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Trying to please

Who is your marketing or your product or your effort trying to please?

Every campaign that I've ever seen fail has failed for precisely the same reason: it pleases the wrong person. Think about it... it wouldn't have launched if it hadn't pleased the boss or the client, right? Pleasing the wrong person meant failure.

The same thing is true on a deeper level in your career choice or what you write or what you say or what you sell or how you sell it: if you are working hard to please the wrong people, you'll fail.

Does that critic or that buyer or that spouse or that girlfriend or that investor really matter as much as you think they do?

 

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Posted by Seth Godin on June 14, 2010 | Permalink

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5 Ways to Get Your Site Penalized by Google

Jun 10, 2010 -

Google has some pretty simple rules. They want to see sites that produce high-quality, educational content that carries the authority of lots of other sites suggesting that the content is thus. The primary objective of the search engine is to deliver results that are just what the searching was looking for, as fast as possible.

 

Consequently, they take a dim view of people who try to trick them into thinking their site fits the bill. If you are caught trying to alter the results of their algorithm, the make-up of which is top secret, you can suffer penalties as minor as dropping a half dozen places for a phrase to the kill shot ban that removes your entire site.

 

Getting banned takes some pretty silly, repeated behavior, but a number of seemingly harmless things, some of which are promoted in the name of SEO expertise, can get you penalized enough that you might as well be banned.

 

Below are a handful of practices that can trip site owners up.

 

1) Links to and from a bad part of town – If Google has banned a site, they sure as heck look twice if you and that site seem chummy. Having links to and from what Google calls “bad neighborhoods” can get your site penalized without you knowing it. Use this bad neighborhood text link tool to see if you are doing this one and of course remove those outbound links to these sites if you find them.

 

2) Redirecting pages poorly – Meta and Javascript redirects may be the easy way to send a visitor to a page when you move a page or want the user to go to something different than where Google is sending them, but Google doesn’t like this a bit. In most cases users are doing it as a convenience but people can also use this practice for dubious means, so Google has to frown on it.

 

There is a proper way to create redirect when you move a page so that Google knows it’s a permanent move. Using what’s known as a 301 redirect, you get the benefit of the page’s standing without being penalized by Google.

 

3) Lots of new links – If your site has a couple dozen links to it and all of the sudden you get several hundred, Google is going to look to see what’s up. If they find there’s a natural reason, they may let it slide, but often they issue a minor penalty because they see that as unnatural behavior. Sites that already have lots of links can gain larger numbers of new links without being scrutinized.

 

4) Overdoing keywords – Placing your keywords in titles, meta data and throughout the content is a practice that helps search engines better understand what the content is about. Stuffing words in over and over again will get you penalized and probably produce content that’s not very readable.

 

Write all of your content for eyeballs first and then go back and do a little editing to include SEO elements. There’s a nice tool called Scribe that can do this analysis for you.

 

5) Buying and selling links – Another practice that falls squarely in the unnatural to Google camp is buying or selling links. If you have a page that ranks well for just about any popular term you can expect to receive email solicitations from people who want you to place a link to their site for $100 or something. Don’t fall for the temptation. While Google can’t tell if you’ve received money for the link, there’s a good chance that the linking site will show up in the bad neighborhood list pretty quickly.

 

The flip side, buying links will usually land you in the Google penalty box as well. You can probably get away with a few of these but any large amount will trip the Google sensors. It’s so much easier to get high quality links by participating in social media anyway.

 

Bonus – Slow loading sites are starting to get penalized and Google has produced some nice webmaster tools that can help you speed up your site – start with the performance video from Google and then make sure you visit Webmaster Central. Slow loading sites also damage the user experience.

 

Ban vs. Penalty

 

Think of penalties as set backs, although some can be harsh enough to move your listings back far to make you non-existent. A ban is the removal of your site from the listings.

 

The easiest way to see if you’ve been banned is to search Google with site:yourdomain.com. If you don’t have any pages listed, you know you’ve been banned.

 

Either way, it would be nice if Google sent you a letter telling you that you’re site was penalized or banned and why, but they don’t. If your site has been banned you can, and should, fix the problem and then request reconsideration of your site.

 

Image credit: Ed Yourdon

 

John Jantsch is a marketing coach, award winning social media publisher and author of Duct Tape Marketing and The Referral Engine.

Tags: 301 redirect, duct tape marketing, google, john jantsch, pagerank, scribe, seo, webmaster central

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Matt Basta
Former Widgetbox whiz kid intern and current successful widget developer

As part of Widgetbox’s new staff series—we’ll be bringing you occasional guest posts from members of the Widgetbox team.

When I first started developing widgets on the Widgetbox platform back in 2006, I never could have anticipated where they would take me. The first widget I developed showed what was happening on http://digg.com/ in a manner similar to Digg Spy. It amassed a total of a staggering three subscribers. Over the course of four years, however, I’ve designed and built more than thirty widgets and serve over eight million impressions every month. Scaling to accommodate this much traffic (particularly during peak hours) was not easy and quickly grew expensive. The following is some insight into how I learned to successfully make a business out of widgets.

Technical Side

When I first started out developing widgets, my website was running on a $3.99/month hosting plan from GoDaddy. It diligently served its purpose until mid-2007 when my YouTube widget really took off, at which point GoDaddy started acting up, forcing me to upgrade to the $6.99/month package.

When my new hosting plan also began to fail after about six months, it became apparent that something was amiss. The bulk of my “popular” code was an XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) file which was applied to the data grabbed from the YouTube API…which was requested every time the widget was loaded. After doing some research, I found that this was incredibly inefficient and that I needed to implement caching.

Lesson Learned #1: Always use caching. Caching caching caching caching! If you don’t, it’ll only come back to bite you in the rear.

After implementing a dead-simple file cache, my hosting stopped throwing errors and the performance of the widget increased substantially. Problem solved!

As my widgets continued to gain in popularity, I eventually outgrew GoDaddy altogether. I moved all of my assets to MediaTemple ($14/month with a coupon), where they would live for another year. Both MediaTemple and GoDaddy are managed hosts, meaning that you don’t need to worry about how stuff works deep-down, helping you to grow without needing to worry about servers or load balancing or anything like that. For a small business, these are usually adequate.

Lesson Learned #2: Plan to scale. Even if you’re small now, things change fast, so plan ahead!

In 2009, MediaTemple made it clear that my websites and widgets were too big for their basic package and so I once again started looking for a new home. I found that home in Linode, a virtual private server (VPS) provider. A VPS is an example of unmanaged hosting, meaning that you get a server that you set up with whatever software you please in whatever configuration your heart desires. The benefit is that it’s completely customizable: you’re not locked in to any setup; however, unmanaged hosting is likely going to be a challenge if you’re not familiar with it (like it was for me).

Lesson Learned #3: Have friends that know what they’re doing. Knowing where to ask for help is half the battle of figuring something out.

After consulting with some (engineer) friends, I managed to get Linode’s basic package ($20/month) set up with my widgets and websites. The VPS ran like a dream! After a few month or so, however, I noticed that I was starting to push against my package’s 200 GB bandwidth limit (I was using 190 GB), and so I made the decision to make yet another investment. This time, I signed up for Amazon CloudFront. CloudFront is a content distribution network (CDN).

A CDN is a service that hosts static files (images, scripts, stylesheets, etc.) and distributes them inexpensively from a data center that is geographically close to the user. For instance, users requesting a widget in China will receive their files from a data center in Hong Kong, while users in Alberta, Canada would get the same file from a data center in Seattle. This helps to cut down on transfer delays. In my case, it also frees up my VPS to do other things, like serve more widgets.

Lesson Learned #4: If your application feels faster (possibly due to the new CDN you set up?), users are happier. Happy users make everything worthwhile.

Since my first Linode VPS, I’ve come to accumulate two more servers: one for testing and active development and one for real-time applications. To make the management of these three devices a little easier, I use a monitoring service called Pingdom ($9.99/month). Pingdom checks up on my servers every few minutes, and if one of them is being a bit problematic, Pingdom sends me an email and a text message to let me know that something is up.

Lesson Learned #5: When things stop working, your users will be sure to let you know about it. Angry users are not nice.

Business Side

Despite the popularity of my widgets and their rapid growth, it wasn’t until earlier this year that I actually started monetizing them. As you might imagine, running the three servers, the CloudFront instance, and Pingdom adds up pretty quickly. A few of my friends would poke fun at me because I spend more money on my web hosting costs than on my cell phone bill.

Lesson Learned #6: Your friends probably won’t “get it.” Neither will your family. Especially if you tell them you make “widgets.”

In the past, I’d experimented with advertising on my widgets. On my YouTube widget, I included a tiny eight by fifty pixel shout-out to my employers who were helping to cover my overhead costs. Within a month of deploying the “ad,” my widget’s traffic dropped by 10%.

Lesson Learned #7: People don’t like change, especially if that change involves advertising.

Since that time, I’ve figured out that the best way to monetize my widgets is to do so more organically. First off, ads within widgets should not be central to the widget’s design. Instead, they should supplement the widget and appear to users that engage the widget’s content. For instance, in my YouTube widget, ads are intermingled with videos, though a user would likely need to scroll through some videos to see one. I’ve found that users aren’t opposed to ads, they’re opposed to being forced to look at ads.

Since I’ve started monetizing my widgets, the income from the advertising has managed to cover the cost of my overhead, plus a little extra to allow me to experiment with new technologies and come up with some pretty cool ideas.

Lesson Learned #8: Neat products don’t innovate themselves. You need to put time and money back into coming up with really cool stuff if you want to get really cool stuff back out.

Lastly—and I know this sounds corny and clichéd—have fun with what you’re doing. When I started writing widgets, it was purely a hobby. I keep creating them because I like doing it, not that I have to. I’ve seen plenty of people with a great idea fail because they’re simply looking to make a boat load of money. Problem is, without a great passion and excitement for your work, your products lack life and personality.

Lesson Learned #9: If you think your work is boring, it’s time to reevaluate your project. Bring in friends with exciting ideas, talk to people that are doing awesome work, and do whatever else it takes for you to make your vision of the final product the greatest thing you’ve ever come up with!

With over 16 Billion impressions, Widgetbox is the leading platform for widget developers to make and publicly list their widgets. Make a widget from scratch to promote yourself as a developer and grow your business.

Not a developer? Widgetbox still offers numerous resources to help you grow your business and drive online traffic. Create customized widgets, make a mobile site, or create Facebook Fan Page Apps.

—When Matt isn’t being a crazy-smart college version of Alan Turing, he’s a successful widget developer whose widgets recently hit the 300,000,000 mark.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Dayton Chan,
Your IT Strategist and Coach

Comments:
Three takeaways from this blog:

1) Make sure it works 99.999% of the time and be prepared to scale. If it does not, it will get uninstalled and that's that. Set up a separate reliable server that caches the content so that when your primary content server goes down (probably because it does a lot more than just serving out widget content), your widgets will still appear as if it's functioning just fine (i.e., no error page).

2) If you are going to change a bunch of stuff with your widget (other than fixing things), deploy a new widget and label it as version X. People hate to be surprised, especially if they are unpleasant surprises.

3) This is my personal lesson - Don't forget to change where your production widget is pulling its feed from. Developing from development to Test to Production can be tricky sometimes, especially when you are developing on someone else's widget platform like widgetbox. Last thing your users want to see on their pages are things like, "This is a test, test, test..."

By CHRIS ANDERSON

Over the past decade, we have built a country-sized economy online where the default price is zero -- nothing, nada, zip. Digital goods -- from music and video to Wikipedia -- can be produced and distributed at virtually no marginal cost, and so, by the laws of economics, price has gone the same way, to $0.00. For the Google Generation, the Internet is the land of the free.

Which is not to say companies can't make money from nothing. Gratis can be a good business. How? Pretty simple: The minority of customers who pay subsidize the majority who do not. Sometimes that's two different sets of customers, as in the traditional media model: A few advertisers pay for content so lots of consumers can get it cheap or free. The concept isn't new, but now that same model is powering everything from photo sharing to online bingo. The last decade has seen the extension of this "two-sided market" model far beyond media, and today it is the revenue engine for all of the biggest Web companies, from Facebook and MySpace to Google itself.

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John Kuczala

 

In other cases, the same digital economics have spurred entirely new business models, such as "Freemium," a free version supported by a paid premium version. This model uses free as a form of marketing to put the product in the hands of the maximum number of people, converting just a small fraction to paying customers. It's an inversion of the old free sample promotion: Rather than giving away one brownie to sell 99 others, you give away 99 virtual penguins to sell one virtual igloo. (Confused? Ask a child: This is the business model for the phenomenally successful Club Penguin.)

With physical stuff, samples must be doled out sparingly -- there are real costs to be paid. With bits, the free versions are too cheap to meter and can be spread far and wide. That's why so many people businesses (expensive!) are turning into software businesses (cheap!), which is why your cranky tax accountant has morphed into free TurboTax online, your stockbroker is now a trading Web site and your travel agent is more likely a glorified search engine.

All this worked well in a rising economy, where non-monetary riches such as attention (Web traffic) and reputation (Google PageRank, which determines how high your site will appear in a search) could be turned into cash with the wave of a venture capitalist's wand or a well-timed acquisition. But this year, for the first time since 2001, the overall tide of investment and advertising won't rise. Indeed, it will almost certainly fall. Venture capital has dried up, Google is killing products rather than buying them, and Yahoo can barely support itself, much less look for others to fund. What does that do to Free as an economic model?

Sergio Capursi

Something for Nothing

hypem.com

The Hype Machine monitors hundreds of music-related blogs, and lets users listen to songs posted on those blogs for free -- just type in the name of a band or track. (It's also a good place to find out what's new and popular in the music blogosphere.) Songs can't be downloaded, but Amazon and iTunes links appear next to most tracks.

kayak.com

Compare fares from multiple vendors, including airlines and online travel agencies, on this fare-search site. Kayak breaks down itineraries by airline, time of day, number of stops and length of layovers. It also lets users exclude turboprop aircraft or regional jets from searches. You have to go directly to the vendor to buy the ticket though (a link is provided).

picnik.com

A free photo-editing site that doesn't require registration or software downloads. Users crop and adjust photos within their browser window -- special effects and frames are available, too -- and can post images to sites like Flickr or Facebook without leaving Picnik. A premium account ($24.95 a year) offers features including batch photo uploading, advanced editing tools and no ads.

pogo.com

Play free online or downloadable games -- including card, puzzle, word and board varieties -- at this ad-supported site from Electronic Arts. More than 100 games are available including Scrabble, Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit. A paid account ($5.99 per month, or $39.99 per year) gets rid of ads and provides access to more games.

shopittome.com

Billed as the online alternative to a personal shopper, this service emails members when retailers mark down their favorite designers. Users specify their preferred sizes and brands, and choose how frequently they want to be alerted. Tracked brands include Prada and Theory; the site searches a limited number of retailers including Saks, Nordstrom and shopbop.

-- Juliet Chung

From a consumer perspective, it should only help. After all, when you have no money, $0.00 is a very good price. Expect the shift toward open source software (which is free) and Web-based productivity tools such as Google Docs (also free) to accelerate. The cheapest and coolest computers today are "netbooks," which sell for as little as $250 and either ship with free versions of Linux or super-cheap old versions of Windows. The people who buy them don't load Office and pay Microsoft hundreds of dollars for the privilege. Instead, they use online equivalents, as the netbook name implies, and those tend to be free.

These same consumers are saving their money and playing free online games, listening to free music on Pandora, canceling basic cable and watching free video on Hulu, and killing their landlines in favor of Skype. It's a consumer's paradise: The Web has become the biggest store in history and everything is 100% off.

What about those companies trying to build a business on the Web? In the old days (that would be until September of last year) the model was pretty simple. 1. Have a great idea. 2. Raise money to bring it to market, ideally free to reach the largest possible market. 3. If it proves popular, raise more money to scale it up. 4. Repeat until you're bought by a bigger company.

Now steps 2 through 4 are no longer available. So Web startups are having to do the unthinkable: come up with a business model that brings in real money while they're still young.

This is, of course, nothing new in the world of business. But it is a bit of a shock in the Web world, where "attention" and "reputation" are the currencies most in demand, with the expectation that a sufficient amount of either would turn into money someday, somehow.

The standard business model for Web companies that don't actually have a business model is advertising. A popular service will have lots of users, and a few ads on the side will pay the bills. Two problems have emerged with that model: the price of online ads and click-through rates. Facebook is an amazingly popular service, but it also an amazingly ineffective advertising platform. Even if you could figure out what the right ad to serve next to a high-school girl's party pictures might be, she and her friends probably won't click on it. No wonder Facebook applications get less than $1 per 1,000 views (compared to around $20 on big media Web sites).

Google has built an enviable economic engine on the back of its targeted text ads, but the sites on which they run rarely feel as flush. Running Google's Adsense ads on the side of your blog, no matter how popular it may be, will not pay you even minimum wage for the time you spend writing it. On a good month it might cover your hosting fees. I speak from experience.

What about the oldest trick in the book: actually charging people for your goods and services? This is where the real innovation will flourish in a down economy. It's now time for entrepreneurs to innovate, not just with new products, but new business models.

Take Tapulous, the creator of Tap Tap Revenge, a popular music game program for the iPhone. As in Guitar Hero or Rock Band, notes stream down the screen and you have to hit them on the beat. Millions of people have tried the free version, and a sizable fraction of them were ready and willing to pay when Tapulous offered paid versions built around specific bands, such as Weezer and Nine Inch Nails, along with add-on songs. (The Wall Street Journal is pursuing a strategy of blending free and paid content on its Web site.)

At the other end of the business spectrum there's Microsoft, which now has to compete with the free word processors and spreadsheets of online competitors such as Google. Rather than complain about the unfair competition (which would be ironic), Microsoft created Web versions of its business software and offered them free to small and young companies. If your firm is less than three years old and under $1 million in revenues, you can use Microsoft's software without charge under its BizSpark program. When those companies get bigger, Microsoft is betting that they'll keep using its software as paying customers. In the meantime, the program costs it almost nothing.

But extracting a business model from free is not always easy, especially when your users have come to expect gratis. Take Twitter, the fantastically popular (and free, of course) 140-character messaging service where people update the world on what they're doing, one haiku-like snippet at a time. After taking over the world, or at least the geeky side of it, it now finds itself having to actually make enough money to cover its bandwidth bills. Last year it hired a revenue guru to try to find a business model and has announced that it intends to reveal its strategy early this year. Speculation as to what that will be ranges from charging companies to have their "tweets" recommended to consumers (which is a bit like "friending" the Burger King on Facebook) to certifying identity to avoid impersonation. The revenue officer has his work cut out for him.

View Full Image

 

Mirko Ilic

 

Meanwhile YouTube is still struggling to match its popularity with revenues and Facebook is selling commodity ads for pennies after its effort to charge for intrusive advertising led to a user backlash. And news-sharing site Digg, for all its millions of users, still doesn't make a dime. A year ago, that hardly mattered: The business model was "build to a lucrative exit, preferably in cash." But now the exit doors are closed and cash flow is king.

Does this mean that Free will retreat in a down economy? Probably not. The psychological and economic case for it remains as good as ever -- the marginal cost of anything digital falls by 50% every year, making pricing a race to the bottom, and "Free" has as much power over the consumer psyche as ever. But it does mean that Free is not enough. It also has to be matched with Paid. Just as King Gillette's free razors only made business sense paired with expensive blades, so will today's Web entrepreneurs have to not just invent products that people love, but also those that they will pay for. Not all of the people or even most of them -- free is still great marketing and bits are still too cheap to meter -- but enough to pay the bills. Free may be the best price, but it can't be the only one.

Chris Anderson is the editor in chief of Wired magazine, and the author of "The Long Tail" and "Free," which will be published in July.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W1

Dayton Chan,
Your IT Strategist and Coach

Commented:
The days of "you get what you pay for" has been rewritten. There is so much quality free stuff these days that there is fierce competition to offer "free". Let's see - gmail is free, google analytics is free, even your internet browser is free.

Corporate IT is a bit slow in jumping onto the freemium stuff. They prefer the peace of mind that by paying an annual maintenance, they are not left to fend for their own. In reality, they might have to anyways if the company goes "kapoof".

If you are going to use free, be smart about it. Make sure what you are using has a committed and active community behind it. That way, you will not be left standing as the only one with skin in the game.

And if you are going to provide free, don't put out garbage and expect millions flocking for your stuff. Chances are you will be spending most of your time and resources developing the free stuff and only a small percentage of your time on the stuff that people will actually pay for. That is the new reality.

Dayton Chan, Your IT Strategist and Coach

Comments:

Technology is constantly changing and improving. It is fast paced and provides ample opportunities for those who seek a fresh start as well as those just getting in the game. You can take three paths. Path 1: Do nothing. Wait and figure out what to do when your skills has little value. Path 2: Act conservatively, wait till the technology matures then get in the game. Path 3: Study and analyze the next trend, make the best educated choice then dive right in, go all out.

The guys who choose Path 3 may not get it right all the time, but these are the guys that stand the most to gain.

Which path do you like to take?

I always took the position that my boss (when I had a job) worked for me. My job was to do the thing I was hired to do, and my boss had assets that could help me do the job better. His job, then, was to figure out how best give me access to the people, systems and resources that would allow me to do my job the best possible way.

Of course, that also means that the people I hire are in charge as well. My job isn't to tell them what to do, my job is for them to tell me what to do to allow them to keep their promise of delivering great work.

If you go into work on Monday with a list of things for your boss to do for you (she works for you, remember?) what would it say? What happens if you say to the people you hired, "I work for you, what's next on my agenda to support you and help make your numbers go up?"

Your IT Strategist and Coach

Comments:

Seth's message is on point. Being a leader, "the boss" isn't so you can tell people what to do. It's not an ego thing either, where you get to brag about how many people work for you. Your job is to serve the people who work for you so you can help them do their job better. Yes, some people needs a little guidance, but I think if you want the best results, you should give them room to grow and figure things out. Don't rob them of their experience by telling them exactly how YOU would do it. Instead, cheer them on and support them every way you can.

8 Tips to Getting Started in Cloud Computing

 

May 10, 2010 -

In the old days, infrastructure meant buying $5,000 servers, putting them into high-security, cooled rooms, and hiring IT folks to make them all work. And then doing this all over again so that you’d have redundancy. Those days are gone—in fact, if you tell investors that you need money for IT infrastructure, they’re going to question your intelligence.

 

Cloud computing is what has changed the game. It provides small businesses with the ability to deploy websites and applications quickly, to pay only for what you use, and leave all the management issues to someone else. It makes for a leaner business that can react faster to challenges and opportunities.

 

But cloud computing also requires understanding a whole new technology and computing philosophy. I was lucky when we put my company’s website, Alltop.com, “into the cloud” because our service provider, Rackspace, hosts hundreds of companies and our developers at Electric Pulp have done this many times. The gang at Rackspace and I have come up with a list of ten tips to help you get started in cloud computing:

 

1. Know the different options available to you. “Cloud computing” simply means that you pay only for what you use—like electricity, but it can be found many forms. A platform-as-a-service (PaaS for short) works well for front-end applications and websites. It takes care of a lot of the infrastructure you need to get started. An infrastructure as a service (IaaS for short) gives you access to a command line and allows you the flexibility to customize your load balancing, autoscaling, security and failover settings, but requires advanced technical knowledge in system administration.

 

If you don’t have someone comfortable programming in a terminal, an IaaS is not for you. Infrastructures-as-a-service require some system administration experience. If you don’t have someone with this type of expertise, either find a competent systems administrator or consider a platform-as-a-service instead. A PaaS provider should be able to handle basic but necessary tasks such as load balancing and security.

 

2. Understand that scaling is a skill, not a default. Cloud computing gives you a lot of flexibility to scale at a lower cost. However, no cloud provider offers “infinite scalability” out of the box though. The world’s most popular websites and applications have professionals working full-time to ensure uptime and speed when they are needed most. Be sure to factor this into your long-term IT costs.

 

3. Implement a disaster plan. The cloud is not fool proof, but there are ways to protect yourself should it go down. A multi-tenant cloud will go down on occasion. If uptime is crucial to your business, be sure you have a disaster recovery plan, geographic failover, and redundancy set in place.

4. Don’t be naïve. Cloud computing will not make up for a poorly written application or database structure. A hosting provider gets the blame for a lot of performance issues. If a database is not set up properly, or code is not optimized, there is nothing a hosting provider can do to make up for this. When it comes to developers, remember that you often get what you pay for. Be sure to check their resumes and portfolio for other work.

 

5. Budget for your specific use-case. Calculating your budget is not as simple as reading a provider’s website. Cloud computing treats hosting as a utility. Like other utilities such as electricity, your bill will vary each month with usage. If you see a surge in traffic or users, use more space, or process more information, expect to pay more at the end of the month.

 

6. Choose a cloud provider on your needs, not its popularity. Do you need something that is highly elastic in a short period of time? Are you going to need support and additional services? High availability? Integration with third party software? Different cloud providers excel at different things. Consider your individual needs, do your homework, and ask cloud providers questions about their availability, speed, security, and integration before you sign up.

 

7. Remember: some applications are not good fits for cloud. Cloud computing is great for anything you’d need to deploy quickly and at a low cost. However, just like multi-tenant buildings are not good for every business, a multi-tenant cloud is not good for every application. If you have high security or bandwidth needs, you will need to pursue dedicated gear.

 

For security reasons, any application that requires PCI or HIPPA compliance is not a good fit for cloud computing. A multi-tenant cloud may also not be able to handle extreme performance loads often seen by more resource intensive applications. Evaluate your specific needs and don’t rule out dedicated or hybrid hosting (a combination of cloud and dedicated hosting) if it looks like the right fit.

 

8. Think outside of the box. When hosting becomes a commodity, it opens your business up to new and exciting things. You can deploy applications or sites on the fly. Consider media rich or real-time elements to your application or website. Set up a server just to comb through customer information or other data your company collects. These possibilities were not as accessible to the masses before cloud computing, so don’t be afraid to try new things and expand how your business operates.

 

Here is more information about cloud computing from Rackspace.

 

Disclosure: Rackspace provides hosting for my company’s website, Alltop.  

Tags: alltop, cloud computing, guy kawasaki, infrastructure as a service, it infrastructure, multi-tenant cloud, platform-as-a-service, rackspace, server, website

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Your IT Strategist and Coach

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Some people think that by simply putting their app on the cloud, it will save them money, never go down and will infinitely scale. Hate to break the bad news, but it won't. At least "not out of the box" as some would put it.

As with most things, there needs to be some planning, designing and of course, implementing if you want to enjoy the benefits that cloud computing has to offer.