Cloud Computing and Web Hosting

The Market Toolkit hosting solution is built on a cloud computing platform. It is built on the same platform used by Amazon.com and other large, robust organizations. It is an 'elastic' structure which means it grows or shrinks based on a website's traffic. There are several options to help you manage your flexible website environment.

How It Works

Understanding cloud computing requires a bit of a mindset change. Consider the concepts of a traditional server/network platform: processing, storage, RAM, transfer (bandwidth). The same concepts apply to a cloud platform; however, the cloud platform is elastic so the capacity is much more flexible.

For example, daily usage may cause processing capacity to grow while storage capacity remains consistent. A particular website may serve up many gigs of video and require high storage and bandwidth requirements with low processing. Another site may require many calculations and need higher processing capacity while the storage and bandwidth needs are minimal. Server capacity is allowed to scale up and down based on the amount needed.

Increases and decreases in web traffic cause additional server resources to come online or go offline. If the equivalent of 3 standard servers is needed on average but a marketing campaign or news event causes a spike in visitors requiring the equivalent of 5 servers, automatic capacity comes online to manage the traffic without performance deficiencies. When the spike is over, the server capacity is retired to the equivalent of the 3 standard servers.

Cloud Computing Options

Vauntium offers multiple packages so you can take advantage of cloud computing without hiring and training an IT team to manage your cloud computing efforts.

• Market Toolkit CMS - The Market Toolkit CMS runs on our elastic cloud platform. All websites are allowed to grow as needed. Pricing is flexible. Many sites require minimum capacity. All sites are allowed to grow and pricing flexes with the capacity changes.
• App Stage - The App Stage is designed for websites where additional functionality is needed. Widgets, 3rd party apps, and other services are hosted on the App Stage and called into the Market Toolkit CMS via the API.
• Economy Cloud Hosting - Some web efforts require advanced development options. However, you may not have a strong need or large enough budget to afford a dedicated solution. Web solutions are deployed on a shared, partitioned environment.
• Dedicated Environment - Organizations requiring dedicated cloud hosting will find great value in the Vauntium solution. For example, in an environment where significant resources are required, the cost is considerable for a traditional server platform. The environment may require a load balancer, multiple web servers, multiple database servers, a monitoring server, a process server, etc. It may cost $3,500 or much more for this type of capacity. Vauntium is able to deliver the same capacity for roughly a third of the cost in many cases.

Elements of the various packages are broken down by usage:

* Compute Unit equivalent to 1.0-1.2 GHz Opteron or Xeon processor.
** With a subscription to My Market Toolkit CMS
*** 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability.

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

The Market Toolkit CDN is an automatic web asset delivery resource. Your images, PDFs, flash files, etc. are automatically replicated to server resources around the world. That means download times and delays for your web visitors is minimized. Users on the East Coast automatically download from our East Coast resources. European vistors download from our European resources, etc. The CDN does not add complexity to your solution. It is all automated and simple to implement.

Benefits

• You pay for server capacity as you need it. You don't have to pay for racks of servers with unused capacity.
• Your site is not limited by physical constraints. If your site requires the equivalent of 15 servers, your environment grows to that capacity. If your site traffic slows down, the environment shrinks to the appropriate capacity. Your environment can grow to nearly any size in a very rapid period of time.
• Your sites are redundant. If a server resource becomes unavailable due to any circumstance, new resources come online to replace the missing capacity without losing data and user performance in most cases.

Costs

• Developers slightly alter their deployment processes. Server flexibility is automated so developers who manage their own code use a version control system (as opposed to using hard-to-manage FTP options) and all servers have access to production code and database structure and can pull it in on the fly as they come online.
• You'll spend time on migrating your site to the cloud.
• You may have to convert your website. If you opt to use Market Toolkit CMS because of its significant benefits, your web team will spend time to convert the HTML to object oriented and template based modules.

Cloud Computing ROI

In nearly all cases, our clients benefit significantly from transitions to cloud resources. The improvement in scalability, flexibility and cost savings allow for alternative usage of a majority of traditional hosting budgets. What could you do with 60% of the budget normally spend on traditional hosting solutions?