Cloud Computing

Cloud computing means renting computers instead of owning them. A company such as Amazon, Microsoft or Google keeps thousands of machines in a guarded building, and you rent a slice by the hour. Your website, database and files all live on that slice, so you never see the machine. You are also not the one driving out at midnight when a fan dies.

The change was not really technical, because the same programs already ran on much the same hardware. What changed was the money. Buying a server means paying all at once, and guessing today how busy you will be in three years. Renting, by contrast, lets you turn the capacity up for a busy week and back down on the Monday after. So an experiment that goes nowhere costs a few hours of rent instead of a rack of equipment nobody wants.

The trade shows up on the invoice, because a usage bill is one nobody sees until it arrives. The line that catches people out is almost never the computer itself, but the data leaving the building. Most providers let data in for free and charge you to take it back out. A site heavy with images or video can therefore find that line bigger than the server one. The other classic is a test machine somebody started in March and forgot, still billing every hour since. Set a spending alert on day one.

There is a second cost that never appears on the invoice at all. The more of a provider's own extra tools you build on, the harder leaving becomes, so ask a supplier one plain question first. If we wanted to move to another provider in two years, what would have to be rewritten? A good answer is short, which is why Linkysoft keeps the hard-to-move parts small when it plans a web application.

For most businesses this is less a decision about servers than about who is awake at two in the morning. Renting hands the machine room, the spare parts and the power cut to somebody else, but it does not hand over the data. Backups, who may log in and what happens when an account is stolen all stay with you. That is why a security review matters as much in the cloud as it did in the cupboard down the hall. Linkysoft's ready-made systems arrive set up this way, so you see a monthly price instead of a meter to watch.