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It is the 2nd time in 3 days I have received a cancellation from one of my clients who stated the reason for their cancellation was "moving to cloud hosting". I am honestly quite scared here since ultimately hosting is moving towards cloud hosting and most hosting providers still don't offer it and I honestly haven't a clue, do you? Everything from 'cloud shared hosting' to 'server cloud hosting' is popping up. Right now to my knowledge there doesn't appear to be any commercially available software to allow a client to create and manage any such 'cloud hosting account'.

 

Is WHMCS considering looking into this? Are there any commercially available software to enable our ability to sell cloud hosting? I don't know about you but single server hosting is slowly dying as the move towards cloud becomes bigger and bigger. I'm not sure what is going to happen next but unless everybody has custom developers to create these platforms to offer cloud hosting then it just might weed out all us little guys. Please chime in and give your opinion on the matter.

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It is the 2nd time in 3 days I have received a cancellation from one of my clients who stated the reason for their cancellation was "moving to cloud hosting". I am honestly quite scared here since ultimately hosting is moving towards cloud hosting and most hosting providers still don't offer it and I honestly haven't a clue, do you? Everything from 'cloud shared hosting' to 'server cloud hosting' is popping up. Right now to my knowledge there doesn't appear to be any commercially available software to allow a client to create and manage any such 'cloud hosting account'.

 

Is WHMCS considering looking into this? Are there any commercially available software to enable our ability to sell cloud hosting? I don't know about you but single server hosting is slowly dying as the move towards cloud becomes bigger and bigger. I'm not sure what is going to happen next but unless everybody has custom developers to create these platforms to offer cloud hosting then it just might weed out all us little guys. Please chime in and give your opinion on the matter.

 

 

I can understand your concerns but, honestly, all this "cloud" BS is just that. It's nothing more than a marketing term for already existing services. You should ask the customers that are leaving what the service they are moving to supposedly provides them that you do not. On shared hosting the ONLY thing I can possibly imagine would be redundant and distributed servers. The dirty truth is that most services marketed as "cloud" are no different than what anyone else is offering. The cloud is only a marketing term that in reality refers only to the internet as we know it.

 

My advice to ALL would be to spend the time on their websites and in their customer communications to make it PERFECTLY CLEAR that this whole "cloud" thing is nothing but a con.

 

BTW, if you want redundant/load balanced shared hosting software you can check out InterWorx and Virtualmin. InterWorx has had load balancing for some time and is releasing redundancy (HA - High Availability) support with the next update expected within the next month.

 

I don't work for either company.

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I think you are right to an extent. speedysparrow owned by hawkhost advertises 'hosting on the cloud'. I think he is just using this as a marketing gimmick.

 

However sites like gogrid.com or gigenetcloud.com really do seem to be offering a service with full redundancy where your data is duplicated and/or stored across multiple servers. In hostingcon this week everybody was talking about 'cloud hosting' being the future. I don't think there would really be much discussion around the 'cloud hosting' topic unless it was actually different than regular hosting to a degree.

 

I will certainly ask my clients about it and try and get them to un-cancel if I can but they seemed pretty set on going 'cloud'.

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Well Yes i agree that cloud is being used as just a marketing gimmick by majority of service providers. Most of the users were using cloud in form of google docs , gmail and others and were still not aware of the same. but what we cannot disagree of is that cloud computing has serious business benefits especially for Small Businesses

http://www.myrealdata.com/cloud-computing-and-small-business.html

 

http://www.myrealdata.com/application-hosting-cost-efficiency.html

 

Check out these articles to know more....

 

cheers

niyati

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I wouldn't consider it a marketing term.

 

We moved from Virtuozzo/OpenVZ/Xen to Applogic. Applogic is Grid Computing/Cloud Computing.

 

We were able to go from flawed server failures. To nobody knows if a server fails.

 

I don't have to wake up at 2AM because i had a server failure. Now tell me that is not cool? I think Grid/Cloud Computing is the wave of the future. I think the people see that as well. Email hosting is starting to turn into a phone type situation. It doesn't matter what happened, it needs to remain up 100% of the time.

 

I'm able to achieve that with Applogic. Were I wasn't able to achieve it with a single server solution, or multiple single server solutions.

 

Just my opinion.

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If it uses cloud in anything other than "in the cloud" it is simply renaming already existing technologies.

 

AppLogic has been around for 4-5 years at this point. Nothing really new there. All that most of these providers are doing is running HA servers using a shared (and possibly distributed) storage sub-system. You can do everything most of them are doing with publicly available free software.

 

I guess I've just been around this industry enough to not see any of this as new. As my earlier post mentioned, InterWorx is providing HA services in their upcoming 4.5 release. This handles the shared hosting side of the problem. The VM side is also handled easily enough.

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the issue with almost all of these cloud based systems is that there is no clear cut client side systems or integrations with support and billing functions, unless you custom build something

 

we use citrix xen and applogic and are having to build our own systems to integrate with front end setups...costly and time consuming, but it needs to be done because the cloud is where everyone is heading

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The process of moving from the traditional stand-alone servers to any kind of infrastructure and platform solutions that utilize the concepts of distributed/cluster/grid/cloud computing is inevitable. How powerful should b an isolated machine to handle the load of even one large web enterprise...?

 

I would suggest to any web hosting provider to look around and to start exploring the opportunities to use its own Cloud computing infrastructure and to start testing various Cloud hosting automation solution.

 

Honestly... I do not expect traditional hosting providers to grow within the next few years. The innovations in computing and the new model of creating, delivering and using computing resources is just too strong, to be ignored.

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I don't buy into the whole "cloud" thing either. Its mostly marketing fluff for technology thats been around for years.

 

I also do not agree that traditional providers will not see any growth. We have not had any problems with growth offering "traditional" services. Theres more to web hosting that buzz words my friend.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hi Frank,

 

I'm sure you'd get customers and you will grow. The whole industry is growing and I'm sure you're good and that's why you are growing.

 

However the applications, the websites and everything you host requires more resources today. There is a growing demand for any kind of "distributed computing" systems because they are better optimized, more efficient, high performance and provide better ROI both to providers and consumers.

 

So I can not agree with the conclusion "There's more to web hosting that buzz words my friend". There always be a buzz in this industry. However the Cloud computing market is growing rapidly and steadily.

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There is quite a fundamental shift going on in the hosting industry now towards cloud hosting and it's being driven by users. We should embrace this rather than saying it's all fluff - the benefits of cloud hosting have been well proven.

I've been using StratoGen's cloud hosting for ages and it's been bulletproof. I wouldn't dream of going back to legacy hosting now. I can only think that a lot of those who question cloud hosting haven't used it. It certainly doesn't feel as nice as having your own dedicated server somewhere but I don't get the calls in the middle of the night which I used to get when my dedicated box went down.

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But an OS is still an OS. And if it goes down, everything on that server goes down no matter what hardware redundancy you have built in as part of the cloud. We've got an HA infrastructure that is not in a "cloud" but the infrastructure is solid. Again, that still says nothing for the OS itself, or the apps running on it, which can easily be affected by viruses, malware, bad coding, BSOD, etc.

 

I'm just not convinced I see the benefit over what I already have in place, other than perhaps pulling on additional products to add to my portfolio using assets I don't have to support.

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I have to agree that the majority of so called cloud providers out there are marketing fluff, they are no more than Xen virtual machines that automatically fail over to another node if there is a problem providing tripple 9 availability....

 

To me this is NOT cloud hosting, it is high available virtual private servers that are not capable of scaling beyond a single server....

 

 

To me cloud hosting (only achievable by a handful of providers) is: Highly available and scalable hosting that can grow as large as a datacenter and even multiple datacenters in different locations with geo load balancing. - With this true cloud hosting a site the size of 100 users can scale to the size of facebook without ever changing servers...

 

There are solutions that actually do this but these guys are right by stating that the majority of providers are just jumping on the bandwagon and using the term cloud hosting as marketing hype. Much like was done with "HD" now monitors, mice and video cards are "HD" really?

Edited by ExsysHost
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Exactly my point of false claim to cloud hosting... Virtual private servers configured to failover is not cloud hosting... It is called high available virtual private servers! god this term has been distorted by so many marketers.

 

 

There is quite a fundamental shift going on in the hosting industry now towards cloud hosting and it's being driven by users. We should embrace this rather than saying it's all fluff - the benefits of cloud hosting have been well proven.

I've been using StratoGen's cloud hosting for ages and it's been bulletproof. I wouldn't dream of going back to legacy hosting now. I can only think that a lot of those who question cloud hosting haven't used it. It certainly doesn't feel as nice as having your own dedicated server somewhere but I don't get the calls in the middle of the night which I used to get when my dedicated box went down.

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Another point is if you are hosting a small site on a true cloud... then this cloud could auto provision 10 physical servers to handle the load on a given second during a slashdot or digg effect and load balance this site automatically across all servers . ....

 

 

then to throw another kink in the torch of the term hybrid - hybrid clouds can do this across windows and linux servers at the same time so one site could have both windows and linux files/resources being served at the same time.

Edited by ExsysHost
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At the VMWorld conference I attended a couple of years ago, when they first started announcing "the cloud", they demo'd on demand capacity where as high demand came in that overpowered the server that was hosting a site, other virtual servers could be brought online instantly to handle the load, then power off when no longer needed. This kind of service as part of a cloud makes sense and that's what I see true cloud hosting as. But you don't need a cloud to have that capability. Just excess capacity at your data center.

 

So the cloud is a "nice to have" but not necessary if you build your infrastructure right. Again, unless there are things "in" the cloud that you don't have that you want to take advantage of as a host. But then what makes that different than reselling services hosted by someone else, like hosted Exchange, for example?

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It may be marketing and it may be fluff, but if people want cloud service, you either can provide it, or they will go to someone who can. You can try to explain to people that you have a high availability clustered VPS system thats just as good as any cloud system, peoples are still going to go to the vendor who hypes cloud computing because thats all the buzz these days.

 

So if you don't have plans for implementing a 'cloud' of some sort then you should think about it.

 

I think this cloud mania will shake out a lot of the single server or smaller vps hosting companies out there that can't afford the infrastructure costs of going with a SAN (and a backup SAN) and expensive software which is critical to a cloud.

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It may be marketing and it may be fluff, but if people want cloud service, you either can provide it, or they will go to someone who can. You can try to explain to people that you have a high availability clustered VPS system thats just as good as any cloud system, peoples are still going to go to the vendor who hypes cloud computing because thats all the buzz these days.

 

So if you don't have plans for implementing a 'cloud' of some sort then you should think about it.

 

I think this cloud mania will shake out a lot of the single server or smaller vps hosting companies out there that can't afford the infrastructure costs of going with a SAN (and a backup SAN) and expensive software which is critical to a cloud.

 

Agreed, but it will cost alot to make a cloud system, since it needs multiple servers.

 

so the question is can you use the harddisk of the other solutions full capacity? or only on one server, it's payable when that is possible else, it's just a waste.

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I was also sceptical of this Cloud Hosting thing, but ever since both of our servers were upgraded to Cloud Hosting, I've understood the whole thing a lot better. It's not something I would feel that everyone would want to be switching to straight away, but I do understand exactly what it does.

 

So far both our servers have not been offline since the switch to Cloud Hosting, so I guess it is something pretty good, but that's all it does. It's like you've got Santa Claus at your house, but with no presents. It just does one thing, that's it.

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I think you are right to an extent. speedysparrow owned by hawkhost advertises 'hosting on the cloud'. I think he is just using this as a marketing gimmick.

Excuse Me?

 

SpeedySparrow is in no way associated with HawkHost, we are not owned by HawkHost we are not affiliated with HawkHost and we are in no way a sense any part of there services.

 

SpeedySparrow is an Australian owned and run business, please do check the WHOIS data of our services compared to HawkHost and you will find there is no affiliation.

 

What gives you this idea?

Edited by Dedigeeks-Sean
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  • 5 weeks later...

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