Mikal, Great question.
As I'm both working on ways to advance Witango usage as well as strengthen my own hosting services, this question is frequently on my mind. On the Witango front, I have set the Standard Edition license, where I hope that it is economical for customers taking advantage of virtual and cloud computing. This is at least true when you are applying cloud computing to static "always-on" services, which is I believe how Robert Garcia's setup is [mostly] used. Cloud computing has the second connotation of being able to dynamically bring up [many] more servers when demand is high. This is a tricky situation from my prospective, but I have already made some notes on how I might be able to publish an Amazon AMI under their DevPay program where you would only pay for the Witango license while you are using it. The goal for this configuration would be to allow a customer to own a single license for "everyday" traffic and then "rent" additional licenses when they need greater performance. The complication to supporting this kind of scheme is that the load-balancer and the configuration (most notably regarding data sources) would need to be improved first. On the hosting side, I see cloud computing as filling in a large amount of the mid-level hosting needs. I've found that Amazon and other cloud computing setups aren't much cheaper than having my own servers "in the rack". For low-end sites, where many tens or hundreds of sites sit on a single server (and therefore have a reasonable ROI), and high-end configurations where performance and security is of extreme importance and "hands-on" administration is valuable, I think traditional hosting environments are still worthwhile. As I middle-ground step, I have created my own small "cloud" where I have multiple servers acting a nodes of a cluster, and all they do is support virtual servers, which I can manipulate efficiently. I looked at possibly going into the cloud deeply (using Amazon) about 2 years ago. I decided at that time to go with the above mentioned cluster. Since then I think they've added a lot of services, like Windows servers, MySQL, VPN, EBS, web management, etc. So I think it's much more realistic of an option today. Robert -----Original Message----- From: Mikal Anderson [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, October 29, 2010 4:19 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Witango-Talk: Cloud Computing & Witango Hosting Hello List -- I'm thinking of transferring my Witango servers to the Cloud. Has anyone on the list worked out the economics of setting up virtual servers in the cloud vs. other options (such as maintaining an existing server room or switching to a traditional hosting company)? Conclusions, hunches or thoughts as to how cloud computing pencils out? Is Amazon the only game in town or has anyone tried the other cloud service providers? Thanks in advance for any insight into this topic. Mikal ---------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list, please send an email to [email protected] with "unsubscribe witango-talk" in the body. ---------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list, please send an email to [email protected] with "unsubscribe witango-talk" in the body.
