GeoNorth is excited to announce that we are now leveraging the new hosting technology known as the “cloud.” A cloud host is built upon massive server clusters and virtualization technology. This new hosting technology has numerous benefits for our clients over a traditional hosting practice. Cloud hosting, as opposed to traditional hosting, offers a more cost-effective, stable, and scalable platform upon which we can deliver the best all-around site for our clients.
Cost-effective: Due to being virtualized, there is no new specific physical hardware to purchase or maintain. This greatly reduces the time spent getting started as well as the cost associated with purchasing, setting up, and physically installing a new server. This means that GeoNorth, and thus our clients, need not incur that unnecessary overhead expense. Also, being virtual, there is no need to buy more resources than you have a need for at any one time. Our clients need not spend a large up-front investment in hardware in order to handle the occasional spikes in usage. Instead, the amount of resources available is only what is needed, and therefore only the minimum possible expense will be incurred.
Stable: Cloud hosting is built upon the most reliable clusters available in the world. Each environment uses what is know as “high-availability” practices, and guards against physical failure by having redundant physical machines ready to take over the task of hosting. This means that our clients’ sites will be far less likely to go down than would be the case in a typical, traditional hosting environment.
Scalable: When sites start out, they often have little traffic. Over time, traffic increases. This means that server capabilities also need to increase. Ordinarily, this “scaling up” of capabilities is a complex and costly venture. Not so with cloud computing – our clients will be able to handle traffic as it comes with a simple adjustment, allowing us to provide the smallest to the largest sites in a uniform environment.
Our experience: The programmers, technicians, and analysts at GeoNorth have a broad understanding and base of experience with several major cloud providers, including:
This unique diversity of experience allows us the ability to choose the most effective solutions for all of our clients’ needs. Each platform has their strength, and our experience with each will allow us to help match our clients’ needs with the appropriate environment. What is the lasting benefit to our clients? The answer is a more cost effective, stable and scalable solution.
Case study: One of GeoNorth’s more high-profile site examples to have recently migrated to cloud technology is our sister company theStatus (www.theStatus.com). theStatus is currently running on top of Heroku, which is in turn running on top of Amazon EC2. Heroku is an online Ruby on Rails cloud, meaning they specialize in maintaining the entire RoR application stack. This focused cloud platform allows us to spend more focused time and energy on building the business solution, instead of worrying about the environments necessary to provide those solutions. This is an example of finding the right environment for the specific application. After having setup theStatus to run on Heroku, it is now a much more responsive and easy-to-maintain site as a result. This is the lesson learned from leveraging cloud hosting: it’s flexible, it’s scalable, it’s stable, it’s cheaper, and it’s available today.
To learn more about Cloud Environments, Heroku, or what GeoNorth deploys utilizing cloud technology, please contact us at (907) 677-1500.