Web Business by Ken Burbary

The computing cloud just got bigger

I’ve already written about cloud computing and some of the reasons why I think it is a game changer, forever altering how we look and utilize web hosting (for the better). It looks like Rackspace believes the same, as evidenced by their annoucement yesterday that Mosso, a Rackspace subsidiary, will now offer cloud computing similar to Amazon Web Services. Specific product offering and pricing can be viewed by clicking on the image below:

It’s encouraging to see more players, especially industry leaders, jumping into this space along with Amazon. The result will be increased innovation, competition, and a more mature cloud computing offering. All of which benefit their customers. As the Mosso slogan says, it’s time to “Code, load and go.”

Web Scalability

I read a presentation today that covered the challenges businesses face when scaling their web properties as they become more successful. It was originally written and presented by John Engates, Chief Technology Officer at Rackspace IT Hosting. It’s a good explanation of the various stages of growth that online businesses go through and the associated issues that come along the way. There are some mentions of best practices and good recommendations included as well. These are tried and true methods that Rackspace and John have gleaned from their extensive experience with high traffic customers.

You can download the entire presentation in PDF format by clicking here.

The problems outlined in the presentation are well documented and prevalent across the web hosting industry….TODAY. However, with the emergence of on-demand hosting by leveraging cloud computing, such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3 and Amazon Simple DB, are many of these challenges still relevant? At the very least on their way to becoming irrelevant in the near future.

As a site owner, if you decide to host with Amazon, you don’t face the horizontal scaling issues that come with traditional web hosting. Those problems are taken out of the equation for you by Amazon. Need more hosting horsepower? Add another server in minutes. That type of horizontal hardware scaling can, and often does, take many days in the traditional web hosting model. Cloud computing is not currently without flaws, but these will be worked out over time. For now, the benefits far outweigh the risks when compared to the traditional web hosting model when looking at it from a scalability perspective.