Cloud Hosting Mag

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.

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 [...]

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 [...]

For the past six months I have used Amazon Simple Storage Solution (S3) to store all the newly uploaded images on my WordPress installations and it works like a snap. But why should you host all your images on S3 when your can simply upload them to your own hosting account? There are several reasons [...]

So your site is running a bit slow but you have followed the golden rules or site optimization, how do you find where the bottlenecks are and how to fix them. These tools should help you identify performance issues with your site and even how to fix them. PageSpeed – This is Firefox addon from [...]

A sluggish website not only reduces your site’s ability to attract and retain visitors it also looks unprofessional and will not be attractive to advertisers. If your site is hosted on the cloud it is also an indication that the site is not properly optimized and will be consuming too many system resources which increases [...]

Initial cloud hosting offerings focused on the LAMP stack, however in the past 6 months several viable Windows cloud hosting options have become available. Both Rackspace and Amazon now have Windows cloud offerings and most notably Microsoft has just launched Windows Azure which is actually a new cloud operating system and not fully compatible with [...]

The last few years has seen a dramatic expansion in the number of cloud hosting offerings. Below is our listing of cloud hosting offerings, we have excluded offerings which are not truely cloud solutions (ie the plethora of shared hosting solutions which offer no scaling capabilities but just append ‘Cloud’ to the host’s name). Amazon [...]