Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Secure Hosting In The Cloud For The US and Europe

You’ve been investigating the benefits of cloud computing hosting, but have concerns about the cost and security of cloud hosting solutions. Let’s take a look at what a secure cloud hosting provider has to offer for clients in the United States and Europe.

Firehost: Managed Secure Cloud HostingFireHost has enterprise-class secure data centers in Phoenix, Arizona, Dallas, Texas, London, England and Amsterdam, Netherlands. They are interconnected by a secure private network and offer access through multiple Content Delivery Network (CDN) Points of Presence (POPs) in major cities in the US, Europe and Asia. This offers special benefits to companies doing business globally who need the high performance of cloud hosted solutions.

You might think that this level of sophistication would price secure cloud hosting out of the reach of smaller and medium size companies. That’s not the case at all. One big advantage of cloud hosting is that it is enormously scalable from a minimal server configuration right on up to as much horsepower as you can use. At all times, you have the ability to rapidly scale up and down to meet rapidly changing business needs. You can even set the system up to automatically scale up your resources when you are close to running out of capacity.

If you processes credit cards or are involved in the healthcare industry, you are subject to special regulation. Not every hosting company is set up to meet the requirements of PCI DSS 2.0 or HIPPA. This one is. To support PCI DSS, they have an auditor friendly infrastructure, managed SSL service, application and database server isolation, two-factor authentication, managed antivirus protection and continuous vulnerability monitoring. These same features plus business association agreement friendly solutions makes it easy for you to meet HIPPA requirements for protecting people’s healthcare information.

Enterprise security is included with all size cloud hosting plans. It is VMware based. Hardware firewalls lock down all unnecessary ports with only ports 80 & 443 open for Web servers. You have to option to open other ports at your own risk. Your cloud server is protected by VPN with SSL encryption. The VPN client is compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems. A web application firewall actively protects websites and applications from sophisticated hacker attacks such as SQL injection, session hijacking, cross site scripting, distributed denial of service, zero day web worms, directory traversal, cross-site request forgery, brute force login and more. Suspicious activity is automatically blocked.

Managed support is available 24x7x365. The Service Level Agreement (SLA) offers 100% network uptime, 100% infrastructure uptime and 1 hour hardware replacement. Their SAS70 Type II compliant certified data centers feature backup UPS power with backup generators to backup the UPS. Multiple Internet providers are employed to ensure continuous network connectivity. There are no support charges or hidden fees for fully managed support services. FireHost manages the physical environment, network, operating systems, databases and web servers. You manage your Web applications and custom applications. Managed 14 day backup is included.

You are probably wondering how affordable this level of secure hosting really is. Would you be surprised to learn that you can get a cloud server starting at $200 per month with no setup fees and no contract? Amazing but true. Scale up to a maximum of 84 GB memory, 8 cores and unlimited disk space as you need it. 1 TB of bandwidth is included. You can buy more if you need it for extremely large applications.

You can easily pay more for a non-cloud server and have none of the benefits included with secure cloud hosting. Plus, HIPPA and PCI compliant secure hosting is available at reasonable prices if you need them. Can you really afford to run your own data center or use standard hosting services anymore? Get secure Web servers with managed hosting starting at $200/mo. now. Check out the HIPPA and PCI packages as needed.

Click to get more information and view sample videos.




Follow Telexplainer on Twitter