Facebook’s Recent Acquisition Parse Launches Hosting For Developers’ Web Presence

Parse, the mobile back-end startup that Facebook recently bought to set up a new developer-focused business, just launched hosting. It’s meant to help mobile developers that have a desktop web presence or companion experience on the web. The acquisition has already given Parse a boost, with the number of apps it hosts up 33% to 80,000 since the deal was announced.

“People were building mobile apps using Parse. But when they wanted a web presence or a dot-com landing page, they were using Parse for the log-in, but the website was being served from something else like Heroku or App Engine,” explained Parse co-founder Ilya Sukhar. “So we’re launching a fully featured web hosting platform.”

Sukhar said the project has been in the works for the last four to six weeks, even while the Facebook negotiations were going on.

The new hosting service lets developers host landing pages, and display user data retrieved using the Parse API. Say if a developer wants to show a leaderboard for their game on the web, they can do it using both the new hosting service and the standard Parse data product.

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Parse Hosting comes on top of other products that help mobile developers manage push notifications and user identities and log-ins.

He added that the Facebook deal, which we had independently heard was worth 85ドル million excluding retention incentives, hadn’t scared away developers. They’re at 80,000 apps now, from the 60,000 apps they said they had when the Facebook deal was announced. “There was an interesting debate about whether people would move off Parse, but all of our metrics are up,” he said.

Facebook had won the deal to buy Parse even as many of the Valley’s best known companies like Apple, Yahoo and Dropbox had looked or expressed interest. They’re starting their very first business-to-business revenue stream through the Parse acquisition and had — like in the case of Instagram — promised the team a fair amount of autonomy to grow their products as they see fit. They’re not tampering with Parse’s SaaS-based revenue model.

He also said that the company hadn’t celebrated the deal yet. “We have a lot of stuff on our plate,” he said.

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