Cloud Hosting Mag

A persistent issue with Amazon’s CloudFront is the lack of analytics available – what’s the point of hosting your video on CloudFront when you can’t tell if anyone watched it or if user’s quit after the first 3 seconds. Today’s announcement of streaming access logs goes some way to address this. Amazon will now log all streaming [...]

Amazon today announced the Beta of its SNS (Simple Notification Service) service. SNS is a “push” messaging service for delivering real-time notifications to subscribers. Amazon already offers a non-push messaging service (SQS) which is primarily used for distributed applications to communicate. SQS messages are persisted in a queue so that other connected applications can ‘poll’ [...]

CloudKick , the cloud monitoring startup has just announced the availability of CloudKick Hybrid. The Hybrid product allows admins to monitor both on-premise and cloud server in a single control panel. CloudKick’s  monitoring  tool is web-based and tracks load, CPU, bandwidth, and memory. It can also run  diagnostics tests and send SMS and email alerts [...]

Windows Azure is just 2 months old and there are still a lot of unknowns regarding it. A couple of articles which might help clear some things up: A detailed review of Windows Azure. A pricing comparison between Azure and Amazon AWS.

Microsoft and Amazon announced Windows License Mobility which allows enterprise license holders to migrate their licenses to Amazon’s EC2 instances. The program is currently running only as a pilot and Microsoft only allows the license to be used for Windows EC2 instances for a period of one year. After one year (if the program is [...]

Akamai, the leading CDN vendor, just announced the introduction of the Akamai Download Analytics. Getting useful data on files served over CDN’s has long been a pain-point for CDN users. Akamai Download Analytics hopes to address this by providing the following types of analytics: User engagement data such as download duration and completion rate. User [...]

Rackspace just announced that its offer Oracle on its Cloud Servers product. AWS has had Oracle offerings for some time now and the announcement by Rackspace is clearly a move into the enterprise market which is a major target of AWS. No word on pricing as yet as this is still in Beta – see [...]

Over the years I think I have migrated about 30 sites (normally to different CMS platforms) and there are always unique issues involved in every migration. Although each migration is unique there are some common issues that need to be addressed in almost every migration: 1. 301 Redirects Unless you are just moving a site [...]

Continuing from Speed up Your Site Part I : 6. Minimize Hits to the Database Why is caching so effective? It reduces requests to both the server for processing and to the database for data. Database operations are very expensive in terms of resources and so you should review your code to minimize hits to [...]

Great video from James Hamilton of AWS demonstrating the eocnomics of data centers and cloud computing. Ever wonder where the cost is consumed or why cloud computing is more efficient. Did you know that power is only 13% of the cost of running a data center but it is the key reason that Amazon decided [...]

Time to Live or TTL is the time a file is cached on at a CDN ‘edge’ location. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) work by caching files at numerous world edge locations, when a file is requested for the first time from a CDN the CDN requests the file from the data center and it then [...]

Contend Delivery Networks (CDN s) pricing is typically broken into bandwidth tiers plus a  charge separate storage charge. To simplify comparison I have used the base bandwidth and storage of each plan for the CDN’s which publish pricing, others such as Level3, Akamai, Edgecast etc usually have a high minimum charge and are not suitable [...]

So you’re convinced that a Content Delivery Network ( CDN ) would be a huge benefit to your site (if you’re still on the fence just read this first) and you are unsure of how to integrate it. How to integrate a CDN into your site depends very much on your needs. The first thing [...]

Cloud server monitoring  is essential to ensure your server is up and running and performing optimally. The tools to monitor cloud servers range from basic tools to simply check your site is running to those monitoring and diagnosing all aspects of your server: Pingdom : This would definitely fall under the basic tools category and [...]

The choice between cloud hosting or dedicated hosting often comes down to your requirements for your host, we break this down into the key areas for any hosting solution: Scale – This is probably the biggest single advantage of cloud hosting, scaling up beyond a single server is notoriously difficult on a dedicated server setup [...]