When I restarted this blog I had the idea that every post must provide the reader with some useful information. It has to be worth reading. This post is one I’ve written to introduce the idea of the hosting 365 cloud as a solution (as opposed to a technical spec) and from the perspective of a customer who while satisfied with the service has nothing to gain from hosting 365 gaining more customers.

How it works

The ideal itself is fairly simple, they have a large amount of equipment that is treated as a pool of memory, processors, hard drive space etc and each virtual machine running on the cloud makes use of the pool. From the customer’s point of view the solution is cheaper than the equivalent physical hardware and the Virtual Machine instance(s) act just like physical machines do.

The cloud platform in theory

The ideal hosting platform is one you don’t need to worry about, you don’t need to plan for scaling,waste, special configuration, backups, redundancy and maintenance. The cloud platform doesn’t allow you to be worry free but its a big step forward.

• Scaling
  When using the cloud you can add and remove memory, CPUs and hard disk space on the fly, so scaling is far less of a problem. You will still need to have multiple virtual machine instances once you reach the operating system max but even that is simpler as machine instances are much easier to clone than physical hardware.
• Backups
  Because its all virtualized backup disks can be attached as hard drives, this backup space can be much lower speed than your live data and hence much lower cost
• Redundancy
  Each hard drive are in a redundant array, all the memory and processors are taken from the pool so if any part of that pool no longer works its simply removed from the pool and replaced by a technician. So you don’t have to worry about your hard drive dying on a friday evening at 5:30.
• Maintenance and Monitoring
  The only part you really have to maintain in this system is your software, all the equipment is taken care of by the host.
  Also, you can arrange with the host that the machine instance be monitored and should the monitoring software pick up a hard drive filling up or some other resource being overused it can add on the fly extra resources.
• Initial Setup
  As its a virtual machine, no operating system installations are necessary as the host can simply use a standard disk image for any given OS.
• Utility Costing
  You only pay for what you use, if your website has shifting requirements, the cost shifts with the requirements.

The h365 cloud platform in practice

Here are some of the good and bad things I found about the system

• Fast hard drives
  On pretty much any system the hard drive speed is a major issue and bottleneck, on the h365 cloud your OS runs on 15000 RPM hard drives which is super fast. You really notice it when you extract a file.
• Expense
  This is not a cheap system, before going for this system you want to seriously look into the cost, particularly for backup, firewall, cost for hard drive space, cost per CPU and cost per GB of RAM. All of which may shock you a little if you compare it to other hosting options number for number it won’t come out well unless you include on the fly system changes, up time and load balancing into your calculation. The benefits to the system like reliability and performance have to be essential to you and not just nice features. As of this writing there is a significant discount in place for Microsoft Biz Spark customers, be sure to mention that when you are asking for prices.
• No automated control panel
  This is something I’ve been told by H365 is in development, I haven’t really found this to be very inconvenient as I wasn’t under pressure to get the system live but creating an instance took about a week and it took a few weeks after that before I had everything sorted. Still they set up the servers with all the software I required with the configuration I requested, all I had to do was deploy my application.
• Great Support
  I found the support excellent, I’ve sent in quite a lot of tickets and they’ve been dealt with quickly and professionally, I haven’t had any trouble with the solution yet but I feel confident that if anything disastrous were to happen it would be resolved quickly and to my satisfaction.
• Backup
  This is something you have to pay for but its done off site and stored redundantly. Very simple to configure.
• Firewall
  Its possible to create a network of virtual server instances and remote control them over VPN so that nothing bar port 80 and 443 on your web server are exposed. This greatly enhances security, also something you have to pay for.
• Run Book
  This is a description of the system as well as any procedures the support technicians should follow in the event of failure of any monitored condition. Rather clever idea, I thought.

Conclusion

I’m generally impressed by the system, having come from Blacknight its been nothing but a breath of fresh air but without the Biz Spark for a starter business like us it would have been cost prohibitive.  What I would have expected from their system would be a charge for each CPU hour rather than each CPU so that the hosting costs would be correlated to the income. However I’ve used a few enterprise level systems before and I’ve never had to worry so little about maintenance and the future. I may not be as excited as I was when I first looked at cloud but I’m genuinely looking forward to the things I will do with this one.

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