Category Archives: Web Hosting

Web Hosting Evolution and the Cloud

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At RedGalaxy Ltd, we like to make sure our customers have everything they need for their web presence. From hosting to web development to online marketing, we work to your requirements. Another thing we wanted to do is too demystify the whole process of hosting, domains and cloud data storage, which is one of the reasons we started our blog. We want to point you in the right direction and explain some of the finer points, which, by the very nature of this industry, do tend to get buried in tech speak at times!

the evolution of web hosting, infographic

So, one of the most recent(ish) web developments is the avalanche of infographics which in recent months have visualised everything from the music industry’s dramatically sliding profits to an explanation of the explosion of Pinterest, the latest social media sharing sensation.

Which is quite apt seeing as Pinterest was where we came across this very excellent infographic form Peer 1, ‘The Evolution of Web Hosting’ which documents the history and development of web hosting over the last 20 years which has come a long way from the days when you needed to purchase and manage your own computer or server to host a website. Today, you can find web hosting services from thousands of web hosting providers for a fraction of the cost.

How big is the web hosting industry? Well, cloud services alone in the UK made up around 7.5% of the £8 billion software market back in 2010. Google searches for ‘web-hosting’ are now in decline, fast being overtaken by searches for ‘cloud-hosting’. The reach of web host services continues to increase in a market that is forecast to expand, worldwide by 2015 to 3 billion users.

Look out too for an increase in buzz words like ‘cloud Iaas’, cloud infrastructure as a service.

 

A Refresher Course in Cloud Storage

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Back in the 90s ‘the cloud’ (the trendy new moniker) was simply called online storage and services like the (now defunct) X-Drive offered a whopping 200MB of space. These days the cloud is crowded with free and paid services, some you have heard of, some you haven’t, offering anything from free 2GB accounts to enterprise sized 1TB+ capacity cloud space. If there is one solution they are all selling its security, accessibility and convenience.

Online_storage_history_red_galaxy_cambridge

  One thing we do recommend to everyone, whether they use RedGalaxy online backup services or any one of our many competitors, don’t, under any circumstances use a free service for anything you value and want to keep secure. As much as we love the availability of free storage services, using the free cloud is almost akin to putting your money in a bank and leaving the door open.

If you have data – photos, documents, business files… anything you consider important, it is always a good idea to have at least one backup copy of those files. Ideally, your backup should be kept away from the originals.

Wikipedia sum up ‘cloud computing’ in a concise explanation thus:

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network (typically the Internet).

After the dot-com bubble, Amazon played a key role in the development of cloud computing by modernising their data centers, which, like most computer networks were only using something like 10% of their capacity.

red-galaxy-cloud services

Image thanks to Wikipedia Commons

   Online backup from RedGalaxy works by creating an FTP connection to our backup servers and either manually uploading files using an FTP client such as FileZilla, or automatically connecting and uploading your files using dedicated backup software, capable of connecting to FTP servers, something like Syncback is a popular choice.

The advantages of cloud computing are many, including lower infrastructure costs and easy maintenance.  Cloud also helps save the environment. You can define cloud computing as a pay-per-use model for enabling on-demand access to reliable and manageable services. Another way to describe this type of cloud storage service is SaaS (Software as a Service) which put simply is basically a backup service that offers a software to help people back up their data.