Finding a Web Hosting Solution in the Cloud

Cloud computing is not just on the horizon as a web hosting solution–it is here now. Back in the 1990’s when you may have been coding HTML by hand and serving up web pages from a PC over a dial-up modem you might have never guessed at the kind of on-demand computing power that is at your fingertips today. Web hosting solution providers have made life easier by providing turn-key servers at the flip of a switch, but cloud hosting goes even beyond that.

It is difficult to tell in advance the amount of resources you will need at any given moment for your web presence. What if you build it, and they do not come? But then again; what if they do come, and you do not build it big enough? Sure, you can call up your host and after a few minutes, or a few hours you might be able to expand the traffic capacity for your site. It will probably be too late to handle this demand peak, but maybe you will be ready to handle the next–right? In the mean time you are stuck paying for the additional resources for another month.

Cloud computing enables the delivery of hardware as a service just as you would adjust the flow of hot water in the shower. If you need to ramp up resources for processing and bandwidth just for an hour to handle a sudden peak then an hour is all you purchase. While high-end data centers may boast N+1 redundancy and data feeds coming from two directions a server cloud may have N times 200 redundancy and network connections from five continents.

Stop pulling your hair out wondering about how your data-center will handle the sudden demand for a web video broadcast, or a rush of orders for an application you are serving up. There is an enterprise-level web hosting solution just waiting for you to adopt it. Companies like Amazon, GoGrid, and Rackspace are now making these solutions available to all comers at affordable prices, for resources that expand as your business does.

Rather than paying for dedicated resources you purchase ‘instances’ that you can add to or abandon as the need arises. A small Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) ‘instance’ consists of 1.7 GB RAM, 160 GB of storage, and one 32 bit processing core which you have complete control of, including full root access, for ten cents per hour. Lager instances are available and can be added together to scale your platform to the size you need for only as long as you need to use it as a web hosting solution.