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Some of the greatest resources are free.  The internet truly makes everyone equal.  There are developing nations that don’t have roads, running water, but they have access the the internet.  They have the ability to access the same resources as I do.  They can create a Facebook account, access all that Google has to offer, and research on Wikipedia.  No longer is the knowledge controlled by a select few its all out there you just have to go look for it, and you don’t even need to get up off the sofa to find it.

The real question is how do some of these companies (namely Facebook, twitter, Wikipedia, and Google) pay their employes, and cost of doing business? Only Wikipedia doesn’t sell anything.  They are fully supported by donations, and contributions from supporters.  The others, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others sell thing, but not what you may thing.  They sell research data, and lots of it.  As you use their services they monitor what you looking at, what you like, and what you search. They take that data, and put you into groups.  Lets say you do a lot of reading about cats, look at videos of cats, and post about cats.  Well you will see that the adds that popup in the add bars will start to reflect items that cat lovers may want or need.  This targeted marketing and advertising is what makes these companies sucessful.

Now there are other products that you can download, and user for free.  Unix Apache, Open Office and Chrome are a few of these.  Lets look at Open Office, Microsoft office sells for around $300 and you can go and download install and use Open Office for free and it has the same tools at MS Office.  How in the world is that even possible?!?!  One word, crowdsourcing.  This is the ability to anyone to add to the Open Office project.  No one person owns the code that makes up these programs so there for no one person has the rights to sell it.  It also give anyone the right to edit and change the code to their liking.  There are groups that manage the code, and put out the office releases but these are volinteer groups of people who do it for the love of the project.

Think open sorce isn’t very powerful or widly uses,  As of May 2011 Apache was estimated to serve 63% of all websites and 66% of the million busiest. Best think again.

In my day to day dealing with people i get a lot of questions about hosting.  Hosting of applications, websites, servers, and total IT environment hosting.  Everyone wants to do if its better to host it local (with in their walls) or remote (outside their walls).  There is no right, or wrong answer to this question.  If the company is larger enough to have in house IT staff i’d bet their staff has been cut and they are pushing for remote hosting.  If the business has a MSP the MSP is most likely recommending remote hosting that they manage, and if its a very small company the guy in charge of the computers is so confused that he just wants it to work.

So why are IT professionals pushing for remote hosting of your equipment?  Most companies have older hardware that’s going to fail and when it does it add huge stress on the IT staff, and cuts into their WoW time.  I know, i was one of those IT guys who push and push for hosting for years.  The idea behind hosting is you never have to worry about hardware, backups, or disaster recovery again, because you are out sourcing those worries to the hosting company. This frees up the IT department to manage problem, build for the future, and stay on top of software.

Now when someone asks me about should they host local or remote, my first question is how comfortable are you shipping your data outside your walls?  People don’t have a problem putting their cash in a bank and just getting a statement, but everyone gets a weird feeling about letting their data leave their building.  One reason for this is most Remote Hosts done provide a plan to get the clients data back out of the remote host.  They give you a ton of information about how there is thousands of levels of fail over, and backups that are hosted on the moon encase of the zombie apocalypse, and how you can access you information from anywhere including your upcoming moon vacation.  But never do they say if you want to move back to local hosting, or another remote host here is what we will provide you with at the end.  At a bank i know i can go in, hand them a check and get all of my money out of the bank (albeit it with some difficulty) but its my money, and they cant hold it hostage.  There are some unscrupulous hosting providers who have in the past deleted users data if a payment is more than a week late.  Granted its usually bargan hosts that do this but that’s what gets the press.

In the end, hosting Remote, or Local is a choice a business is going to have to make, right now most are choosing to continue to host local, but as the months, and years wear on more and more people are going to move to remote hosting.  When it right for you and your company is something you will have to talk about with your Technology Provider.

Have you ever gotten that feeling of “oh boy this just became a really long day”.  Well when you recompile code, and get hundreds of error messages and THEN realize your last backup is from 5 days ago, panic begins to creep in.  That’s what happened last last night when I was working on my Ubuntu server that’s hosting the mySQL db for not only this website, but dozens of other projects i have going.  Thankfully I didn’t panic, i remembered “The Cloud” I quickly spun up a server on Amazons Cloud with Ubuntu 11 then quickly ran the mysql installer and threw my mysql databases into the Cloud while I sat and worked out how my very own server could corrupt so many files.

Just about two hours later, I got my own server back online, copied the database from Amazon back to my server and all chugged along as normal.

Heres the thing, what if I didn’t have the Cloud?  Well granted, its just my silly little site, and some other silly projects I’m working no so really not huge loss.  But think of if I were a bank, or a mid size corp.  Then down time really could have been a killer and cost me loads of money and production time.  This is what A) Backup are important (yes i’m now running backups every 4 hours) and B) having a backup plan is so important.

I didn’t have a backup plan, but was able to formulate one on the fly. This saved the day for my wife, who was going over our wedding pictures and only had a 10 minute outage of service, not a several hour outage.  And believe me, wives are less understanding than any CEO CIO or Cxx in the world about system outages.  The only person I know who is less understandable, may be the mother.