Can Amazon's Cloud Reduce MSP Hosting Costs?
If you are a start-up managed service provider, I would recommend taking a look at Amazon Web Services. It is very promising and it helps you host your software on Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), store the data on a networked drive EBS (Elastic Block Store), and backup the data on to the S3 (Simple Storage Service) with an uptime guarantee of 99.95%. All for less than $99 per month. Here's what that means for MSPs.
I believe Amazon Web Services could be a boon for start-ups who lack the time to design a system like this in-house or lack the money to host their services with a traditional hosting provider.
For the focus of this blog entry, Amazon cloud basically has three components you need to know about:
- EC2: Elastic Compute Cloud (your server in the clouds)
- EBS: Elastic Block Store (your disk drive in the clouds)
- S3: Simple Storage Service (your storage platform in the clouds)
Numerous software vendors are fueling Amazon Web Services' momentum by releasing public Amazon Machine Instances (AMIs) of their software.
For example ManageEngine MSP Center Plus is now available as an AMI in Amazon. It is now possible to launch a full blown MSP Center on the Amazon Cloud in less than 10 minutes. If you're interested, you can download this guide to setting up MSP Center in the Amazon Cloud.
By the way, the $99 per month pricing I mentioned above is for a small server instance with 1.7GB RAM, a 32-bit design, and a 1.2 GHz processor. Higher configuration machines are available for around $400 per month.
Note: Devanand is product manager, MSP Solutions, ManageEngine. Guest blog entries such as this one are contributed on a monthly basis as part of MSPmentor.net's 2009 Platinum sponsorship.
MSPmentor / Wed, 21 Jan 2009 17:11:57 GMT
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