Defining a strategy for migration to e-mail requires care. The cloud model used should be in legal compliance with the rules of country of origin of the content.

A matter that should be discussed in detail in the near future is the question of the use of electronic mail in the cloud, the famous cloud. Because this is still a very new issue, there is a specific positioning of the Indian judiciary about the cloud contracts, as well as on the discussion of territoriality.

The use of “cloud computing solutions” means the application of a model for the provision of software and infrastructure for processing and storing data over a network (internet). The principle of the cloud is virtualization of total and maximum data availability, which is irrelevant to the local access device used. Or is, a principle that defines the juridical model which is still based on physical borders.

Whereas the cloud assumes a world without walls, but despite the global plan, it is still very local – towards the legislation of each country and the very sovereignty of states – there is high concern regarding information security and the possible unavailability of service that prevents access to data as well as violation of specific laws to protect sensitive or confidential data, depending on the type of information and the countries involved (country of the service provider, holder of the contractor’s country information, country of origin of the data individuals or firms).

There is already a range of four models of “Cloud“. The private cloud is owned exclusively by one company, for own use, which holds the control and supports their costs of infrastructure. Already, the public cloud is best known for very low cost and most of the services and web applications are based on it, voice mail, free e-mail to social networks. The cloud community involves a number of companies that meet and come together to share the costs of infrastructure, has been very common in some markets or even group of companies. And the last format, which is the hybrid cloud, makes use of one or more models, differentiating the type of cloud as the degree of security required to be applied to data and legal requirements related to them.

The market

Cloud computing is regarded as the IT solution for the 21st century. According to the study, companies are planning to accelerate the adoption of cloud computing from 10% to 69% of IT spending by 2020 to reduce its energy consumption, reduce carbon emissions and their investments in IT resources, and increase operational efficiency.

Among all Asian countries, India is the leader in the use of cloud computing, according to a study. About 18% of medium and large businesses already use some form of cloud and it is expected that by 2013 the number will jump from 30% to 35%. In addition, a recent survey by Computerworld magazine indicates that the main cloud model has been adopted by companies is private cloud, which is about 60.6%.

However, like all other technological tools, as well as benefits, cloud computing also poses risks and their application should be investigated, especially regarding protection of information and data that will carry over and be stored in a totally external infrastructure. This risk analysis should involve the legal aspect of using the cloud service, since it is necessary to observe laws of the country of origin of the data (not just the company that owns, but also customer) and the countries in which they will be stored or made available.

The e-mail in the Cloud

One of the main reasons to consider e-mail in the cloud is the significant economies of scale obtained with this computational model. Most corporations do not have more than hundreds or thousands of users, while a cloud provider can provide these services to tens of millions of users at the much lower costs – reaching at the limit to zero. Furthermore, due to budgetary constraints, the internal e-mail does not provide large storage capacity to organizations. It is common that one e-internal mail is restricted to 500 MB per user, while one e-mail in the cloud supplies 30 GB. The cost per GB in the cloud is much smaller for economies of scale offered and thus the provider can offer, with minimal cost, greater storage capacity.

However, defining a migration strategy for e-mail in the cloud requires care. In the legal aspect, the cloud model to be used must be in legal compliance with the rules of country of origin of the content (contractor). There are companies who prefer that the data are more easily accessible at the place where they need to meet the demands of authority, supervision and / or audit. There are others that as a matter of risk management of the business prefer the opposite, ie, leave the data in a country other than the country which falls under its legal obligations to prevent the actions of search or other measures even political can easily access company information.

Therefore, the analysis of the territorial issue is relative, depends on how much is the model of corporate governance. Can be either positive or negative have the data in another country, depending on the management strategy adopted by the company. However, one point is indisputable (the protection of data against access by unauthorized third parties). That is, the use of cloud for corporate purpose cannot bring the prerogative or the right to the vendor to also view and use information that is placed on your cloud.

In India, the Federal Constitution and other legal instruments are generic when addressing data privacy and intimacy of citizens and legal entities, being the understanding, the law takes care of specific scope of protection for data that are considered private.

Therefore, one should be very aware of the terms and agreements before joining an e-mail solution in the cloud, especially not to unduly expose classified information, which may be carried forward, unprotected, in the e-mail in the cloud.

The contractor must make sure that the e-mail cloud provider supports their needs and provides assurance and control mechanisms for security, according to the required dynamic cloud environment. Therefore, before adopting the e-mail in the cloud, one must take into account the hidden costs, legal and contractual issues and follow the various recommendations, including security.

Care

For this, the following aspects and best practices should be observed:

• Define the type of cloud to be used that best meets the aspects of information security (in general, companies have adopted private or hybrid model);
• Set the territorial limitation of the cloud and countries for greater collaboration in terms of legal matters,  it has restricted the global use of cloud and has avoided the use in countries like China and Iran ;
• Choose the right solution provider that already meets other clients with similar requirements (usually free services do not meet the security requirements of information required);
• Develop a contract shielded (to avoid mere translation of drafts in a foreign language, must adhere to the laws of the country of origin of the contents), with detailed and SLA Contingency and Continuity Plan (considering digital blackout scenario);
• Make use of strong authentication and data encryption;
• Create an awareness campaign of the teams before the implementation of the solution for guidance on using encryption and other essential care for safe use of cloud;
• Make permanent monitoring of the cloud and the internet in general for rapid identification of incidents.

In organizations of the twenty-first century the concept of Electronic Document has a vital importance. The document, be it text, image, video, or even virtual reality, has become the basic element of management for each business user.

The advantages of using a document management application are numerous and not just pass by factors that act directly to reduce costs.

Advantages of using a document management application

A set of non-negligible advantage of the use of a document management system, is to reduce costs. But the advantages do not stop at cutting costs. The increase in performance, the standardization process, shortening the time to educate a new human element of how the organization operates, are other obvious advantages.

One of the advantages of a document management system is the great reduction in the cost of copying, with a consequent reduction in the file space. Cost reduction remains one of the administrative efficiencies that are reflected in cutting operational costs.

With document management system, the efficiency of search of any document is greatly enhanced, as well as ease of forwarding the same. With a document management application, it becomes possible to manage the file in a centralized organization, with all the advantages that this entails in terms of access and availability of information. To this end, it is possible to further standardize the document, its processes and procedures at all valuable securities, and a knowledge edge over all flows of information (documents and processes), a necessary condition for control.

Standardization Of Documents

The document management allows the standardization of all types of documents in the organization, whether purchased electronically or on paper more often.

Additionally, the documents of the institution, the document management system, also manages the documents of internal entities and external entities that interact with it, such as customers and suppliers, thus allowing a desirable standardization of processes.

Characteristics of most document management systems

Web Interface

Provide a designated, user friendly web interface, or enable interaction with an interface well known to the user – a simple browser, which is used when the user accesses the web pages, be it Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Chrome or any other.

Interface of document management systems are often integrated with productivity software packages such as Microsoft Office tools (Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook) and OpenOffice to speak  further popularized in two packages.

A key feature of these systems is the guarantee that produces an effective normalization of entities inside and outside the organization, and all documents produced.

Multi-format

Allows storage of all materials on the organization (scans, emails, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, and any other possible formats).

Classification of Documents

Implement a system for classifying documents based on a criteria defined by the organization who may rely on their own business processes.

Versioning

Implement a system for creating, editing, version management and circulation of WTO documents.

An effective search maintaining documents and indexed to facilitate searching thereof.

Search Tool

Advanced search for documents, circulations, orders, tasks and processes free text.

Some systems have integration with fax server, which allows receiving and sending faxes directly from the document management system

Database

Full integration of data into a database tool seamlessly integrated systems and other projects of the company, the tool that can be used is Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Cloud Computing Solutions, Dedicated Servers or other.

RAID Backups

A simple method that can be introduced to a dedicated server to increase the security of the data that you are hosting is RAID 1; this is a hard drive configuration that requires two physical disks, with the idea being that when you store data to one hard drive, it is automatically mirrored on the second hard drive so that if one of the pair fails, you can still run your server off the drive that is still available and you won’t lose any data. Failure of an entire RAID array is a very rare occurrence which is why we recommend this solution for anyone looking for a dedicated server that can offer data integrity; this is something that will need to be chosen during the order process because RAID can’t be integrated into your ESDS dedicated server once it has been provisioned.

Off-site Backups

A second line of defense is necessary to ensure that if your server does suffer data loss, you can still retrieve a copy of your data that can then be used to rebuild your dedicated server once it is bought back online. There are a number of ways in which you can create copies of the data that you wish to backup; more often than not it is only the data that you are hosting along with any specific configurations files that you should backup using such methods because these are the easiest to package and transfer automatically. If you were to create an image of an entire server and then copy this over to a backup site using methods such as SCP or FTP then this could take a long time.

Application Backup

There are many applications that you may be using as part of your day-to-day activities that can offer backup facilities, which can minimize the amount of work, that you have to do to keep your data safe. For example, web hosting control panels such as cPanel and Plesk can provide you with the facilities necessary to backup the web hosting accounts contained on your dedicated server to a remote location in just a few clicks. Such facilities can be a life saver as a web hosting provider because they allow for quick hosting account restoration if your server fails.

R1Soft Backup

ESDS offers R1Soft Backup as an option with our range of dedicated servers for the ultimate in data protection for business continuity. R1Soft is able to take a backup of your entire dedicated server by reading the disk at the lowest level possible; because the application is bypassing the operating system as a whole, it is able to detect individual vectors and back these up as necessary. When compared to traditional methods of backup that have to read every individual file on a server, R1Soft is able to achieve a lot more in a shorter period of time and without placing a high load on your dedicated server. Other benefits of choosing R1Soft for your backup needs include:

• You are able to configure your own data retention policies so that you can choose how long your backups are stored for – it is recommended that you take backups daily, but if the data stored on your servers is mission critical then more frequent backups (i.e. every hour or half-hour) can be setup
• R1Soft is designed to industry standards and can cope with backing up around 64TB of data from a single hard disk, meaning that it will be more than capable of keeping up with your data backup requirements
• A web interface is provided so that you can manage your backups and download files to restore from any of the backup points that match your retention policies.

ESDS believes that it is important to encourage our customers to take regular backups of their data so that if they do encounter hardware failure or data loss at any point, they will be able to recover their data so that their website can be bought back online in no time at all. If you are unsure about which backup system will be the most appropriate for you, then please contact the ESDS sales team as they can shed light on the best possible solution for your needs.

RAID configurations are one of the primary reasons for businesses selecting dedicated server hosting over other high-uptime options that are available, namely eNlight India Cloud Hosting and VPS hosting. ESDS offers a range of dedicated servers that can be adapted to suit your needs as you wish and we offer a range of hard drive options that you can use to develop a RAID solution for your dedicated server.

RAID 0

This is one of the most popular RAID configurations available and is seen as a way of boosting the performance of disks in a server by combining 2 or more physical hard drives into a single logical disk, therefore combining the read/write speeds of all disks and splitting the data evenly across the disk array. It should be noted that in a RAID 0 array, the disks contained within the array needn’t necessarily be the same model or even the same logical size; however, the disk space that can be contributed to the array by each physical disk will be limited by the total size of the smallest disk in the array.

Compared to other RAID applications available, RAID 0 is one of the best performing solutions available; even though there is no additional data security offered, this can be achieved using other solutions such as backup applications that can back up your data to an external server located off-site. It should be noted that the performance of any RAID configuration is going to be dependent on the controller that has been used to create the array, with on-board controllers that are built into motherboards being less effective and reliable than dedicated RAID controllers that can be found in the form of PCI-E cards.

RAID 1

This has been designed to provide additional security for the data that you have stored on your dedicated server because the data that is stored on one disk is mirrored onto a second hard drive, with the intention being that if the primary hard drive fails then there is a secondary hard drive available containing an exact copy of the data contained on the failed drive. RAID 1 can also improve the performance of your server by increasing the read speeds at which data is accessed because the server will have two locations from which it can access the necessary.

RAID 1 is ideal for situations where data security and integrity are essential because it means that even if you do experience hardware failure with one of your hard disks, this won’t knock your dedicated server offline completely; once you have replaced the failed disk, it is fairly easy to rebuild the array without causing any further issues. However, ESDS to advise that you also invest in other methods to keep your data safe such as off-site backup because there have been occurrences where both hard drives have failed or a server has been destroyed.

RAID 5

Whereas RAID 0 and RAID 1 require two identical drives, RAID 5 requires 3 identical drives to function as intended. It seen as being a cost effective method to achieving high read figures without compromising the reliability of the data contained within the array since this is distributed throughout the array. Even though the write speeds that you will see with a RAID 5 array won’t be amazing, you should be looking to use this in scenarios that are more heaily read-orientated, such as databases that are powering the CMS systems for websites that receive high volumes of traffic.

RAID 10/1+0

RAID 1+0 (often referred to as RAID 10) is a combination of RAID 1 and RAID 0 meaning that it will be able to provide the ultimate in performance and data security. A RAID 10 array will require four identical drives to make sure that the array can function correctly; the drives are then separated into pairs to create two separate RAID 1 arrays, with these two arrays then being combined using RAID 0 to create a single high-performance volume. The data that is placed into a RAID 10 array will be spread across all the hard drives in the array meaning that access is going to be needed to all drives when reading them, therefore meaning that the read power of all the drives is going to be combined which will mean faster processing times for your data when retrieving it.

Although this can be a more costly configuration to setup, it is by far the best performing solution available to businesses that can afford it. Useful applications for this may include file servers where information is going to be constantly requested or in situations where disk performance and reliability are on par with each other in terms of the need for them.

The best thing in life are definitely free when it comes to developer software. There’s plenty of free software that does the job as well as the commercial and proprietary offerings. The difference is the price – free software is free; and many of which are released under fair licensing terms that give you many rights as to how you can use the software. For example, the GNU General Public License (GPL) is one of the most less-restrictive licenses available for end users using software; because it permits users of software released under this license to use software for commercial and non-commercial purposes, to use it free of charge, to copy it, to distribute it to others, to use extracts of the software in their own software applications and much more. The question really is – if there is a free software application out there that can do the job as well as commercial software can do – why do you want to pay for the commercial and proprietary software application without first trying out the free software alternatives first? It saves money.

FTP clients.

FileZilla.

FileZilla is an open-source and cross-platform FTP client for Windows, Mac and Linux distributions (including Ubuntu). It’s a great FTP client that does the job very well. And as it is open source, it is completely free to download and use. FileZilla is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

A few things to point out about FileZilla is that there is no way in which to set FileZilla to automatically upload saved files. You have to switch to FileZilla to confirm you want changes to be saved on the remote server. It’s slightly annoying and slows you down a little, but it may come useful one day.

Nonetheless, FileZilla is a great FTP client to consider using. I don’t even think there’s any point to buying a commercial and proprietary FTP client when FileZilla has all the features you’d need in an FTP client and it being completely free.

WinSCP.

WinSCP is a free and open source FTP client for Windows (not available for OS X or Linux unfortunately). It supports FTP, SFTP and FTPS connections to remote servers. Looks like a good FTP editor for Windows, although we haven’t tried it ourselves yet.

IRC clients.

OK, this isn’t entirely related to web development but I’m sure many of you use IRC clients. Of course, you may well be using a free IRC client right now – and there’s plenty of free IRC clients to choose from; some of which released under an open-source license like the GPL. But for many people, the license doesn’t necessarily matter if the software is still free to use.

KVIRC.

KVIRC is a free and open-source IRC client released under the GPL.

Programming Editors.

jEdit.

jEdit is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License, and is written entirely in Java which means it is entirely cross-platform; it’s available on Windows, Mac, Linux and other less common platforms. It’s got a pretty nice feature set and auto-saves files as a separate temporary file in the same location as the file in question (and automatically deletes this temporary file after you’ve finished with the file). It’s completely free and I’d definitely recommend you give it a try. It supports syntax highlighting for the most common programming languages and less common ones too, – full list below:

(From jEdit’s website)

SciTE.

The SciTE text editor is likely one of the most popular programming text editors on Linux distributions. It’s also available on Windows and Mac OS X as well. However, it is only available in the Mac App Store for Mac OS X users for a very expensive price point $41.99 USD (approximately 2,358 INR)

MySQL Database Management Clients.

HeidiSQL.

HeidiSQL supports MySQL and MSSQL databases and is an open-source and free Windows application; however it works on Linux distributions such as Ubuntu and others using the Wine Windows application emulator, if you wish to use it on your Linux-based computer.

Toad for MySQL.

Toad is another MySQL database management client; it is free (specifically freeware) but it is not open-source, is a proprietary software application and is released under a more restrictive licensing agreement. Even so, it is free and many people do indeed use Toad for MySQL. As the name implies, it only supports MySQL databases. So if you need to use MSSQL databases, use HeidiSQL or Microsoft’s own proprietary and closed-source Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio.

Graphics Editors.

You may not think GIMP is any good, but it is by far the most versatile and feature-rich graphics editor alternative to Photoshop. As well as being free and open source, it is released under the GPL and is available for all the major platforms – Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. It hasn’t got the same layout and usability as Photoshop in regards to how you use it, but it has all of the features you’d expect to use in Photoshop.

If you’re looking for a graphics editor that gets the job does – including the basics – get GIMP. Does the job very well.

Managing your passwords.

Do you use the same password for multiple services, servers, hosting accounts or websites? Not a very good idea – especially when it is incredibly easy to generate and store random passwords using the KeePass Password Manager, which is both free, open source and cross-platform. It’s available on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and many mobile platforms including BlackBerry, iPhone, iPad and Android.

We’d highly recommend you make use of KeePass to ensure all of your passwords are secure.

Colocation hosting is the process of a business taking their own physical hardware and hosting it with a third-party web hosting company in an enterprise-class data center; the simplest way of looking at co-location hosting is as dedicated server hosting, but you own the hardware that you are supplying. Larger businesses can often make deals with hardware suppliers when purchasing equipment in bulk and if this is possible then it can work out cheaper than dedicated server hosting; furthermore, by owing your own equipment you can guaranteed that it’ll have some sort of disposal value in several years when the time comes to upgrade – with a dedicated server you will never own the hardware and so you will never see any of the money spent on dedicated server hosting again.

ESDS provides a range of different co-location options so that we can cater for businesses of all sizes. Servers are available in different sizes and ESDS recognizes this by offering the following co-location choices to our customers:

• 1U servers are often the smallest available and aren’t usually very powerful, but can be engineered to provide effective performance at a low cost when the correct hardware components are used.
• If you are using larger servers then we can also accommodate for 2U and 4U server chassis so that you can introduce hardware configurations that can offer more power.
• If you are looking to host multiple servers with us then you can also purchase co-location space within the context of half racks or entire racks to ensure that you have the room necessary for your equipment.

All co-location purchases include network and power connectivity so that you have access to the services necessary to connect your hardware to the internet. The power supply that is offered with each of the co-location plans offered by ESDS is appropriate for the average power of the hardware that the hosting plan is designed to suit; you can always purchase additional power if you feel that your hardware is going to require extra juice to keep it running. As part of your connection to the internet, you will be provided with a number of IP addresses so that your server can be accessed from any internet-connected computer; similarly to power units, extra IP addresses can be purchased for your server as and when necessary.

Data Center India

ESDS’ state-of-the-art data center has been designed from the ground up to provide the most reliable service available to our customers; as a co-location customer, you can expect the following from ESDS data centers:

• We have staff based on-site 24×7 working directly from the NOC monitoring our hardware and network so issues which have the potential to impact on the performance and operation of our customers’ services can be dealt with immediately.
• The above along with our agreements with the partners that provide connection and power facilities allow us to offer a 99.95% uptime guarantee with all of our web hosting plans.
• 24×7 support is available via Live Chat, telephone and email so that there is always someone available for you to talk to when you are facing issues with your co-location plan, or simply have query.

As ESDS owns its Indian data center as opposed to renting space in a data center that is owned by another provider, ESDS is able to provide some of the most  affordable co-location rates in India. Furthermore, we also have full control of the hosting infrastructure and the data floor as a whole. We believe in providing a secure environment for the hosting of your equipment, with some of the core features including:

• Biometric access protects the data floor from access by unauthorized individuals, with only the most highly trained ESDS employees being allowed access – CCTV cameras also monitor all entrances and exits to the data floor and the site as a whole.
• All hardware is stored in secure server racks that are protected with lock and key access, with the keys being stored securely by our security team to ensure that access to hardware is only provided when needed.
• We are consistently carrying our Research and Development to identify any areas in our data center infrastructure that can be improved to increase stability or to offer additional security measures.

Choosing ESDS as your co-location partner in India will provide you with the assurance that your hardware is being hosted in a secure environment. With our 99.95% uptime guarantee, downtime is going to be a rarity and even if it does occur then it won’t be noticeable. Contact us today to see how our co-location packages can offer your hardware the ideal hosting environment.

A dedicated server is a physical server that is formed of physical components that can be adjusted to provide servers of differing specifications, with low-specification dedicated servers being the least powerful and the most powerful dedicated servers being available in the form of high-specification hosting plans. Whereas virtual server hosting services such as VPS servers and cloud hosting VMs are aimed at businesses with restricted budgets, dedicated servers are designed for businesses with larger budgets as is evident with the price of most dedicated servers. Even though ESDS aims to offer affordable dedicated servers, this is within the context of larger businesses that are able to justify the cost and maximize the usage of the resources available.

The purpose of dedicated hosting is offer larger businesses an isolated environment in which applications requiring high levels of security and uptime can be hosted. ESDS believes in ensure that our dedicated hosting customers can secure their dedicated servers to a level that matches their customer expectations and industry standards; ways in which this can be achieved include:

• A hardware firewall can be used with a dedicated server to provide an additional layer of security outside of the software that you have in use on your server to offer security
• Providing a professional server management service that includes carrying out a number of security checks and application installations to ensure that your server is available to protect itself using all available defenses
• As you won’t be sharing your dedicated server with any other users, you can be guaranteed that you have full control of the security of your hosting environment.

ESDS provides a range of dedicated servers that can be adjusted to meet your requirements as you wish. As well as offering a choice of hardware options, you can opt for Windows or Linux as you wish so that you can make the most of the technologies that you are familiar with.

Dedicated Hosting Custom

ESDS believes in offering all of our customers value for money and this includes providing them with an opportunity to select additional features for their dedicated servers that they feel can be used to enhance their web hosting experience and the overall usefulness of a dedicated server for their day-to-day business activities. As dedicated servers are physical servers, it is fairly easy to change the hardware configuration at the time of ordering the server – it is simply a case of opening the server case and modifying the hardware arrangement; however, once your server has been bought online, the hardware can’t be modified without causing downtime because your server will need to be taken offline in order for the changes to take place.

The isolated nature of dedicated hosting puts you in a position that isn’t obtainable with other forms of web hosting; you won’t have to share a single aspect of your dedicated server with anyone else, therefore giving you full access to the hardware of your server to use as you wish. Creating a custom hosting environment is one of the best benefits of dedicated hosting and can be done in the following ways:

• As you have full root/administrator access, installing applications and services of your choice will allow you to add functionality to your web applications that may not be possible due to restrictions in place on shared hosting environments
• During the order process ESDS will allow you to specify the hardware that forms your server so that you have room to create extra capacity by purchasing additional resources such as a more powerful CPU or more RAM for your server
• ESDS’ professional support team can also implement advanced server configurations for you that make use of several dedicated servers; server mirroring can be used to enhance the redundancy of your hosting platform by utilizing a secondary dedicated server as backup in the event that the primary server fails, whilst load balancing can be introduced to delegate the load of your website across several servers to improve system stability.

As all dedicated servers from ESDS are fully managed, if there is something that you are looking to achieve with your dedicated server but feel that you lack server management skills then you should contact our support team who can then assist you as necessary.

As one of India’s largest web hosting companies, ESDS believes in offering high quality service that can be used to develop a custom solution for each of our dedicated hosting customers.

The provisioning of virtual machines and resources for these has been increased dramatically with the introduction of the eNlight cloud, therefore reducing the time that they a business will have to wait to add additional capacity to its IT infrastructure. eNlight users are provided with a web-based control panel through which they can control their entire cloud hosting experience; it is quite normal for a website to require extra resources as it grows and by choosing an eNlight virtual machine, a webmaster can order additional resources when they need them – these resources will be provisioned to the virtual machine immediately upon completion of the order, with no downtime to talk of.

The eNlight platform from ESDS works automatically to provide clients with the best level of service achievable. ESDS has a 24×7 support team that is available to assist you with your cloud hosting service at any time of the day, but all virtual machine and additional resource orders are taken care of by our automated billing and platform system so that you are allocated your order once you have completed the checkout process. ESDS also offers a range of private

eNlight is a form of shared (or public) cloud hosting, a term which means that you are sharing the cloud as a whole with other users. This provides benefits as it means that ESDS will provide you with full support, whilst you can choose between Windows and Linux OS templates for your virtual machines. Shared cloud hosting is an affordable solution and is a good point at which anyone seeking cloud hosting can begin. ESDS also provides a range of private cloud hosting products for businesses with complex requirements – dedicated servers can also be purchased if you are in need of a dedicated hardware solution.

Idle Resources

The issue with existing cloud server platforms is that users are often left with idle resources that they have had to pay before because they could only choose from a set of pre-defined cloud hosting plans, but they have absolutely no need for these resources. Idle resources are a waste of money for cloud clients and for web hosting companies they represent a lack of ability to meet customer’s needs in all respects.

With eNlight cloud hosting you can choose the specific resource allocations that you would like to begin with; as you are charged per unit, you will only be charged for the precise amount of resources that you have purchased and this will put you in a position where you are only paying for what you need. You can then increase the resources allocated to your virtual machines as the demand on your website increases and your virtual machines are put under a greater load so that you have full control over how your servers before and your expenditure at every stage. eNlight also has an auto-scaling feature built-in that you can use to automatically scale the resources of your virtual machines when they are suffering load spikes, doing so guarantees that your virtual machines will never crash due to lack of resources and you can put a cap on how much you are billed by using this method.

Cloud Server Management

The clustered nature of the cloud makes managing a cloud an easy task for server administrators because all aspects of a single cloud can be managed from a single interface. With the virtual machines in an eNlight cloud being distributed across multiple servers in the cloud in order to provide the highest level of performance obtainable, it is important for server administrators to be able to manage every server in the cloud from a single location to ensure that everything continues to be synchronized and work in harmony. eNlight cloud hosting represents an opportunity to reduce maintenance costs and this is recognized in the prices that we charge for resources with our cloud hosting services; ESDS believes in offering affordable web hosting to all users and eNlight allows us to achieve this in the cloud hosting sector.

As a client using eNlight from ESDS you will have full control over your virtual machines from the comfort of our billing system. Features of your VMs that you will be able to control include:

• If your virtual machines are stuck in a frozen state, you can start, stop and restart them so that access can then be gained once the SSH service is running again
• You can order additional resources for your virtual machines so that you can give them a performance boost if necessary.

New features are constantly being added to the eNlight cloud – we will soon be introducing the ability to setup a vLAN between multiple virtual machines so that we can introduce cloud-based load balancing.

IaaS-based cloud web hosting platforms provide customers with complete control over their web hosting experience, with emphasis put on the operating system used and the resources of virtual machines. eNlight from ESDS is a prime example of an IaaS implementation because our cloud hosting clients are able to develop their virtual machines with the resource that they wish to see, as opposed to choosing a pre-defined web hosting plan as outlined by other forms of web hosting. IaaS implementations can provide businesses of all sizes with a variation of benefits such as:

• The pay per use configuration of this cloud platform basis ensures that customers are only billed for the resources that they are using, along with any additional features purchased to support their VMs
• Scalability is offered through the option to order additional capacity for your virtual machines as demand increases; with eNlight you will also find that auto-scaling is supported
• Reliability and security are two features that IaaS can offer as additional control can be offered to clients, putting them in a position similar to what a dedicated server provides.

Additional control of particular networking components is also a possibility because to some degree it is important for businesses to have control over factors external to their cloud virtual machines. Popular options chosen by larger users of cloud web hosting can include:

• Setting up a virtual LAN between multiple virtual machines in the cloud can create a secure communications channel between these servers
• Access to routers can be provided to offer load balancing in the cloud for websites that experience high volumes of traffic
• APIs can be built into the software layer to offer advanced control of virtual machines from third-party interfaces, whether these are desktop applications or web applications.

ESDS utilizes the concept of IaaS with our eNlight cloud hosting services, one of the most advanced cloud hosting platforms available today. We also offer private cloud solutions for situations where a shared cloud doesn’t provide the desired level of control.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

PaaS services related to applications or services that are hosted in a central location where the user doesn’t have control over the operating system layer or any of the hardware involved. The best example of PaaS is where Microsoft Exchange Server email hosting is offered within the context of a shared platform where multiple users share the same Exchange server environment; here the consumer will have no control over the hardware, OS or application layers, but can create additional email accounts that can access and use the Exchange environment. Benefits of PaaS services include:

• Similarly to IaaS services, a majority of PaaS services work on a pay per use basis; so if we use Exchange Server as our example again, you will only be paying for individual email accounts here and any additional storage purchased for your existing email accounts
• Instant scalability can be achieved with ease as in such environments capacity can be increased with the addition of hardware; as a consumer, you can create extra accounts for use with the centralized application as necessary.

The only downside to choosing the PaaS hosting model is that you as the web hosting company are responsible for the management of the platform as a whole, but if you have a 24×7 support team such as the one that ESDS has at its disposal then it is easy to appreciate the benefits that PaaS can bring to businesses. PaaS should be seen as an alternative to situations where otherwise a dedicated server would be considered for application where it isn’t really necessary.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

You may not realize it, but a majority of the time you are probably using a SaaS-based service. SaaS based services serve the software directly through a web browser in a fashion meaning that the consumers has no control over any of the underlying layers, including the application layer. SaaS is often used to deliver applications that are designed through a specific service through a web browser; these applications could otherwise manifest themselves as desktop-based applications, but this introduces system compatibility issues, as individual versions will need to be developed for different operating systems.

Examples of SaaS applications include HR and Finance applications for businesses that require access from a multitude of locations and because of this a desktop application would be inconvenient; a centralized operation provides a central point from which applications can be managed and updates can be applied without the need for any intervention from consumers. Web hosting companies, including ESDS, use SaaS billing applications for the management of their finances because web hosting billing applications tie into a business’s infrastructure to control further aspects such as servers and web hosting accounts.