Cloud Computing in Web Services – Next Generation Webhosting

With the advent of rapidly-growing websites and expansion of services to meet the increasing business needs and clientele, webhosting has essentially transformed from being just a mere provider of a singular and definite platform for internet presence to becoming a flexible and scalable one-stop solution and service extension to both consumers and business owners world-wide.

 

What is Cloud Computing?

In simplest terms, Cloud Computing is a set of pooled computing resources such as Office Productivity Suite, Image Editors, Accounting Programs and etc. hosted and owned by a third-party service and delivered over the Internet to your PC.

Before Cloud Computing…

Sounds complicated? Haha, let’s try an analogy:

1. Let’s imagine you’re an executive working at a large corporation. Your job scope includes ensuring that all your employees have the right hardware and software they need to do their jobs everyday.
   
2. However, buying all the software and hardware for them is simply not enough: You’ll also need to purchase software licenses to give your employees the programs and stuff they require.
   
3. So whenever you hire a new guy, you’ll have to buy more software or licenses for his terminal in order for him to work legally and effectively.

This involves a lot of money and often become a burden and an unproductive chore that not only adds on to your capital cost but also creates extra work in the setting up and purchasing such requirements!

How the “Cloud” works?

Cloud Computing offer an alternative solution. Instead of installing a whole suite of software for each and every computer, users will only have to load one application or interface which can be as simple as a web browser, logging onto a service-provider’s website and have access to all the applications remotely hosted over the network, saving up on tons of software and hardware purchase and maintenance cost.

Scalability and On-Demand computing power, storage and bandwidth

Cloud computing customers simply pay for the resources they use as they need them which is extremely flexible especially for new start-ups and expanding businesses as they do not have to manage and engineer web traffic and peak load limits.

For example, customers in retail and sales industry can choose to scale up their bandwidth, storage and computing power of their web services during festive seasons to augment their operations to meet increased business demands and scale them down in months of low-peak usage to maximize cost-savings flexibly and efficiently.

It’s not really a novelty

Cloud computing is not really a novelty. There’s a good chance that many of us are already familiar with and in fact, regular users of it. Web-based email services like Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail are actually primitive cloud computing experiences that have become an essential part of our daily lives. Instead of running an email program on your computer, you login to a web-based email account remotely, with the software, mails and messages all stored on service’s computer cloud!

 

The emerging Cloud in the changing web industry

“Nothing endures but change and Change is the only constant that remains in the world we live in yesterday, today and tomorrow to the indefinite future.” Such is the truth too for the cyberspace and the Internet which remains one of the fastest growing and changing medium that is ever-expanding, reaching out and touching the lives of many others globally and effectively.

Cloud Computing technologies offer a viable, effective and cost-efficient solution for companies to emphasize on their core business policies and delivery to the customers rather than spending productive time on the extra, side-lined tasks of hardware and software infrastructure, saving valuable assets and resources for the greater good of the company and the consumers.

Brought to you by ~
Wong Kheng Leong =]