Cloud Hosting

Cloud Hosting is an innovative technology that allows the development of flexible and scalable solutions that grow as they do the projects, solutions without huge initial outlays, without migration or barriers.

Cloud Hosting allows the availability to any application at any time from any location and device.

All this is possible with Cloud: a technology that separates the service infrastructure that supports it.

     * Flexibility

       Cloud's philosophy is based on a major technical infrastructure, consisting of a large number of servers connected together and living in the cloud (Cloud).

       The elasticity of the evolving cloud offering services and support significant increases in charges, providing highly scalable solutions that grow and change depending on project requirements in real time.

     * Power

       Platform Cloud computing has great ability and allows each service to provide all the power you need at every moment, no more no less.

       An infrastructure for continued growth in high-end able to satisfy any need, large or small, always at peak performance, without having to make large investments in deployment and maintenance.
     *
       Stability

       Cloud Servers are based on a common hardware structure, but each one is at the level of Operating System as a complete machine independent.

       This concept allows the service, even for smaller projects, have the most advanced measures of stability and security load balancing, storage systems, RAID double parity fault tolerance and automatic recovery.
     *
       Savings

       In Cloud Hosting is billed only for the use of the contracted service, saving the cost of investment in hardware, including the adequacy of an appropriate environment for the maintenance of the structure (Data Center), and the acquisition of software licenses.

       The service charge is significantly lower and of great ecological value through economies of scale and intensive use of structures and energy

Cloud Hosting

Cloud Computing, the future of the hosting market.
The cloud computing is the question of fashion lately. Many news and views in this regard. What Infomar says, he does Enrique Dans, Loogic, Carlos Blanco, says Businessweek Stallman and appears to be angry and said that this is all hype!

Steve Ballmer yesterday reported that they were about to launch an operating system "Windows Cloud" and a few days ago Oracle Aliaba with Amazon to offer part of their products into the cloud "

All these features have to be hype because we're not talking about a product or service but a philosophy which defines a model of change and the need to label it in some way.

The cloud computing is the ability to deliver IT capabilities as services over the Internet.

But apart from the interests of many to leverage its communication in this hype, there are already cases of Cloud Computing attention they deserve.

It seems very interesting to the launch of the open source platform Abiquo. A Spanish company that has created a platform that enables the creation of distributed applications (as a first step.) The Spanish also offered Maat eg grid technology in the service of scientists at CERN to manage the massive information that will emerge from the evidence in the LHC.
Typology

The type of cloud computing services to companies contains creation and deployment of cloud platforms, the SaaS (Software as a Service), utility computing companies like Amazon and MSPs (Managed Service Providers).

Receives special mention of the Amazon AWS strategy. I still seems an extraordinary strategic move from Bezos. Imagine the Management Committee of Amazon, a pure e-commerce company, deciding to market part of its huge surplus to build infrastructure computing services on demand. It is brave.
The hosting is a commodity

I started working in the hosting market in 1998. Since then little has changed in the field of hosting. The hosting has become a commodity for most people. It is an area where major advances come from the increased capabilities of the services as they produced the technological improvements. For example, switching to dual processor servers, increasing the availability of storage for the price decrease of GB or more flexible connectivity models as the reduced price Mbps. The profile of the hosting companies is highly technical and service offerings revolve around skills and actions too technical and complex for the end user.

Most providers are unable to differentiate its offering from the competition. Deciding between business and hosting services are now limited to compare their numbers. In shared hosting has come a time when most of the available capacity exceeds the real needs of clients and the decision ultimately rest on the recommendation of your friends or experiences with customer service. In dedicated hosting environments, supply is very similar and the decision factors of infrastructure servers, connectivity and software included.

The hosting has comoditizado because technology exceeds the needs of users, because it is not easy to differentiate the offer, because the whole world can create a hosting company and because there has been a price war that expresses the market value differential only on price. In this market that wins is that he has more volume and exploiting economies of scale offers more for less and with good service received. Among Managed Hosting Providers win the best after sales service is able to provide for the needs of its customers.
Cloud Computing and hosting

But the environment in which I saw more clearly the application of cloud computing is in the field of hosting. If we return to the fundamental definition of cloud computing is done in Wikipedia, we find:

     It is a style of computing where IT-related capabilities are provided "as a service", allowing users to access technology-enabled services from the Internet ( "in the cloud") without knowledge of, expertise with, or control over the technology infrastructure that supports them.

Ie the value proposition of cloud computing is the ability to offer users access to IT skills via the Internet without having the necessary knowledge, expertise or control over the infrastructure that supports it.

Most clients we deal with in my years of hosting industry profiles were mainly technical personnel and programming, but analysts were not overly experienced on systems. When demand grew, the applications often suffer because they were not designed for climbing. Many companies that were our clients could not afford to have a technical team with expertise in application development and implementation of system architectures to support growth.

And this is where I see the validity of a proposal for cloud computing hosting, solving these problems:

     * Offering hosting services that can grow and scale and does not require knowledge of the technology by the customer.
     Without forcing the user to have prior experience in infrastructure management. For example avoiding incompatibiliadades hardware configurations that are in some cluster of databases.
     * Providing the user control and that it can from a control panel have the full access to its infrastructure and the configuration of new infrastructure.

But besides offering these advantages:

     * Scalability no captive. Power demand growth, assuming peak usage or seasonal needs. Until now, the client assembles a contractual infrastructure dedicated servers you need or need cree. If your needs grow, you need to recruit new servers and anticipate that growth will be to optimize your investment. The platform does not make me captive from the supplier.
     * No idle capacity. In a demand to pay for what you need not really have to take for idle capacity only have to bear the peaks 12:00.
     Without technological obsolescence. The servers will become obsolete soon, and although there are contracts against technological obsolescence, it is often more costly to migrate systems to new servers as you stay.
     * With flexible supplies. Payment for use of transfer, bandwidth or backups. Simple units.
     * Integration of the platform easily. For example, without having to create and understand the creation of VLANs.

Case study, new Web 2.0

Imagine mounting a new project for the Web 2.0 and you need hosting. Given the demand and in anticipation that you have the flexibility they need to make a dedicated server at a hosting company. You have to make the decision whether to hire a server or a normalito and powerful multiprocessor, RAID disks, and so on.

You began to receive visits and to use your tool. Your server responds but in much of the time range of load processes suffer at times of peak usage of your service or application. You have to decide to expand.

Talk to your business, he asks for specific data to enlarge ask your help, he asked the technicians of the hosting company you return to the question. How many visits, how much space, the bandwidth?

Decide to expand further and mount another server and another to support the backend database and reporting servers for a VLAN, and so on. You also have to extend the contract of transfer or bandwidth relevant. You've tripled your costs fixed and now I get to take the peaks and intense moments you for months on infrastructure, but you run out of disk space and you have to expand the disk, also choose to expand RAM and that makes you stop and two servers an evening, etc.., continuously taking decisions for which you do not have to be prepared for you or your programmer.
The same case in a cloud computing hosting

Find a provider that has a range of cloud computing. The operating system that provides supports and the disk image is preconfigured with much of the software you need. A basic service contract and set up your application in minutes, you pay per month only by the capacity of processes used. During development time you do not have to pay anything for a transfer. You put your project into production. Accessing the host's control panel and clicking with your extensive processing capabilities. Decides to increase the disk space to accommodate demand. The vendor provided you with billing. An unexpected peak occurs as shown in the hosting Meneame but assumes peaks without having to receive an alert from falling of the server.

You go and you decide to mount a growing system of load balancing, enter the panel, select Server, add the IPs, the option of rolling drag and click "mount". Within minutes you confirm the operation. You have not suffered any involvement, have a balanced system that can expand with a click. The supplier charges you for what you consume (processing capacity, memory, disk, backup space, etc).

You also have to expand the international market and grow your provider allows you to escalate infrastructure "as a whole" in various locations worldwide. And when the structure needs to grow up is sure to save the list of system administrators and other highly qualified staff.

In short, you have control, you have no lack of systems knowledge or experience in sizing and demand forecasts, you have more time and resources for your project and certainly smaller and more predictable costs for your peace of cash flow.

The market today

Are already several commercial services that offer the concept of cloud computing hosting. None that I know of in Spain. Some are:

     * Mosso, the Rackspace. A cloud computing is very similar to using shared hosting, without root access and where contracts have some applications and preconfigured. The advantage lies in its standardization which will allow better scalability.
     * GridLayer. Using standard servers housed in their DataCenters have mounted on the creation of tencnología cloud computing hosting 3b. I met the founders of the fair 3TER HostingCon 1 year ago. Taught me as your system allows visually create solutions with just a browser. Gridlayer is the standard GridLayer marketer. 3TER drawback was that their applications were not too extensive pre-and did not cover the whole spectrum of needs in operating systems and applications.
     * GoGreen. I have found the solution closer to the vision put forward. It seems simple to use. Visual Windows and Linux environments, immediate scalability. Low cost of entry, choice of test account, etc.. Incidentally, I was surprised that the GUI is created with the Google Web Toolkit.
     * Amazon AWS. The set of solutions including the Amazon and EC2 allow the creation of a host. But in my perspective is the most complex to implement and it is necessary to master and understand their modes of integration. Not satisfied with the premises I have outlined for simplicity, but it seems an excellent solution capacity aides. Writeboard for example the use of BaseCamp Amazon AWS.

Target Market

There will be strong resistance from more traditional settings that will prevent this type of solutions have the success they deserve in the medium term. It is a shift that will involve a range of educational change in technology. I see traditional companies pushing for a cloud initially.

The early adopters of such a solution will be the Web 2.0 companies and projects, hosting resellers who will see opportunities to reduce costs, companies adopting SaaS models or market solutions and finally starting the incumbents for hosting solutions or non-core services.

Opportunity

Mosso and GoGreen are two good examples of solutions which have their own entity but rely on traditional companies. No risk cannibalize their services and have a unique personality with specific business models.

Some time ago I had the idea of putting something like that, the advantages of the cloud to enable a new web hosting company offering a real service differentiation. At the rules of hosting, your relationship with your client is close and could focus on bringing service to answer the needs of programmers and responsible technology. Solve the problems and needs of customers and not confront the ignorance, lack of control and captivity. Furthermore a model is not as capital intensive infrastructure standard that it needs to operate. Customers enjoy a hosting service and as we all envision a simple marketing.
Future

Judging by the effort he made to the existing providers to explain and educate about your models, we are in the initial phase of this. I have no doubt we will see shortly, these offerings and the answer will not necessarily come from hosting companies. Amazon, Google and Microsoft, all are better prepared and have greater capacity to respond to such solutions. All take time to invest in DataCenters and all have experience in developing complex infrastructure scales.

Cloud Computing is the type of hosting that I like.