I have been thinking quite a bit since HostingCon about Cloud Computing. One panelist, Emil Sayegh, General Manager at Mosso – the Rackspace Cloud Division – really stoked controversy when he proclaimed that: ”Shared hosting will be obsoleted by the Cloud”.

Since I know tons of hosting professionals who have made considerable sums from shared hosting, I wondered how this migration from shared to the Cloud would occur. In order to conceptualize the transition from shared to the Cloud, I decided to look over a few Cloud offerings and consider the advantages of the Cloud over a traditional shared hosting offering. First off, let’s settle on the definition of Cloud computing as offered by Mr. Sayegh at HostingCon: ”A set of pooled computing resources done offsite using software”. Also based on the HostingCon discussions I gathered that two of the big advantages of Cloud computing are ‘instant on-off’ and ‘scalability’. Click to continue »

Web hosting can present an easy way to go green, if you’re willing to do a bit of legwork and research on the options available. Many website owners don’t realize the amount of energy a typical web host uses. But between security systems, servers, and the massive cooling needs of most data centers, web hosting is not an insignificant energy user. Click to continue »