Cloud VS Dedicated: Best Options for a business
May 13th, 2010 // 8:00 am @ Charlie Homes
If your company generally operates exclusively online then you essentially have two choices when it comes to alternatives to in-house servers. For an established company that has stable growth, their best option is definitely dedicated hosting. If you are a start up though, then you should go with cloud hosting. Depending on what you are looking for these two options can differ greatly and one must be smart when choosing which hosting option to go with.
The Cloud Option
If you are relying heavily on the web for most of your business but are still in the start up phase of your company when downtime has the ability to kill you then you should consider cloud. One major advantage of cloud is that it can easily deal with growth and keep your company active at all times.
The best description of cloud hosting is that it is a rental service. You are renting space on a virtual server much in the same way you rent an apartment or a condo. You are able to adjust your required level of space as the size of your business goes. You are not tied down to a specific level of service. Cloud hosting can be adjusted as required in order to accommodate the traffic levels you are receiving. Also you have the ability to choose which operating system you prefer. If you prefer using a windows or a linux system you have that option. This gives cloud users the same flexibility as those using a dedicated host but with flexible billing along with API server configuration.
All this does not mean that you can just flick on a switch and let your site coast. Your IT team will still have to manage the cloud package to make sure that it is optimized for your site. As traffic fluctuates the configurations will as well. This will be familiar to most IT professionals since it is most likely what they are doing now.
Dedicated hosting
Dedicated hosting is when a company leases one or more servers in order to control the work completely. There are 3 advantages to a dedicated package.
For one, your data center is a stable and secure location. This will lower your hardware costs. You won’t have to spend money on housing space or power for the servers since they are off site.
Two, you have complete control over the contents of the server. The server holds only the information you want it to. You therefore have complete control of the bandwidth on that server. Your load times should not be affected by traffic level unless you allow it.
Third, you can adjust and customize your servers’ performance to fit your level of technology.
Why you might chose dedicated hosting:
- A key component of your business is hosting based
- You are an established, large scale business
- You would prefer not dedicate valuable resources to on-site servers
- E commerce or the internet are essential to your business strategy
If you are a company that is ecommerce focused or are running an advertising network then dedicated hosting is probably the preferred option. Online advertisers place banners across thousands of websites. If their ads go down the sites will not get paid and that leads to loss of clients.
If you are using a customized content management system then dedicate hosting is most likely your best option. This will be beneficial for companies that have online inventories. If you are processing thousands of queries or even orders every minute, down time could be the difference between prospering and closing shop.
Article by Charles Homes who is a consultant at Hosting.com, for more info check out their Dedicated Servers
Category : Computer/Networking Tech &Web Tech
YouTube to allow ‘private’ videos
May 13th, 2010 // 7:55 am @ Terrance Gaines
Youtube is now removing private videos from it’s search engine, but allows the publisher to send the link to selected people to view and there’s no cap to the amount of people that can view the private video (was capped at 25). Additionally, viewers do not need a YouTube account to view the video sent to them via link from the publisher.
So that means you can now send private video and not worry about it showing up in any public search.
(I’m not sure that I want to know what some people deem as ‘private’)
*shudders*
- A Posterous Joint
Category : Web Tech
The Lowdown In Tech This Week: 5-7-10
May 7th, 2010 // 2:10 pm @ Terrance Gaines
Bit.ly Shows Off Their Revamped Site
image via: InterAwesome
Those of us who are heavy into sharing links via social networking sites should be pleased to know that the popular URL shortening site Bit.ly has done a revamp that includes automatically shortening URL’s (before you have to click ‘shorten’), and adding more functionality like quickly searching your short link history and recovering deleted links. They’ve also added more real-time tracking and analytics so you can obsess over how many people are clicking your links up-to-the-second.
Google Touches Up Desktop & Mobile Search Pages
image via: BloodHoudBlog.com
Google has added a left side search optimization bar to both its desktop AND its mobile search page. It’s similar to the current bar at the top of the search page that has the ‘image, web, videos, etc. options; but with more options that will enable you to further zero in on the actual results you were looking for. It reminds me of the Bing search engine by Microsoft, or eBay’s search options. Either way, I think it’s a nice addition, especially to the mobile page. You could for instance narrow your search without repeatedly changing your initial search words.
Scribd and Opera Jump on the HTML5 Bandwagon
image via: andyuk.net
You could say it has been a rough couple of weeks for Adobe seeing as their Flash product that has pretty much been a web developer’s must have to bring media content to the web has been loosing support in favor of HTML5, the new web language. HTML5 isn’t fully adopted and integrated yet, but recently, Apple slammed Flash and is NOT adding it to ANY of it’s mobile devices, and Microsoft sees a bright [web] future with HTML5 and is making plans for future developments around it. Slowly but surely, more and more companies are following suit. Next on that list is media sharing/publishing site Scribd, and mobile web browser platform Opera.
Scribd says it doesn’t need Flash because its content isn’t really heavy enough to need a powerful web plug-in like Flash, and Opera said that using Flash on a mobile device was similar to cooking an egg on the concrete in the sun. So both of the them are endorsing HTML5 and as a result, delivering another blow to the future of Flash.
Apple Fanboys/girls Need Love Too!
image via: Cupidtino
The new site Cupidtino (a mash-up of the ‘Cupid’ & Cupertino, CA where Apple’s HQ is located) plans to be the “hook up” site those in love with their Apple Products. In addition to just provide a place for Apple fans to date, mate, and birth entire Apple families, members will also have access of exclusive social and location-based apps for the iPhone and iPad.
I will leave you with a quote from Techcrunch, that I happen to cosign:
“On the other hand, making sure that Apple fans only date other Apple fans is a good way of stopping them from spreading their Apple fan genes to the general population, I guess. So maybe this site isn’t all bad.
Category : Computer/Networking Tech &Mobile Tech &Random Tech &Web Tech
