In the span of a mere six months, not one but two, newer versions of my smartphone have been released. Now, I know I’m not the only one that suffers from what I call “the next big thing” syndrome. You know, you want the latest and greatest — all the bells and whistles. Fortunately, or unfortunately for me, it is only a mere annoyance to have to keep spending more to keep up with the latest technology.

But, imagine if you were trying to do the same with your IT infrastructure, to allow you to scale up and down as needed whether you are testing, expecting temporary spikes in traffic, or you need to address other business-related reasons for upping the number of servers you need at any given time. The costs and resources spent doing this would add up in a hurry too.

That’s where cloud hosting comes in. Whether you are considering a managed, dedicated or hybrid hosting solution, to help you sort it out, here are some recent articles and posts about the options and benefits available to you.

• Cloud Is ‘Bright Spot’ in Global IT Spending
• The Economic Impact of Cloud Computing
• Cloud Hosting Ideal for Testing
• Cloud computing spending: Miniscule, but fast growing
• Cloud Computing Forecast: Cloudy With A Chance of Fail

Oh, and if you want to learn more about our offerings, check out our Cloud Hosting Buyer’s Guide.

The 1980s marked the “golden age” of arcade video games. All you needed was a fistful of quarters for an afternoon of fun playing favorites like Pong, Donkey Kong and Pac-Man. Although you can still find those same classics on display as antiques in pizzerias, today’s gaming industry has morphed to include a multitude of genres across an array of platforms. With driving factors like the spread of high-speed broadband connections, Internet penetration and the popularity of social networking sites, online gaming seems to be a natural progression for the industry. These forces combined with new game varieties, new gamers and advanced technologies are fueling Business Insight’s prediction in their “Video Gaming Industry Outlook 2011” that the online gaming market will reach $25.3 billion dollars by 2014, a compound annual growth rate of 13.9% since 2009.

Intense competition for gamers, however, is a major concern for publishers. Gamers are a finicky breed, abandoning games that don’t offer maximum uptime and high speeds. Even one millisecond of delay for gamers is the difference between slaying the dragon and becoming the dragon’s lunch. Providing reliable downloads, eliminating buffering and delivering dynamic game rendering are real concerns for studios trying to capture these mercurial consumers. Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams put it well in their book, Fundamentals of Game Design, when they said, “Online gaming is a technology rather than a genre, a mechanism for connecting players together rather than a particular pattern of gameplay.” As a technology offering, it only makes sense to consider the IT backbone behind the title as a key differentiator in the online gaming realm. But where does a game studio begin? Here are three considerations to get you started:

1. Enhanced Content Delivery Network (CDN) for fast game setup: Leverage a global network of edge POPs to cache game code and static media for initial downloads, patches and pre-rendering.
2. TCP-accelerated CDN to speed downloads and eliminate buffering: TCP acceleration from the CDN edge server to the end user significantly reduces download times. A full CDN feature set ensures multi-device support including Apple and Android OS.
3. Route-optimized IP for dynamic game variables: Because many game elements are highly variable, robust connectivity from the end user to the origin server is essential. Dynamic routing over multiple backbones mitigates latency and maximizes uptime.

Looking for more winning IT Infrastructure ideas? Check out our online gaming solutions sheet for more.

Image credit: Hi-Rez Studios’ Tribes Ascend

F1 is all about performance, speed and technology. But did you know that there is a lot of intrigue and speculation that is associated with F1 too? All of a sudden I find that the F1 ecosystem is abound with juicy driver and team gossip. Everyone’s focus seems to have shifted from race predictions and strategy analysis to conspiracy theory discussions like which drivers will shift teams and where they will end up. Certainly seems that Lewis Hamilton of McLaren is at the center of these theories, and a change in teams for him will lead to a sort of domino effect that will be felt through the F1 world.

I have been quite captivated by all the speculation and possible permutations, so I mentioned it to my resident F1 expert and guide. His response? “Oh, it’s just the start of silly season.” So apparently all of this speculation occurs every year during the F1 season and has its own moniker. Excellent. There are lots of sites and blogs out there dedicated to it, in fact. Here’s one to check out from real-motorsport.com that will give you the lay of the land.

I wondered if there was anything analogous to silly season in the technology world. Apple and its i-product suite come to mind. As soon as a new version of an i-device is announced the speculation begins and boy oh boy, can it get wild – and can the speculators get it wrong. I remember last year while waiting for the iPhone 5 to come out a picture of a prototype started making the rounds on the Internet. Turns out this “prototype” was just a design that an average citizen with no relation to Apple had come up with on their own. As we all know now, the iPhone 5 was further delayed, and we all had to settle for a scaled back version – what we all lovingly refer to now as the iPhone 4S. As it turns out, CNET has actually resurrected the iPhone 5 rumor roundup to cover the new tidbits from 2012.

Since it’s my first silly season with F1, I certainly won’t be foolish enough to make any predictions of my own. Well, none that I will say out loud anyway. I’ll just watch the shenanigans and enjoy the fun.

Speaking of shenanigans, be sure to join us at the Atlanta TechCrunch mini meet-up this Monday, July 9^th. Adult beverages will be flowing as we visit the SweetWater Brewery Co. in the heart of the ATL, and we’ll be sponsoring the food truck. We’ll also be giving away $500 in free cloud services to one lucky winner. Plus, our “cloud superhero” (made famous by our “The Top 5 Mistakes You Want to Avoid When Becoming a Cloud Superhero.”) will also be on hand for photo ops. You can RSVP to the event here.

Recently I got a chance to visit beautiful Vermont, the Green Mountain state to those familiar. I stayed in Vermont’s largest city, Burlington, a seemingly quiet town with lots of locally-owned restaurants (you must try Bove’s Italian if you ever visit — to die for!). The city is also a playground for University of Vermont students and sits on one of the most gorgeous lakes I have ever seen, Lake Champlain, which neighbors upstate New York and Canada. Vermont is the home of Ben & Jerry’s^®, Green Mountain Coffee^® and of course, The Vermont Teddy Bear Company^®, which was the main focus of my trip.

Vermont Teddy Bear agreed to let me and my video crew tour their facility for a day to see how they make the most classic childhood toy of all time, the original teddy bear. As we filmed the factory, I learned all of their bears are still made right here in the U.S.A. and all by hand. The company was started by a man selling teddy bears out of a cart in downtown Burlington, and they became so popular he started shipping bears around the country.

Today as an online retailer, Vermont Teddy Bear makes 80 percent of its sales via its website, and most of its sales occur around Christmas, Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day. During these special occasions, the company experiences spikes in traffic as high as 700 percent above their average year-round site traffic. With demands like these, Vermont Teddy Bear needed a solution that wouldn’t be susceptible to latency or cause downtime during peak seasons, where most of the revenue is earned.

This scenario probably sounds familiar if you also rely on an e-commerce site to drive your business. Downtime, latency and unpredictable loads can be huge challenges for today. But how do you find a partner that can meet those challenges? Here are a few questions to consider asking future providers when shopping around:

1. What technology is the IP solution backed by? Typical BGP or standard TCP aren’t enough when faced with busy holiday shoppers. A solution that comes with Intelligent Route Control that dynamically chooses the fastest path over the Internet will be your best bet to ensure shoppers complete a purchase rather than abandon their shopping cart.
2. In terms of Content Delivery Networks (CDN), does it come with accelerated IP technologies built-in? What parts of the CDN network are optimized? The ingress, intra-CDN communications and egress are three areas that if optimized, are a triple threat to any latency issues.
3. What level of uptime does the provider guarantee in their Service Level Agreement (SLA)? And do they offer proactive credits?
4. For elasticity during high-volume periods, can the provider offer you multiple options to handle the load? Think private and public cloud solutions and the ever- increasingly popular hybrid hosting.

These a just a few ideas to get you started.