You may have seen ads on the Internet offering cloud computing or cloud hosting services with an array of capabilities that are beyond the ordinary computer or server. So what is Cloud Computing?

Rackspace, Inc., a leading U.S. data center, defines cloud computing this way:
‘Simply put, cloud computing is a set of pooled computing resources delivered over the Internet. The cloud uses software to manage the cloud’s computing resources so that it can dynamically scale to meet traffic and computing demands.’

Rackspace, Inc. provides the Rackspace Cloud service which offers web masters a capability to setup websites instantly without having to deal with hardware, operating systems and application software. Formerly called Mosso, the Rackspace Cloud can scale up website capacity automatically ensuring that a website will not go down when it becomes popular.

Another cloud computing service provider is Amazon.com with its Amazon EC2 service. They define their service as: ‘Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.’

Amazon EC2 is perfect for developers who need flexible computing capacity and are willing to do the reconfiguration themselves. While Amazon EC2 might be more hard work compared to Rackspace Cloud, it offers the capability to do computing services at virtually unlimited processing power and storage capacity.

The term ‘cloud’ is used to represent a network or the Internet and in network diagrams, a symbol that looks like a cloud is really used. The cloud symbol can mean that the network can be very complex and large but we know we have access to it. In the same manner, cloud computing is represented by a cloud symbol and it can mean that the computer system is complex and composed of a lot of servers and storage devices but we have access to it.

Auza.Net has used the Rackspace Cloud service for all its websites and its customer websites, including www.dyrdam.com for over a year already. Since using cloud computing, downtimes of its websites has been reduced to only a few instances lasting only for several minutes compared to past downtimes that took hours before the service provider was able to fix the issue. This is due to the setup of cloud computing system which utilizes multiple computers that are programmed to act as one computer. If one computer goes down because of hardware failure, the other computers take over automatically while the technicians resolve the failure. The user never sees the downtime and if ever there is a downtime, it will last only for a very short period.

If your website is down more often and longer than you can tolerate, you should consider moving to cloud computing. Contact us at 038-501-7931 or 038-501-8459 or email to info@auza.net.