What is Cloud Hosting.

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1 What is Cloud Hosting

2 What is Cloud Hosting Hosting is the infrastructure on which your website or application is physically located. Infrastructure includes both the computing power and connectivity that your website needs to run and be available to the World. As your website becomes more popular, or if you add new features such as audio, video, e-commerce, databases etc, you will soon find that you need more computing power to keep up with demand, or your site will become slow and unresponsive. At this point you will need more than shared hosting where you share hosting resources with other customers. Until the introduction of Cloud Hosting, your only option would be to move to your own ( dedicated ) server. The problem with dedicated servers is that you pay for 100% of the server s computing power, even if you only need 25% of it. Eventually you will probably need the whole server but until then you are wasting money. This creates real dangers for your business. While you delay the decision to rent new servers because of the costs, your customers are complaining about the slowness of your website. Once you do make the investment, you then have to charge more for your services to cover those extra unnecessary costs. The good news is that a scalable Cloud Server can now replace a costly dedicated server. They are essentially the same thing, except that, due to some very clever technology called virtualisation, a Cloud Server can have fewer resources (CPU, RAM, Storage) than a dedicated server and can therefore be much cheaper. And when your website need more computing power, your Cloud Server is simply given more to match your needs. We call this Pay-as-you-Grow. There are times or periods in business where there is more demand, and times where there is less demand. With a Cloud Server you can increase and decrease your computing power to allow for this variation. So your customers are always happy with your fast website and you are not wasting money. The benefits of Cloud Hosting are not limited to scaling easily and cost effectively. With shared hosting or dedicated servers, if there is a problem with the hardware or infrastructure, it can take engineers hours to fix. During this time you are loosing money and opportunity as your website is down. Cloud Hosting is a smarter way of doing hosting since it protects against real-life possibility of hardware failure. Your Cloud Server is actually continually creating a copy of itself on another physical server elsewhere in the Cloud. If any problem occurs with the server hosting your website, then the secondary copy of your website becomes live within minutes instead of hours.

3 Understanding more about Cloud Hosting benefits Cloud Hosting is all about reducing the total cost of ownership for high-availability hosting for your business IT infrastructure, websites, applications, data storage and information systems. The key areas of cost-reduction that are available to you with Cloud Hosting are: Pay-as-you-Grow: start with exactly the CPU, RAM and Storage resources that you actually need and increase incrementally as you grow. This way you only pay for what you need. Built-in high-availability: As well as Cloud-wide hardware auto-recovery (using stand-by spare servers), all servers, applications and data are automatically replicated in the Cloud and are made available in the case of any hardware failure so you loose less revenue and opportunities from downtime. One platform for product lifecycle: No need to migrate your application infrastructure when you outgrow your current server capacity. Simply expand to use more server resources in the Cloud and reduce your application development and scaling costs. One platform, many applications: the more IT resources you can move to the Cloud, the more efficient your use of server resources and the lower your overall IT spending. The Clouds multi-platform support means that it need not be limited to hosting one type of application or system. Easier system management: centralized web-browser-based management of all hosted IT resources in the Cloud can simplify your application design, system administration workflow, human resource load and infrastructure management costs.

4 What about the technicalities? Cloud Hosting has emerged from developments in Virtualisation technology, which is now widely accepted as being a far more costeffective method for deploying & managing IT resources than the traditional hosted physical infrastructure approach. The key technical advantages to Cloud Hosting & Virtualisation are: Application abstraction: application are abstracted (or separated) from physical hardware and so become more mobile, scalable and versatile. Application dependency on specific hardware has been removed and the ability to size your Cloud Server to the lowest required resources has eliminated under-utilisation of expensive hardware. Migrating applications between Clouds is a simple process meaning that even the physical location need not be a constant. Virtual Infrastructure: a large cost component of a hosted system is the network infrastructure required to connect your application components together and make them available to the outside world. With Cloud Hosting, physical infrastructure components (routers, switches, firewalls, load-balancers etc) are now virtualised, considerably reducing the capital expenditure required for expensive networking equipment. Application & Infrastructure Encapsulation : with Cloud Hosting, software developers, IT system integrators and Software-as-a-Service vendors are now able to rapidly Build, Deploy and Maintain their entire application, server and infrastructure stack as a unified Cloud Application with all the cost, scalability and versatility benefits that Cloud Hosting offers. Hybrid System Integration: because there are times when an application or platform should not be deployed in the Cloud, Cloud Applications can also form part of an wider hosted System linking seamlessly via IP to any other hosted infrastructure such as off-cloud databases, or bespoke application/hardware solutions. Templates & Branching: with Cloud Hosting you can easily create templates from which applications & virtual infrastructure can be deployed repeatedly. Updating the master template provides a quick and easy way to update all deployments based on a master template. Templates can also be branched creating a new master template that can be managed independently from the original.

5 Making the move to Cloud Hosting Moving to a Cloud Hosting solution is an option available to the majority of businesses with an IT hosting requirement. In some cases there is even an opportunity to take advantage of hosting which would not otherwise have existed before the emergence of Cloud Hosting technology. DNS Europe specialises in Cloud hosting services and support and we offer a full-service approach to assisting our customers with the challenges surrounding adoption of Cloud Hosting technology. We can assist with strategy, planning, cost-analysis, migration and skills acquisition. Our business consultants and solution designers are on hand to provide expert guidance as you integrate this once-in-a-decade technology evolution into your own business and establish real cost-savings and growth opportunities both within and through the Cloud. We would welcome the opportunity to discuss your specific requirements in more detail and invite you to contact us today to arrange for a free initial consultation.

6 Cloud Services Enquiries Tel: +44 (0) Web: DNS Europe Ltd. Unit 4, Walpole Court Ealing Green London W5 5ED United Kingdom Useful Information Locations: Services: Cloud Technology: EU, SE Europe, Worldwide remote management of Private Clouds Cloud Servers, Cloud Applications, Private Clouds, Support, Solutions & Networking AppLogic from CA Technologies ( Datacenter partners: Interxion, Level3, Telenor, EUnet Network partners: Hardware partners: Level3, Cogentco, Telenor, EUnet Cisco, HP, Supermicro, NetApp Copyright 2010 DNS Europe Ltd.