Let’s Answer The Question: What is Cloud Computing?
Buzzwords and acronyms are a mixed blessing.  On one hand, they are a very useful shorthand for those who are ‘in the know’.  However, for those who have no idea what it means, a phrase like “Web 2.0″ or an acronym like “SEO” can be a barrier to understanding, and for those who are too ashamed of their ignorance to ask, they risk using these terms incorrectly.

One of the newer phrases being bandied about is “Cloud Computing”.  In order to take the mystery out of the term (and allow us to use the term correctly), let’s answer that question:  What is Cloud Computing?

Getting Virtual With Your Servers
To understand Cloud Computing, first you have to understand the concept of Virtualization. Virtualization is the ability to run several standalone disk images on the same server.  Being able to create an image of your machine is technology that we’ve been using for years.  A typical machine backup involves making an image of the machine and pushing it to another server.  Then, when you need to restore your data, you can simply load the disk image onto your new hard drive.

Virtualization is just like this, except you take this disk image and you run it.  It’s like having an OS inside of another OS.  So you might have a Linux machine that is running several different Virtual machines, disk images that were created and loaded onto the server and assigned an IP address so that you can hit that virtual machine directly.

A Traditional Server Is A Great Big Desktop Computer On Steroids
A traditional server is a great big desktop computer on steroids, with hundreds or even thousands of different websites running on it.  They usually will share a single SQL server, run under the same OS, and everything on the server rises and falls together.  So if Site A has a big day and receives a hundred thousand requests, it can impact the performance of Site B because Site B resides on the same server and shares resources with Site A (and about a hundred other sites).

There are notable downsides to this traditional approach, namely:

• Hardware Expense- When hardware breaks or gets old and obsolete, you’re going to reinvest in the server that’s been purchased.
• Inefficiency- Of the 100 sites on a server, do all of them really need access to 16GB of RAM?  You’re usually increasing your server resources to account for 1 or 2 very busy/intensive sites on a server.
• Shared Risk- When the hard drive of your server fails, every site on the server is going to suffer.  When the OS encounters a “blue screen of death” sort of error, it’s going to bring down the entire server.  Why should 99 sites suffer for the failure caused by a single site?

There Is A Better Way Up In The Clouds
“There’s got to be a better way!” cries our paid sponsor, and there is.  Virtualization offers us the ability to grant every site its very own server, at a fraction of the cost.  The hardware doesn’t really matter, because you’re only going to allocate a small portion of system resources to each virtual machine.  So even though the server might have 16GB of RAM available, “Bob and Jo’s Kitty Cat Site” might only need a max of 256MB of RAM to run smoothly.  If we need to ’scale up’ and provide extra system resources for Bob and Jo’s Kitty Cat Site, we can do that easily and tell our server to allocate 512MB of RAM to the server instead.

This resolves the issue of shared risk, since if Bob and Jo’s Kitty Cat Site encounters a horrible error that requires a restart, you’re only restarting the Virtual Machine that runs on the server, rather than the entire server itself.  Service Interruption for a single client, rather than everyone on the server.

This also resolves the issues of efficiency and hardware expense, because at a more granular level you can assess the resource requirements of a site and limit a site to only using the resources it needs, rather than infringing on the resources needed by a more resource-intensive site.

With these advantages, it is no wonder so many companies are moving apps into “the cloud”.  Cloud providers like Amazon EC2 and Rackspace offer a very tempting proposal:  Create as many servers as you want for a fraction of the cost of doing things “the old way”.  Backups and maintenance on the hardware are handled already by the cloud providers, all that a web hosting company has to do is make sure that everything is running smoothly within the virtual machine itself.

Cloud Computing Offers An Inexpensive & Hassle-free Solution
Hopefully this has de-mystified some of the questions regarding Cloud Computing.  ArcStone has been using this capability for some time in managing our own servers, and after all of the advantages provided to using this method, it’s hard for us to imagine ever going back.

Of course, this solution is not the right one for all situations, and you should first evaluate the pros and cons of hosting a physical server of your own versus utilizing a cloud computing strategy.  In most web apps, however, cloud computing offers an inexpensive and hassle-free solution for your hosting needs.

If you’re interested in learning more about ArcStone’s hosting options see our email and web hosting services page.

The Internet has come a long way since the days of chirping modems and painfully slow download speeds. The modern web is a multimedia marvel filled with audio, video, and interactive content. One of the most exciting trends is the explosive growth of online video. Billions of videos are watched everyday, and the technology to make high quality video content is accessible to anyone.

Since not everyone has the talent of Spielberg, or the budget of Pixar, here are some tips I’ve picked up while doing video projects for ArcStone:

1) Keep It Short & Sweet

Even if your video is well made and compelling viewers can only handle so much at a time. The sweet spot seams to be two minutes or less. Audience attention starts to wain after one minute, and sharply decrease after two. Keep the pacing quick and your script concise to help viewers make it to the end, and have enough attention left to visit your other videos or website.

YouTube has some great tools for measuring your videos effectiveness and audience attention.

2) Make It Your Own

Adding your company’s unique style and branding to your videos will help viewers make a connection between your video content and overall web presence. Also, take advantage of the customizing options many video sharing sites have. YouTube, for instance, offers a custom channel page that can help you brand and promote your videos.

With some tweaking you can make your YouTube page look much like your website.

3) Say Hello & Goodbye

Including intro and exit screens help frame up the video, and will benefit your marketing efforts if you include your logo, website address, phone numbers and other information. Having consistent intro screens will also create continuity between your videos.

4) Capture Every Detail

Now that HD (high definition) video technology has come down in price it’s worth filming, editing, and saving all your content in HD format. Many of the most popular video sharing sites are also making HD their preferred format. HD or not, upload the highest quality version of your video to sites like YouTube, as they will handle scaling down the quality for users with slower connections.

If you can produce videos in HD, viewers will enjoy more lifelike images and crisp, easily readable text.

5) Do Your Homework & Planning

Before embarking on your first video production check and see what else is out there. It should be easy to find a wealth of videos pertaining to your industry. Notice what you like and dislike about them, which ones keep your attention, and how well the audience has responded.

Usually the most costly aspect of producing video content is the actual shooting itself. You can minimize this cost, and end up with a better product, if you do the proper planning. Make sure the talent is well prepared, the location ready, and the shoot well thought out.

6) Have Some Fun

Online video is a great way to show your company’s personality, culture, and unique way of doing business. The most successful videos not only communicate key marketing messages, they also have a little fun doing it.

If you would like more information about how ArcStone can help you produce high quality web video check out our video production services page. To see some of our work visit ArcStone’s YouTube Channel.

As was recently announced, Railo, the open source CF engine, has finally given ColdFusion to the masses.  March 31st saw the release of the first 3.1 public beta, providing full feature compliance with Adobe’s ColdFusion 8 standard, and allowing developers to begin porting over existing sites to Railo.  The ability to port over existing sites, or to spin up entire servers for a client without running into the pesky licensing costs of ColdFusion is one of the developments that has me the most excited about Railo.

Previous versions of Railo (including the promising but ultimately not CF8-compliant and buggy 3.0) have been known to provide phenomenal speed increases, but without the ability to fully support the CF standard there have been compatibility issues with web software firms attempting to make a move to Railo.  This, combined with a lack of true enterprise capabilities led many to dub the platform unready for prime time.  Railo 3.1 is about to change all of that, at least once it is finally out of beta.

I have not yet had time to play with Railo 3.1 too much, but they provide an express install that isn’t really an install, so it has been very easy.  Just extract to a folder, double click the ’start’ script to start the application/web server, and then you can immediately browse to it at http://localhost:8888.  Drop code into the Railo webroot folder, and you can start testing existing apps against Railo.  The administrator for Railo 3.0 was very sparse compared to the CF administrator that ColdFusion developers know and love.  Not so with Railo 3.1.  The server adminstrator which manages the more global settings has a separate password from the web administrator, and there are numerous settings available, many specifically tailored towards compatibility with CF8, but there are also enhancements beyond what Adobe provides. Additional enhanced selections within the administrator, such as “convert 0000-00-00 MySQL dates to NULL” seem like a sensible upgrade to the default behavior of CF, others probably depend on the needs of your application.  Missing at this point in the release is the much ballyhooed cfvideo tag, a cluster scope (though Railo supports J2EE sessions at this point), and clustered caching.  With a CF license costs no longer at issue, expect Railo’s clustering functionality to get a full workout in the coming months.

Installing extensions, and restarting the cf service are available within the administrator as well.  Things like Galleon forums, the Mach-II framework, and other open source CF goodies.  Additional providers can be added via the server, too, (this works very similarly to how plugin providers are added via the Eclipse IDE) and updating the server software is also possible within the Railo admin itself.  One of the weirdest things for anyone that has restarted a ColdFusion service before is that Railo’s cf restart is darned-near instantaneous.  Everyone gets logged out on the server, as sessions and other scopes are cleared, but other than that, there is no painful delay waiting for the service to kick in while site visitors are crashing into technical looking 500 server error screens as is so often the case with a typical ColdFusion restart.  It’s…eerie.  It is also a distinct improvement, but performance has always been Railo’s most promising and consistent offering in their platform.

You can bet that many people across the internets have been tinkering with Railo 3.1 lately, especially in tandem with Amazon’s EC2 or similar cloud service, in order to provide things like open source load-balanced J2EE session-scoped cluster farms.  Suddenly, stunningly, ColdFusion developers are now enjoying something that PHP developers have been able to enjoy for years.  I welcome an open CF8 standard (whether Adobe has created or simply joined the CF standard is unclear) and a fully-featured open source ColdFusion application server.  It is clear that this can only mean good things for CFML and ColdFusion developers in the future.

What is not so clear, however, is how Railo’s other open source competitor Blue Dragon has fared, but with many members of the Blue Dragon team leaving (and some of them joining the Railo team), chances are that it will not fare very well.  Equally unclear is Adobe’s opinion on Railo, and how its official release might come to affect its bottom line.  Whatever the case, the cat is out of the bag now.  We’ve seen the future, and the future is open source.

Viva la Revolucion!

I was catching up on one of my favorite bloggers, David Pogue of the New York Times. On his blog, Pogue’s Posts, you’ll see a lot of reviews of gadgets and commentary on tech news. Yesterday, for the first time ever, I watched a video he had up on the site that reviewed free cell phone voice-activated services. The video is funny and useful, and observing his geeky enthusiasm serves to remind you that he’s just a regular guy — like you or me.

It reminded me how often I am surprised to see the real live personality behind a blogger, a radio personality, or anything else where you usually don’t get to see the human on the other end. It’s usually a pleasant surprise.

Web media like blogs, and especially video, give us that human connection we all crave. I think this can be a place where a lot of websites fail miserably. In an attempt to appear professional and creditable, they take the human element out. But sites that do have that human element — say, a how-to video, or a blog with an active comment section — tend to make more of a real and lasting connection with users.

Is your site guilty of being sterile and cold? Here are some signs:

• You have no photos with people in them.
• Your site colors are all cool in tone.
• Your site is static with no interactivity.
• Your content focuses on your business and organization rather than your visitors’ wants and needs.
• You have no audio or video media.

If you suspect your site may be too cold, try any of the following:

• Add a video message, demo, or interview.
• Start weekly or monthly podcasts and make them easy to download from your homepage.
• Find professional and appropriate graphics that prominently feature people.
• Add an interactive element, such as user ratings or testimonials.
• Integrate a blog into part of your marketing strategy and keep the posts personable and down-to-earth.
• Incorporate some warmer colors into your site design.

Making your site “human” is easier than ever to do now. Have at it!

In the past, it was pretty clear who you went to for developing and implementing a cross-media marketing campaign — the ad agency. You went to an interactive firm when you only needed web work, or you had to integrate complex web applications that traditional agencies could not effectively manage.

Today, the web-based projects are a critical component for major marketing initiatives. The lines between ad agency, interactive agency, and web development firms overlap. So when it comes to online marketing efforts, who do you go to? Do you go directly to the ad agency? Or do you find a company specializes in custom web development, design, and consulting? Do you separate out the web portion of your project and hand-pick a specialized web company? Or do you let your agency find their own vendor?

Good questions. Here’s a few indicators you may want to consider working directly with a company that specializes in web development:

1. You need more than a public marketing site. If your project involves anything more than a public-facing website, there’s a good chance the traditional agency is going to be lost.
2. You want to streamline your business processes through web applications. Ad agencies won’t help you build web-based software to manage your members, for example. ArcStone, on the other hand, can build you a member management system with online dues payment, member communications, and more, all integrated into a public facing website. (That’s just one example – the possibilities are pretty much endless.)
3. You want to implement search engine marketing. Agencies don’t typically build SEO into their campaigns. SEO campaigns are their own special beast — they can be very time-consuming, the rules are constantly changing, and they require specialized skills that ad agencies typically don’t cover.
4. You need a full-service solution. Using five different agencies for your design, programming, SEO, email, and hosting can be a logistical nightmare. If you find an agency that accomplish all of your online objectives, you’re going to save yourself a heck of a lot of time, money, and headaches.
5. You need heavy interactivity and broad support. Agencies are great at designing the generalities of the user experience but struggle with the details. A development company is going to follow interface best practices and bring years of experience to the table. A typical web development shop has done hundreds of different user interfaces and has a good idea of what works and what doesn’t. Another example of a sticky interface issue is multi-browser compatibility. The intricacies of modern browsers makes it very difficult to make a consistent user experience across all the major browsers. Web developers have special expertise in scripting and style sheet languages that agencies don’t.

ArcStone is a great fit for clients who need custom web solutions or a full-service technology solution provider. We do web consulting, development, design, hosting, email, search engine marketing, file management, email marketing, and more. We’re interactive, we’re programming-heavy, and we excel at building custom web solutions to help streamline business processes.

Ad agencies recognize that most mid-sized to large organizations have some form of online most often need to sub-contract out web development work. It’s a good system, as long as the web portions of the project are pure marketing. Introduce anything else and the traditional agency is out of its element.

The web is a complicated enough beast these days; don’t trust your marketing guru with your web technology. It behooves businesses and organizations to recognize the strengths and weaknesses in both types of firms.

This week Sun Microsystems announced an agreement to acquire MySQL, makers of the most popular open source database platform. This comes much to the dismay of open source zealots and sweaty nerds everywhere, who are afraid their beloved dolphin may end up in Sun’s enterprise tuna salad.

Sun has had a rocky past with the open source community, and tends to garner mixed reviews when they attempt to make inroads into open source.

Continue reading for more insight into Sun’s past open source shenanigans and what this deal might mean for the future of web developer’s favorite database platform.

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If you’re anything like me your daily digestion of web content can’t be contained in one browser tab. Between RSS feeds, work Intranets, gMail and other web applications, several tabs are needed, and flipping between them constantly becomes a carpal tunnel inducing nightmare.

The solution many choose is to setup a start page. Start pages are one page sites that aggregate data from many other web pages into a dashboard style display.

Google’s iGoogle is the most popular start page system, but I have started using a little known competitor that puts iGoogle to shame; Netvibes.

Keep reading for tips on setting up the ultimate start page and the secret to unlocking the start page’s hidden power.

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When you leave software to make up its own mind, like which ads to show a user, sometimes strange things happen, or worse. I have been noticing this more and more, especially in high profile sites, like Gmail, CNN, CNET, and other sites you would think sport top-of-the-line advertising engines.

Here is CNET’s media player, currently sponsored by T-Mobile, playing a Sprint phone review. Before the review you get to enjoy a short T-Mobile spot professing the superiority of their phones.

Here is Google attempting to peek my interest in purchasing a heavily armored vehicle. I have also been served ads for body armor and night-vision goggles. Just how dangerous does Google think Minneapolis is?

I am not even sure what this is. Gizmodo rarely breaks away from their usual fare of programmable toasters and Apple news. So when they blog about a mysterious, non-English shopping site you have to look.

Take note: if you are on psychedelic drugs when viewing the site you may not notice anything special.

People are saying the broadcasters are in trouble, that the future consumers of video entertainment will turn to the Internet, and turn the TV off. I don’t buy it, at least not yet. There is a saying: “content is king”.

Right now the quality content is not online; it’s still in the kung-fu grip of traditional broadcasters. Sure you can see hundreds of clips online of people blowing things up, getting hit in the groin, or building epic Slip N’ Slides, but no one would ever waste their time watching if it wasn’t free, and they weren’t at work, bored.

There are, however, a few bright spots in the online video wasteland. These sites tend to be less popular than Youtube, and a lot edgier. Here is a small sampling of the online video underground:

www.heavy.com – Heavy has been around for a while, and features both original and third party content.

www.metacafe.com- They claim to have the very best video content on the web, a claim many would agree with.

www.vbs.tv – This is a site from the people at Vice, and is sure to generate a solid cult following.