Cloud Computing Appropriate For Small Business

Cloud computing is all the rage among medium and larger enterprises. You might say that there is a veritable stampede from local data centers to cloud based services. Small businesses may be left scratching their heads trying to figure out if the cloud makes any sense for them or if it is simply overkill for their size organizations.

In reality, cloud computing may make even more sense for smaller companies that it does for large ones. Why? It’s because major corporations have major budgets for large IT staffs and in-house data centers. The idea is that if you integrate everything under your control, you’ll logically have the lowest costs, greatest security and fastest response times.

There are many cloud examples that prove this is obsolete reasoning. Hiring a specialist service, the cloud, can actually lower your costs, improve security and allow you to react to changes in business conditions much faster than doing it all yourself.

For smaller businesses, the cloud may well become your IT department or an adjunct to a consultant that works on a less than full time basis. Cloud service providers have the expertise in-house that you can’t really afford. This means that you can get top-notch support by people who are trained in the state of the art included as part of your monthly fee.

Let’s take a look at typical cloud computing solutions that are appropriate for small businesses. One service that nearly every business, including SOHO (Small Office, Home Office), is embracing is cloud backup storage. The value in remote backups is that even if your local office is wiped out by fire, flood or tornado, your business records remain safely intact. Storage tends to be very affordable and more cost effective than buying more and more stand alone disk drives. The beauty of the cloud is that you don’t have to worry about filling up the next disk drive. Storage is virtualized and nearly unlimited.

An extension of online storage is backup and disaster recovery. These systems give you an easy to use control panel so that you can figure out what files to bring back down when needed. One thing to remember about online backup is that the limiting factor to how fast you can upload and download is the speed of your bandwidth connection. It’s not much of a problem on upload because files are being transmitted in the background as you work. Only a little bit of data needs to be sent to the cloud every hour.

The real limitation is when your entire office or local file storage is wiped out. You’ll be glad you have backup storage in the cloud so you can stay in business, but it can take days or weeks to bring everything back down. You’ll need to pick and choose which files are most important to continuing business and get those back first. The rest can be restored as a background activity.

Some cloud solutions get around this by having mirrored storage in both the cloud and in a secure appliance located in your office. This makes it really easy and fast to get a file you may have accidentally deleted and fast to restore an entire system because so much of the data is local. Of course, if the disaster is extensive and all of your on-site equipment is destroyed, you’ll still need to get everything back from the cloud.

By the way, a big advantage of cloud solutions is that you can be quickly back in business at another location. This is especially true if some or all of your connectivity is via the Internet. Set up shop at home, a temporary rental office or at the local coffee shop. As long as you have bandwidth, you’re in business.

Web servers are another technology that makes sense in the cloud. Many companies already rent shared or dedicated server space from companies that specialize in selling these plans. There is no need for anything more sophisticated unless you have the type of business with such variations traffic that you wind up paying to support the maximum number of visitors possible. Cloud servers can be scaled up and down almost instantly. You pay only for what you need right now and add more capacity during the holiday season or other high traffic times.

The old fashioned way to get the computer tools you need for your business is to buy software packages and then spend some time maintaining and upgrading them over the years. The new approach is called SaaS or Software as a Service. The actual software resides on a cloud computing platform remotely. You use the office systems or specialized software by connecting to the cloud. The cloud provider takes care of patching and upgrading the system so you have no maintenance headaches and no need to invest in expensive software. Once again, you pay for how much you use by the month.

Security is now moving to the cloud. The truth is that few businesses have security experts on staff and the attacks are getting bolder and more sophisticated. A simple anti-virus program may no longer be enough to prevent an intrusion or shutdown of your business. The way to have the latest network security is to buy a cloud based solution that acts as a firewall between your business and any potential trouble makers. Like software, security as a service is maintained by experts who have nothing else to do but stay on top of threats.

Finally, even your telephone service may make more sense in the cloud. Hosted PBX or Hosted VoIP systems move all the call switching to a cloud service provider that also makes the connection to the public phone system. All you have at your location is IP telephones and perhaps a specialized gateway device. You pay by the phone by the month and some providers even include new business phones as part of the deal at no extra cost.

Is it time to reconsider the costs and performance of the IT systems used in your small business? There are great deals to be had that can help you avoid investments, lower expenses and keep up with the latest technology. Get competitive quotes from cloud computing providers and see what works best for your company.

10 Mbps Up and Down

Have you heard that 10 Mbps is the new 1 Mbps? I've heard it said that 10 Mbps is the new T1. Those statements are pretty close, since T1 speed is 1.5 Mbps. Either way, there’s a move afoot to higher bandwidth levels and it should come as no surprise that 10 Mbps is becoming the new benchmark for SMB business bandwidth. Let’s see why.

T1 bandwidth established itself in the last couple of decades as the telephone industry made this digital technology available to businesses not related to telecom. One big impetus was the rise of the Internet. When the Internet opened up to business in the 90’s companies of all size suddenly got interested in getting online. That meant web servers, email and broadband connections. T1 lines were reasonably speedy for the time and readily available over twisted pair connections.

A lot has happened since the turn of the century. We still use web servers and email, but web pages have grown tremendously and much of the content is now audio, video and interactive. Commerce has moved online. Brochure pages have become full-fledged retail stores. Companies with both online and bricks & mortar operations may have common inventories that are managed in the cloud.

As you may well realize, the bandwidth of yore won’t cut it for today’s applications. Sure, a generation ago a T1 line could be shared by dozens of employees who thought they found the holy grail of high speed connections compared with the dial-up they were used to at home. Nowadays, 6 to 10 Mbps is considered about average for residential broadband. Some users are inclined to pay up for 2x or 3x that amount in order to support their insatiable video habit. You may not be sanctioning long periods of video watching at work, but you still need line speed to keep up productivity.

Look at what’s happening right now. Businesses large and small are relocating to the cloud. Data centers are going dark, as servers are moving to colo facilities and being sold off in favor of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). PBX systems are meeting a similar fate. The telephone closet is emptying out as companies go with hosted communications. What’s left is a phone on every desk plugged into the LAN along with a PC. These are augmented by smartphones and tablets. All that IT infrastructure is gone.

Well, it’s not really gone. It’s just located somewhere else and likely part of virtualized shared resources. What companies may forget in their zeal to gain the economic benefits of the cloud is that connectivity is now a choke point. The problems of running out of LAN bandwidth were solved so long ago that everyone takes lack of network congestion for granted. The memories of moving up from 1 Mbps to 10 Mbps to 100 Mbps and perhaps 1000 Mbps have become fuzzy and faded. Surprise! Those growing pains are being revisited in the form of connections to the cloud.

The bulk of traffic is now flowing back and forth to the cloud for companies that moved to hosted solutions. What that boils down to is that you need LAN quality connections to the WAN. Clearly T1 lines at 1.5 Mbps aren’t up to that. This is where 10 Mbps makes a lot more sense as a baseline. Don’t get too comfortable with that number. It’s going to be 100 Mbps before you know it.

For the moment, let’s take 10 Mbps as a baseline connection requirement. How do we get that without breaking the bank? There are a couple of easy growth paths that will give you 10 Mbps in both directions. That’s important with cloud services because you have data flowing both up and down. Your T1 line is symmetrical like that. It’s 1.5 Mbps upload and 1.5 Mbps download. Wouldn’t it make sense to simply hot rod a T1 line to get more speed?

Don’t laugh. That’s exactly what we’re going to do. You can’t jack up the speed of a single T1 line or it won’t be a T1 line anymore. In fact, it won’t run at all. T1 is a synchronized service that runs at 1.5 Mbps or shuts down. However, there is no reason you can’t run 2 T1 lines and combine their bandwidth. That process is called bonding. Bond 7 T1 lines together and you get 10.5 Mbps. Exactly what you need and a little more.

Another service that will get you to 10 x 10 Mbps bandwidth quite easily is Ethernet over Copper (EoC). This service runs on twisted pair telco cable, just like T1, so there is little or no construction cost involved in an upgrade. The modulation scheme is newer and trades distance for speed. That means that within a few miles of the telco central office you can easily get 10 Mbps and perhaps 20 or 30 Mbps over copper. Closer in that figure rises to DS3 levels of 45 Mbps. What’s more, EoC tends to be less costly on a per Mbps basis than bonded T1 lines.

Is your business straining its WAN connection to get the bandwidth you need? More speed may be less expensive than you think. Get competitive quotes for 10 Mbps bonded T1 and Ethernet over Copper services and see if now is the time to make the move.

Low Cost Cloud Backup For Business

Many companies are taking a hard look at what cloud services have to offer. Not all businesses have their own data centers or on-site public-facing web servers. But all businesses generate important data that they can’t afford to lose. Think about what would happen if a tornado, flood or fire came sweeping through and destroyed all the paper and computer files in your office. How badly would that hurt you? What if your hard drive simply crashed? They do that, you know.


Fortunately there is an easy way to protect yourself without getting into a costly outsourcing contract. Simply backup your important business files to a secure location quickly and cheaply. The service you are looking for is called MozyPro.

Mozy is a cloud services company that specializes in low cost online backup solutions for both individuals and businesses of all size. Their business product is called MozyPro. It’s used by over 70,000 businesses right now. Why? Because it’s an affordable pay-as-you-go solution with no setup fees, no hardware to buy and very little in the way of management needed.

Compare that to remembering, or trying to remember, to backup your hard disk drives. You know you’re going to forget occasionally. Even if you don’t, will all of your files be backed up when disaster strikes or will it have been too long since the last backup? By the way, where are you going to store those backup disks or tapes? In an office safe? In a file drawer? Bad idea. For disaster recovery, you want copies of your files as far away from your business location as possible. It’s unlikely that disaster will strike two geographically unrelated areas at exactly the same time.

Here’s how MozyPro works. You get a Web-based administrative console and software for each Windows or Mac user, or server that you want to backup. These simple tools allow you to select folders and files to backup to the secure Mozy data center. You can also set automatic or scheduled backups and restore files and folders as you wish. The simplest approach is to tell MozyPro to automatically backup files while your computer is not in use. That way you’ll be sure backups are up to date.

But how secure is this process? Mozy is part of EMC Corporation, the largest provider of data storage platforms in the world. Their servers are located in world-class data centers located around the world. They are all SAS70 or ISO 27001 certified and, where applicable, adhere to European Union Safe HArbor Privacy Principles. Prior to transfer, your data is encrypted with military-grade data encryption and then sent to the data centers via 128-bit SSL connection. You can choose a managed encryption key or a personal key for added security.

Here’s something else you might like. Windows user can use a feature called Mozy 2xProtect to backup locally to a USB or external drive in addition to online. You’ll have a copy of your files nearby in case of an oops, but also a remote secure copy in case of a major disaster.

How much does all of this cost? You buy licenses for your computers and servers and pay by the month. Desktop licenses are $3.95 a month plus $0.50/GB per month for each user. Server licenses are just $6.95 per month plus $0.50/GB per month for each server. You’ll get a special deal if you sign up for an annual or biennial subscription rather than just paying by the month.

Have you had that uncomfortable feeling that you aren’t as well protected as you should be? Mozy offers pretty cheap insurance to help your business keep running no matter what. Learn more and sign up for MozyPro Online Backup For Business now. You’ll sleep a lot easier.

The Easy Way To Host Lots Of Domains

With more and more businesses moving online, companies are finding that one domain name is no longer adequate. You may very well want an individual domain name for each product line you offer. Online marketers will definitely find themselves constructing separate web sites to be fine tuned for each type of product sold or even each demographic group being targeted. The problem then becomes how to host all those domains.

The traditional difficult and expensive hosting solution is to buy a separate hosting service for each domain you register. Even at $5 to $10 per month each, that can get expensive for smaller businesses and independent marketing people. If all you have is a few domain names and that’s all you ever expect to need, then go ahead and add hosting services at the same time you buy your domains. For only a few domains it won't get that pricey and you'll avoid paying for a large hosting account that you’ll never need.

So how can you host a dozen or more domains without breaking the bank? One approach that is often touted for this purpose is to start with a single hosting account and then purchase “add on” domain hosting. Usually for a couple of bucks a month each, the hosting service will program their servers to allow you to have an additional domain on your shared hosting service. The way this works is that a separate folder is created within your public HTML hosting space where you put the files for this extra site. It’s just like any other folder, except that the system knows to direct the visitor to those files for the “add on” domain. As you add more domains, you add more and more folders.

I’ve used this approach and, while it works, you still have only one control panel and one htaccess file to cover all domains. Frankly, I much prefer the flexibility and independence of giving each domain its own cPanel and being able to allocate storage and bandwidth quotas depending on the size and traffic for each site. You’ll really appreciate this if you need to do some experimenting during development of a brand new site and don’t want to risk affecting the operation of your existing sites.

Does this mean you need to stick with individual hosting plans for each domain to decouple them? No, not at all. The solution you want is called reseller hosting. It was intended for Internet development businesses that support many clients and want to give each of them their own separate account. With a reseller account, you can create web sites for many businesses and then let them make their own updates, confident that one customer can’t do anything to damage the site of another customer. You can also use reseller hosting to rebrand the hosting plan so you can sell hosting accounts to your customers.

The name “reseller” pretty much describes a service that is intended to be split into smaller accounts and resold at a profit. You can also keep all of the accounts for yourself and treat each web site you construct as if it were for a separate customer. The difference is that you personally maintain all the sites by logging into a separate control panel for each site. You also get a master control panel called the WHM or Web Host Manager to create, upgrade and delete all those individual sites.

Why would you want to buy something for your own use that is designed to be resold? Simple. The price is right. For instance, You can get a HostGator reseller web hosting account for $24.95 a month. That gives you 50 GB of disk space and 500 GB of bandwidth to host unlimited domains.

You read that correctly. You can host all the domains that will fit into your reseller account for $24.95 a month. Let’s say that you want to host 25 sites on your account. You can assign each site 2 GB of storage and 20 GB of monthly bandwidth. The cost spread across all sites comes to $1 per site for hosting. Just where are you going to get professional grade web hosting with free website templates, free site builder software, unlimited MySQL Databases, unlimited sub domains, and unlimited POP 3 email accounts for a buck a month per site?

With the $24.95 per month reseller hosting account, you may find that you can host dozens and dozens of small “mini sites” or affiliate marketing customized sites to support Internet sales. One beauty of this approach is that you can always add another site at a whim when a bright idea occurs. Just buy a domain name, set the name servers for that domain to the ones for your reseller hosting, and create an account for your new domain. In a matter of hours or less you can have a completely new site up and running, even in the middle the night. I know, I’ve done it many times to capture a new business opportunity that suddenly emerged.

By the way, you are not limited to 50GB disk & 500 GB bandwidth. If you need more, order a larger reseller account up to 200 GB disk & 1400 GB bandwidth for $99.95 per month. Beyond that, you may ready to move up to virtual private hosting or a completely dedicated server. All of these are available and fully explained at HostGator.

Note: Photo of server rack courtesy of William Viker on Wikimedia Commons.

Managed Hosting Service

If you run a website or an ecommerce business of any type, you are already familiar with web hosting. But did you know that there are many flavors of web hosting available? Have you heard of managed hosting serves? If not, you may be missing out on more reliable hosting solutions at costs lower than you may experience by trying to do everything yourself.

At the beginning of the commercial Internet, many businesses got their start online by acquiring server software and dedicating one computer to be the Web host. Today, most SOHO and small businesses have abandoned trying to do everything themselves and purchase their hosting service for just a few dollars a month. What they’re actually buying is something called “shared hosting” or “virtual hosting.” They are one of many businesses websites running on the same physical server. At relatively low traffic and business levels, you don’t need all the performance a modern server can provide and you don’t want to spend that much money.

Things change when you are supporting a larger organization or have a popular e-commerce site with thousands or tens of thousands of visitors browsing your pages, making demands on the databases, and placing orders with expectations of snappy response times. The need for the lowest cost hosting service becomes less important when the lost revenue from a day’s or even an hour’s downtime can exceed the monthly hosting fees. You can no longer afford to be at the mercy of someone else on the same server hogging resources or somehow crashing the system and taking your site down as well as their own.

At this point, you are ready for dedicated web hosting. That means that an entire server is allocated to your exclusive use. The question is whether to buy this service or buy the equipment and support the servers in-house. Companies with substantial IT staffs may have the talent and want the level of control that comes with having everything under one roof. Some may find that renting physical space in a colocation center gives them access to lower cost bandwidth and saves considerable cost on things like backup power and physical security. It’s still your equipment and you are responsible for it. It’s just not installed at your premises.

Managed hosting servers are provided by a colocation center and managed by center personnel as well. They buy the server hardware, provide all software updates for the device, ensure the physical security of their premises, have multiple levels of power backup so that power outages won’t even be seen by the equipment, provide fire suppression in the event something goes horribly wrong in those server racks, provide redundant bandwidth connections so that individual line failures won’t make your site invisible on the Internet, and monitor server operation 24/7/365.

One well known and respected provider of managed hosting services is The Planet. They specialize in mission-critical enterprise-class hosting solutions that range from a single physical server to complex infrastructures that can support the largest operations. These are customized to your needs and come with a Service Level Agreement that includes 100% power and network availability, 1 hour hardware replacement and 15 minute critical live-person response time. Their Northstar managed hosting also includes managed backup and data protection, security and patch management, database management and optimization and regular business and capacity planning.

Have your server-based operations become essential to the operation of your business? Do you struggle with having the right level of resources available at the right time? Would you be seriously jeopardized by a server outage? If so, you may be able to benefit from managed hosting from The Planet or other high quality hosting service. Get prices and availability on managed hosting services now.