Cloud Hosting. (and a bit of Software as a Service)

I just moved the site www.juanpelaez.com and other associated sites to a new hosting provider, I was a couple of years with the previous provider but suddenly they decided to migrate their mail servers to a Linux server (without notifying the users), as a result of the migration I was from June 29 until July 9 without mail, I called Customer Service several times, but I could never obtain a solution, so all I could do was change providers, curiously the process of withdrawing from the service was very fast, however nobody seemed to care about the reasons why I was changing (nobody asked me anything).

Hosting

Well then I changed to mosso (the hosting Cloud)a really novel new hosting concept, they do not ask about dedicated servers, shared servers, virtual servers or anything like that, it is pure software as a service (SaaS) or even services as services. (SsaaSs), so I register in the system, they create a management console for my sites in 5 minutes and I am ready to start distributing hosting services:

· I can create my clients

· Then I can create one or many sites for each client, including unlimited email accounts.

· I can establish whether this client is going to be billed (they should be!) and the system generates the invoices for me so that I can send them to my clients.

· I can establish whether my clients' sites are on Windows (IIS7,.Net 3.5) or Php, Linux, even RubyonRails.

· I have good usage reports, billing, etc.

· I have a good support service by Mail, LiveChat and Telephone, 7×24.

· All this from the system's Web administration console.

· I have 500GB of bandwidth, 50GB of Disk space and 3 Million web requests per Month.

If the above list does not impress you think about this, before I had a Windows server, if I ever wanted to set up a test application on Linux with Apache, I needed another hosting server, so I was really limited to what I was paying for: A Windows server. Now it does not matter if I ever need a website in Apache Php or in Ruby on Rails I simply have it, it is an important paradigm shift, instead of asking me about hardware or Operating Systems they ask me about the need I have: Web Sites.

I myself migrated the DNS pointers from my old provider to the new one, I started the registration process at this new provider at 3 in the afternoon and by 5pm I already had my mail up again. As soon as I finished uploading the files I connected with customer service (10pm) and quickly configured my applications (basically a DASBlog blog), the people seemed to know their stuff. So in less than 12 hours I already had my sites running from scratch on a new server. In theory I only pay what I consume (with a minimum of 100 dollars) but it seems like a good deal.

By the way this service is a new venture of RackSpace which is the best classified company for hosting services according to the reviews of webHost Magazine

Software as a Service

This is an interesting topic (beyond my domain change) because there is a lot of talk about cloud computing (Cloud Computing) and there are many rumors and realities that range from Exchange and SharePoint rental by Microsoft to giant Microsoft investments in infrastructure (3 new datacenters in the USA, the one in Chicago the largest in the USA, etc) to new services for publishing corporate applications on the Internet that will be announced at the upcoming Developer conferences. So starting to see this type of service is really a warning of how the future of the internet and computing will be.

In software as a Service (SaaS) a very important topic is the provisioning of the service, it is an interesting concept because a service NEEDSto be scalable and that is only possible with automatic systems, for example in this hosting service everything happens without human intervention, I create the sites, I create the accounts, I bill, etc., the provisioning system is key to the success of the software that will be rented.

And of course now that I have other concerns like the space I use and so on, I start to rethink the way I am using other Cloud services, for example: from now on I will publish all the photos on flickr.com and only place the pointers in my posts, maybe it is a little more work from Windows Live Writer at the time of publishing, but surely it is worth it. I am publishing all the files on skydrive.live.com and all the videos I am going to put on Silverlight streaming, in this way I save tons in bandwidth, and space.

And of course the final touch is to set all my RSS to point through feedBurner, so that those who subscribe to the blog do not spend my precious bandwidth.

Juan Carlos Peláez
Software Architect

Keywords: Software as a Service, Cloud Computing, Hosting, Juan Peláez, Juan Carlos Peláez, Windows Live Services, Blog, DasBlog.