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Hawaii Businesses: Get Rid of Your Servers!

Last year most of the organizations we work with moved to EC2 or Heroku for their web applications and 100% of those people are happier than they were with their dusty old server room. People always think hosting on-site will be cheaper and safer, but its almost always neither when you take into account labor, hardware failures and stress. Google and Amazon are better at this than you :-) There is no substitute for being able to instantly duplicate a developer environment to create a QA and production environment. As a sys admin, I love that flexibility. Setting up all those environments for every project used to be a pain in the butt.

In 2011 Hawaii's companies should look at every computer in their office and ask, "How can we get rid of that?" Make getting rid of all the servers in your office your New Year's resolution. Use Google Apps for your email, calendaring and document collaboration. Need an online store? Use Shopify. Its great. Unless you have really unusual requirements there is no reason for Hawaii companies to have servers on-location. If you do, chances are you are throwing away money, wasting time and causing needless stress. Use the cloud, enjoy good karma :-)

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Comment by Francis A. Covington on February 1, 2011 at 7:11am

Hmmmm Interesting concept.  However, the industry is advocating more servers, and finally getting rid of your mainframe.  I attended an executive briefing last year put on by EMC.  Think VCE stands for Virtual Computing Environment... Not anymore. VMare, Cisco, and EMC (VCE) have combined their forces to create a world class server environment that will be plug and play everything.  Keep an eye out for additional information grom them.

RE: Microsoft Cloud...

I agree with Daniel, The jury is still out.  Last year when I was Regional Manager for Critigen, I constantly ran into Google and competed with them.  They were priced at $4.00 @ seat.  Microsoft was around $5.00 @ seat for hosted Exchange.  We couldn't compete at that time.

Comment by Daniel Leuck on February 1, 2011 at 6:44am
@Attila - I'm interested in hearing about your experience with OpenCart. We've built e-commerce sites with Magento, WordPress + ecom plugins and Shopify, but haven't yet tried OpenCart. We've also been tortured by an inherited ZenCart project. An important distinction with Shopify is that its software as a service - no server required :-) The only drawback is that you don't have the code so some types of customizations aren't possible.

re: Microsoft in the cloud

The jury is still out. Microsoft's online offering doesn't compare to Google docs for real-time collaboration, but their supremacy on the desktop is definitely an advantage. MS has a long road ahead as they implement the move to HTML5 that Muglia and Ballmer laid out at the last PDC. They really need to get their act together in terms of a coherent RIA technology strategy.
Comment by Attila Seress on February 1, 2011 at 12:00am
I'm a fan of OpenCart myself for e-commerce. As for email and calendaring, Microsoft has their own version as well to compete with Google but I don't know of anyone using it.
Comment by Brian on January 24, 2011 at 11:02am
Comment by Fred Baclig on January 21, 2011 at 6:53pm

Don't forget appharbor for you .net gangsters and phpfog for you php thugs!

 

:)

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