There is much hype and confusion about cloud. What is it, what defines it? Providers try to confuse you that shared hosting or legacy style VPS servers are ‘cloud’ or worse still, dedicated servers are cloud!

Here is the ‘official’ definition:

The five characteristics of the cloud computing model were originally defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technologies (NIST) and have since been refined by a number of experts. The model has been published many times before, but if you’re like me you need to see something several times before you really internalise it.

Frankly, I recommend that you memorise this list; you’ll have the vague term “cloud” thrown at you many times in the future, and understanding these five characteristics will help you judge whether the latest offering you’re being shown is really cloud computing. And as an added plus, you’ll be able to finally explain cloud computing to your friends and relatives.

1. On-demand self-service. You can quickly and easily configure the computing resources you need all by yourself, without filling out forms or emailing the service provider. An important point is that what you’re using is service-based (“I need 15 computing units”), not resource-based (“I need an HP ProLiant DL380 G6 with 32GB of RAM”). Your computing needs are abstracted from what you’re really being allocated. You don’t know, and in most cases you shouldn’t care. This is one of the biggest hurdles for IT departments that want to create their own internal cloud computing environment.

2. Broad network access. You can access these resources from anywhere you can access the Internet, and you can access them from a browser, from a desktop with applications designed to work with them, or from a mobile device. One of the most popular application models (such as iPhone apps) is a mobile application that communicates with a cloud-based back end.

3. Resource pooling. The cloud service provider, whether it’s Dediserve or your own IT department, manages all of its cloud’s physical resources; creates a pool of virtual processor, storage, and network resources; and securely allocates them between all of its customers.

4. Rapid elasticity. You can grow and shrink your capacity (processing power, storage, network) very quickly, in minutes or hours. Self-service and resource pooling are what make rapid elasticity possible. Triggered by a customer request, the service provider can automatically allocate more or less resources from the available pool.

5. Measured service. Also described as subscription-based, measured service means that the resources you’re using are metered and reported back to you. You pay for only the resources you need, so you don’t waste processing power like you do when you have to buy it on a server-by-server basis.

Dediserve nails every one of these 5 defining characteristics – does your provider?

Not a day goes by that we don’t get asked ‘What is cloud computing?’ – as well as lots of other questions!

In short, there are lots and lots of definitions, but the simplest one we like of the general term is;

“Technology delivered as a service over the internet”.

This covers everything from SAAS (software as a service) like Facebook, Google Apps, Salesforce, to IAAS or Infrastructure as a Service (like the service provided by Dediserve) and lots of things in between.

We define ‘our’ Cloud Service as;

“low-cost, enterprise cloud infrastructure as a platform for secure, compliant IT services and applications”

In other words, we’ve taken over ten years experience in building hosting platforms for websites, ecommerce, applications and data, as well as more than three years experience in building and running an enterprise cloud platform, and applied it to a low cost, super easy to use solution that small business can readily adopt and run with. Leave the complexity, need to change how you work and unpredictable costs at the door, we’re all about easy!

Here’s a few more things we’ve been asked in the last few months!

Where is my data stored? What about privacy and data protection?
Dediserve are based in Ireland and the UK and all data is safely stored in Dublin, Ireland,home to ebay, amazon, google and more. By being an Irish company and holding our data in Ireland in the EU, you can be assured of complete privacy of your data, without being subject to the Patriot acts or similar US or UK based legislation. We are registered with the Data Protection commission.

Isn’t cloud computing billing hard to predict? Will my bills fluctuate?
No. Dediserve are all about simplifying the cloud experience for small business. With our cloud platform you pay a simple fixed amount every month, but can still flex up and down any time you require, the change is simply reflected in your next bill. Complete control, complete predictability, complete visibility. Never stress about your next cloud bill again!

Is dedicated hosting or colocation cheaper in the long run?
Dediserve cloud hosting is designed to be more cost effective than any alternative. With no capital expenditure or maintenance to worry about, no charges for power, cooling, connectivity, transit and everything you need including for a simple, low monthly fee, you can realise significant savings by migrating your dedicated servers, collocated infrastructure, virtual servers and even shared hosting accounts to the dediserve cloud.

Is this very technical or hard to use?
Our easy to use control panels have been designed specifically with small business users in mind. We have API’s and more ‘complicated’ cloud stuff for the techies, but you can do absolutely everything you need via an extremely simple, yet powerful, web interface. Backed up by our 24/7 availability and friendly support, you don’t have to be technical to make the savings in the cloud!

Do I have to contract for an extended period to get these prices?
Absolutely not. Dediserve is all about simplicity. We believe our services, service and price to be good enough to retain your business month after month. There are no contracts, no commitments beyond what you pay for each month and you can change or leave at any time. Unlike other cloud solutions, we don’t lock you in, or put your data in propriety  formats to lock you in technically either.

Are the resources guaranteed? I have a ‘Burstable’ VPS at the moment?
We use the industry leading Xen virtualisation platform, the most common platform in cloud environments. With Xen, there is no overselling, so when we allocate 1GB of ram to a customer, we can’t sell that ram to anyone else. This means that you get exactly what you are paying for, and those resources are guaranteed to you at all times. There is no contention nor competition for resources on the server, ensuring at all times a predictable performance level from your cloud machine.

Have another question? We’re on livechat, at the end of the phone or email around the clock. We’re also happy to meet you, at our place or yours, and have a conversation around how moving to dediserve can save you a significant amount of your IT and hosting budget, while hugely improving the service you receive.

One of the Most important aspects of any Web based solutions provider is monitoring what’s actually happening with your machines and what your customers are currently viewing, a key aspect of this is being able to monitor the traffic levels into your machine, to ensure accurate monitoring you need to ideally host these machines offsite on a completely different network to your hosted machines in order to get a third eye view on how things look.

So if you have your hosted servers currently with another provider , have a look at Dediserves current solutions which all make excellent third party monitoring servers. Below i have listed the five most powerful opensource monitoring tools which all run easily on dediserves servers.

1. MRTG - The Multi Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG) is primarily designed to monitor and graph traffic on network links. It is written in Perl, generates HTML with PNG image graphs, updated at configurable intervals. One of the best features is that it creates daily, weekly, and monthly graphs as well. You can monitor any SNMP variable you choose. MRTG is one of the most popular tools  for network monitoring and is used widely in industry.

(more…)