Cloud hosting

If you believe everything that cloud hosting companies tell you, thanks to them, small businesses, startups or someone trying out an online venture no longer needs to invest a fortune on servers. In actual fact, the credit for that should go to the thousands of small web hosting companies that made it possible for you to rent (rent not buy) servers right in your own town.

Cloud hosting companies should however be credited for further reducing the barrier to entry. (If the server is not in your basement it doesn't matter whether it's on the other side of town or the other side of the world).  Cloud hosting makes it possible to start with the lowest price option and automatically scale upwards should your service or website become successful or has a sudden spike in traffic.

Cloud hosting isn't as abundant as virtual or dedicated hosting right now. Amazon EC2, Opsource, Rackcloud and GoGrid are some of the names that come to (my) mind.  Because each company has different price models, offers different virtual CPUs , virtual storage options and non virtual SLAs it's very hard to do a comparison between them to find out which option is the best for you.

There are some cases where virtual hosting or even dedicated hosting might be more cost effective than cloud hosting. Additionally there are situations where combining virtual hosting with cloud storage (eg amazon s3) might be the best option.

Over the next few days, I plan to dig deep into the services provided by these companies and try to figure out which option is most cost effective 'bit for bit'