by Andy Brudtkuhl on November 17, 2009
I had some inside info that Rackspace would be announcing this and it’s significant for many reasons. First off this is all powered by JungleDisk – software Rackspace purchased that created automatic backups to cloud storage systems – including competitor’s Amazon S3.
Another reason this is big news is that it totally legitimizes cloud backup and storage for Small to Medium size businesses (SMB’s) which is something Amazon has yet to be able to do within its web services division.
So what does it do and how much does it cost?
- Store and share files between other employees and/or team members
- Synchronize folders across one or more computers
- Use Rackspace Team Sync to ensure that team members are always working with the most recent version of a file
- Set up automatic backups of your data to the Rackspace Cloud and easily restore that data in the event of a hardware failure
- Secure your data with built-in AES-256 encryption, using a key controlled by the user
At only $4 per user per month this is a great solution and alternative to tedious onsite backups and network sharing. We’re going to try it out at 48Web and let you know how it works but we think this is going to be a great tool to add to our internet business arsenal.
They are also introducing a server backup solution that seems like a win/win for IT people. As someone who used to manage a network of web servers I know backup is a pain in the ass to manage and monitor. This alleviates most of those issues by having it automagically pushed to the cloud.
Rackspace Server Backup enables you to automatically backup your Windows or Linux based server data to the cloud. Chances are, if you have a server in your closet, you also have backups running on that server already, most likely with a tape backup. Every few days or couple of weeks you have to go into the server closet and switch out the old tape for a new tape. Sound familiar? It can be a painful, manual process.
Say Hello to Rackspace Cloud Drive & Rackspace Server Backup
by Andy Brudtkuhl on October 11, 2009
“Besides some little bugs with a thumbnail plugin we’re using not related at all to Cloudfront, our page load times have been cut by between 40% and 80% the former, only when we’re loading a full image to then make the thumbnail. On one test, Pingomatic went from 8.7 seconds before to 2.9 seconds after…and that’s staggering. I don’t get the full effect in Australia because there’s no local CDN, but even I can see the difference here.”
This is how Inquitr is using Amazon’s CDN technology with WordPress to host a highly available and reliable WordPress site – via Amazon Cloudfront CDN with a WordPress Blog
We’ve been using Amazon CloudFront with WordPress for awhile – to serve ads, images, and media for our internet business podcast. What’s a content delivery network you ask? It’s a way to easily and efficiently distribute media on the web using Amazon S3 for storage.
by Andy Brudtkuhl on August 1, 2009
Well, to be exact check out the insurance application level confusing FAQ on the topic. We geeks and developers know what that means but business people like Doug Mitchell turn to me and ask “What Does That Mean To Me?” Amazon has a killer lineup of web services that are popular in our industry but there exists a lack of marketing material like “Amazon S3 for business” – where it explains its amazing benefits in business speak, rather than geek speak.
One of the first question our web strategy clients give us when we suggest using Amazon S3 as a way to lower costs and increase productivity is – “Well, what does it really cost?”. Amazon does a poor job of explaining this to “business joe”.
My answer: $2.87/mo
That’s our bill from Amazon Web Services every month. And here’s what we do with it…
- Store and Distribute our internet business podcast using Amazon S3 and CloudFront
- Store and Stream videos to our members and clients
- Our company file server – including documents, images, client stuff, templates, etc
- Image Server – almost all our website images – from blog posts to stock are on S3
- Code – We store commonly used CSS and Javascript files on S3 for all our sites to use
- Backup – We backup our computers and websites to S3
So that’s how much Amazon S3 costs.
Have questions or comments? What’s your Amazon S3 bill per month? Let us know below!
by Andy Brudtkuhl on June 24, 2009
Today Amazon announced an update to its Amazon Web Services (AWS) console supporting its CDN infrastructure CloudFront.
Manage Amazon CloudFront through an easy to use interface. The AWS Management Console lets you review all your CloudFront distributions, create new distributions, or edit existing ones. All the features of the CloudFront API are supported: you can enable or disable distributions, configure CNAMEs, enable end-user logging, and more.
by Andy Brudtkuhl on February 23, 2009
I was pleased to stumble on another killer service built on Amazon S3 called StreamInCloud. This service will monitor an Amazon S3 bucket for new videos. Once you upload a video to that bucket, it will automagically convert your videos to flash. They support all the major video formats so you need not worry if your videos will work or not.
Now that you know streaming videos in S3 is easy and affordable, you need a convenient
way to encode (convert) those videos to FLV. That’s where Streamincloud comes in.
We continuously scan your bucket for video files and encode them to FLV so
they’re ready to embed on your site. If you want to get started with Streamincloud,
click here to sign up.
