PLANNING FOR THE EVOLUTION OF CLOUD AND HOSTING?

Hosting 3.0 avoids a �race to the bottom� where the only differentiator between providers is how much cheaper they are. The focus for the 3.0 providers is to create a next-generation data center that leverages advances in automation, orchestration, and performance quality of service (QoS) to truly enable business agility and transformation in the digital economy. This data center delivers business-critical infrastructure and applications in the on-demand, flexible, economic fashion of multi-tenant cloud, but with the performance, security and availability of dedicated platforms. This new infrastructure must also deliver this flexibility without increasing provider staffing or costs.

The 3.0 Customer
Potential customers of hosting providers have evolved over the last few years. The demands of the digital economy make it nearly impossible for them to meet their mounting and increasingly urgent IT needs in-house with existing staff and resources. They struggle to meet the rapid time-to-market demands of the business, and to maintain high availability, performance and even security of their in-house IT systems and digital properties. They now consider providers for mission-critical, production and customer-facing workloads, which means higher expectations. Providers are now being compared to services these customers use every day like Salesforce.com, Office 365 and even Facebook. While these comparisons are not always fair, customer perception is reality, and the provider needs to be prepared to meet them.

What Is Hosting 3.0?
Hosting 3.0 is an infrastructure that providers can assemble to meet the increased expectations of customers while keeping data center costs under control. Hosting 3.0 requires an end-to-end multi-tenant architecture that assures distinct levels of performance for each customer and their different workloads. The infrastructure should also have a high degree of automation so that the provider can create workflows that allow the infrastructure to respond to customer requests for moves, adds and changes, with virtually no human intervention.

Storage Infrastructure: The Heart of Hosting 3.0
At the center of Hosting 3.0 is the storage infrastructure, and this infrastructure has to be more than just flash. Flash is a critical component of Hosting 3.0, but all-flash arrays by themselves were elements of a Hosting 2.0 infrastructure. Hosting 3.0 harnesses the full potential of flash by creating a storage infrastructure that not only uses flash but uses it intelligently. It offers not just fast performance, but predictable, guaranteed performance for every customer application. In other words, it is the package that surrounds flash that is critical. These systems have to be able to respond to the variable nature of their customers by providing rapid scale-out expansion and contraction, true multi-tenant support via fine-grained quality of service, and high levels of automation by leveraging a REST API.

The 3.0 Bottom Line
For hosting providers, the data center is more than a part of the business�itis the business. At an executive level, these companies are looking for ways to onboard more of their current customers� workloads without sacrificing the customer experience. The addition of more workloads per customer means that the storage system needs to scale seamlessly and it has to ensure that each workload experiences consistent performance.

These executives also know that a �build it, and they will come� philosophy is a recipe for disaster. They require an architecture that does not need to be meticulously planned for the next five years. Instead, they need a storage architecture that can match the ebbs and flows of the business. Delivering on this flexibility requires more than a scale-out architecture, it requires an architecture that can scale up and down with no customer disruption. It also needs a quality of service foundation that provides dedicated hosting-style performance but in a flexible, scalable, more economic multi-tenant platform.

Conclusion
Hosting 3.0 is not merely nice to have, it is a requirement for survival. If hosting providers can�t be more nimble and more responsive than their customers� data centers, then their value comes into question. Armed with the right storage infrastructure�one that is scalable, controllable and automated�the hosting provider can make the move to 3.0. The result will be more customers, happier customers, and more profits.

WHAT IS FREE WEB HOSTING?

                              
Website hosting is vital in making your website accessible to other people, if it is not hosted, anyone other than you won�t be able to visit your website. This used to be very expensive to do, either having to pay for a server and maintenance yourself or paying someone you know to do it for you, both very costly methods of getting your site up. Nowadays, the majority of hosting is bought online through companies like BlueHost and eHost, who host your website on their own servers (and more) for a small monthly fee. It doesn�t always cost money, however�

Website hosting companies often offer a free website hosting package. They can offer this because what you upload to their servers then becomes an active advert for their website hosting company. How does it become this way? You cant expect a full hosting service for free, website hosts have to make money too! For their free hosting, they, in turn, put banner advertisements on your website, which massively intrude the content. This is, quite clearly, not very good for most people, especially those who want to show off what they have made to their friends, family and audience. It can ruin the website�s aesthetics, but for some this isn�t important, as they use the free hosting as a costless way to practice website development.

There are some other downfalls to free hosting as opposed to paid hosting, for example:

  • The only way to publish the website is onto a subdomain of your chosen hosting company. Your website will, instead of appearing as �websitename.com�, present itself to visitors as �websitename.hostingcompany.com�, of which it�s affect is clearly negative. When using free hosting, you�ll never be able to publish to a unique domain of your choice, even if you already own it!
  • The connection speed and uptime will be much worse. Because you are not paying anything for the service, website hosting companies group these free users on to as little servers as they can, which results in sharing computing power between many different users. This means slower and less frequented websites for everyone!

That is by no means a complete list of downsides, but to save the article from becoming overwhelmingly negative, I feel that I must discuss a big plus to not have to pay for hosting:

It is free, so the only cost is time.

That, for me, balances out all negatives, because it opens up website hosting, building and development to everyone.