Where We Are Now
The pulse of the Internet is in a constant flux and we in the new and social media fields are no different. As the first post in my Pie In The Sky series I thought I’d provide you with some links and resources to get familiar with the latest advances and information having to do with web hosting.
While we can talk about Cloud computing, grid hosting, etc, the foundation of the Internet is being threatened right now by what’s called Net Neutrality. Now I have my opinions and ideas about it, but I don’t feel confident enough in my own knowledge so I give you some links to learn more. And you DO need to learn more about Net Neutrality
- Wikipedia Net Neutrality Page and US Network Neutrality
- Save The Internet: fighting for Internet Freedom
Of course the topic of the Pie In The Sky series is cloud computing/hosting. Here’s some quick links to more information about cloud hosting:
- An Outline of how Cloud Computing Should Work – (by Jonathan Coffman)
- Wikipedia entry on Cloud Computing
Cloud or Utility computing is still in its infancy at this point but all signs lead to heavy adoption in the coming years. The technology behind stringing a bunch of servers together to share the load of processing billions of web pages at the same time keeps getting better, more reliable, and less expensive.
Perhaps the biggest success story of them all when it comes to cloud hosting is Google, they use tens (hundreds?) of thousands of commodity web servers to serve up the most popular site on the web to people of every country.
While many would love to hear Google offer such a service (and they may), we do have a few options right now. In fact, this site is hosted by MediaTemple on their (gs) GridService platform. It works quite well actually, my site is stored in a large Storage Area Network device and lots of servers have access to it at any given time. This allows my site to remain live and speedy in the event of a flood of readers coming all at once.
I’ll look at more of these services in the coming week but here are the major cloud/utility hosting providers right now:
- Amazon EC2/S3 is perhaps the most widely known and popular, they have fully adopted the utility computing but face problems with availability, speed, and a general lack of usability by all but the most experienced web developers.
- MediaTemple is the least expensive provider I’ve encountered and they provide a great grid hosting service.
- 3Tera offers enterprise level application hosting across a grid of servers.
- SoftLayer while not a ‘grid’ or ‘cloud’ hosting provider does offer many dedicated server options and load balancers so you could create your own Pie In the Sky. I’ve had servers with them in the past and they are my all-time favorite hosting company.
- ServePath offers grids of servers although I have no experience with them.
- Concentric also offers load balanced clustered servers for cloud computing
Stay tuned throughout the week for my blog series Pie In The Sky – Cloud Computing and the future of web hosting!
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Pie In The Sky is a weeklong blog series by Jonathan Coffman – Convergence Journalism Specialist and New-Media Evangelist examining the state of the web hosting business and the potential for cloud computing. Visit Jonathan’s blog all week for expert commentary, insight, and vision.
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