Even though your business challenges are unique – flexibility, low capital costs and many other benefits make managed hosting an attractive solution for small and large businesses alike. Whether you are a new startup just hitting the ground or an established global enterprise, managed hosting can be an excellent fit. Do any of the following situations sound like yours?

1. As a start-up, you work to stretch every dollar as far as it will go. You’ve invested in a couple servers to handle your growth and are getting by with your limited IT knowledge. However, in the long term, investing in IT Infrastructure isn’t something you want to do. Plus the complexity of the technology continues to advance at light speed. What’s more, you need to focus on developing your product and don’t have the funds to hire a dedicated IT manager.
2. Business is growing, but technical staff is spread thin with the day-to-day responsibilities involved in managing your company’s IT Infrastructure. The daily burden of infrastructure management is becoming distracting, resources are stretched to a breaking point and your organization’s ability to focus on its core strategic objectives is diminishing.
3. Your multi-national software company has been using colocation services for years to house its IT Infrastructure. The company has continually invested in its own equipment to maintain a certain level of control, but the costs of a technology upgrade across the entire footprint are getting too expensive to justify. How do you reduce capital expenses and still maintain an advanced infrastructure that is capable of delivering your solution to your customers?

If any of the above scenarios rings a bell – managed hosting may be the perfect solution to solve your business challenges. And, if that’s the case you may find our Managed Hosting Buyer’s Guide eBook useful as it outlines the benefits of a managed hosting solution and can help you decide if you are a good fit for managed hosting, compare the costs of managed hosting vs. doing it yourself, and discover questions to ask a prospective provider.

Ahhh, the holiday season is upon us and you know what that means — 2012 strategic and budget planning! Instead of visions of sugarplums dancing in our heads, many of us have visions of a strategic plan and budget that has to support it.

As you define IT Infrastructure strategy for 2012 and beyond, you are likely looking for ways to optimize for today and future-proof for tomorrow to gain a true competitive advantage for your business.

Well, here’s where we come in. We have created a microsite with a series of whiteboard videos on colocation, managed hosting, cloud and hybrid hosting that explain how these services can be leveraged to achieve the highest performance solution while having the most flexibility with one IT partner. Additionally, this site is packed with all kinds of useful information such as buyer’s guides, success stories and research from Gartner.

As you develop your 2012 IT strategy, we hope this information will help you find the right mix of hosting solutions for your business! Happy planning season!

Some of the brightest minds in technology didn’t get cloud at first:

Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?
— Larry Ellison

There’s no way that company exists in a year. (referring to Salesforce.com)
— Tom Siebel

Eventually, it became clear that the cloud wasn’t going anywhere. Quite the contrary, the cloud is now everywhere:

The cloud services companies of all sizes…The cloud is for everyone. The cloud is a democracy. — Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com

You are in good company if you’re working to understand your own cloud options. Yesterday, Internap hosted a webinar entitled “Defining Your Cloud Strategy.” Paul Carmody, Internap’s SVP of Product Management and Business Development, discussed the cloud landscape, the differences between public, private and hybrid clouds and key considerations when selecting a cloud provider.

When asked what type of cloud their business is most interested in, 30% of attendees selected private cloud, 9% chose public cloud and 22% said they were unsure. More interesting is that 39% chose hybrid cloud, indicating that there is strong interest in leveraging the unique strengths of both public and private clouds to support applications and workloads.

The Q&A at the conclusion of the webinar confirmed that while enterprises are actively evaluating, and even experimenting with, the cloud, defining the right cloud strategy for your business can still be challenging.

It’s important to remember that the cloud is a means to an end, not the end in itself. If you want to know more about the webinar, download the presentation. It might just help you define your business needs and chart a path to the cloud that works for you.

With over 1.4 million visitors (and 3.2 million page views each month), chinaSMACK aims to give Western netizens an often neglected and overlooked view of modern Chinese society by translating Chinese-language internet articles, posts and content into English.  Despite having only a handful of contributors all working part-time, chinaSMACK has garnered mentions from major mainstream media including the New York Times, China Daily, Washington Post, Economist, New Yorker, BBC and CNN – just to name a few.

A few months ago, chinaSMACK came to Voxel looking for a backend infrastructure upgrade so they could keep up with their growing traffic.  Find below a Q&A with Thomas, chinaSMACK’s Sys Admin, on what he’s done with chinaSMACK’s WordPress site to keep it up and running at peak performance – without significant resource drain.

1) Can you describe the original hosting setup and why you were looking for a new provider?
We used to be hosted at a tiny VPS provider.  They didn’t cap our bandwidth, which was great.  They also couldn’t keep their SAN working, which was less great.
2) And what does your hosting setup look like now?
We’re running the site on a single VoxCLOUD VPS and all our static hosting [images, CSS, etc.] has been off-loaded onto VoxCAST CDN, Voxel’s Content Delivery Network.

Our backups are handled by Voxel’s built-in backup agent which continuously backups our MySQL database, something we can’t afford to lose.

On top of that, an open source monitoring package called Munin handles our performance metrics on the VPS,   generating pretty graphs and ensuring that we know if our tweaks are actually improving things!

3) Can you share some of the pretty graphs you’re using to give us a snapshot of what you’re monitoring?

4) So what have you done to make WordPress scale so efficiently?
The only way to scale WordPress efficiently is not to scale WordPress 🙂

Almost all our page views are cached so WordPress never has to worry about processing them.  We run a pool of PHP workers using PHP-FPM.  Our webserver, nginx, sits in front of that pool and has its own built-in page cache.

Rather than cache each page for a few minutes at a time, we use a WordPress module to invalidate the cached pages when they change.  This keeps the WordPress processing to a minimum.
5) Can you dig a little deeper into your caching set-up?
Sure.  We’re using a custom build of nginx that includes a page cache invalidating module.

Every content page is cached for up to 36 hours or until an action [a comment or an amendment] invalidates it.  Nginx Manager pushes all invalidations into nginx from WordPress.

I’ve experimented with more “sophisticated” mid-tier caching tools using the APC object cache, but I found that they sucked up a lot of memory with only a minuscule performance gain.  The cache invalidation wasn’t always reliable either.

I found that relying on a decent sized MySQL query cache (which is essential for running WordPress anyway) was just as fast and much more reliable.

If we were a forum site or a Facebook game, page caching probably wouldn’t be enough but it works for what we are.  As with everything in tech, Y.M.M.V, K.I.S.S. (Your Mileage May Vary, Keep it Simple Stupid) 🙂
6) What other optimizations and tuning have you done to the chinaSMACK website?
Besides investing heavily in server-side page caching, most of our efforts after the initial push have been focused on the client-side.  Removing JavaScript libraries and minifying CSS has had a big impact on load times and bandwidth requirements.

Most of the future changes will also focus on the client-side.  However, since a lot of our readers have high network latency, we’re also considering tuning our TCP/IP settings.
7)  What WordPress plugins are you using?
We use a lot of plugins for everything from image handling to spam filtering.  Other areas we depend on plugins for include: spam filtering, web optimization, comment and content management, redirection, mobile, mail and syndication.

8) How are you using the VoxCAST CDN to handle traffic from a world-wide audience?
We found VoxCAST CDN to be incredibly easy to set up using the CDN Rewrites module, so currently all of our static content [CSS, JavaScript & images] is hosted on VoxCAST.

Since we have a global readership, utilizing a content delivery network is very important to us.  It means that 90%+ of each page load is handled by a server on the same landmass as the reader – which really reduces load times.  Anyone who’s browsed a Japanese website from Europe knows how big a difference this can makes!

Nginx can serve tens of thousands of cached page hits per second.  With VoxCAST CDN (whose capacity is essentially infinite) hosting all our content except the HTML, the chinaSMACK website can easily handle being featured on CNN or the BBC (and the huge spike of traffic that would entail).  That wasn’t a possibility before.

9) What is the greatest change you’ve seen since signing up with Voxel?
The most important change we’ve seen is reliability.  Voxel simply hasn’t gone down.  Our old provider was a constant worry, but now I don’t even think about downtime.  Everything just works.

Recently, a very popular national newspaper experienced a data center outage lasting 15 minutes. During that time, viewers were unable to reach the company’s news website. I bet this wasn’t the 15-minute spotlight they were hoping to achieve.

As a data center guy, 15 minutes of downtime scares me because that can be a lifetime for many businesses. For e-commerce, media distribution and transaction rich organizations that rely on their IT Infrastructure, 15 minutes has the potential to cost millions of dollars. However, N+1, 100% SLA uptime guarantees and resilient IT Infrastructure are often referred to as “checkbox items” when evaluating Colocation providers. While generators and UPS systems may appear to be standard features of all data center providers, the end user must proceed with caution; all resiliency is not created equal.

Rather than assuming a provider has designed a facility and developed a service allowing for resiliency, you have a responsibility to your organization to ask the tough questions. Below are a few that are part of my Colocation evaluation process:

• Ask for the redundancy in the mechanical and electrical infrastructure. Ask about the generators, UPS, Transformers, PDU’s, Chillers specifically. Anything less than N+1, at every level, represents a risk to your business uptime.
• Ask if there have been any outages in the last 3 years. What occurred, what was the impact and why it happened? Find out what preventative measures have been taken. The provider should be able to provide detailed information around each and every outage whether it was service impacting or not and offer a detailed explanation of how they plan on preventing this in the future.
• Ask how often maintenance is performed on the key components within their infrastructure? By whom? Maintenance should be performance on a quarterly if not monthly basis and executed by certified technicians.
• Ask about the SLA. What guarantees do they provide against downtime? My advice is to ignore the money penalties and look for a nice alignment between provider interests and your own business interests.

More often than not, we overlook the checkbox items in our evaluations and focus on the differentiators. Don’t get caught making that mistake, very minor differences can spell 15 minutes of disaster for your business. For a full list of considerations when choosing a colocation provider read this decision brief.

Lately, Steven Colbert has been doing a series of bits about how the Supreme Court has ruled that corporations are in fact people. While reflecting on our recent public cloud launch, it occurred to me that clouds are people too.

The cloud is much more than a one-size-fits-all commodity. Every cloud has unique characteristics and “finger-prints” that establish a distinct personality. The best clouds, like the best people, are well rounded. Your cloud should be flexible, scalable, secure and give you optimal performance to your end user.

At the end of the day, it’s the quality of services and support delivered by the people providing your cloud that will matter the most for organizations making decisions about who they trust with the infrastructure that keeps their business running smoothly.

To understand your options and develop a cloud strategy that works for your business, talk to an Internap expert.

We’ve all dreaded that conversation with the CEO after he/she has come back from a long flight, having had plenty of time to catch up on their reading and pick up on the latest technology trend. Who hasn’t experienced that moment of “you know I was reading in the Economist that (fill in the blank with the latest hype) will be an immediate game changer – what are our plans for that and when will it be implemented?!”

If we’re not aware of what has grabbed their attention and you’re not ready, you will be on your heels quickly. In a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, Andrew McAfee does a wonderful job in speaking to “What Every CEO Needs to Know About the Cloud.” He lays out in stark clarity the different forms of the cloud, the importance of the trend, the benefits and the perceived uncertainty of the cloud.

McAfee also points out the not so obvious benefits of the cloud, supported with real-life success stories. The ability for companies like Zynga and Netflix to scale globally wouldn’t have been possible without their forward-thinking use of cloud resources. “The unanticipated benefits often outweigh the intended ones” is also real. As companies looked to save costs in email and moved email to the cloud, companies quickly realized the ability to communicate from anywhere on nearly any device, improving collaboration and productivity immensely.

McAfee closes in his article with, “Delegating the move to the cloud to traditional IT people is like putting the crew running the boiler and steam turbine in charge of electrifying your factory.” So, when your CEO returns to the office, will you be ready? Or have they already initiated their own effort to discover the benefit of the cloud?

Tell us your story, and/or please share this one.