnApp are available as both hosted versions and self-hosted versions for businesses that maintain their own data centers. CDN, SAN, DRaaS and other service options can be added on an a la carte basis. Pricing packages are broken down based on the volumes of licensed units per month.

Below is a breakdown of the features of the three core service available from OnApp.

Cloud Infrastructure

The cloud infrastructure management service from OnApp enables data centers and other resellers of OnApp to deploy cloud servers of all kinds – public, private, and hybrid – plus dedicated servers from one convenient dashboard. All of these services can be deployed and managed through a control panel that is also mobile friendly.

In addition to server management, users can manage the full suite of OnApp services from this cloud infrastructure portal, too.

Content Delivery Network

For resellers that don’t have a need for the full service cloud platform but want to improve the performance of websites, apps, and streaming media in their hosting environment, OnApp CDN provides a network of 100s of locations to improve the performance of a hosting platform. Providers can even buy or sell CDN with no internal infrastructure for content delivery through the OnApp Federation.

Storage Area Network

The storage area network (SAN) from OnApp provides consolidated blocks of cloud storage that are distributed across the OnApp Federation and can be built into the cloud infrastructure platform without any extra software, hardware, or special configurations. is a high-performance distributed SAN built into the OnApp cloud platform. The storage network provided by OnApp also scales easily because it is built in the cloud.

Should You Use OnApp As Your Cloud Infrastructure Platform?

Almost every cloud reseller, hosting provider, telecom or managed service provider dreams of deploying a full-service cloud solution within a single pane of glass dashboard. The cloud computing market continues to shift towards this as softwares work together to become more integrated, but few platforms have the cloud network behind them to truly present an all in one cloud solution. OnApp appears to have developed that solution for service providers.

OnApp has the infrastructure to provide a hosting and cloud service startup everything they need to run a business with almost no hardware required. With developing services like disaster recovery and pay as you go content delivery, too, OnApp has the full suite of services that can even help growing cloud providers attract enterprise clients looking to reduce their technology infrastructure costs.

If you are looking to start a cloud infrastructure service offering, OnApp will be a great place to start your business until you have the revenue to invest in your own infrastructure. If that’s not in your plans, OnApp can also scale with your business as it grows without the need for the bare metal costs.