24 April 2013 20:00:00 AEST 1 MIN READ

Cloud is changing the web hosting game

 

At MailGuard we use software-as-a-service technology to deliver our security. However, the cloud has many more benefits in the broader IT industry. Over at TechCrunch, Scott Merrell writes that cloud providers are changing the way websites are hosted and delivered.

The explosion of infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service offerings has greatly expanded the ways in which hobbyists and professionals deploy web sites and web services. For about the same cost as cheapo shared hosting, you can get your own small virtual machine at any number of providers, allowing you to tweak the entire instance to just the way you want it. Such a VM is perfect for running TT-RSS, or a photoblog, or just learning the differences between Apache and nginx web servers. If infrastructure isn’t your thing, you can quickly deploy your code to various PaaS providers, often for free, and have as reliable of a site as what you’d get from shared hosting.

The great thing about PaaS hosts is that they’re mostly agnostic to the stuff running inside them. Some PaaS hosts may cater to specific languages, but generally any app or framework written in a supported language will work on your PaaS of choice. The bad thing about PaaS is that a lot of the underpinnings of “hosting” get abstracted away completely, and the various open source applications and frameworks haven’t quite caught up with this design paradigm quite yet.

Take, for example, the simple task of uploading a file to your typical open source CMS. The PaaS host likely doesn’t permit writing directly to your application’s execution space, so you’ll need to jump through some configuration hoops to point your CMS to wherever your provider wants you to write files. Depending on the app, this may or may not be easy to do. Because uploaded files live outside of your app’s version control, you need to take extra steps to properly backup uploaded files. In short, things can get complicated quickly.

Continue reading for the next steps in PaaS technology >>