A few months ago, finally sufficiently sick of the abysmal customer service and reliability delivered by my ISP, I decided to move the hosting of my blog to another provider. I reached out on Twitter and a buddy of mine (thanks Robot) pointed me in the direction of ZippyKid.
Now ZippyKid is a great story about the Cloud enabling a business – that’s not actually the subject of this post but it’s worth a quick look. ZippyKid is a small team (that seems to hardly ever sleep!) that has a simple product offering – fully managed hosting of WordPress blogs using Rackspace’s Public Cloud.
Using ZippyKid, a blog owner gets to enjoy the full breadth of services provided by the Cloud provider, while at the same time getting the level of hand holding that non technical folks like. Similarly, for ZippyKid, going with a Cloud provider means that they can offer customers the sort of infrastructure that the largest of enterprises enjoy, without having to worry about building servers, software issues or the vagaries of physical infrastructure.
All of which sounds great, but what does it actually mean for me as a customer?
It means that I have a site that has the bells and whistles that there’s no way I could justify paying for under the old model. I pay $20 per month (mine is, alas, not a high traffic site) and that gets me a lot of bells and whistles – things like a Content Delivery Network (CDN), a service which serves content from servers closest to your visitors. A CDN is something that is crucial for a pleasant user experience and is all part of the service offering that ZippyKid’s Cloud provider offers. Things like automatic scalability so that if Oprah Winfrey somehow decides to tweet about my site, I know that the cloud provider that ZippyKid uses will automatically scale to give me all the capacity that my new found fame needs. Things like the nest networking, redundant storage and multiple connections that money can buy – all managed by someone somewhere with no input from me.
Data centers are complex, and managing and maintaining servers is no fun. With ZippyKid and the Cloud, I don’t need to worry about that any more.
This series of posts are companion pieces to the CloudU series of educational material. We’d love you to join in some of our webinars or read the whitepapers the CloudU homepage is here, And you can register to have updates sent to your inbox (in a non-spammy way of course!) as well.
