A visit to my in-laws for Sunday lunch yesterday afternoon culminated in the obligatory look through my father in laws’ photos on his Apple TV.

He’s got it plugged into the  big telly in the living room and played his favourite classical music while the slide show worked its way through years of pictures carefully digitised and stored on his Apple iMac in the study upstairs. The most recent pictures had all been taken in the RAW format and when I looked at the sheer number of pictures along with the massive list of songs available through his Apple TV a question occurred to me.

“How much storage does your iMac have?” I asked. “A terabyte”, he replied.

Suddenly I was transported back to the 3rd year Standard Grade Computing Studies class at school. The teacher was expaining storage. He ran through Bits, Bytes, Kilobytes and Megabytes, and when he got to a thousand Megabytes he said “We would call that a Gigabyte but we’ll never have to worry about them.”

It was 1993 and the rest is history.

Then last night I was reading the new Stuff magazine and their feature on Cloud Computing where of course storage is unlimited and in theory ALL  our music, pictures, newspaper articles can be stored forever and accessed at any time, wherever we are, without taking up any space in the physical world.

And then it hit me. Fast forward 40 years from now (hopefully more) when I’m ready to leave this wonderful world. And I hand over to my children and grandchildren the password for my DropBox account.

Then, they’d be able to access every photo I’ve taken, every piece of music I’ve listened to, everything I’ve written, everything I’ve read; in short, the entire digital input and output of my life from now on.

Imagine we’d had that information about our grandparents, many of whom lived at a time when a colour photograph was seen as a precious commodity. How much more would we know about how they lived, their personalities and what went on? And how much richer will our interactions with our own grandchildren be if they’re able to access what made us tick when we were in our prime instead of trying to work us out from hazy memories and what we feel able to share with them.

Will we all live forever in The Cloud?

Cloud hosting, an approach to website hosting in which a website exists on a network of servers or computing devices as opposed to a traditional single server, is gaining a growing following. But is it a good solution for small to medium sized companies looking to make an impact online?

The cloud, which many are saying is ‘the future of web hosting‘, is flexible and convenient for businesses, since its dynamic approach reflects the fortunes of a company. If the traffic or general demands of a website increase, the server reaches into its network – or ‘cloud’ – and gathers the extra resources needed.

Cloud hosting allows businesses to focus on the immediate tasks that they need to execute, as opposed to spending excessive time dealing with hardware concerns, general IT maintenance and questions of infrastructure. By outsourcing the majority of IT needs, IT departments in particular can avoid many cases of providing extra manpower, training and dealing with bureaucracy.

However, some firms have been reluctant to engage with cloud hosting because of potential security concerns. Cyber thieves, hackers and other companies have been seen as potential threats that could access sensitive information, but the growing popularity of the cloud has boosted the platform’s security. Many web hosting companies are seeking ISO 27001 certification and are joining the Cloud Security Alliance in order to stay vigilant and raise security standards.

At NSDesign we’re keeping a keen eye on developments in the cloud hosting space, as we are planning on introducing a range of cloud-based web hosting solutions in the future.

Web hosting via a Virtual Private Server (VPS) is one of the most popular solutions currently on the market, and for good reason. It’s affordable at all levels of business and, with the right web hosting company, is generally highly reliable. However, by its very nature, VPS means that your website’s resources will be limited as the space of a single web server is split between varying sites.

The alternative to this is Cloud Hosting, which combines multiple web servers to create a single network. The resources of this network are then allocated to and disseminated amongst sites as they are required. The result is generally less down time for your site and quicker loading speeds.

This type of hosting is now very popular amongst bigger corporations running a large number of websites or hosting numerous pages and products, Google, Bing and Amazon are three major examples. However, the reason it is popular with these big organisations is that it suits this type of company.

Cloud hosting is a very expensive option and while it does guarantee less down time and faster loading, the difference between VPS and Cloud is probably not worth the extra outlay, unless you intend to grow your business across numerous web sites which will require extra resource. For the time-being, a Linux-based solution is probably a better option.

If your company grows to encompass ten or more sites, or you find yourself hosting a 1000 page + website then cloud hosting may be a worthwhile investment; however, most SME’s will find that VPS remains the ideal, cost-effective solution for their site.