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Cloud Computing 101

Imagine a corporate data center. Say, it has 100+ servers, air conditioning, power backup, line conditioners – all paid for and owned by the company — and skilled personnel to keep the data center running. Say it costs the company $350,000 per month, or $11,666 per day, to keep the data center operational. Whether it is a weekday, weekend, or the night before Christmas, the company continues to incur a daily cost of $11,666 towards the infrastructure.

Now imagine your local utility company that provides power to your home. They have huge plants full of equipment that you never had to pay for. When nobody is home and all lights are off, your home consumes only the minimum power required to run the equipment that hums along perpetually. However, when the whole family is at dinner, the washer-dryer is spinning, TVs are running, your power consumption spikes significantly. If the entire family goes vacationing to the Bahamas for a week, your power consumption reduces to a trickle.

These two scenarios underscore the difference between traditional I.T. infrastructure and Cloud computing respectively. The following schematic is reproduced from Gartner.

A Cloud is a set of interconnected resources – such as, CPUs, memory, servers, hard disk storage, networking equipment, databases, firewall, anti-virus software, etc., and even applications software – on the Internet that is delivered and consumed as a service. Potentially, a Cloud can provide computational power, data storage, software applications, data access, disaster recovery and other resources, including the management of all of these, from a location on the Internet. The user can access all Cloud resources from anywhere in the world through a web-based browser, and is billed for the services he utilizes on a utility model – per use, or per consumption.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines a Cloud as “a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources… that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.” ***

CHARACTERISTICS

Clouds are differentiated from traditional I.T. by at least the following distinctiveness.

1. The Cloud delivers computational power as a service.
2. The Cloud is hosted somewhere on the Internet, and is usually not physically present on premise.
3. The Cloud is accessible from anywhere using a plain web browser from any machine, whether Windows, Linux, Android, iOS (Apple), AS/400, Mainframe or some other. Access is not restricted to any particular type of device. Liberating, huh?
4. The resources are virtual. Unlike a dedicated hosted service, one cannot necessarily go to any particular Server in the data center and say “This is where my payroll application is running.” The cloud consists of a set of resources, and at any point in time a particular application is running somewhere in that cloud, and not on any particular pre-designated piece of hardware.
5. There is nothing ever to buy. The user never incurs any capital expenditure in having to pay for equipment.
6. There is nothing ever to discard or replace. The user is never burdened with the cost of obsolescence.
7. The resources available to the user are elastic, because he can demand increasing resources as his needs increase, and he can release resources as his needs decrease. The user enjoys instant scalability and on-demand provisioning.
8. The resources are used exclusively by the user, but when released by him, may be assigned to any other user.
9. Multi-tenancy greatly reduces cost by sharing finite resources across multiple clients, thereby facilitating the handling of peak load without any capital investment. Multi-tenancy reduces cost and does not compromise exclusive use of resources or security.
10. The user is billed for his usage of resources purely as a utility.
11. The user is protected from the impact of fluctuating and unpredictable business demand. In fact, the user is greatly empowered by the ability to instantly scale up his computing infrastructure on demand and without any capital investment or captive equipment.

UNIQUE SELLING PROPOSITION (USP)

Cloud computing is:

1.  A great boost for start-up companies. Because a cash-strapped startup can now compete in computational power and computing capacity with the Big Boys.
2.  A source of great savings for established companies. Because with proper investment in Enterprise Public Clouds, they can save a bunch of money by taking advantage of the multi-tenancy economy of scale.
3. Great for the economy. Because it start-up companies benefit AND established companies benefit, how can the economy not benefit?
4. Great for the ecology. Because when (a) data centers hosting massive numbers of servers and other equipment, (b) cooling systems, (c) power conditioning units, (d) data center operators, and (e) associated support systems are consolidated, the result is less wastage of all resources. Additionally, it is easier to make data centers green than hundreds of companies green, and green data centers are, in fact, today’s viable reality.

ADVANTAGES

1. Elasticity
2. I.T. agility leading to business agility.
3. No capital investment.
4. Lower cost of ownership
5. The user is protected from the impact of fluctuating and unpredictable business demand.
6. The user is greatly empowered by the ability to instantly scale up his computing infrastructure on demand and without any capital investment or captive equipment.
7. Improved security due to centralization of data.

SERVICE MODELS

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

In this most basic cloud service model, cloud providers offer computers – as physical or more often as virtual machines –, raw (block) storage, firewalls, load balancers, and networks. IaaS providers supply these resources on demand from their large pools installed in data centers. Local area networks including IP addresses are part of the offer. For the wide area connectivity, the Internet can be used or – in carrier clouds – dedicated virtual private networks can be configured.

To deploy their applications, cloud users then install operating system images on the machines as well as their application software. In this model, it is the cloud user who is responsible for patching and maintaining the operating systems and application software. Cloud providers typically bill IaaS services on a utility computing basis, that is, cost will reflect the amount of resources allocated and consumed.

Platform as a Service

In the PaaS model, cloud providers deliver a computing platform and/or solution stack typically including operating system, programming language execution environment, database, and web server. Application developers can develop and run their software solutions on a cloud platform without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware and software layers. With some PaaS offers, the underlying compute and storage resources scale automatically to match application demand such that the cloud user does not have to allocate resources manually.

Platform as a service (PaaS) is a category of cloud computing services that provide a computing platform and a solution stack as a service. Along with SaaS and IaaS, it is a service model of cloud computing. In this model, the consumer creates the software using tools and libraries from the provider. The consumer also controls software deployment and configuration settings. The provider provides the networks, servers and storage.

[1] PaaS offerings facilitate the deployment of applications without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware and software and provisioning hosting capabilities.

[2] providing all of the facilities required to support the complete life cycle of building and delivering web applications and services entirely available from the Internet.

[3] Various types of PaaS vendor offerings could be extensive and will include a total application hosting, development, testing, and deployment environment, along with extensive integrated services that consist of scalability, maintenance, and versioning.

[4] PaaS offerings may include facilities for application design, application development, testing, deployment and hosting as well as application services such as team collaboration, web service integration and marshalling, database integration, security, scalability, storage, persistence, state management, application versioning, application instrumentation and developer community facilitation. These services may be provisioned as an integrated solution over the web.

Software as a Service

In this model, cloud providers install and operate application software in the cloud and cloud users access the software from cloud clients. The cloud users do not manage the cloud infrastructure and platform on which the application is running. This eliminates the need to install and run the application on the cloud user’s own computers simplifying maintenance and support. What makes a cloud application different from other applications is its elasticity. This can be achieved by cloning tasks onto multiple virtual machines at run-time to meet the changing work demand. Load balancers distribute the work over the set of virtual machines. This process is transparent to the cloud user who sees only a single access point. To accommodate a large number of cloud users, cloud applications can be multitenant, that is, any machine serves more than one cloud user organization. It is common to refer to special types of cloud based application software with a similar naming convention: desktop as a service, business process as a service, Test Environment as a Service, communication as a service.

DEPLOYMENT MODELS

• Public Cloud
• Private Cloud
• Hybrid Cloud

ADVANCED CONCEPTS

• Cloud of Clouds
• The Intercloud
• The Hybrid Cloud

FOOTNOTE

*** Mell and Grance, “The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing,” National Institute of Standards and Technology, Information Technology Laboratory. http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/cloud-computing

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How to publish website with Microsoft Publisher?

Q: I am using MS Publisher to build my website so is it necessary to have MS Front Page, Dreamweaver, Coffeecup HTML, Adobe GoLive or another tool to make changes or to provide regular maintenance to the website?

Ans: Well it is not necessary. You can create and maintain your website with only MS Publisher. With this program, you have two options to publish your website on a hosting server.

1) You can use integrated wizard in MS Publisher to publish your website.
2) You can download the website files to the server through simple FTP or File Manager feature in control panel.

PS : Your hosting server must support MS FrontPage extensions and must be activated for your account.

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PhpMyAdmin Installation Process On Windows server

Users can install phpmyadmin very smoothly with windows VPS hosting.

1. Users can follow the following link to install it :
http://www.phpmyadmin.net/home_page/downloads.php
2. Users have to double click on their phpMyAdmin Zip file which is already saved on their desktop and they have to extract it to:
C:inetpubwwwrootphpmyadmin
3. Users have to navigate the same directory & rename the file config.sample.inc.php to config.inc.php
4. Open the file in Notepad & get the following :
$cfg['blowfish_secret'] = ‘ ’;
5. Within the ‘ ’ insert any word, eg: manan. The line should look like:
$cfg['blowfish_secret'] = ‘manan’;
6. Save the file. Note that the file name should be config.inc.php
7. In your browser, go to:
localhost/phpmyadmin
8. And that’s it, login with the credentials you provided during the MySQL. If all’s done right & the php God’s are smiling you should see your login page, something like this:

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PhpMyAdmin Installation Process On Linux server

phpMyAdmin iis a software tool written in PHP. It is an open source software to take care of the of the MySQL administration over the World Wide Web. Users can install phpmyadmin very smoothly with Linux VPS hosting or Dedicated hosting. You can follow the following link to install it :
http://www.phpmyadmin.net/home_page/downloads.php
OR
http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpmyadmin/files/

* Rename the TAR file for your convenience :
root@support [~]# mv phpMyAdmin* phpMyAdmin.tar.gz

* Untar the package :
root@support [~]# tar xzf phpMyAdmin

* Move it to the appropriate place :
root@support [~]# mv phpMyAdmin /usr/share/

* Configure phpMyAdmin :
root@support [~]# cd /usr/share/phpMyAdmin
root@support [/usr/share/phpmyadmin]# cp config.*.php config.inc.php
root@support [/usr/share/phpmyadmin]# vi config.inc.php

* Locate the following lines within that file & make sure each they look like the below ones :
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type'] = ‘http’;
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['controluser'] = ‘root’;
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['controlpass'] = ‘mysql-root-pass’;

* Save the file.

* Create the apache configuration file for phpMyAdmin :
root@support [/usr/share/phpmyadmin]# echo “alias /phpmyadmin /usr/share/phpMyAdmin” > /etc/httpd/conf.d/httpd.conf

* Restart the http service :
root@support [~]# service httpd restart

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Get Advanced Features With cpanel VPS Hosting By bodHOST.com

If you choose a VPS or dedicated hosting, then you have to choose a control panel, because you can manage your server with a control panel. There are many control panels available in the market, but cpanel is the most popular control panel. You just have to purchase the cpanel license to get many advanced features free of cost. Bodhost provides you the following features with cpanel vps hosting :

Full Root SSH Access
Host Unlimited Domains
Dedicated Memory
Dedicated Ips
Instant Reboot Capability
Install Custom Software
Backup Restore Utility
Free Custom Name server
FrontPage Extensions
Mailserver – Sendmail/Exim
SSI CGI-BIN
IonCube v3.1.33
Zend optimizer v3.3.3
Apache 2.2.9
MySQL 5.0.51
PHP 5.2.6
Perl 5.8.8
SSL 0.9.7e
Image Magick 7.15.5
Clamav AntiVirus
Cron Jobs
..htaccess
Python
Glibc
GCCBind
SMTP/POP3 Accounts
Autoresponders
Mailing List
IMAP
Mail Forward
Block an Email
Unlimited EMail Aliases

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Softaculous – List of scripts

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General Web Hosting FAQs

Q. Why should I deal with your company when a lot of popular brands are available in the market?

Ans: Generally, people believe on the attractive advertisements of popular brands, but the fact is most of them do not provide the services which they usually advertise like unlimited space, unlimited data transfer, etc. Even though some of popular brands in the market place advertisements on their clients website without any permission to promote their services. You will never see something like this happening with our hosting company.

Q. Do I choose the cheap managed hosting program?

Ans: Yes, if you do not require the massive amount of resources.

Q. Should I look for a web server hosting Windows or Linux?

Ans: First, I invite you to read the articles and discussions on Windows vs Linux in our knowledge base, Blog, and Internal Forum in this regard. You need to understand the each OS has its own unique set of characteristics, advantages and disadvantages. Although it is difficult to say which is the best one, but it is not difficult to determine which is the choice for your requirements. Actually, the language in which your website is programmed is what defines beforehand the type of hosting platform you need. Please note that the operating system you have on your desktop machine (Windows, Mac, etc …) has utterly nothing to do with the hosting platform that is used to host your website.

Q. If my company is also offering small hosting packages then does this pose a problem?

Ans: Absolutely not, you can choose a reseller hosting program. You will most likely get better support in this case. However, keep in mind that you will not get root access to your hosting account but you’ll get WHM control panel to assign a separate control panel to each domain you host. So it gets easier for you to manage your domains as well as your clients domains in the right manner. As a primary hosting company we will provide you the necessary technical support, free billing software, etc

Q. What is PHP, MySQL, Java, IP addresses, etc …?

Ans: These are abbreviations of Internet and computer technologies. You can browse Google to find out their exact respective meanings. Most of the hosting plans include all these features.

Q. What is meant by Web Space and Data Transfer?

Ans: Web space is the amount of space that you can use on the server to host your websites. All your files, images, videos, html are included in your hosting account space. Email messages, databases are also calculated to monitor the space used by your website on the server. The data transfer is the amount of traffic your website can consume per month.

Q. What is a domain name?

Ans: A domain name is the name of your website. This is what a visitor will type in their browser to access your site. For example, our domain name is “BODHost.com”. You’ll need to register a domain name for your website. You can also register a domain through our website. Nevertheless, we always recommend that you register your domain name with a domain registrar independently.

Q. What is domain parking or parking domain?

Ans: Domain parking allows you to use more than one domain name for your website to prevent cybersquatting or you can reserve it for the future development of your website. For more information regarding this subject you should browse Wikipedia.

Q. What is shared hosting or virtual?

Ans: In a shared hosting environment your website will be hosted on the server where other customers websites are also hosted on the same physical server. If your website is not heavy and does not require large amount of bandwidth, web space, and CPU usage then it is pretty ideal for you. Even on a shared hosting server you have your own IP addresses if necessary. On the other side the virtual private server hosting offers more features and a similar environment like dedicated hosting where you get root access to your account, can choose operating system of your choice, get the ability to install software, etc … Overall virtual hosting means that one physical server is being isolated into multiple VPS hosting accounts to offer more independence to the users.

Q. What is the service uptime?

Ans: The service uptime is usually measured in percentage. The number reflects the length of time that the server works for you over a period of time.

Q. For what reason I need to change the nameservers?

Ans: The conditions refer to the nameservers used by a domain name. Usually when you change the web hosting provider you will need to update the information of nameservers for your domain name. So that your domain can begin to resolve or redirect to the new server hosting company. The details of nameservers can be updated at the company where your domain name is registered. Generally, most of the domain registrars provide an interface for management of the domain name where you can manage your domain names whenever you want. You’ll receive the information of nameservers in a welcome email once your account is configured. It would look like this:

• ns1. Example.com
• ns2. Example.com

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Steps To manage files/folders in WinSCP

1. If you want to manage files/folders through WinSCP then you can follow the following steps. This knowledgebase assumes that, you already have WinSCP and have it running on your computer, but is not connected to a remote server.
2. Now let’s learn how to manage our website files.
3. The first thing you are going to do is create a new folder or directory on the remote server.
4. Click on “create directory” option, which is locate at the bottom of the page.
5. Type the name of the new folder in the “new folder name” option and then click on “Ok”

That’s all there is to it.

Now let’s rename the new folder…..
1. Select the folder to be renamed.
2. Click on “rename” option and type new name of the folder.

3. The new folder has been renamed. You can also rename files the same way as you rename folders.

To delete a folder or file make sure it’s highlighted.
1. Select the particular folder.

2. Click on the “Delete” option which is located in at the bottom of the page.

3. Your selected folder has been deleted.

Now let’s learn how to change the permissions of a file
1. Select postinfo.html > Click properties
2. To change the file permission simply enter the new permission value in the checking off the appropriate boxes below and click the “ok” option.

That’s it. Permissions for the file postinfo.html have been successfully changed.

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Steps To Upload Files Using WinSCP

1. If you want to Configure the Website through WinSCP then you can follow the following steps. This knowledgebase assumes that, you already have WinSCP and have it running on your computer, but not connected to a remote server.

2. Now let’s learn how to upload or transfer files from our computer to a remote server.

3. You have to select that particular file which you want to upload in your local computer windows…
4. If you want to select multiple files for uploading then you can hold down the CTRL key and then click the “copy” option, which is present in the bottom of the page.
5. Now you have to click on the “copy” option in the following page.

6. That’s it. You have successfully uploaded the selected files to the remote server.

To demonstrate how to download files, you will first remove a file from your local computer….
1. Highlight the file mrteng.org and if you want to delete it, then you can select the “Delete” option which is present in the bottom of the page.
2. Now let’s download the file mrteng.log from the remote server to your local computer.
3. Select the file > click on the “copy” option > Click on the “copy” option again in the copy file mrteng.log to local directory.

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Steps To Configure Website In WinSCP

1. If you want to Configure Website through WinSCP then you can follow the following steps. This knowledgebase assumes that, you already have WinSCP  and have it running on your computer, but is not connected to another server.
2. Now let’s learn how to configure our website in winSCP.

3. Enter the server address in the “Host name” option.
4. Enter the user name in the “User name” option.
5. Enter the password in the “password” option.
6. Click on the “Save…” button.
7. You will get the following message.

8. Click on “OK” button.
9. You will find-out the following page.

10. You have to click on “Ok”.
11. You have to click on the “Login” option in the following page.

12. That’s it. Now you successfully connected to your website through FTP and the session is saved for future use.

Let’s go ahead and disconnect :
1. You have to click on the “session” option.

2. Then click on “Disconnect”.

3. As you can see that, the session was saved and you can login quicker the next time you connect to this remote server.

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