Smart VPS Blog

The term cloud computing has certainly been the recipient of much hype in recent times.   However, it’s become a service that’s proving very useful, and will certainly be growing in the future.

From a technological point of view, cloud computing offers advantages of reliability, scalability and speed of provisioning.

From a business perspective it offers lower costs and most importantly flexibility.  In order to survive, business needs to be agile.  That means being able to quickly scale up as circumstances change (and scale down, such as in times of recession).

Here’s a video debate from the BCS:

Unfortunately, many smaller businesses lack the knowledge and in-house IT skills to be able to take advantage of this capability.  Upgrading a database server, or adding a new system, is often costly and time consuming.

This is why we provide a managed service with our virtual servers.  Although our VPSs are cloud based, this becomes a technical detail, leaving our clients  free to benefit from the speed, flexibility and improved reliability.

Google’s recent announcement that they well be factoring in the speed of website in the search results has caused some concern for webmasters:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html

If your website is currently being served in a shared hosting environment (or even on an old dedicated server that’s seen better days), now is the time to consider a modern virtual server for your hosting needs.

With dedicated RAM and CPU, hosting your site on a VPS will provide a valuable boost in speed, which will please your visitors as well as the googlebot.

We provide  a managed VPS service, so there’s no need to worry about leaning new technical skills.

Backups are one of those things similar to insurance, that we hope we never need to use, but when we do need them, they’re essential.  Back-ups are the insurance policy for your data.

Just like insurance, it’s also something we don’t like to think about too much, or spend much time over.  If a back-up isn’t made automatically it won’t happen, no matter how strong our good intentions are in the beginning.

That’s why all our virtual servers come with automatic back-ups as standard.  Hopefully you’ll never need them, but if you do, you’ll be glad that they’re there.

James Zawinski has  a short (and strongly worded) guide to back-ups for home computers [Maybe NSFW].