Attending the Affiliate Summit Social Media event in NYC, offered an opportunity to meet some of the finest in the industry: affiliates, merchants and developers.

During the event I ran into Oliver George of OpenX, and as we started our little chat I shared with Oliver that about a year ago I gave OpenX (it was still called OpenAds at the time) some consideration. However, I realized rather quickly that OpenAds, being an outstanding software, was a little over the top as far as my needs were concerned. During our chat Oliver mentioned that OpenX is about to roll out hosting solution that may benefit publishers like myself.

On October 20, they indeed announced OpenX Hosted Beta and OpenX Market Alpha. Not only allowing publishers who do not have time or resources to install OpenX on their own servers an excellent way to manage their ad inventory, but also giving an opportunity to make money through OpenX Market Alpha. I am not sure if I will ever use the OpenX Market, as far as I know it is optional. But it is possible to let the inventory from OpenX Market to truncate your other ads if OpenX has a better deal.

One of the problems I faced with OpenAds last year was that MySQL database (one that OpenX relied on) had swollen in two weeks to three times more of the disk space required to host my little blog. Even today, unless you are running your website(s) from a dedicated server, you should not ignore the OpneX hosted solution. The odds are that OpenX has more reliable servers than majority of us.

As you can tell from the name OpenX Hosted is still in the development stages, but you can ask to participate by filling out following form.