Cloud Servers Versus Dedicated Server

The decision will often depend on the particular business' needs; however, there's a lot of features that make cloud servers more advantageous for a business that has high web-site demands. Below are the differences between cloud & dedicated servers.

Deployment Time: With cloud servers, it is simple & speedy to deploy a ready-to-use server. All that you require to do is pick a package & the application, & in a couple of minutes your server is configured, deployed, & prepared to be used. With a dedicated, deployment will take time & a substantial amount of manpower. Everything has to be done by hand such as selecting & installing the hardware, installing operating method...etc. The whole deployment method can take several days or weeks.

Billing & Fees: Cloud hosting providers will normally charge by the hour for usage. With dedicated hosting, you will normally must pay a every month fee said in the contract & an preliminary set up fee.

Vertical Scaling: Cloud servers allows for vertical scaling. All that you require to do is pick your desired resources & give it to the Server. Also, being able to resize your will give you the ability add or remove memory, computing power, & hard drive space basically & quickly. With dedicated, it can be complex to add & remove resources. It may also be time consuming & cause downtime. As well, dedicated upgrading is more complex & time consuming as it involves such tasks as building a new server, upgrading application, & installing new application.

Horizontal Scaling: Cloud servers let you scale horizontally by load balancing over multiple web server front ends. They have a templating feature that makes it simple to load balance. You can also provision new identical cloud servers for testing without impacting your original cloud. A dedicated server involves building a new server, installing the application, & then copying knowledge to the new hardware. It can be expensive because you will must lease redundant hardware for months or years.

Hosting Services: Cloud hosting services will provide all the tools necessary to manage your servers. It is simple to perform such tasks from your browsers as back ups, restoration, firewalls, monitoring, scaling, & private networking. With dedicated servers, hosting services can be expensive because you require to pay for each additional charge such as leasing a private switch. As well, with each lease, you will have a every month contract or yearly contract. When it comes to choosing a server for your business web-site, it is well-worth checking out Cloud Servers as they are cost efficient & high performing servers that can meet you business server demands. As well, there's quality hosting services that are dedicated to making sure that all of your server needs are met.

Why Should I Migrate to a Cloud Hosting Environment?

While launching an online site, they are left with the daunting task of choosing a hosting package that provides safe shelter to our newly launched net site. The net marketplace offers numerous hosting packages such as shared hosting, VPS, dedicated hosting etc. While shared hosting is cheap, it's positive drawbacks such as scalability, lack of administrative control & speed. To deal with the shortcomings of shared hosting, users resort to a VPS hosting package. While VPS is a better option, it carries positive drawbacks as well in terms of hardware limitations & shared IP address.

Dedicated hosting appears to be an ideal choice over here to stay immune from all kinds of drawbacks associated with shared hosting & VPS. However, dedicated hosting can show to be damn expensive. Since the server is not shared between numerous accounts, the cost could be out of budget for plenty of start-up companies. Lack of free script is another disadvantage linked with dedicated hosting. Those who have technical knowledge can prepare & install their own script, but others who lack technical knowledge must quench their thirst with the pre-acquired scripts provided by the hosting company.

In the present scenario, cloud hosting appears to be the best of the bunch for over a couple of reasons, which is why web owners are seen migrating to a cloud hosting surroundings to provide a safe home to their sites. Cloud hosting involves the use of hundreds & thousands of interconnected physical machines. This implies that users are literally exposed to countless amount of resources, which can handling immense amount of load without any kind of interruption.

Functionality wise, cloud servers offer great benefits as well. Cloud server supports numerous scripts that regular hosting packages do not. It is thought about to be an ideal pick for companies that don't need to invest lot of funds in logistics. Cloud hosting offers more liberty as you can choose the amount of funds you are willing to spend. You can lower or upgrade the resources based on traffic fluctuation. Cloud hosting allows maximum traffic without walking in to issues such as server downtime, slow net site speed etc. It goes back to the normal mode when traffic falls down, thereby ensuring that you don't pay over what resources you use.

There is absolutely no need to keep all the functions installed on your personal computer because cloud hosting provides you the freedom to choose when & what you need at great ease. The key over here is to choose the right company to make positive that you reap maximum benefits for your choice of migrating to a cloud hosting surroundings. Needless to say, your best bet would be to choose a reputable web host provider that has been in the business since several years so that you are ensured of great quality service. There's scores of new arrivals in the market. In lieu of trying your luck with new providers, you ought to choose a reliable & reliable web host company.

Cloud Computing - Is it Right For Your Business?

Cloud computing, put simply is the use of computers located on the Internet for your day to day computing needs, including services like web based e-mail and data storage as well as more complex tasks.

Cloud computing has a number of advantages over more traditional computing; however it also has a number of weaknesses. In this article I'll try and give you a balanced view of the pro's and con's of cloud computing so that you may make your own mind up as to if it's for you and your business.

Pros

Price - Probability the most cited advantage of cloud computing is the cost, there are two main cost savings associated with cloud computing. They are, the capital expenditure, the amount of money needed to buy the IT equipment initially and the long term maintenance and support. While the cost saving of not having to buy the initial infrastructure may be obvious, there is also an ongoing saving associated with outsourcing your IT services, the economics of scale means that the price of maintenance and support can be brought down to slightly less than if you where hosting the data yourself, but still allowing your cloud suppler to make money.

Scalability - Image if you suddenly realized you needed to double the size of your network storage how easy would it be for you to do that? Normally you would have to find a suppler who supplied the same type of equipment as you currently use, ring them up, hope they have enough in stock then wait for them to be delivered and then hope you can get them all working together without too many all-nighters. With cloud computing it could be as simple as login into your control panel and selecting the new amount of storage you need.

The situation is even more extreme if you turn this on its head and consider what would happen if you suddenly needed half your network storage. Traditional you would be stuck with a load of equipment you don't need that is slowly going out of date, with cloud computing if you no longer need it you no longer have to pay for it, you just login to your control panel and reduce the amount of storage you need.

The Environment - Because of the same economics of scale that make cloud computing cheap, cloud computing is also more environmentally friendly than traditional computing. When computers in the data centre are not processing your data, they will be processing someone else's, why have two half full hard drives when a data centre can combine them an you will only need one disk.

Cons

Security - The main concern regarding cloud computing is that of the security of your data. While your twitter "tweets" may not be the most important chunk of data ever your financial records may well be. Sadly companies go out of business, sometimes very quickly and with little time for you to do anything about it.

Uptime - While a guaranteed uptime of 99.9% such as that provided by Amazon S3 accounts, sounds very impressive it's worth thinking what this means in terms of downtime. 0.1% of a month, the amount of time Amazon can be down before they give you anything compensation is 43 minutes 50 seconds, which if it were to happen just as you or your boss needed that file for the big presentation then throes 40 minutes could feel like days.

Of course all computer services no matter if they are in-house or cloud based suffer downtime, but the problem is compounded within cloud based computing because you only become aware of it when your customers complain or you need the service, and there is nothing you can do directly to fix the problem.

Legal - One of the leased cited but possibly damaging aspects of cloud computing is the legal issues involved. For example, Companies based in the European Union can no "export" data that identifies to countries that don't comply with the European Union's data protection laws, this included countries such as the USA. This would mean that a company in the European Union could be breaking the law if they where to use a cloud computing service based in the United States to store their customer database.

While cloud computing has a number of advantages, it's a cheap, it's Scalable and it's more environmentally sustainable than an in house solution, there are a number of other issues that need to be looked at before you move your business into the cloud. It is of course possible to mitigate some of the problems with cloud computing, while still reaping some of the benefits, by limiting the move to the less mission critical parts of your business.

3 Reasons to Try Cloud Servers

Thousands of people around the world are now using cloud servers. I recently tried them and was blown away. If you have not tried them yet here are a few reasons why you should.

Cloud servers are flexible allowing you to experiment and try new things. Most vendors allow you to startup a server and run it for as long as you want. This can be as little as a few minutes or much longer even permanent. I recently heard that Centos Linux version 6 was available and wanted to find out what the changes were and check out all the cool new apps. I logged into the online control panel via my Firefox web browser to one of my cloud accounts, clicked on create new server, selected 256 megs of ram, typed in root password, then waited about 3 minutes for the server to load. Then I logged in via my ssh client(putty) and it was play time. I had the option to upgrade to more CPUs and memory, you can do it in small increments to find out what works best for your web application. A few days later I wanted to test samba on a Debian Linux system. Instead of spending an hour loading Debian from DVD, I simply fired up a cloud server saving about 45 minutes. This time I chose a server with copious amounts of memory since that is what I needed, it was great.

Some vendors are now offering load balancing so you can build a whole server farm using cloud servers. This is especially useful during peak time like a special event or shopping season, it can also be useful in the case of a denial of service attack allowing for more capacity as a counter measure. A multi-server system can scale out to hundreds or even thousands of servers. I have not tried this personally but I hear it works pretty good. I read about an online E-commerce web site that was under a Ddos(distributed denial of service) attack who simply added servers to negate the flood of connections, then the attackers went on to pick on someone else.

Have you ever needed to backup a whole system? You are going to love new cloud based method. You can make snapshots of your server so you have an image of all your data at some point in time. It only takes about 30 minutes to copy all data on a 10GB system. You can also make multiple snapshots and even setup automatic snapshots every 4 hours so you always have a recent backup.

Another cool thing you can do is making your own boot image. I fired up a Linux server, then spent an hour loading applications like MySQL database server, Bind name server, Postfix mail, Cpanel, and Apache web server. I configured it with mod security and some complex rewrite rules. I then saved the image as its own image so I can make clone systems anytime. I can also share my image with the public if I choose.

You can use a cloud server for a few cents per hour. There are many vendors that offer smaller size servers for less than ten cents per hour. I am always firing up various servers, everything from Windows 2008 to Linux and my bill has never been more than $10 per month because I shut them down when not in use and you only have to pay while they are active. There is a small charge for storage if you are saving snapshots or boot images but disk storage is relatively cheap these days. In case you need a more powerful system for web hosting tomcat with a quad core CPU with 16GB of memory will cost you about $2 per hour.

There are many reasons to use cloud based servers. They are flexible, easy to backup using snapshots, and relatively low cost. There is no shortage of cloud vendors. I suggest you surf to your favorite search engine and type in cloud server or cloud hosting where you will find a ton of choices. I don't think cloud servers will ever replace virtual or dedicated servers but they make an excellent compliment.

ParaScale Cloud Storage Software

Cloud Storage is certainly increasing wildly in popularity for mid to large sized businesses. Offering a storage service delivered over a large network, be it the Internet or an internal network, the capacity and performance of the solution combined with the ease of managing it certainly gives it a broad appeal. Owners will find that there are options for both rented public storage as well as private storage that keeps data behind firewalls while offering the benefits that cloud technology offers. These storage clouds can range from as few as three nodes up to hundreds of nodes and still provide easy scaling and management.

One benefit of cloud storage is that it provides a sort of pay for use service. Hardware, software, and services are typically billed only according to what is used or on a subscription basis. The shared cost and infrastructure of this storage method is generally very highly regarded, as it lowers management costs significantly, and the ability to terminate contract at any time virtually eliminates the risk of significant financial losses.

The biggest drawback to ParaScale Cloud Storage software as well as cloud computing in general is security of personal and high level data. While this is certainly true for public clouds, private and hybrid clouds offer an alternative that allows companies to reap the benefits of cloud computing while still providing a high level of security and protection for networks and data.

ParaScale cloud storage offers remarkable capabilities in today's IT industry, allowing those who purchase the software and install it on even a standard server to create multiple nodes and act as a storage provider. These clouds can include many popular applications and sites, but provide the capability to offer them in a manner that is cost effective and utilizes only standard hardware.

At its core, ParaScale is working to target large enterprises that can turn a large number of servers into a single cloud. The service works to pool multiple file servers, creating a faster, more integrated form of computing that saves costs on every end. By creating a system of automated storage provisioning, space is always available for seamless addition of new servers and storage nodes. The software itself is remarkably affordable, offering yet another benefit to those seeking to step into the cloud storage market. For people who were turned off by the bursting of the last major Internet bubble, cloud storage offers many more options as well as numerous abilities to keep up with the needs of today's companies.

Singapore Polytechnic to Launch Educational Cloud Computing Center

Inside the Singapore Polytechnic Electrical and Electronic Engineering Cloud Computing Center

Related Topics: asia, cloud computing, cisco, netapp, citrix, singapore

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- The Singapore Polytechnic Electrical and Electronic Engineering Cloud Computing Center (www.sp.edu.sg) is set to launch, marking the first educational institute in Asia Pacific to provide students with the latest skills in cloud computing through an operational data center environment.

Conceived by its School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, the SPE3C3 will provide teaching staff and students in the school with "on-demand, scalable, virtual computing and storage in labs to enable more sophisticated projects and research work," according to the press release.

The SPE3C3 was developed in collaboration with technology providers Cisco, Citrix Systems and NetApp.

Singapore Polytechnic is using the benefits of cloud computing to realize cost savings, energy efficiency and dynamic scalability.

The resources will initially be available to the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering students on campus, then later be accessible to all students on and outside of campus via Internet access in the near future.

"The new SPE3C3 shows Singapore Polytechnic's commitment to innovation in education and the use of cutting edge technology to provide its students with relevant and up-to-date training to develop their skills in virtualization, enterprise and cloud computing," said Tan Hang Cheong, principal, Singapore Polytechnic. "Singapore Polytechnic graduates will be truly work-ready in the cloud era and be able to contribute immediately to the industry upon graduation."

Starting in April 2012, students in the third year of the Diploma in Computer Engineering course at Singapore Polytechnic's School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering will be able to take two new elective modules, Data Center Management and System Virtualization.

These new courses are designed to educate and train students to setup, manage and support data centers, virtualization techniques and data recovery.

SPE3C3 is built on integrated cloud architecture from Cisco, Citrix and NetApp, specially configured to support up to 31,000 input/output operations per second.

The SPE3C3 can power up to 400 virtual machines, as well as have the ability to start-up and shut-down 240 server virtual machines in six minutes, 20 times faster than the standard industry benchmark.

The solutions implemented in SPE3C3 are powered by Cisco, Citrix Systems and NetApp and will deliver a unified, pretested, and validated shared infrastructure that caters to Singapore Polytechnic's data center and desktop needs.

The collaboration with Cisco, Citrix and NetApp allows cloud access for teaching resources, laboratory experiments, complex projects, lecture notes and lesson materials, enabling students touse the latest, industry standard technologies in cloud computing and storage resources for their research or projects.

During periods of low use such as school holidays, Singapore Polytechnic plans to use the SPE3C3 to provide students with practical experience in the management and configuration of a virtualized data center.

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